Chapter 4: Chapter three – A hop, skip, and a jump

The months after my birth were all spent learning languages, in which Refur became invaluable. My parents' names are Syn(teal), Xcero(magenta), and Nix(purple), and apparently, they are a major military house, and Nix was the last General before retiring about a decade ago. They decided that teaching me everything early would be a good idea, and started with cramming four extra languages into me. The languages were Common, the language most humanoids know, Hule Snakke, the Gruvefolket’s language, Tretungen, the Trefolket’s language, Romspråk, our own species language, and tradespeak, which was spoken or understood by almost all intelligent beings. And once I had a passable form of the languages, we started working on practical things like walking, running, and shapeshifting. All while keeping the language lessons going. Then we added books into the mix. Books on Geography, politics, manners, economics, history, the different races, monsters, affinities, and… magic.

 

Turns out, magic is really hard. The runes to make it happen range from basic, to complex, to basic runes in the shape of a basic rune, to basic in a complex rune, to complex in complex runes. Each of those runes need to be formed in a sort of mental bubble, then the ‘bubble’ is popped, releasing the spell. Needless to say, they are convoluted. But then I found a book on making runes. Apparently, they are just really complex instructions for what the Makt should do, and the base instructions were made by someone who doesn’t understand code optimization. I do, however, so after many failed attempts over many months, I did it. I made… an iron ball. Not very impressive until you consider that I had no iron at the beginning, I made it, and that the spell is supposed to take more Makt than I have. Now, besides getting slapped in the face by the tattered remains of the laws of thermodynamics, I was loving it. I was always the coder at the lab, making all of the machines do the right thing at the right time in the right place, so this was right up my alley.

 

However awesome making things out of nothing might seem, I really couldn’t do anything impressive with that iron ball. I wasn’t fluent enough in the code of the runes to do anything on the fly, and I couldn’t combine Creation magic with Space magic runes in order to do anything useful with it. I couldn’t make useful shapes, like a dagger, or a sword, without hours of fine-tuning. Those hours did help me in another way though, as I learned how to unmake my creations, and turn them back into Makt. In the end, I decided to try to make a program out of the runes, to make one rune that can make others. 

 

Three years later, I did it.

 

The rune itself is ridiculously complicated, getting up there in the tiers of complexity (of which there are nine). First, it creates an Earth style keyboard and mouse, and a screen. The screen then asks what you want to make, a Rune for an object, or a rune for a spell, though I haven’t tried the spell yet. It then gives options on material and material composition. It works similar to a cad program, but with way more detail in the composition. Then, at the end of the process, it makes another ridiculously complicated rune, and all that is left is to cast it. The first thing that I designed was a Aermet steel dahong palay, but with an added small hooked blade at the opposite end of the hilt. Once I ended the design process, a notification rang out in my mind.

 

Ding - For the creation of a unique and powerful Rune, you have been awarded with a Plus 10% to Intelligence, permanently, as well as the skill Advanced Runescibing [1]

 

Looking at the new notification in shock, I paused, before realizing what it implied. The benefits were huge! Also realizing that I hadn’t checked my status for a few months, I decided to take a peek.

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