After making sure that Moblin gets a few treats for behaving himself on the long walk and his check-up, and once again assuring Zelda – and to a lesser degree, your folks – that your dog is in good health, the first thing you do is go down to your workshop, dig through the loot piles, and retrieve those three swords you mean to hand off to Robin tonight.
You then take the opportunity to do a more detailed, but still non-destructive examination of the things for your own arcane education. Due to the simplicity of the enhancements and your prior exposure to Earthly, Earth-adjacent, and Hyrulean examples of weapon-crafting, the swords prove unable to tell you much that you hadn't already known, save in the area of what hard-used, poorly-maintained, and/or possibly poorly manufactured magical weapons look like. Which is… not useless, per se, but nothing really special.
The minor stylistic flourishes in the physical and arcane designs of each sword make for a similarly mediocre discovery. You'll probably be able to identify items produced by the same individuals as these going forward, but that's of minor value at best.
Setting the blades aside for now, you decide to spend a few hours reading, with the goal of finishing off the book "Magic of the Smithy," which you purchased from Balthazar a while back and have been plugging away at since, Quincy invasions notwithstanding. Given your plans to build the tools to build a new workshop from scratch in the coming weeks, a more complete understanding of magic-assisted and outright sorcerous crafting methods will only be beneficial.
The bad news is that since the book was intended for people already moderately educated and experienced in the field of arcane metalworking, there are a few basic concepts that are glossed over rather described in truly helpful detail. You make a mental note to ask Robin about some of those later…
The good news is that, even with the limits of your foundational skills in this field, your well-rounded magical education allows you to grasp a fair bit of the intermediate and advanced stuff.
Gained Disenchantment E (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Production (Armor) E (Plus)
Knowing more about how to work metal and strip out unwanted magical essences will indeed be a useful skill going forward.
Dinner passes, and then evening TV-watching with the family, and in due course Zelda and the sun have both called it a day.
You've let your parents know about your plans to invite an acquaintance over, and perhaps out to go vampire-hunting, and why.
"How good would these anti-demon knives be, if they worked as well as possible?" your father inquires.
"Not as immediately lethal as staking a corpse-demon in the heart or cutting its head off," you admit. "But bane weapons are pretty nasty. An otherwise ordinary knife with that enchantment could probably dust your average bloodsucker with three or four good hits. IF it works as well as possible," you add.
Your father looks VERY thoughtful about this.
Perhaps even more remarkable, so does your mother.
Leaving them to their ruminations and setting your own aside until you know whether or not the knives are worth acquiring, you head downstairs, call up your Mirror Hideaway, pick up the blades, and step through to call a guy.
"Interesting summoning chamber," Robin observes a few minutes later, as he looks around at the reflective walls. "So, these are the swords?"
"They are. And that is one of the knives?"
"It is," he replies. "Trade you for them?"
"Pending testing, anyway."
"Of course."
Handed over swords
After Robin has stuffed the blades into his enchanted pouch, you hold up the still-sheathed knife. "Now, this obviously needs testing, but given the confines of this space" – you gesture around at the small cubical room – "I don't particularly think summoning a corpse-demon is ideal. I also really don't want to bring one into my house."
"I completely understand," Robin says with a nod. "What are you proposing?"
"I was thinking we might go out for a night on the town…"
Robin has no serious objections to taking a little time to walk the streets of the town that one of his younger sisters has been calling home.
"And even if I did, Mom and Summer both want to know what it's like around here," he adds.
Ah.
"Oh, come on," Briar grumbles. "I've been away from home for over twenty years without getting captured, crushed or eaten by anything. Isn't that enough proof that I can take care of myself? And this guy isn't exactly a slouch, either."
It's nice to be included.
"Even so, Briar," her biggest brother replies patiently.
Some spellcasting ensues.
Obviously, you don't want Robin to be noticed or tracked by any local magic-users, so the Spell of Mind Blank is a definite necessity, and his appearance is such that a disguise or even outright invisibility would be a good idea: his Hyrulean-style clothes are definitely unusual by modern Earthly standards; and unsurprisingly, he looks exactly like "Cousin Briar's" older brother, which is a connection to your family that it's best to keep from getting around.
Fortunately, Robin has the means to turn himself invisible. As he and Briar explain it, he's too big to utilize the innate imperceptibility trick that smaller, younger fairies rely on, but also has yet to grow into the innate magical power that allows Great Fairies to do the same, and similarly lacks the typical arcane training to make up the difference. As a smith, Robin has simply made himself the proper tool, a statement he emphasizes by tapping a ring he wears on his right hand.
"Ah, a classic," you reply. "I have one myself, actually, although…" You trail off as you produce the Ring of Invisibility from your pocket and compare it to Robin's Ring. Both are plain silver bands, but the aura around Robin's not only speaks of Fae energy, it registers as less powerful than your own – which is saying something, considering that it doesn't take much to make such Rings.
"Seems a bit different?" Robin guesses, in response to your pause.
"Yeah. What's that about, if you don't mind my asking?"
He doesn't, and as he explains, it's because his Ring doesn't really have the power to bestow invisibility on its wearer; rather, it serves to augment Robin's latent power of invisibility, permitting him to disappear much as he used to do. For anybody who wasn't a fairy, there'd be little to no effect, and none at all for anybody that wasn't Fae.
And this is evidently about the best that Robin can do in the field of "magic rings" at this time. He admits that he needs more practice with the "fiddly detail work" and especially in the field of lapidary before he can really progress.
Regardless, it saves you some magic.
For your own disguise needs, an Extended Spell of Adjustable Polymorph will do nicely. For once, you forego your various adult guises and adopt the form of a teenager, one that you try to steer in the direction of "corpse-demon bait." Unremarkable features to make it easier to disappear into a crowd – or in this case, off of the street; average height and build so as not to seem like too much work or too small a meal; decently fit to be more appealing, without coming across as an obvious fighter or runner; and some other little details to round out the presentation.
You consider adding a Spell to Bestow Weapon Proficiency, but after a moment's thought, you pass on that. If this works out, you'll be giving the knives to Cordelia and Larry almost for certain, and your two friends have about as much practice with short blades as you do – which is to say, very little, outside of the wooden or blunted metal equivalents that Lu-sensei has brought out for training. With that being the case, knowing how well someone with such a lack of knife-skill can handle the weapons would be a useful bit of information to have.
Are there any other spells you wish to cast before leaving your Mirror Hideaway and the house?
Robin's invisibility will suffice to hide him from most creatures at a distance, but since you're going corpse-demon hunting and you know that those things have some heightened non-visual senses, you offer the smith and your partner the use of a Greater Spell to Hide From Undead.
You aren't exactly planning to leave any survivors, but bloodrats do run in packs, and if there's enough of them and they're twitchy enough – which, given the legend of the Independence Day Killer is apparently spreading, they may well be – some of them might try to run for it when you break out the anti-demon knife or other effects, or even just if they smell the fairies hanging around invisibly.
Said spell will cover the sound of Robin's footsteps, but you ask him if he'd like a Spell of Flight or something for greater mobility.
"I'll be fine," he replies.
His call, at least as long as he can keep up…
In anticipation of the possibility of something going wrong, you ready a Staggered Flicker. You'd considered Overloading the technique, but while you've greatly reduced the telltale glow of excess ki, you haven't quite managed to eliminate it, and such a feature will be more visible at night, particularly in Sunnydale – with its (in)conveniently spaced-out and not always ideally maintained street lights – and to creatures that can see in the darkness.
As that could compromise your ability to bait the bloodsuckers, you leave it be. Having a couple of "low" speed Flickers on standby should be plenty.
…but just in case it's not, you also cast the Greater Spell of False Life, so you can take a few hits without suffering real harm.
Is there anything else…?
After a moment's thought, you cast the Spell of Prying Eyes, intentionally limiting the effect so that you conjure sixteen featureless crystal orbs into being around yourself.
"Wait to receive a Spell of Invisibility," you order them. "Then follow me outside and spread out to record my immediate surroundings as we proceed."
You aren't entirely sure this will work, mainly because you aren't sure if the "Eyes" will be able to make it through the mirror portal. Their thematic modification from inorganic eyeballs to blank crystal spheres didn't do anything to increase their great fragility, and the passage to and from the Mirror Plane is… unpleasant. It hasn't hurt anybody you've brought across thus far, but none of them were made of glass, either.
A couple quick Mass Invisibility Spells, and you're done.
Exiting the Mirror Hideaway-
?
-you confirm that the Eyes came through.
You take a minute to remove a few items from your Arcane Pocket, in favor of a more anti-undead loadout, and also to pull on your Airwalking Boots. Since it IS dark out, you also fetch La Renarde's Thief's Goggles, and then regard them for a moment. They look odd enough that it might pose an issue, so you work a bit of Illusion Magic upon them. You don't actually know a spell specifically suited for this task, but between the Spell to Disguise a Weapon and the Spell to Alter a Musical Instrument, you can fake "make something I'm wearing look like something else" decently well with a little work.
"You're going to wear dark glasses at night?" Robin wonders, as you adjust your eyewear.
"They have night vision, among other things… what are you singing, Briar?"
"Nothing~," she replies with a snicker, before flying off. "'So I can, so I can see the light…'"
You trade glances with Robin. "…did she used to sing to herself?"
"No, this is a new madness."
"Ah."
Preparations complete, you momentarily shift your Adjustable Polymorph back to your regular appearance as you exit the basement-
"Why are you wearing sunglasses, Alex?" your mother wonders.
"They're actually goggles."
"My question stands – Tony, stop humming to yourself."
"The madness spreads," Robin muses, while Briar cackles.
-and introduce your partner's brother to your parents – or is it a re-introduction? They were all on Bali Ha'i at the same time.
"We didn't actually speak then," Robin admits. "I was a little busy helping Mom and Summer keep an eye on all the little menaces. You understand, of course."
"Oh, yes," Mom sighs. "Magic or not, I don't know HOW your mother handles so many kids. Zelda is a handful all by herself, and then there's this one..."
After a couple minutes of pleasantries, you resume your disguised form, Robin pulls on his Ring of Invisibility Assistance, and you set out for a night on the town.
