Chapter 9: Chapter 9 – Magical Items Are Mostly A Terrible Idea

“Adam, how did those fit?”

I’m about halfway through, reflexively, answering with “In the usual way” when I realize that actually, no, that’s not right. I keep forgetting that the two pouches on their too-thin, utterly unbreakable string are, well. “In the usual way,” I say with a total lack of conviction, “for definitions of usual that apply to magical items, I guess?”

There’s a pause, and a creeping look of horrified disgust on Amber’s face. “You’re putting things, magical things, in a storage artifact. Why, how could you ever think that’s a remotely -” She visibly stops herself, almost collapsing to the ground with her head in her hands.

I give her a moment. Well, I mean, I’m giving her a moment in the sense that I’m not saying anything, but not saying anything isn’t some kind of conscious choice. I’m staring at my visor’s rendition of a scroll instead. It’s a scroll I used on the second floor, something I’ve been calling Diamondize, and I’m staring at it like I’m going to figure out all of a sudden how the escapement works to regulate the flow into the secondary glyph array. I’m not, and I know it, but it’s this or go scrabbling over to the opposite wall to start hyperventilating.

I’m kidding. Mostly. Even I have better ways to handle social anxiety than that.

Still, I don’t say anything, just staring at the scroll. My mind is busy pinwheeling across all of the things she might say, cognitive loops churning through time that should be productive, if I wasn’t too… something. Too busy revisiting all the angry fights and arguments I’ve had that foretold the implosion of a relationships, though never this quickly.

“I’m sorry.” Her arm comes down around me and pulls me into a hug.

I startle, almost flinching away from her. Would have, if not for most of a lifetime, thirty years at this point, spent being conciliatory. A still lake accepts, the mantra starts, and then it sinks in that she was apologizing, not yelling at me, and I don’t have any scripts for that.

“Please stop.” I would bury my face in my hands, but she’s in the way. I’d bury my face in her, despite thirty years of habit, if she weren’t wearing mail. “I don’t know how to deal with people apologizing to me.”

The honesty slips out of me, and she’s silent for a moment. “What, then,” she finally says, “am I to say, when I have erred, and wounded you?”

“Uh.” That, I think to myself, is a fair question. I make myself stop and think, and she lets me. “Can you explain? The thing with storage artifacts, or whatever. Why you had the look on your face.”

“So that was what… I’m… yes. Yes, of course.” She’s mostly muttering to herself for a few seconds, but then she’s on her feet and pacing. “I am going to be in the habit, my lord, of being surprised by your lack of general knowledge of Cador. Your moments of implausible brilliance tend to overshadow them.”

“Well, uh.” I’m about to tell her something like I’m sorry or possibly That sounds plausible, maybe even Gosh, thank you, but then I blink a few times. “Oh! Your planet is called Cador?”

“This!” She throws her hands into the air, laughing. She was trying to be formal, and that’s gone again. “This is precisely what I mean, Adam!”

Her laughter is infectious, or maybe it’s just my relief that she’s not angry at me. I’m laughing with her, anyway. Not for long; we both know we’re in a time crunch, with every room we want to clear getting harder over time. It’s still good. “So. Storage artifacts? Short version first.” Context first, then details.

“Storage artifacts.” Amber sits down on the same bench I’m sitting on, hugging me again. It’s nice despite the layers and the chainmail. “The short version is that artifacts fail.

“Normally, this is fine, for awkward values of fine.” She gets up to pace, hands swishing in fretful motions. “An enchanted sword is still a sword. Armor enchanted to fit itself to your body or even be manifested out of a ring can be enchanted such that its enchantments failing result in you still wearing armor.” She gestures at her own armor. “This is enchanted with Immutability, Dampen Inertia, and Weather As One. A failure, and it will fail in time, will cascade; losing Immutability would inevitably mean damage to the runework, while without Dampen, the…”

She’s struggling for words, so I give it a shot. “Dampen probably makes it so that use and wear-and-tear don’t actually do any damage, brings it below a threshold? And Weather As One will spread everything out. Does that mean if you take a hit, it gets split across your whole body?”

“Imperfectly.” She smiles at me, and I feel a bubble of glee, as much at guessing right as at her reaction. “Might you guess, my lord… no.” Regret flashes across her face. “We are short on time.

“Weather is the keyrune; all goes through it, and then to Dampen, and then to Immutability. And when it fails, I will still have chainmail; and having had my hand at work in… making this...” Her voice trails off. After a second, when I’m still trying to figure out what’s wrong, she shakes it off, a whole-body shake. “I will assume that having memories of having had my hand at work in making this,” she says firmly, “I can, through my Bond with it, re-empower it, with time and effort. Some hours to build the frameworks of concepts, a day’s worth of my mana regeneration.”

“Okay.” I nod. That was reassuring. “So, given that the idea of my storage pouches made you look like I was suggesting we spacewalk without a suit, I’m guessing that something dramatic happens to a storage artifact.”

“It… depends.” She grimaces. “Anything conjured will simply cease to exist. We know this, due to limits on… instantiation of things conjured through Skills. We believe mundane matter is much the same.”

“But not,” I say quietly, “other magical items. Like scrolls.”

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“Their energy is… released.”

I lean back, thinking for a couple of seconds. “Are we talking released like backlash, released like whoops, I swear I used to have a hip there, or released like this bag is about to blow, let’s throw it in the boss room and close the door?”

