HankTheMoose
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3.15 Hypothesis
🕑 Added 2024-12-03 16:03:00 +0000 UTCHi all, Happy December. I didn't manage to get this all properly edited before posting, so please let me know if all the magical theory is too unclear. I'm also going to be suspending patreon billing in December and slowing down posts to 2/week for the Holidays since I'm going to be traveling. Cheers!
The next several days, Bernt focused as best he could on working his way through Iriala’s books. He made sure to visit Pollock as often as he could, refining ideas for potential experiments. After work, he went to visit the library and to study and check in on Hallan. The librarian had managed to find quite a bit of information on planar theory – they just hadn’t managed to figure out how to apply it yet. None of the texts talked about ambient mana, much less anything like a mana bridge or tether that might transmit a familiar bond between planes. Still, Bernt was sure they were on the right track. There had to be something there.
Despite the lack of useful results, Bernt felt like things were coming together, somehow. At least, until he left the guild to go home each night. Whenever he stepped into the street, Bernt found himself looking over his shoulder and jumping at shadows. He kept a light burning over his shoulder at all times when he wasn’t behind the guild’s wards. Passersby were starting to give him odd looks. Bernt often felt like he was being watched, especially every time he walked through the ruined Crafters’ District.
He knew was being paranoid. Still, someone probably was watching him. He had no reason to believe that shade wasn’t still around, even if it couldn’t actually kill him. It could certainly cause this kind of psychological reaction – that was what the shades had been doing during the siege, after all. Unfortunately, being aware of the problem didn’t lessen the symptoms. The question was why. And was the demon following him personally, or was it just terrorizing the Crafters’ Quarter?
Bernt was still considering the problem when he opened his front door to find two letters that had been pushed under his door. He closed the door, hung a few torch spells up near the ceiling to light the house brightly and bent down to pick up the letters. One was just a folded piece of paper, while the other was written on heavy cardstock in a fancy envelope.
Taking a deep breath, Bernt opened the expensive envelope, first.
Underkeeper Bernt,
You are hereby summoned to appear before the Count, Narald of Halfbridge on Eyelsday next, one hour before noon…
The letter didn’t mention why he was being summoned, but he could guess. Iriala wouldn’t have gone to such lengths preparing him if she wasn’t sure that the count would follow through. This was going to be his formal appointment as Torvald’s legitimator.
The letter went on about appropriate attire and proper forms of address, which Bernt, ironically, had just learned all about from Iriala’s books. By the looks of it, there was going to be quite a ceremony, and that meant he needed to buy a more formal mage’s robe to be presented to the court.
He’d been meaning to visit a tailor for some time, but he hadn’t managed to get around to it so far. Now, he was running out of time. Eyelsday was in just three days. Ideally, he wanted something he could take to the Sacral Peaks, so he needed to see about getting it properly enchanted as well – he would have to talk to Grixit, soon.
It was going to be a tricky project. The robe needed to provide proper protection, but the enchantments had to be laid on the garment in a way that didn’t risk setting him on fire the first time he cast his manaburn spell.
But that could wait, for now. For the court, the clothes just needed to make an impression – a better one than an Underkeeper’s work clothes, anyway.
The second message was from Farrin, at the orphanage. She wanted to know if and when he was planning to start teaching again. He’d only visited once since the battle, and it had just been to check on Gnugg and Trip. The kobold had been out, but Trip said he was doing fine. She’d be at the Mages’ Academy now – her first winter term would have just started.
Bernt sighed and tossed the note down on his table. He was just too busy. The orphanage would have to find a new tutor. Beside his official studies for Iriala and his personal projects, the tide of refugees had only surged since Uriah had arrived. Nearly a thousand people streamed into the Undercity every day. Most nights, he stopped for an hour or two to help guide the flow and process a few of them, trying to ease the pressure on his colleagues.
That, and he felt guilty.
Sure, Fiora had traded him for more support from City Maintenance, which gave her more of her own people to work on the refugees. But still – he spent his days hiding away in a library and reading for his own personal benefit while collecting his normal salary. Meanwhile, his friends had to work their asses off trying to wrangle desperate and traumatized people down here every day. No matter how the math worked out, it felt like he was doing something wrong.
***
When he arrived at his new office the next morning, Bernt found a few additional books waiting on his desk, probably courtesy of Iriala. They documented the history of the second and third Great Clysmic Wars. Both texts were painfully dry, painstakingly detailing the Invigilation’s campaigns to permanently break the back of the Circle of Nine after the fall of the Madurian Empire, which ultimately left them confined to the Isle of Harrowick, where their organization languished in a diminished state until their destruction in a summoning gone so wrong that the island was still uninhabited over a hundred years later.
After another lunch with Iriala, where she grilled him about the potential political significance of various arcane details buried in those texts, Bernt made his way down to the library. By now, he and Hallan had read everything there was about planar theory, but that didn’t mean they understood it. They needed fresh eyes to look over the problem and all the information – someone who thought outside the box.
His first impulse had been to talk to Pollock. The old wizard was a genius, and even if he wasn’t an expert on planar theory, he would surely understand the literature better than Bernt. On the other hand, though, he’d already told too many people about his persistent familiar bond.