In your studies of the demonic, the monstrous, the undead, and even the animalistic, you've come across the argument that, when trying to track down creatures of a general kind – as opposed to specific individuals – signs of the beasts themselves aren't necessarily the first thing you should look for. Rather, some voices recommend finding your quarry's preferred food source, and then either settling in to watch that and wait for the target(s) to show up, or else checking the surrounding area for traces you can follow to another location.
Corpse-demons prey on people, but can't enter private residences without invitation. As you noted to yourself when envisioning your current disguise, the parasites generally aren't interested in having to exert themselves to catch a meal, either, but humans already tend to be skittish at night, and more so again when they're on their own or in small groups after dark – especially in this damn town. And while you haven't directly experienced it yourself, comments from your parents, Lu-sensei, and the other Sunnydale adults you know are in the know and who know that you're in the know – you know? – have given you the impression that corpse-demons on the Hellmouth tend to target teenagers and young adults more frequently than other groups.
With those points in mind, the ideal location for you to check would be a venue that was open to the public after dark, popular with that particular age group, and with enough distractions to cover the sights and sounds of brief struggles to the death.
How… fortunate, then, that you've overheard some of your seniors in Lu-sensei's advanced class talking about a club here in town, where the high school kids like to hang out. You've never been, of course, and the exact address is a little vague, but you have a fairy partner.
Briar heads up, and up, and well out of sight while you and Robin keep walking along, and a couple of minutes later, she returns with directions.
Perhaps fifteen minutes after that, you've managed not to have any demonic encounters – unless the general environmental nastiness counts-
"It's like walking into a monster nest," the blacksmith's voice comes from a short distance to your right. "An old nest, at that. How do you stand this, Briar?"
"You can get used to almost anything, with enough time," your partner replies grimly. Then, in a lighter tone, she adds, "But the familiar bond helps, as does hanging around Alex when he does his daily purification rituals."
-which it arguably should. But whether it does or not, you've started seeing a lot of teenagers, most moving in threes and fours, some on foot, others in motor vehicles, all dressed for dancing and hanging out, and all headed for the same place.
And then you turn a corner and see it: The Ironworks.
As the name suggests, the club is built into the shell of an old industrial plant, one that apparently was shut down when your parents wouldn't have been much older than you are now. The reasons for the closure are unknown to you, never having come up in the handful of conversations you've overheard about the place, but Sunnydale being what it is, blaming the supernatural seems like a safe bet. That aside, the parent company evidently stripped the place of any equipment that was worth taking, locked down the really heavy stuff that would have been too expensive to relocate, and left a bunch of other junk laying around – abandoned office furniture, chains hanging from the ceiling, and what have you. A couple of decades of neglect and decay later, and teenagers were daring each other to check the place out, and then, when Awful Things or Mysterious Disappearances failed to happen, they started using it as a hangout. Eventually, it got popular enough that somebody thought they could make money off of it, bought and renovated the building, and opened it for business.
Looking around-
"I like the shades, man!" one guy calls.
"Thanks."
-you don't spy any demons in the line-up before the door, or haunting the shadows in the area. There's an alley of sorts to the right, between the main building and another that must have been part of the little-i ironworks back in the day, but which doesn't appear to be in use now. To the left, there's a large open area with a loading dock, where some teenagers are just hanging out, talking, and one or two smoking.
Better get the lay of the land first, before heading inside, and the roof offers the best vantage point. Actually getting up there won't be an issue, thanks to your Boots, you just need to find the right moment…
…
It is perhaps a little depressing how easy it is for you to do that. When you slip away from the crowd, heading for the mouth of the not-exactly-an-alley between the two buildings, it's not that surprising that nobody calls after you – after all, you only recognize a few of these older kids by sight, basically none by name, and are disguised as somebody who doesn't exist on top of that – but your heightened senses don't even register a feeling of anybody looking your way.
You choose to believe that it's a combination of your bland appearance – sunglasses aside – better-than-decent stealth skills, and the abundance of shadows created by the poor exterior lighting. The alternatives, that teens in Sunnydale are so passively unobservant of their surroundings and/or actively indifferent to others, are kind of sad.
Whatever the case, you step into the alley without issue, vanishing from the sight of the bouncer and the dozen or so guests waiting in line.
Also, nothing jumps out at you from the deeper darkness. That might have something to do with how narrow and cluttered with junk the alley is, but you don't spare it more than a brief glance and a quick probe with your more exotic senses to make sure nothing is within biting, grabbing, or lunging distance, before clicking your heels together and beginning your ascent via that "jogging in place" method you tried out in the Death Mountain Trial.
Up, up, up you go, until you are level with the roof and able to just step forward onto the ledge, and from there onto the roof proper. Looking around, you find that there's really not a lot to see, at least not atop the building itself: some old pipes and air turbines, the latter of which are not moving; a big boxy set of fans that ARE in operation, and look about thirty years newer than anything else up here; a roof access door that is locked, although not barred or chained, at least not on THIS side; and some litter, including a few cigarette butts.
Satisfied that you aren't about to get jumped by anything – but keeping an ear and a portion of your other senses alert for movement all the same – you turn around and peer over the side of the building, bringing your Corruption Sense to be-
!
-well, THAT was quick!
You're close enough to the door line and the handful of teens by the loading dock that you can shut out the Hellmouth's ambient energies while still getting a good read on them, and with that done, you can say with confidence that there are five demonic signatures in the bunch.
One of these is not a demon at all, but rather the energy of an empowered item, specifically a necklace worn by one of the girls in line. Or maybe calling it an amulet is more accurate? Either way, it's not much more than a crystal on a bit of fabric – pretty enough, but with your awareness of the taint, it comes across more like bait for a trap. Reading the corruption alone doesn't give you the best idea of how strong the crystal's power might be, but a quick probe with Mage Sight answers that – and the answer is, "not really, even by ordinary standards." The aura of Abjuration and Divination suggests a protective charm, something based more on luck or chance than direct, overt defenses, but that's all you can tell without taking more time to investigate.
The next aura is also a magical signature, in this case of a young warlock who is one of the better-dressed individuals in line, with the sort of clothes that subtly show off a certain amount of wealth and taste. Cordy and Kahlua would approve. The guy's objectively pretty good-looking, too, but that subtle sneer and the way he carries himself as if everyone around him were inferior ruin the impression he's no doubt going for, if only in your eyes. The girl hanging off his arm and the three other teens hanging on whatever he's saying don't appear to notice.
The next two demonic presences – one in line, the other over in the second group – are actual demons, or at least demon-blooded humans. You aren't sure about the ancestry of the one in line, the signature being muted enough to suggest that he's more human than not, but the girl by the dock, currently laughing along with her companions at something one of them said, has a familiar aura that it takes you a moment to nail down until you recall a dream at the World Tournament, and an intruding little girl who got rather more than she bargained for.
Succubus or no, it's the last mass of corruption that gets your attention, because the young woman who looks like she could be in her late teens or early twenties is definitely a corpse-demon. The aura, the subtly predatory language, the lack of breathing – you have to look closely to notice – and the fact that she's wearing the height of last year's fashion all prove it.
Points to her for trying, though; an outfit just a year out of date is a lot better than most of the other vamps you and your Shadow have briefly encountered managed…
"Target acquired?" Briar asks.
"I believe so," you reply.
Now there's just the question of how to engage…
Casting the Spell to Attract Undead has some appeal, but you recall what Captain Marcus said when you tested the magic on him, about it feeling like something had reached into his skull and grabbed him by what was left of his brain. He admitted then that if he hadn't been expecting the spell, he might have been driven to attack you, a feeling that only diminished in subsequent tests at greater range.
You're close enough to that corpse-demon that you might still prompt an aggressive response, and while you aren't too bothered by the prospect of a lone bloodrat charging to its demise at your hands, the thing is standing in the middle of a bunch of humans, who might get hurt if the unholy entity in their midst freaks out.
Why take the risk if you don't have to?
So instead, you cast the Spell to Command Undead-
!
Bwahahahaha!
What brought THAT on?
I am almost reluctant to ask.
-which takes effect with surprising ease. Not that you were particularly concerned by the prospect of the vampire standing up to your magic – being a necromancer with reliable access to spells of the eighth circle has its perks, after all – but you did think you'd at least sense some kind of resistance, some spiritual push-back or demonic struggle. Instead, it feels like the psychic equivalent of walking up to a solid stone wall, giving it a push, and seeing the whole thing collapse.
Shaking your head in wonder-
"Wait, did it not work?" Briar asks in surprise.
"Almost the exact opposite," you reply.
-you head back over to the alley-side of the building, Air Walk over the ledge, and start your descent. A short time later, you walk around the corner of the Ironworks, pass the bouncer and the folks at the head of the line with a couple short nods of acknowledgement, and keep moving down the line until you reach your target.
"Hey, there," you greet the corpse-demon.
"Hey, yourself, stranger," she replies, turning to you with a surprised blink that shifts to a… surprisingly genuine-looking expression of friendly puzzlement. The hints of restrained aggression and deadly hunger in her posture and expression that you were able to discern when observing from above are just… well, no, not gone, she clearly would still kill any of the people around her, but not the least hint of hostility is being directed your way. "Can I help you with something?"
Wait.
And that sounds more like an actual offer than the merely expected social politeness most humans would extend.
Waaaaiiiit.
What the heck did your magic just do?
"So," you say, your confusion over your spell's effectiveness affording a slight delay that, thinking on it, probably helps to sell your act, "I know this is completely out of the black and all, and you don't know me from a hole in the ground, but would you mind joining me for a walk?"
…why is she blushing?
Bwahahahaha!
…I see.
…oh my.
A couple of the people in line, meanwhile, are giving you looks that range from jealous to startled to impressed. One guy even gives you a thumb-up.
"Sure," the demon replies, stepping out of line. "Where to?"
"Just around the way, a little chance to talk privately…"
Is… is the spell supposed to be able to do that?
Bwahahahaha!
Although a good part of you is still tied up wondering exactly what is going on, and a second part readying to draw Robin's knife, another bit considers that you have here a corpse-demon that you're in a position to make inquiries of, as long as you keep them friendly.
Do you have any questions you'd like to ask?
You walk with your, uh, new companion for a bit, considering how to conduct this impromptu interrogation, and finally say, "So."
"So," she replies.
"It's a beautiful night."
"Yeah."
"There are some lovely people walking about."
"…yeah."
"And it makes me wonder… who's your master?"