She blanches. “Kazir forfend.” That gets my attention. She almost never swears by her own God. She breaths out, takes a deliberate breath in. “Released as in… the record show’d there once was a Temple in the land of Mehir, and all prepared we traversed the oceans to land upon it; but none lived that we found of all those that dwelt in that land, nor those things which flew in the air nor walked upon the land; and in the center where that Temple once rose, we found a lake of fire, which was not elemental but stone in a form molten.”

“Stars alive and burning.” My voice is quiet. I draw the scrolls carefully, very carefully, out of the pouch, along with three other little trinkets. “I, uh. Wow.”

“I shouldn’t think that such a reaction would be expected of some small number of scrolls. Nonetheless.” Amber sighs, tension visibly coming out of her shoulders when I empty out the pouches. “I am surprised that you found such a thing, I must say.”

“Yeah. It’s even got a name, and it had a line on my Status, back when I could see it.” I shake my head at her raised eyebrow. “You’re gonna be disappointed.”

“What?”

“The name. It’s not cool or anything.” I give a dramatic pause. I love dramatic pauses; I’m so rarely the person getting to show off something anyone else actually cares about. “It’s called… Jedkel’s Mediocre Belt of Two Small, Awkward Pouches.”

Her splutter is a thing of beauty. She’s giggling when I toss the belt over my shoulder and we stand up together. “What … are those?”

“Oh, I found a few things that weren’t, like, immediately useful in the first couple floors. Anything I could use when I hit the third floor, I did, but…” I frown at the three objects in my palm. “You don’t know any of these?” She shakes her head slowly, brow furrowed in concentration. Grinning, I tug her head down so I can kiss the lines where they intersect above her nose, which she kindly squats down to permit me to do. “Well. Let’s see.

“This one’s a runic re-engraver.” I gently toss the five-centimeter - two inches - metal rod at her. She catches it, looked it over, and then quirks an eyebrow at me, handing it back. “It doesn’t do anything on its own, but if I trace a glyph with it, it’ll let me write that same glyph into a rune in a compatible location, once. I mean, once per glyph, like, it stores one glyph for one use.” I stumble over the explanation, but doesn’t rush me. “Right now it’s got what I’m calling a Devolve to Nullification rune, which just takes whatever you send it and, uh. Well, my [Insight] came up with the phrase sends the energy down a pipe to the Hungry Void.”

That gets a shiver out of Amber. “Did the insight also suggest that this was anything other than a terrible idea, my lord?”

“You know, I’m starting to suspect that you don’t always use that as a statement of respect and affection?” I grin at her, and she splutters in laughter. “Actually,” I say with more seriousness, “I’m pretty sure the void isn’t, like, a sophont in its own right. I don’t know what it is, though.” She nodded slowly. “Anyway, so. These two are sorta linked, they’re not much good without the other.” I detach one of the thumbnail-sized triangles from the other and toss it to her. “Flow some power through one of these, and the other one will vibrate at its resonant frequency as long as you’re giving it flow.”

She blinks. “That’s… all?”

“Yeah. It’s not the greatest.” I hold my hand out, and she tosses it back to me without a second thought. “I guess we could use it to communicate with, maybe, through one of the binary codes? It seems instantaneous but I can’t measure it all that finely, and obviously I haven’t tested its range. I’d have to teach you one, unless you know one already?” She shakes her head, and I shrug, reattaching them to each other. “Eh. Anyway, the third one’s more useful. A lot more useful, it’s the best of the lot. I call it the Home Key. I mean, that’s what [Insight] calls it.”

She nearly drops it. “I… I’ve heard of this one. It’s worth a… not a fortune, but a substantial amount of Vulgar. It’s a pattern-artifact, something available enough to be written of.” She looks at me with narrowed eyes. “And why didn’t you tell me about this one before?”

“No keyholes.” I grin at her. “Wanted to show you the fun way, but I haven’t seen a single keyhole on the whole floor, probably because of what I did to the second Gatekeeper.” I was still pleased with that move; I’d been a little worried that the keyhole would be destroyed by one or another of the environmental effects, but things had worked out.

The Home Key is a simple artifact, in terms of function. Put it in a door’s keyhole, turn it, open the door, you’re home. Not your home, probably not anyone’s actual home given the mixture of styles, but every time I’d used it, it had food with all the right amino acids, clean water, a bed. Showers, always unfamiliar ones but ones I could figure out. Clothes that fit, comfortable if strange. Toilets. The runework is incredible on it; dense glyphs that practically ovlerap each other, power flowing non-deterministically through a waterfall of pathways. I’m pretty sure it creates the space it leads to, or defines it based on some sort of heuristic based on some glyphs I hadn’t the foggiest -

I snap out of my distraction. Amber stares at it for a moment, then hands it back to me wordlessly. We’re both feeling the itch, staring at the darkness of the next room, and I hear her sigh the same sigh I’m sighing as I tie the Home Key carefully onto the Pouches’s thus-far-indestructible string and tuck it into a pocket.

“So that was the short version, huh.” My musing breaks the silence. It’d feel awkward if I weren’t running a finger along the fabric of the Pouches, ruminating. “When do I get the long version? I have some ideas.”

She all but snatches the Pouches off of my shoulder, but she’s laughing. Good enough.

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