Pollock fundamentally considered Jori a resource, not a person, and Bernt doubted he was going to convince him otherwise. That, and he worked for the guild, and for Iriala. Iriala, for her part, would absolutely try to use any connection she could make to further her own aims, and very possibly to Jori’s detriment. She was already trying to make him into a tool, and he was going along with it. If at all possible, this was something he wanted to keep for himself, and for Jori.
Fortunately, Bernt could think of another mage who had a flair for creative applications of magic.
When he arrived, Hallan took him straight back to the reading room they usually used. Therion was already there, scanning through Hallan’s meticulously organized notes.
“Hey Bernt,” the other mage greeted him, not looking up. “Did you bring your notes? Hallan says he didn’t cover everything.”
“Yeah. Of course,” Bernt said, digging through his bag to find the rumpled stack of papers that he’d jammed into his book on familiar bonds. He held them out to Therion, who accepted them with a disgusted shake of his head.
“How are you a wizard? My little sister is more organized than you! How do you even figure anything out?”
Bernt shrugged. “I don’t know. Usually I just keep collecting information until something clicks. It’s not working this time, though. There’s nothing about ambient mana anywhere.” He clenched his teeth and made a frustrated noise. “How can I amplify a familiar bond that goes outside the material plane if I can’t even figure out how it’s being transmitted?”
Therion shrugged without answering and started to flip through Bernt’s notes, organizing them as he went. As he read, Bernt busied himself with Hallan’s notes, going over them again. Hallan, meanwhile, returned to work.
Only a few minutes later, Bernt tossed the stack down on the table in disgust. Therion looked up at the noise, raising an eyebrow. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” Bernt complained. “Did none of these people know how mana connect the various planes, or did they just think it didn’t matter?”
Therion shrugged and dug out one of Hallan’s note papers, glancing over it again.
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. What if Janaris’ theory here is right and the planes actually sort of occupy the same material space, so we’re actually all using the same ambient mana, projected interdimensionally?”
Bernt snorted. “Then the ambient mana would constantly be moving around or thinning in response to whatever was going on on other planes. It’s way too predictable for that to be true.”
“Well, whatever.” Therion replied, tossing the paper down. “Does it actually matter?”
Bernt frowned at his friend in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we know the familiar bond is working across planes. Do we really need to know how it works? Maybe the entire interdimensional medium is mana. Or maybe there’s no such thing as real distance in the same way as it is here. We don’t really need to find your hypothesized mana bridge or whatever. If the problem were about supposed ‘distance’ between planes, then amplifying the signal the way you already did should have helped. So, what if we could clear the way a bit, instead? It would be the next most obvious thing to try, right?”
Noticing Bernt’s confused expression, Therion flipped over one of the note sheets and produced a pen. As Bernt watched, the mage scribbled two stick figures in separate circles, connected by a line.
“Alright, think about it like this. You’ve got two people, you and Jori, on two separate planes. We know that the planes aren’t touching, since there aren’t any known confluences.
Bernt nodded noncommittally. “Right, I know. But that doesn’t really help us. ‘Clearing the way’, as you said, would mean removing the barrier between here and the third hell. But that would be a portal. We can’t do that, since, as you said, we’re not actually touching on the hells. If that was an option, I wouldn’t be doing this in the first place.”
“Right. We can’t make a portal to the hells,” Therion said, grinning. “But why bother with that when you can just make a portal to nowhere? ”
Bernt opened his mouth to scoff at his friend, but then closed it again as he thought about it.
If Therion was right, there wasn’t one barrier between him and Jori, there were two – the one separating the material realm from the interplanar medium, and another separating this non-place from the third hell. If they were the problem, then even getting past one of them should work. Well, it might not work perfectly, but it should do something, right?
Excitedly, Bernt opened his bag of holding and dug around in it until his hands closed around a tall, narrow book. He pulled it out and showed it to Therion, who peered at the title in confusion.
“A Summoner’s Guide to Elementals?”
“It explains how to create and stabilize portals at confluence points.” Bernt said, flipping to the section about portal formation. “Think about it. Elemental summoning is far more complicated than what you’re suggesting. I’m not totally familiar with all of these runes here, but if we can decipher them properly, it should be easy to simplify this down to something that'll just cut a way out of our plane without opening up to make a path to somewhere else.”
Therion rose, eyes alight with Pollock-like excitement. “I’ll go get Hallan.”
Comments
Antony Claughton
Even ignoring monsters, who knows what gases, magical substances or empty space there might be. Which could all be dangerous. A normal portal may be effectively bridging the two openings. Only having one end of the bridge might be disastrous.
Antony Claughton
He knew was ==> He knew he was
Stephen Pearson
I know, right? I immediately felt dread at the possible outcomes of that idea... Though to be fair, if it's easier than normal summoning, and there were horrifying monstrosities in the nothing, they'd probably already be running around and well known.
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
Steelheart
Opening a portal ti nowhere sounds like a spectacularly stupid idea, that would lead to some eldritch horror invading