"Ugh," the corpse-demon replies without a moment's hesitation. "He's the worst, is what he is. 'You will address me as 'Lord' or 'Master,' minion!' 'So long as you lurk in my crypt, minion, you will do as I command!' 'I brought you into this unlife, and I can take you out of it!'" Dropping the fake deep voice, she continues, "Taking any neat stuff I bring back, making me throw out the bodies he leaves laying around the place, never using my damn NAME – and the one he insists on using for himself is so lame! 'Lord Drake Bloodfang?' Seriously? You're twenty years old and fifty years dead; why are you acting like a delusional teenager?"
…
Some corpses have it rough, it seems.
Partly to move your questioning along, partly out of genuine and somewhat morbid curiosity, you ask, "Do you have to put up with that sort of thing all by yourself, or…?"
"Oh, sometimes, I almost wish," comes the admission. "But no, 'Lord Drake' has to have his 'court' and his 'three brides' and the whole Dracula-wannabe thing – and then because the actual crypt only has space for, like, five bodies, they all start fighting over who gets the good spaces and who gets shoved out into the tunnels, and the next thing you know, half of them are dust and Lord High-and-Mighty is throwing a fit and killing half of the rest."
"That must be a problem when the neighbors show up to complain," you note.
"It'd be more of one if Lord Idiot weren't such a good fighter," she grudgingly concedes. "I've seen him take apart three ordinary vampires in less than a minute, and that's with his bare hands. If he has room to swing that sword he likes so much, limbs start flying. That sort of thing tends to discourage rivals – well, unless they're the Aurelians, but screw those guys."
"Bad blood, huh?"
"Yeah, they're a bunch of stuck-up posers who think they're hot stuff because their ancestor was a fortune-teller and their Master's so old that nobody remembers his name." She scoffs. "Not that anybody's seen the old bat since at least World War Two. Anytime somebody brings it up, the loonies get all, 'The Master will rise again,' and 'The Night of Rebirth has not yet come' – I swear, Lord Dunce has to be related to that bunch, even if he doesn't have anything to do with them."
"So the delusional idiot thinks they're not worth giving the time of night?"
"Even he has to have a good idea every once in a while. But enough about them," she continues, "let's talk about you. I mean, who are you?"
"Who do you think I am?" you inquire, honestly curious.
"I mean, if I knew that, would I be asking?" comes the reply, although not in an upset tone. "Seriously, though. At first, I thought you were just a guy who had the guts to ask a hot stranger out in front of a crowd – which, rare, especially in this town, but not that weird. Then you let on that you knew I was a vampire, even though I wasn't showing it, and you were cool about it, so I figured you must be a demon, too. But we're far enough away from the crowd now that nothing's mucking up your scent, and you smell completely human, but you're not panicking even a bit, and I'm starting to wonder, 'would he even flinch if I did this?'"
And then, with a snarl you've heard a few times before – mostly interrupted by bolts or cones of flaming death – her face goes from human-normal to full vampiric visage.
"And you just blinked, like my face changing was 'no big deal,' and that's it!" She sounds impressed by this. "And that never happens with humans!"
"Is that 'never in my experience' or 'never that I've ever heard of'?" you wonder.
"Both!" the undead entity responds, before making a face – or more of one, as the case might be. "Well, no, okay, I have heard stories about some of the really scary hunters who react like that, but you're not some old guy that doesn't care if he dies as long as he kills his target, and you're not covered in holy symbols, so you can't be one of those turbo-religious lunatics – and you're obviously not a girl, so you're not a Slayer. Not that there's been a Slayer in Sunnydale in, oh, forever."
You just nod at that. "No, I am definitely not any of those things." Granted, Ganondorf was older than dirt, and you suspect that at least a couple of his incarnations only ended when they did because he was focused on killing Link to the point of self-destructive obsession… "Well," you continue, setting those thoughts aside to give a technically honest response, "to put it simply, I'm the new face in town. I'm just trying to get a better idea of how things work in this town, from somebody who wouldn't attack me just for being new, and when I noticed you and your sense of style, I thought you were just what I was looking for."
"Aw, you," the vampire says, nudging your arm and somehow blushing again. She looks you over, a bit critically. "I'd say I like your outfit, too, but, uh… those clothes are really pretty bland. Well, except for the glasses."
"Yeah, I was trying to blend in, at least right up until I wasn't."
She nods sagely. "Going for the surprise value. I get it. There's something to be said for when they don't see you coming."
Oh, the irony.
"But like I was saying," you continue, "is there anything like an official welcoming committee for the supernatural side in town, or a place a new arrival, even a human one, can go to pick up some information and advice without getting his face eaten?"
"There's a few places you might try," the vampire replies. "Burke's Bar serves clients of just about any sort, as long as they agree not to cause trouble on the premises. Decent place for info, though you might have some trouble there because of your age. Mom's Home Cooking has a similar policy for their customers and wouldn't care about your age, but Mom doesn't like it when people show up and don't eat something – and her cooking is, uh, an experience."
"…not that I object to paying for information," you say slowly, "but with the food, are we talking bad, dangerous for human consumption, or just weird?"
"It varies from meal to meal."
Not the most reassuring recommendation.
"And there's the Sunnydale Ladies' Homemaking and General Anarchy Association," the vampire adds. "But trust me, you do NOT want to go there except as an absolute last resort."
…
…
You have never heard of the Sunnydale Ladies' Homemaking and General Anarchy Association before, which makes you wonder if the local adults you spend time with have been keeping you in the dark – and if so, why.
Because when somebody who will talk to you about corpse-demons shies away from a topic, that implies things about the latter subject…
So, you ask: "Why not?"
"Well, for starters, the place is half-daycare thanks to so many of the members bringing their brats along when they have meetings or projects, and kids are just messy, exhausting, and disgusting even when they're entirely human – which not every member of the Association is, last I checked."
Under different circumstances, you might argue about that assessment of children, but you don't see the point here.
"Then there's the fact that the membership includes a coven, and witches are bad news when they get together," the demon goes on.
This statement, you have less issue with accepting at face value, and not even just because of Ganondorf's memories. Amy and her mother have dropped a few remarks about family reunions that make it clear they aren't the only followers of Hecate in the extended family, and that some of the things your parents have said about in-laws apply in spades when witches are involved.
"But even without the actual magic-users, the place is full of nosey old hags, soccer moms, and walking, talking Barbie dolls. And some of them are just so. Damn. Weird. Like, the knitting circle were always in that one room, no matter what time of day it was, the same half a dozen grannies and past-middle-age moms just clicking away on that exact same blanket, for five straight years – and every time somebody went in the room, they'd all look up in synch, like some kind of hive mind or something." The vampire shudders. "I don't know if they were just another bunch of witches or the blanket was actually a demon in disguise, but honestly, I didn't want to know."
…okay.
"And then there was the weapons collection."
"Wait, what?"
"I'm not making this up!" your informant insists. "Those crazy women have a couple of cabinets' worth of handguns, shotguns, and hunting rifles, plus enough ammo to start a war, and there's a room in the back where they keep all the equipment for making more. And then there's the other room full of swords and axes. They get together a couple of times a month to shoot the hell out of a bunch of targets, have monthly meetings where guest speakers show up to talk about guns and explosives – which I never saw them making or keeping stored anywhere, but I would absolutely not be surprised if they did!-"
…okay, Larry's grandmother has to know these people.
"-and on alternating weeks, some of them do freaking martial aerobics! Like, what the hell? Who practices yoga or jazzercise with swords?"
Okay, she definitely doesn't know much about the global martial arts scene, because that's far from the weirdest or most taxing sort of exercise you've heard of. Heck, you practice stuff like that on a regular basis.
"But the worst part about that place," the corpse-demon rants on, "is that they never. Stop. Talking. 'Who are you seeing now, dear?' 'You can do so much better than him, child.' 'Learning to cook is a life skill, girl, whether you want to get married or not!' Ugh!"
The more the vampire talks, the more you get the impression that she's channeling the memories of the original owner of the body, because you can't really see a corpse-demon hanging out with a mostly-human group with access to weapons they apparently know how to use, much less long enough or closely enough to know so much or be getting dating and lifestyle advice from them.
With that somewhat depressing thought, you decide to bring an end to this… after one last question.
"Definitely an unusual bunch," you say aloud. "Well, thank you for the warning. I would definitely not have wanted to wander in there unprepared."
It might have been interesting to see the reactions of a group of strange witches to a boy showing up with a fairy and no magical signature, but "interesting" and "witches" are words that should not be combined lightly. Throw in the apparent militia, and it's the sort of thing best avoided.
"You're welcome," the vampire sighs. "But yeah, that's about all the places I can think of in town that would be safe for a human to go looking for information. Well, them and Town Hall," she amends, "at least by daylight, but who wants to deal with politicians?"
"Not me," you agree. Not right now, anyway.
Noting that this conversation has carried you about a third of the way around the block where the Ironworks stands, you figure you're far enough away to avoid witnesses or much in the way of carrying noise. The steady, slightly muffled beat of music from inside the old industrial plant will certainly help to muffle the sounds for those standing around just outside.
Reaching one hand into your pocket, you say, "So, I have one last question, and fair warning, it's a weird one."
"Yeah?"
"If you were given the offer to be something other than a vampire, while still being yourself, would you take it?"
The corpse-demon blinks in confusion. "What?"
You repeat yourself patiently.
"…I mean, I sure wouldn't say no to becoming a greater demon," she replies, "but that's about as likely as… hell, I don't even know what to compare it to."
That's fair; Ganondorf needed to grab the Triforce of Power AND be the embodiment of the Curse of Demise to turn himself into a Demon King, which was a confluence of forces and events that took you don't even know how many centuries to line up, and which you're pretty sure hasn't been repeated in Hyrule since.
"And if it wasn't a greater demon?" you inquire. "Or heck, not even a demon at all?"
The distorted face scowls. "What, like turning into a human?"
"Or maybe a monster?"
"…well, that's less pathetic, but still, what would even be the point?"
That probably answers that.
"Well," you say, with a shrug and sigh, "if you don't want to take a stab at it-"
Out comes the knife, and forward it goes.
It must be said that you're not good with short blades. While there are some similarities to swords, the weight, reach, and balance of a knife falls well short of even the smallest of true swords, much less a hand-and-a-half weapon like your Blessed Blade.
