Chapter 65: Chapter 65 A frustrating Field

Before too long, the Heirs were on their way back to the Adventurer’s guild. The new weapons were all stowed away in Sarah and Aarl’s dimensional pouches, and they strolled down the hill chatting and being cheerful. There hadn’t been any alcohol, so Nathan was even completely sober.

They arrived back at their suite of rooms in a celebratory mood, with Aarl especially not wanting to sit down and relax. He pulled out the twin swords again, examining their shining curves in the main room while the rest of the Heirs sat down on the various couches.

Sarah asked the obvious question. “What mana types are you thinking of having imbued?”

Aarl looked up from the swords, and turned towards Stella. “It seems best to have mana types that could be recharged by Stella? I realize I am assuming your willingness to help me.”

Stella blew a raspberry and waved her hand at him. “Truly the most difficult task.” Then she sobered. “I would agree to charge your weapons for as long as we are on the same team.”

Aarl nodded back seriously. “In that case, I believe force would be an obvious choice. An unbreakable blade that extends the size of the sword and cuts with such a fine edge would be powerful.” He looked down again, considering the swords in his hands.

“But I don’t believe that I should do that to both swords. I should limit myself to mana types you have available, so that recharging is easier.

“Fire seems a lesser choice, but better than air. Herdin made it sound like air would be actively harmful to the weapon unless we’re worried about poison gas. Earth mana does not seem an option. I find myself hoping that your Insight of lightning is going well.” Aarl grinned expectantly at Nathan and Stella.

Stella rolled her head around, flipping her braid over her shoulder. “Fine! Fine! Let’s get on with it. Nathan? It’s time to teach me of Lightning. Again. Hear me but I am feeling like this Insight is forever around the next corner.”

Nathan nodded agreeably and cracked his neck as he sat down next to Stella. He spoke to the other Heirs. “Fair enough. We’re close, might get to it as soon as tomorrow. This probably won’t be too interesting to y’all, so you might want to find something else to do.”

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Then he focused on the lessons of electricity and magnetism. They had already gone through some practical exercises with the generator, and Stella understood that things were more complicated than they seemed, having messed around with magnets and charge enough to accept that there were invisible, hidden forces moving things around.

And it was up to Nathan to explain what those forces were. He needed to connect the math he’d been teaching Stella to the evidence of her eyes. He’d been taught to do a full derivation of all of Maxwell’s laws, and he wanted to instill at least a bit of the logic of those processes into Stella, if not necessarily walk through every aspect of the math.

But math was just a language for describing the world precisely, and Nathan was going to take it as far as he could. His [Lecturing] was certainly helping out - concepts were easier to explain than they should have been, and Stella was likely to interpret Nathan correctly when he made things ambiguous. Honestly, Nathan wasn’t sure how much of that was his Skill and how much of it was Stella being smart.

Regardless, Nathan wanted to start with describing how electric and magnetic fields were generated. Over that evening, Nathan walked Stella through the first two of Maxwell’s laws, governing how electric charges created electric fields and magnetic dipoles produced magnetic fields. Nathan was glad to revisit the ideas and go through the math behind them.

He’d always found it elegant that under Gauss’s law, static electric fields were created by imbalances of charge, while the law for magnetism basically meant that there were no imbalances of magnetic sources and sinks. If you broke a magnet in half between the two poles, you created new poles at either side of the break point.

The math was almost supplementary to helping Stella create the right kind of field simulation with her magic. They went out to the practice field, where Stella left a few glowing orbs in the air to illuminate the darkened area. Nathan was sure to close and latch the gate before they moved to the far side of the practice area, under the 70-foot drop that Nathan felt so well-acquainted with.

Then Nathan helped Stella understand how a charge moved in the presence of electric and magnetic fields. He used his spear to write out the equations in the sand. Then he had Stella conjure up some simulated fields and traced how a charge would spiral around magnetic field lines via the right-hand-rule. Electric field flow was a bit easier, since a charge would follow electric field lines towards an opposite charge, or away from a similar charge.

Part of the trick was to explain how most fields were not simple, but that multiple contiguous sources tended to complicate real-world problems enough that applying the math was hard.

This is really so much easier to explain with a 3-dimensional model. I’m jealous. I had to learn by drawing X’s and bullseyes on paper.

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