You're better-practiced at subtlety and stealth than you are with knives, but even then, your expertise is focused more towards large-scale results, like hiding your entire body – even in plain sight, by blending into a crowd – or staying light and as close to soundless on your feet as you can. Some of the smaller-scale cunning arts, like legerdemain or picking out exactly where on an opponent's body to sink the pointy end of a dagger, are things you've either not had the opportunity to work on or have deliberately avoided cultivating.
This works against you now, as Robin's knife emerges from your pocket with a snick of blade-sliding-from-sheath that registers to the memories of the Thief-King as embarrassingly, amateurishly loud.
So perhaps it is the pricked pride of a professional purloiner that has you driving the blade into your friendly neighborhood corpse-demon with more speed than is truly needed-
*Thunk-hiss*
"OW!"
-or perhaps it's the sudden feeling of eager anger and something that isn't quite hunger or thirst, but closer to either than any other organic sensation you can readily think of, which radiate from the blade in your hand, whose aura surges with elements of Divination and Necromancy that you can almost see – and can certainly feel – subtly guiding your hand.
Gained Knife Training E (Plus)
The corpse-demon recoils from the strike, not soaking the damage as a demon typically might in order to close with a target, but in genuine surprise – even shock – at having been attacked without warning.
"You cut me?!" she shrieks, clutching at her left side where the blade went in. "And it hurts?!"
Rather than waste oxygen and words, you shift your grip and drag the blade – already pulled free of the undead flesh by her sudden lurch back, but also by the energy that hisses faintly along the polished, silvery edge. It's not fire or lightning or anything quite so material, and it's certainly not the radiance of life-essence or a divine blessing. Really, the magic of Bane weapons has more in common with curses, although it's not quite potent enough to truly count, and certainly lacks the potential for indiscriminate and disproportionate reprisal.
*Slice-hiss*
The vampire howls as you slash her arm, leaving a rent in her sleeve and a matching gash in the cold flesh beneath, a deeper, wider wound than seems entirely reasonable for the weapon in your hand to be capable of dealing, and one that's certainly well beyond the immediate healing powers of the undead.
"You son of a-!"
Ah, THERE'S the normal murderous aggression you would expect to see from the unblessed undead! It would seem safe to say that your Spell to Command Undead has been disrupted!
And then you have to lean back to avoid a telegraphed but powerful punch that swings through the air where your head just was.
Up comes the knife again-
"Gah! Bastard!"
-although this time it's a glancing blow at best.
So, at first glance, Robin's homemade Hyrulean Monster-slash-Demon Bane weapons definitely work against corpse-demons to some degree, but possibly not as fully as you would like. Whether that's because the magic is too strongly attuned to a whole different order of unholy abominations or because a corpse-demon is more physically resilient than you were really expecting after casually incinerating a bunch of them, you aren't quite sure.
Then again, you HAVE only really cut your target twice. One or two more solid hits are required even in the best-case scenario. On that note…
While the level of "skill" on display is such that you think you could handle this fight as-is, some of your no-longer-friendly vampire's dialogue indicated that she's not familiar with the world of mystical martial arts. If that's the case, you have-!
"AN OPENING!" you declare.
"What are-?!"
And then you trigger the Body Flicker and, from the parasite's point of view, vanish in a blur of movement-
"-WHAT THE-?!"
-in which you circle around behind her, blade raised. Within the last stretched-out "seconds" of your ki technique – which you only activated at a modest level, feeling its full effects to be wastefully overkill – you consider the undead entity's back, calling on your studies of demons and the undead, as well as your fleeting grasp of general anatomy, to try and line up a shot to the heart.
And then, you strike-!
*Crunch-scraaaape*
Gained Sneak Attack D (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
"-AGH!"
-only for your literal backstab to hit something that was definitely not the heart. Even this Blade of Demon-Bane's supernatural eagerness to rip and tear undead flesh to pieces proves unable to simply punch through whatever part of the skeleton you struck just now – either a rib or the shoulder blade, the spine is too far over – instead being deflected along the edge of the bone. It's the sort of strike that would have you seriously worried about having dulled or chipped a mundane weapon, and even knowing that the knife is magically reinforced, you can't escape that concern, because you know that Robin didn't invest THAT much effort into the basic strengthening enhancements…
The good news is that whatever you hit, it wasn't able to trap the knife, which pulls free more easily and less noisily than it went in.
The unfortunate news is that, once again, you didn't do as much damage as you would have liked. You make a mental note to warn Cordy and Larry about the issues with striking a corpse-demon from behind, if you do end up getting knives like this for them…
And then there's the bad news, which is that after being hit four times in quick succession by a weapon that hurts far more than it should, as well as having witnessed your ability to move faster than she can follow, this bloodsucker has finally clued in that you're dangerous enough that she ought to run for it.
Too bad for her that you have a couple of Staggered Flickers on standby. They're not really meant for running a target down, but when you're this close to start with, only need to move straight ahead, and the target hasn't been able to get up to their top speed, one burst of sudden acceleration is as good as another.
The corpse-demon gets two full strides-
*Zoom-SLAM!*
"GAH!"
-before you tackle her from behind, knife-point leading the way. Supernatural strength or not, she's smaller than your current form, not braced to take an impact like that, and already moving in the same direction besides, so she pretty much drops like a falling rock.
Before the two of you have hit the ground, you've stabbed her again, and are gearing up for another strike.
"Get off me, you a-!"
*Stab*
"-AGH!"
Gained Anatomy F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Okay, stabbing a corpse-demon in what you're pretty sure was the right lung doesn't stop it from making vocal noises, even when you're using a Bane weapon. Maybe if you stab the other-?
"Let me-!"
*Stab*
"-gooooaaaa!"
And what proves to be the corpse-demon's last words trail off into an unholy howl as you finally either hit something vulnerable, or – rather more likely, you suspect – just do enough damage for the demonic essence keeping the corpse active to be disrupted by the antithetical force of the Bane weapon.
Of course, this also dumps you on the concrete and gets a lot of dust in your face-
"Achoo!"
-which is definitely a point in favor of your usual method of nuking these things from range.
Still, on the whole, that seems like a successful test.
"So," Robin says, blurring into plain sight a short distance away. "Definitely not the smoothest field test, but a successful one all the same."
"Seems like," you agree. "Although… actually, hang on a moment."
You take out one of your empty potion bottles, scoop up as much of the lingering Vampire Dust as you can, and then sift through what remains for anything worth taking. That amounts to a pair of plain silver earrings, a matching necklace – no magical auras on either – and a mini-purse that must have been tucked into a pocket or just carried inside the vampire's jacket. Whether because of the extra insulation and distance from the corpse-demon's self-immolating form provided by the added material, or because the purse was set aside often enough to not be as strongly contaminated by the vampire's energies and thus couldn't be induced to destroy itself, the contents are intact. The only thing immediately useful there is the money, but maybe you'll find some purpose for the rest?
Used one Glass Bottle
Gained Corpse-Demon Dust (x1)
Gained Corpse-Demon Jewelry
Gained Corpse-Demon Purse
Gained $139
After sorting out the spoils, you cast a quick spell to disperse the remaining dust and get it off of you, and then turn to Robin. "So, yeah, definitely a bit of an awkward test, which makes me think running at least one more might be a good idea, just to be sure."
"Fair enough."
"Plus," you add, "I still want to see if stabbing a corpse-demon in the heart makes any difference."
"Is that what you were trying to do?" the smith wonders.
"Yeah, but I definitely need more practice with knives if I'm going to stab somebody in the back, and man, it's a good thing nobody else is around to hear this, because that would have sounded really bad out of context."
"It would, wouldn't it?" Briar agrees. "Still, if your spells are still good-"
"They are."
"-and you didn't take any actual hits this time-"
"I did not."
"-then I don't see a problem with doing a little more hunting. Back to the club, or do you want to try your luck elsewhere?"
You consider that. Returning to the Ironworks has some potential, especially since you can use your Spell of Adjustable Polymorph to change your disguise from "the plain-looking guy wearing sunglasses at night, who walked off with a girl that conspicuously isn't with him anymore" to "some completely different guy who may or may not also be wearing shades."
But after a moment's thought, you decide that you don't want to get too accustomed to staking out the dance club to find corpse-demons. You've run into groups of the things walking the streets at night before this; you're sure you can do it again.
And so you do, although the next bloodrats to show their ugly faces do so in a group of three, homing straight in on you as soon as they see you.
"You picked a bad night to go for a walk, kid," the apparent leader says as the trio closes in-
!
"OW, THE PAIN, WHY?!"
-right before the corpse-demon to his left howls in pain and simultaneously tries to stand up straight and bend over backwards, as if, as if… well, as if somebody just stepped out of thin air to stab him in the back with a pair of matched magical knives that really, really don't like demonic entities.
"What the hell-?" the lead vamp begins, spinning about to stare at his minion.
"Is that an ELF-?" the other mook says with a disbelieving laugh.
"FAIRY SURPRISE!" Briar shouts, suddenly popping into plain sight as she assumes human size-
"Wha-HACK?!"
-and then hits the bewildered bloodsucker in the throat. Sadly, since Robin's daggers were designed for use by a Hylian, they aren't enchanted to shrink down to fairy scale, so you won't be getting a data-point there. On the other hand, a ki-reinforced knife-hand strike isn't a terrible substitute, especially since Briar doesn't actually need to kill that one, just keep it busy until you and/or her brother have finished off the other two.
Speaking of, the leader's head is still snapping back around in response to the second prong of the attack when you rush forward, once again going for the heart, this time from a frontal angle.
"Wha-GAH!"
Darn. Missed again.
And unlike your previous target, this corpse-demon actually seems to know how to fight even when taken badly off-guard. Rather than try to strike when you're at such close range, he attempts to grab you. Too bad for him that grappling is one of your better fields of unarmed self-defense, and one that isn't particularly compromised by your having a knife in one hand-
"AH!"
-at least when it's a knife that can actually hurt the thing you're trying to avoid getting into a full-on wrestling match with. Though it also helps that, greater skills or no, this corpse-demon isn't any more used to feeling the sort of pain that a Bane weapon can inflict than the previous one was.
Gained Knife Training E (Plus) (Plus)
You're just readying yourself for a third strike when there is a meaty-sounding *thunk* and the vampire before you suddenly goes still. For a second, you expect to see him burst screaming into dust, but instead, the corpse-demon falls over, body twitching in a few places.
"Wha- fu- gah- why can't I MOVE?" the fallen undead demands. "Also, FUCK, OW, GET IT OUT-!"
You look past where the enemy was standing to see Robin, holding only one of his daggers. The second is currently planted firmly in the back of your briefly opponent's neck, apparently having gone right through the spine, which, ow.
Your gaze shifts to where the demon Robin was fighting a moment ago should be, but no, there's just dust there now.
Then, with an intent sort of look that reminds you of a cat on the prowl, the smith draws the fourth and last blade in the set and moves towards the final vampire, which has gotten over the shock of the ambush and is starting to give Briar some trouble.
Fairy ki boosts or no, something that's already dead takes quite a bit of effort to beat down with your bare hands to the point where it can't fight back. The fact that Briar's human guise doesn't come up to her opponent's shoulder isn't helping her, there.
Fortunately, Biggest Brother Robin is on the case.
Speaking as a Big Brother, partner or no, it would be a bit rude to get in another Big Brother's way as he's going to assist his Little Sister. And quite aside from that, you should probably do something to silence that corpse-demon before its howling complaints draw more attention than you can easily handle.
Besides, you have faith in your partner's ability to keep herself in one piece.
That said, even as you turn the twitching body on the pavement over with your foot and start measuring the upper chest for a good place for a new stab wound, you're also shaping a Spell of Bull's Strength, which you cast in Briar's direction.
After all, having faith in your partner is all well and good, but actually helping her is general better, and this way you can lend a hand without getting in Robin's way.
"Hi-yah!" Briar cries out, punching her opponent in the face with renewed force.
"Urk!" the corpse-demon replies, as he staggers back from the suddenly and unexpectedly stronger blow – almost directly into Robin, who was circling around to hit the last demon standing from behind, much as he had the first two. This is quickly followed by a yelp of pain as the dagger still in Robin's hand finds an opening, and then a grunt as Briar presses her attack from the other direction.
Seeing that the siblings have that enemy well in hand, you focus on the other one, who you note is not so completely paralyzed by the spinal damage as it might have appeared at first. Still twitching, still complaining loudly about the knife stuck in his neck – which, fair – but one hand is visibly moving towards the hilt, however slowly, clumsily, and clearly demanding of concentration the attempt is.
Too bad for him, you've had plenty of time to line the tip of your own blade up right between two of the ribs.
*Stab*
The vampire roars in pain and more than a little fear, full-body twitching intensifying to thrashing, but he doesn't oblige you by suddenly turning to dust.
From out of your immediate line of sight, there comes the familiar death-cry of a slain corpse-demon, followed by some quiet conversation between the Fae siblings – lightly concerned on Robin's end, reassuring and less annoyed than she's affecting to be on Briar's, and after a beat, both of them heading your way.
"How goes the testing?" Briar asks.
"Knife to the heart does not seem to work," you reply, pulling the blade free.
The vampire hisses in pain, but manages to get out, "H-has to be wood, idiot."
"Maybe the third time's the charm?" you add, ignoring the parasite's comment before you stab it from a different angle, to see if that makes any difference.
*Stab*
The corpse-demon chokes, howls, and explodes into dust, leaving you briefly coughing for the second time tonight – demonstrating a distinct downside to the use of knives against these things, or at least the way you've been using them.
Still, the question remains: did the undead parasite die specifically because you'd stabbed it in the heart; or was it just a case of the damage adding up? Counting Robin's contribution, it took four blows to dust this one, two of them clean hits to the heart, and the initial strike at least to that general area. On the other hand, that's fewer strikes than it took to destroy the vampire back at the Ironworks, and she was a fair bit smaller than this one. Given that greater size usually lends a degree of resilience, the heart strikes might have been more disruptive to the demon's essence…
Gained Anatomy E
Well, regardless, there is more Corpse-Demon Dust laying around. You've got the main claim on the one you finished off, Robin has full claim on the one he took out alone, and he and Briar have a shared claim on the third one.
There were three corpse-demons in this group, your group had three members, and the takedowns were, overall, a team effort. This makes the division of the spoils pretty straightforward, although you do have to spot Briar one of your remaining containers so she has somewhere to put her "prize."
"What do I even NEED dead demon dust for?" your partner wonders.
"I'm still working out the possible uses in item-crafting, myself," you admit. "But worse comes to worst, you could always sell it for a little extra cash."
"Oooo, that's a thought…"
It also occurs to you that, given its elemental affinities, Corpse-Demon Dust might make a halfway decent fertilizer for certain kinds of predatory plants, specifically those of a quasi-demonic nature. Its ties to Earth and Blood suggest it would be good for mundane carnivorous vegetation, too, but the aspects of Shadow and Darkness might counteract those benefits unless the stuff was processed correctly; a plant that was already a creature of darkness in and of itself, on the other hand, could very likely take the Dust as-is and thrive.
And as it happens, you know of such a plant…
Of course, you aren't sure whether or not you should bring this up with Briar, as she might be opposed to using Snappy to experiment with such a thing – or entirely too eager to try it out.
Used two Glass Bottles
Gained Corpse-Demon Dust (x1)
Gained $21
Briar gained Corpse-Demon Dust (x1)
Briar gained $38
Fortunately, Robin has some spare containers of his own on hand – or rather, in pouch – so you don't have to use any of your dwindling supply on him.
You do ask the smith if he might be interested in establishing a supply line of this particular material for his own work, but he replies that he'll have to get back to you on that.
"I'm going to want to study the stuff in some detail, to figure out what it might be good for," he says. "At the moment, all I can think of is using it as a focus for more Bane weapons, specific to this particular species of nastiness."
Which is by no means a BAD use, as you're certain anybody who's ever had the misfortune of meeting a corpse-demon would agree-
"Hear, hear."
"And how."
-but given the complete lack of the things in and around Hyrule and the demonstrated effectiveness of his current design of Demon-Bane weapons against them, it's just not something that Robin has much reason to bother with, whether out of personal or financial motives.
With all of Robin's knives tested at least once, you decide to end your outing early and head home. Neither of your companions have any objection to this, with Briar reverting to her normal size and her brother disappearing once again as you make your way back to Casa del Harris.
"So," Robin says from apparently empty air to your right, as you're going down the sidewalk, "did you want to buy any of the knives?"
You inquire how much they cost.
"Well, normally I could sell a weapon like this for anywhere from fourteen hundred to three thousand Rupees-"
Ouch.
"-although given this lot are a set, they'd go for less than that if sold all at once. But like I said, at this point, they're just taking up space in my storage and not getting properly used, so you'd be helping me out by taking them. For that, I could cut you a deal-"
You see what he did there.
"-and mark the price down to the lower end. Plus, you did ask about these as weapons for your friends to defend themselves against the local demonic infestation, and that would include my sister and her local friends-"
"Aw, you big softie," Briar teases.
Robin clears his throat. "-and I got some new research material out of tonight's excursion besides, so, yeah, if you want to just take two of the knives and call it even, that would be fine by me."
Free stuff? Free stuff that's good at killing demons? How is this even a question?
Well, there is the matter of the other two knives to consider – you do have more than two friends here in Sunnydale that could benefit from owning one of the things, after all. You inquire, and Robin is willing to apply your discounts to the whole set, effectively making them half-off, and put them on layaway while you come up with the other twenty-eight hundred or so Rupees. Realistically, that won't be ACTUAL Rupees – your Hyrulean business dealings would need too long to produce that much profit – but a mix of gold, Earthly reagents, and perhaps favors owed…?
You speak.
Briar listens.
Briar thinks.
Robin visibly worries.
"…tempting," your partner says at last. "But I would rather not test demonically sourced fertilizer out on Snappy. I mean, unless you know of somebody who's experimented with this sort of thing already?"
Not off the top of your head, no. You can ask around, but it does seem like a bit too obscure a project for most of the supernaturally-involved adults of your acquaintance to have gotten involved in, especially since none of them have an active interest in gardening that you're aware of.
"Yeah, I figured," Briar replies, "but I wanted to be sure I wasn't forgetting anybody. Anyway, considering Snappy is already a bit demonic himself, I probably shouldn't be encouraging that side of his heritage, especially not when we just re-planted him into a growth-boosting magic pot and all."
Potentially too much of a good thing?
"I mean, the idea of him growing up into a Manhandla and rampaging through the town's vampire population is funny and all, but I think your mom would get unhappy with both of us if Snappy got big enough to star in Little Shop of Horrors."
"The Shop of what?" Robin wonders.
You're right there with him, not recognizing the name.
"It's a musical where one of the main characters is a giant man-eating plant."
You try to picture a singing Deku Baba or the like.
You subsequently join Robin in staring at his sister.
"It got made into a movie in the Eighties?"
The staring continues.
"Don't look at me like that, I didn't write it!" Sighing, Briar switches back to the actual topic of discussion. "As I was saying, instead of tempting Fate, Curses, and the Hellmouth, I think what I'll do instead is collect enough Corpse-Demon Dust to pay for a Venus fly-trap or something, and then see how well using the Dust as fertilizer for THAT plant works out."
It's a plan, you suppose.
You might as well go all-in and pay for the lot. Not only would it allow you to arm Cordelia, Larry, and Amy, but the fact that all four blades were made as part of a matched set would let you use the remaining one as a helpful visual aid for the Spell to Locate Objects, in case you ever need to find one of its counterparts – or more pertinently, the wielder – or for other sympathetic magics.
Or maybe you could try to give it to Zelda? Hm… might be a little difficult to get your folks to okay that until she's older.
Regardless of what you do with the extra weapon, there's the bill to consider. While you trust Robin a lot more than you would a random Fae blacksmith, the fact remains that he IS still Fae, and you don't want to get into the habit of owing favors to anyone or anything of that persuasion, just on general principle. With that in mind, gold and reagents are your only truly practical method of payment at this time.
It occurs to you that you have a fair number of reagents in storage already, and could offer Robin a chance to look through a few of them and choose one as a "down payment" of sorts on your purchase. Are there any such reagents you'd be willing to part with?
She's not using your Dust supply, though.
"None at all?" Briar inquires.
"I've got some experiments of my own to run, and a couple of ideas for stuff I might be able to use the Dust for," you reply. "I mean, if I had more of it in stock, I wouldn't mind sharing, but as it is…"
"Eh, fair. But hey, maybe the next time you send Shadow You out to rain flaming terror and destruction down on the local undead population, maybe make sure he's got some empty bottles?"
That seems entirely fair, provided that Shadow Briar helps with the collection.
"Fortunately, I find the idea of feeding corpse-demons to plants, even indirectly, to be kind of funny, so she'll probably be happy to do it."
There are a few pieces of your moderate extensive collection of random junk stuff that you wouldn't mind parting with for a good cause, and so you ask Robin if he'd like to take a look at them before he goes.
He would, and thus, your trio return to the Harris household as you left it. Your mother has gone to bed by the time you arrive, but your father is still up, if not for too much longer by the look of things, and you quietly nod to him as you lead Robin downstairs and start fetching the reagents you had in mind.
Well, most of them. The Glacial Fragment you leave in the freezer for the time being, instead opening the big box up to let Robin take a look – and it is a fairly long look, albeit one that's directed at the freezer as much as at the reagent itself.
"A bit more convenient than whatever icebox you've got set up?" you guess.
"Just a bit, yes," the smith agrees, before bending down to look at the floor underneath the deep-freeze. "Does it ever melt?"
"I've… never seen it happen," you reply uncertainly.
Anyway, of the items you'd considered handing over, the Demonic Werewolf's Heart gets a firm "No," as soon as you bring it out of storage. Which, fair, the thing IS more than a little nasty on several levels. The Hihi's Heart, on the other hand, gets an actual consideration from Robin, as do the Crystal Animal Figurines.
After some thought, Robin says that, of the available choices, he's inclined to take the Crystal Animal Figurines. Partly, this is because he can easily find uses for Light reagents, especially when there's this many of them AND they're already attuned to Earth and Fire – the natural affinities of a smith – but he's also curious to see if he can learn anything about the mundane techniques that would have been used to shape the crystals.
As he said earlier, he needs to work on his skills as a lapidary if he's going to crack proper magic rings.
You don't think shaping mundane crystal is quite the same thing as cutting gemstones, but then again, you're far from being an expert in such things yourself.
Taking the worth of the Figurines into account – and leaving out the mouse and the butterfly, which were Briar's favorites of the set-
"Thank you for remembering," your partner says.
"You're welcome."
Robin considers for a moment. "Actually, count those two against the total, just be sure to set them up somewhere as Briar's property instead of potential reagents."
"Eeee! Best Biggest Brother!"
-and converting it from dollars to Hyrulean currency, that would come to… 150 Rupees. Not a huge amount, but it does account for somewhere past five percent of the cost of the knives, which is certainly a better start than you could have managed paying out of your Rupee pouch.
You spend a little time haggling with Robin over the cost-
"I already paid for Briar's!" he protests.
"That is family, this is business!" you return.
-and he ends up agreeing to pay 190 Rupees instead.
"But not a copper penny more!"
Gained Haggling C (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
With the transaction agreed upon, Briar makes another gleeful noise, pops back to human scale to give her Biggest Brother a hug, and then carefully plucks her two "new" pieces of property from the collection and heads for the door.
"Where are you going?" you wonder.
"I'm going to set these up in my house!" Briar replies cheerfully.
…
Sure, whatever. They're officially hers, now, she can do whatever she wants with them.
Robin shakes his head and starts packing the remaining Figurines into his pouch.
Sold Crystal Animal Figurines
Once the smith is done, you accompany him back into the Mirror Hideaway.
"Is there really no better way to do this?" Robin wonders with a shudder, after stepping out of the Mirror and into the glass-walled Hideaway.
"I mean, I got Ambrose – you met the wizard, right? Right, and we all apologize for him in general. Like I was saying, I got the wizard to install some wards on the house to help hide low- to mid-level magical activity, as well as keep out more of the Hellmouth's crud, but even basic calling spells are powerful enough to potentially test the limits of that, and I don't feel like taking chances where my family's safety is concerned."
He nods, getting that.
"The good news is, I'm planning to start work on a new workshop on a private demiplane in the coming months," you say cheerfully. "Once that's up and running, I'll have a much nicer and more secure summoning chamber, which also won't require me or the people and things I call up to walk through a wall of razors just to get in and out."
Robin frowns thoughtfully. "Wouldn't you need to use a Plane Shift or a Gate to reach a demiplane?"
"…yes."
"And aren't those powerful enough to-?"
"Just let me have this, will you?"
The smith pauses, and then shrugs. "Sure. So, with tonight's business concluded, I shall be on my way."
*Poof*
And so he is.
Before exiting the Hideaway, you dismiss the Spell of Invisibility you cast earlier, causing the cloud of Prying Orbs – currently pressed up against various surfaces within the chamber, so as to give you and the just-departed Robin space – to blur back into visibility. You do a quick Eye-count-
?
-and come up two glassy spheres short of the number that you started with.
Frowning, you reach out through the matrix of the spell… and find nothing.
So, good news, the lost Eyes are not sitting in someone's possession or otherwise trapped somewhere, they've just been destroyed somehow.
Bad news, you have no idea when or how that happened.
Thinking back, you might, potentially, have lost an Eye when you were dealing with that first corpse-demon. You'd ordered the globes to follow YOU at a certain distance, and when the vampire tried to run for it and you Body Flickered after her and tackled, that might have caught a Prying Eye that drifted too close off-guard and crushed it. Certainly, your focus on the generously-titled "fight," especially the bit where you were trying to stab the bloodsucker in the heart, could have distracted you enough not to notice – your magical awareness of your probes isn't exactly "loud," and there are quite a few of them besides.
For all that it's possible, that outcome seems unlikely, though, and you DEFINITELY didn't lose two Eyes that way.
The other fight was confined to a small enough area to not really be a concern, and your ascent to and subsequent descent from the roof of the Ironworks, while certainly quick compared to the use of stairs or a ladder, weren't so fast as to have endangered your magical flying camera-equivalents.
Maybe one of them got hit by a car? There was a little traffic along the way, and even if the vehicles kept a reasonable distance from you, the Eyes were also staying away, which might have led to an unfortunate overlap. Granted, you didn't see or hear anybody come to a screeching halt in response to a sudden impact, but the Prying Eyes are so small and fragile – and also invisible – that a few thousand pounds of metal running into them at double-digit miles per hour might not even have registered the collision, at least as long as it wasn't against the windshield.
Regardless, you start taking in the information that your Eyes gathered tonight.
…
Ultimately, it doesn't show you too much that you hadn't already seen, although getting a clearer look at how Robin used those knives against the trio of vampires is informative. Of course, he's invisible when he initially backstabs the first parasite, but once that attack disrupts the magic concealing Robin from view, you can see that there's a certain workmanlike approach to his knife-handling. He's nowhere near as practiced with them as, say, your average Gerudo bandit might be, but neither is he ignorant of their uses – and you don't just mean the magical properties, there, but the physical ones as well. The weight and balance of a blade are important factors, and as the one who forged those knives, Robin would know their quality better than many rogues taking them into a fight for the first time, or even the first few times.
One you've seen all there is to see, you exit the Hideaway, dismiss your remaining unneeded buffs, and head upstairs to while away the remaining time before bed.
There is some giggling from the dollhouse that night. You make a point of ignoring it, at least as best as you can.
The next day, you set aside some time to try and fulfill an outstanding obligation – namely, your agreement to produce separate copies of the Spell of Literary Vision for Ambrose, Balthazar, and Urahara to pore over at their convenience, and in the case of your fellow arcanists, in exchange for a couple of equivalent spells.
Greater Shadow Conjuration is something you can technically do now, sort of, but it would be a lot more convenient if you didn't have to resort to rituals, and a written breakdown of the spell will save you weeks of research and spare you any possibility of having to deal with rogue shadow monsters.
And then there's the Spell of Simulacrum, which you just want on general principle. Many hands make light work, and you have SO much work in need of extra hands, even if there are some things that a Simulacrum just can't do, or at least not well enough for your purposes…
That inherent power loss is annoying, but on the other hand, it's one of the precautions that keep a Simulacrum from starting to think that it's the original creature and/or going off to do its own thing. Considering some of the back-talk you've gotten from Shadow Alex, the slight scare that time you tested the Robe of Arcane Heritage on him, and you general, never far-from-mind issues with the Curse twisting your magic, it really is for the best that you not have full-power and truly self-aware duplicates of yourself running around.
Anyway, your first attempt at scribing your personal variant on the Spell of Vision ends after half an hour, when the good-quality sheet of blank paper you were writing on proves unequal to the task of containing the power of seventh-circle magic, and is ruined.
Which is a nice, non-dramatic way of saying that the damn thing catches fire right there on your desk.
There may have been some startled shouting and hurried attempts to extinguish the short-lived blaze, but there was definitely no screaming, and certainly not any property damage.
None. At. All.
After that excitement died down, you called up Batreaux for a consultation.
"I see. I see. I SEE! So, it has finally happened…"
"You knew that this was a possibility, O Dark Master?"
"Indeed so! For though the processes by which your world manufactures paper are arcane even to one such as I, the mundane nature of the final product DID suggest that there would be a limit as to how much magical energy they could store, and one you would reach sooner rather than later."
"And you didn't mention it before, because it was more amusing this way."
"That, and I wished to see if you were thinking ahead – but yes, mostly for the amusement. MWAHAHAHA!"
He somehow manages the thunder-and-lightning trick in the Mirror Hideaway.
When Shadow Alex goes off to conduct his usual summoning and organizational work at Gen's that day, he does so with an additional order in mind, for a more traditional sort of paper, crafted using materials and methods that produce something more suitable for holding spells. And while he's doing that, you bounce over to New York for a quick word with Balthazar on the subject, as well as an explanation for why the spell you promised him a copy of may be a little delated.
The good news is that the Merlinean Master takes news of the delay perfectly well.
The bad news is that he tells you that, past a certain point, paper, parchment, and other such materials cease to be effective mediums for the raw energy of near-complete spells. There are workarounds, like using paper produced from mystically significant trees according to methods that retain and refine its needed qualities, or parchment that began as the hide of an animal of comparable potency – and was processed in a different but similarly intricate manner – but getting your hands on such things can be a little problematic these days, given human impact on the environment and competition, predation, and/or extermination from demonic sources.
Balthazar grimaces and adds, "Though you can also use the hides of certain demons for some spells. I wouldn't recommend it, though, sometimes they take the magic TOO well…"
Ultimately, it's a bit wasteful to use materials that may take decades or even centuries to replace when you're talking about creating a magic item that's inherently disposable, as opposed to one of a more lasting nature, like a grimoire or an Encantus. Consequently, people interested in making "Scrolls" for high-level spells often resort to sturdier and/or more intrinsically valuable materials than mere processed bio-matter.
Dave stares at his teacher. "A-are you SERIOUSLY saying that Alex needs to make STONE TABLETS?"
The teacher shrugs. "Clay works too, and sheets of various metals. Anyway, if you do it right, the tablet itself can potentially survive the release of the magic imbued into it, which lets you re-use it to make a new one. Or at least the raw material can survive; sometimes the actual 'tablet' still melts or shatters…"
"It would be nice if it was just the one story," Balthazar sighs, before explaining.
Demons and magic are both extremely varied in nature, and while there are some combinations of the two that are useful or even beneficial, the essential Chaotic and Evil nature of demonic life tends to result in a higher proportion of bad outcomes than should normally be the case.
Spells meant to invoke Order, Goodness, purification, and the like tend not to take if you try to inscribe them on demon-skin, or they do and then cause the Scroll to self-destruct at some point, at best wasting all your efforts and more likely blowing up in your face at a critical moment. Spells of a more neutral nature are usually twisted in some manner: a Fire Spell might be accompanied by the smell of burning waste or brimstone, or even burn a bit like hellfire; a Water Spell could produce diseased, poisonous, or acidic liquid; healing spells can cause side-effects ranging from unpleasant discoloration or sudden, unnatural hunger to the formation of disturbing growths; and so on and so forth. And as for spells that were distinctly Evil to begin with…
"I have seen a sorcerer fighting for his life against a demon-skin Scroll that was simultaneously trying to strangle him, beat him with its attached rods, and spill as much of his blood as possible via paper cuts, even though its edges really shouldn't have been that sharp," the Merlinean Master recounts. "I have seen another such item imbued with Summoning Magic, only to turn into a portal for the original owner of the skin, which it could pass through at regular intervals with no assistance from anybody. I have seen FAR too many Scrolls that wept blood or pus or other disgusting substances, and a number that would wrap around people with bleeding wounds and then refuse to let go."
"…that last one actually sounds almost handy," Dave says slowly, and with a distinctly suspicious tone.
"So what's the catch?" you ask, finishing the statement.
"The catch is that they weren't trying to bandage people, they were trying to drink their blood, graft themselves on in place of the damaged skin, or both."
Yeah, that sounds more like what demons would do. Or even just parts of them.
"Speaking of demons and potentially horrible or just disgusting things that can be done with their dismembered body parts," you say brightly, "what can you tell me about Corpse-Demon Dust?"
"Been cleaning up of the streets of Sunnydale, have we?" Balthazar guesses.
Your response is a half-nod, half-shrug. "That was almost literally my thinking the first time. I'd killed it with a Fire Spell and didn't want to leave any residual signatures."
Sorcerer and apprentice both nod in understanding.
"But I also had a friend in from out of town to do a little vampire hunting last night, as part of an experiment…"
You quickly recap your night on the town, as well as Robin's decision to investigate the properties of Corpse-Demon Dust, and your thoughts about using it as fertilizer.
Dave blinks. "You… want to feed vampires to your carnivorous plant from another world?"
"To Briar's carnivorous plant from another world, but yes."
Balthazar gives you and your partner a suspicious look. "Just to be clear, you didn't happen to get the seeds for this thing during an eclipse, right?"
Briar starts cackling again.
"…no," you reply slowly. "Does this have something to do with the movie about the singing man-eating plant?"
"The what?" Dave wonders.
"Briar mentioned it last night…"
Coughing once, Balthazar explains that there is a market for Corpse-Demon Dust, if only a small one. It's not something that anybody would have in stock on a routine basis, because it's not really valuable enough to justify the risks of "harvesting" it, unless you can do so in bulk – and if you have the means to do THAT, you can almost certainly find a job that pays better than vampire-hunting, or is just less unpleasant all around.
As for the uses of the substance, Balthazar admits that fertilizer would be a new one in his experience.
"I have heard of people using the remains of other corporeal undead as fertilizer," he admits. "Mostly druids, some witches. Your concern about potentially contaminating the plant in question does have some merit, because that can sometimes happen with undead that aren't animated by a demonic essence, although it usually requires a massive concentration of residual necrotic energy, somebody siccing an animated plant on a large number of undead or a singular greater undead in combat, or trying to use plants to seal away an undead entity."
Hm. Corpse-Demon Dust would have a much weaker level of energy, and you'd be using much smaller amounts of it compared to whole bodies, but the stuff is also tainted by lingering demonic essence, which would resonate with Snappy's own unholy heritage and the environment of the Hellmouth.
It's worth a try, although given some of your past attempts at purification, you're probably going to need quite a bit more Corpse-Demon Dust on hand before you attempt to separate the safely nourishing elements from the dual taint of undeath and demonic power.
Your current samples are small enough that, even if you combined all of them for a single cleansing ritual, you're a little concerned that you might end up scorching them. A bigger quantity of the Dust would have higher levels of contamination, and could absorb and neutralize a greater quantity of purifying power, reducing the secondary effects on the parts that you actually WANT to use.
Also, if you're going to test this out, you might as well make sure to get two Venus fly-traps, so you can set one up as the control for the experiment, while seeing how the other grows to differ from it after a Dust-enriched diet.
You make a mental note to spare a few minutes every time you exterminate a corpse-demon or pack thereof, to supplement your usual looting with Dust-collection. And you should put together a larger container to actually store the stuff, maybe get a few special spare bottles for samples from unusually interesting bloodsuckers…
All in all, not really something that will demand a significant investment of your time – for which your crowded schedule no doubt weeps – although it may take a while to resolve for that same reason.
But hey, maybe stepping up your corpse-demon hunting even this much will help you to blow off some steam?
And since you're on the subject of exterminating undead abominations that absolutely have it coming, you inquire of Dave if he'd be interested in a simple knife that is Really Quite Good at killing demons.
"I… thanks, but… knives aren't really my thing, you know?"
He's sure?
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Not hugely fond of the sight of blood and all that…"
Fun fact: Corpse-demons don't bleed much, if at all.
"Even so."
Fair enough.
"But if you'd like to bring the weapon by for a study session on Fae-crafted blades, or even to sell," Balthazar adds, "let me know."
You will keep that in mind, though you're not terribly likely to sell one of Robin's daggers. You have quite a few other friends who might be able to make use of it, and even without that, you'd much rather know where any and all Hyrulean items on Earth actually are, as opposed to just… releasing them into the wild, as it were.
Balthazar nods, clearly understanding where you're coming from on the matter.
"To get away from demons for a bit," you say then, "what are some of the stranger methods you've heard of being used in the creation of spell-scrolls?"
The senior sorcerer takes a moment to consider that. "Well, there was that one coven that made a point of weaving people's hair into a fabric and then writing on that."
"That… sounds…" Dave trails off for a moment. "H-how did a practice like that even get started? I mean, sure, it's a renewable resource, but people's hair isn't magical and doesn't grow back that fast… unless they were collecting from a whole town or using spells to speed things up?"
"Bit of both, actually. The family in question had been running the local barbershop for a few centuries, and the ladies of the line had branched out into a salon, so bulk supply wasn't an issue, and they had a perfect cover for getting people to try out their homemade hair-care formulas. And you might be surprised about hair, Dave," Balthazar adds. "It can be a pretty good receptacle for human magical energy, provided that the original owner had some talent."
"…this is why hair works for voodoo dolls, isn't it?" the apprentice guesses.
Balthazar nods.
Dave's hand goes to his head in a protective gesture. "Sh-should I be worried about people trying to steal my hair?"
"Look on the bright side; you might go bald and not have to worry about it."
"That is not comforting!"
"Ah, but consider, Dave," you say then. "Magic hair growth is a thing-"
"You, stop," Dave warns, pointing the Finger of Admonition and Implication at you.
"-so if you ever really needed it-"
"No, no, no! Shush, stop!"
"It's actually not quite that convenient," Balthazar interjects.
Oh?
"Growing someone's hair out, when it's short but otherwise healthy, is a fairly straightforward bit of Augmentation or Transformation Magic, depending on how you approach it. Re-growing hair after baldness has set in is another matter, and would require some fairly advanced and specialized Necromancy, since you'd need to revive the follicles without harming the living tissues around them."
That does make sense… wait a minute.
"Balthazar," you say slowly, "are you suggesting that zombie hair is a thing that could happen?"
"Urk," Dave exclaims.
"I've never actually run into a case," Balthazar replies steadily, "but there are a number of undead that do strange things with their hair, and types like the corpse-demons can often replace what they lose. With that in mind, the possibility exists-"
"Enough, already!" Dave interrupts, waving his hands furiously. "No more talking about hair or hair loss or zombie hair or anything hair-related!"
…huh. This actually seems to be bothering him on more than a casual level. You send an inquiring glance at Balthazar, who gestures back for you to wait a minute – and then sends Dave into the back room on an errand.
"So," you observe quietly, while glancing after your friend, "he took that a little more personally than I was expecting."
"Male pattern baldness seems to run in the family," Balthazar replies. "At least if Mrs. Stutler's photo collection is any indication."
Ah. A Mom doing Mom Things, then.
You take your leave not long after that, still wondering about zombie hair and other weird applications of Necromancy.
Shadow Alex gets back from Gen's with some traditionally-made, magically-attuned paper that reminds you of the Scroll of Consecration that Akkiko provided to you for the Familiar Binding Ceremony, some "sheets" of animal skin that feel even more receptive to magical energy, fresh ink suitable for use on either, and some additional reagents for the enchanting process.
And yes, he's also got some soft clay, as well as the implements required to write on (or in?) that particular medium.
"Gen knows about making 'scrolls' out of stone and metal, huh?" you note.
"Balthazar mentioned it?" your Dark Self inquires in turn.
As one, you nod.
"Yeah, well, Gen admitted that he doesn't deal in the high-quality stuff – none of our clients deal with magic potent enough to need it, apparently."
Not surprising. Most of Gen's patrons are minor talents, with a few moderately skilled individuals mixed in. You're by far the most powerful person to have set foot in the shop over the last couple of years – and very possibly to have ever entered the place, unless Gen's Great Fairy friend visited him at some point – and the next-strongest aura that you've picked up suggested a fourth- or perhaps fifth-circle caster.
"That said," your Shadow goes on, "he did have some clay, because a few of his customers prefer it to the organic stuff. 'Harder to burn or tear, water damage, insects, and mold aren't a problem, and with some work, they can be re-used.'"
"Also heavier and prone to chipping or shattering," you note.
"Trade-offs, man. And it's not like we don't have a magic pocket or the Spell of Hardening."
Good points, although you'll have to test whether or not the Hardening Spell is actually compatible with an inscribed… Scroll. Tile, maybe?
You pause at that thought.
"What is it now?" your Dark Self sighs, visibly bracing himself for trouble.
"It just occurred to me that, since binding spells to clay tiles is a thing, then somebody almost has to have created magical dominoes by now," you reply.
There is a moment of silence as the four of you in the room contemplate the image.
Regardless, over the next few days, you test out some of your new materials to see if you can successfully bind the power required for the Spell of Literary Vision to them.
It does work, eventually, although you have some doubts as to how stable the end result is, and consequently make a point of finishing the job as quickly as possible and delivering it right after it's finished.
Expended $1,400 in reagents
Considering how costly this turned out to be, as well as the fact that you have a couple of expensive suits in the works, you may have to delay making the two remaining Scrolls until the Drakes get your first monetary payout from the Silbern loot to you… or maybe not, you DO still have a bit over $10,000 available in various Earthly forms. Plus, now that you have a better idea of how to make Scrolls in the Earthly manner, you can look into sourcing some Hyrulean reagents for more efficient results…
Regardless, which magic-user did you take the Scroll of Literary Vision to?
While there are things to be said for clay spell-tablets, and you undoubtedly will be looking into the practice to see how well it works for more powerful magic than organic materials can deal with, you have to say that you kind of prefer paper. Maybe it's just a sense of familiarity talking, but there really is something to be said for the simple approach of taking your time and writing a spell's formulas out by hand, in the "long form."
And as far as magical dominoes go, you really have no idea where you'd even start trying to get independent enchantments on different game pieces to work together. It's a distinctly different approach than casting spells upon the set as a whole.
That said, Kahlua has showed you a few episodes of a relatively recent anime series where one of the characters is able to cause the monsters and spells in a trading card game to come to life, among other things. That is something that could be very convenient, assuming you could compress the contents of a spell-scroll into the much smaller surface of a playing card.
You aren't sure how you'd go about doing that, although your grasp of magic – especially of the sympathetic variety – is telling you that the images on the cards would be important to the process. If that's so, you might need to shore up your visual art skills to get the best results…
Using up your existing stock of store credit with Gen to cover the bulk of the scroll's cost just makes sense, and the remaining sum is modest enough that you can cover it from your cash reserves without concern. Simple and straightforward.
While it is tempting to hand the new Scroll off to Urahara just to see what he makes of it – and whether or not any explosions result – it's a better use of your time and efforts to pick up one of the spell-scrolls instead. And while both of the spells you stand to learn offer considerable versatility, you already have a degree of access to the Greater Spell of Shadow Conjuration, which makes the Spell to Create a Simulacrum the better choice.
The argument can be made that you can employ a similar effect via the Spell to Create a Dark Self, but "similar" is not "the same" – and more to the point, having two copies of yourself active at one time is flatly superior to just the one.
…okay, if you properly understand how the Simulacrum Spell works, then it would be more like having one-and-a-half copies of you around. That's still a whole other set of hands and eyes and non-trivial, if far less overwhelming and distinctly finite magical power to deal with tasks that don't truly require your personal attention – and you have a LOT of those to be getting on with!
Thus, you make a call to the Drake Estate and, armed with the resulting invitation, enter your Mirror Hideaway to create a Gate to Ambrose's teleportation chamber.
Ambrose eyes the Scroll in your hands with some caution.
"That thing isn't going to self-destruct when I read it, is it?" he asks.
"…probably not," you reply. At his mistrustful look, you add, "Give me a break, will you? It's my first successful attempt at binding seventh-level magic to a spell-scroll, and it's with a spell of my own design, besides."
The wizard nods at that, understanding the unspoken argument.
Even when they're based on pre-existing spells, as your Spell of Literary Vision is, newly-made magic doesn't have the same weight of history behind it, which can sometimes cause issues when it's put up against better-established spellwork and other mystical forces. More commonly, though, it's the lack of accumulated user-experiences that are the problem, the generations of observation, trial and error, and refinement that get passed down via word of mouth, direct demonstration, and/or the arcane equivalent of corrections in red ink or little addenda shoehorned into the existing equations.
Or, you know, your DARK MASTER just finding it amusing to not tell you that you'd need better materials to make the thing in the first place…
In any case, Ambrose takes the Scroll of Literary Vision off your hands and sets it down atop a nearby desk that you don't recall seeing in his workshop on previous visits. There's a light metal frame anchored to the desk, consisting of a pair of clamps on opposite sides; looking at them, it doesn't take long to realize that they're meant to hold a scroll or similar sheet-like item upright and unfurled, or that they can be adjusted to different angles to make things easier to inspect and read.
There's nothing magical about the device – it is, in fact, almost aggressively mundane, likely to avoid unplanned interactions with the energies of whatever item is currently in its grip – but it still manages to fit in with the arcane clutter of the place.
While you're glancing thataway, Ambrose walks over to the shelf of scrolls in the room, takes one down, glances at it, and then puts it back and gets another.
"…no, not that one either," he mutters, repeating the process. "Don't tell me I… ah, here we are!" Coming back your way, the wizard hands over the roll of… some sort of animal skin, you guess, but one that's been inked with some kind of red ink that glitters in the light. "One Spell to Create a Simulacrum, as promised. Do note that, due to the non-trivial cost of the material components, the scroll itself wouldn't be able to create a copy of anything more powerful than a slightly exceptional adult human."
No, no, that's fair. "As long as the formula itself is complete," you state.
"It is," Ambrose replies.
Well, then.
Gained Scroll of Simulacrum
Trade completed.
"Will you be heading out, then?" the wizard asks.
"Actually, I thought I'd check in with the Drakes while I'm here," you reply, pocketing the instructions for your new spell-to-be-learned. "See how Arthur's training with the Sword Beam has gone, ask whether or not Altria has stolen a peek at it, maybe offer some tips…" You trail off with a shrug.
"Fair enough. I'll leave the portal closet unlocked for you when you decide to leave. In the meantime, I have some reading to do…"
You leave him to that, and go in search of some knightly company.
As it happens, Arthur Drake is at home today, but he's also occupied with a guest of some sort – you arrived rather too late to see who, and the staff politely refuse to offer any information on the subject, so instead you seek directions to Altria.
This results in you saddling up Khamsin in the stables. The young horse still has some growing to do and some training to get in before he can carry someone of your size for extended periods of time or at his best speeds, but he's getting big enough now that short rides at modest speeds would be alright, as long as you both kept his limits in mind.
Or, as in this case, if you were using Summoning Magic to bring forth Khamsin's shade, rather than his true body. This way, you can both have some fun and not have to worry about him getting hurt in the slightest. It's a win all around!
As long as he doesn't throw you, anyway!
Once your noble steed is ready and you have mounted up, you ride out into the grounds of the Drake Estate, seeking a tiny dragon on horseback…
You have a plan in mind, and you checked with the staff to see if it was valid from the get-go, or needed a little work to become so.
It turns out that Altria only went out for a ride, and did not take a sword with her. This is easily remedied by asking someone to grab a couple of training blades for you while you're summoning and saddling Khamsin, which the servants are perfectly happy to do – you get the distinct impression this is not the first time they've been party to an impromptu knightly combat.
Anyway, once you have the blades stashed in your pocket, you ride out to find your opponent and do battle.
The grounds of the Drake Estate are modestly large, but not so huge that it takes you more than five or six minutes to track Altria down. She's riding one of the full-grown horses, her own Llamrei definitely still being too young to bear a rider, although the foal is also out running around, seemingly "racing" her master and her current mount – one of the tiny mare's parents, perhaps? – who are of course taking it easy on the young one. There's also a handler nearby, keeping an eye on things from the shade of a tree.
Everyone looks up at your approach, particularly when you take the swords out and raise them over your head, declaring, "ALTRIA! I COME TO CHALLENGE!"
"CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!" she shouts back, without a moment's hesitation.
…though there IS some delay as Llamrei has to be led aside, to make sure the young horse doesn't try to take part in the bout. Feisty thing.
After handing over one of the swords and riding past Altria and her steed, you and Khamsin wheel about to confront them.
Wooden blades are raised in salute, and then you charge.
The first pass goes well enough. Altria's horse is older and larger than Khamsin, but also seems to be of a fairly placid temperament, more of a riding horse than a fighting one, although unflinching from this challenge even so. She's also not nearly as big as the mounts of the Drake brothers, which limits just how much of an advantage she has over Khamsin in the charge.
If Altria's horse has the physical edge over yours, however, the situation is rather reversed when it comes to the riders. Even with the need to keep one hand on the reins, you have every confidence in your ability to at least match Altria with a blade in hand, especially when it's down to just strength and skill-
*Cla-clack!*
-and so it proves in the exchange, as in the absence of any supernatural boosts on either side, your strike overpowers hers. Altria doesn't lose her grip on her practice blade, grunt, or wince at the blow, instead just riding past you and turning about for a second pass as you do the same.
Once again, you charge, blade rising-
!
"WhoAAAA-!"
-and the next thing you know, you're on the ground, sword no longer in hand, with Khamsin's long and slightly bewildered face staring down at you. What the heck just happened?
Lightly pushing your four-legged friend's head aside, you sit up and look around, spotting your borrowed weapon about three feet away, and Altria riding up to you at a trot.
"Alright there, Alex?" she asks.
"A little bruised, but more baffled than anything," you reply, shifting your shoulders. The patch of ground where you fell is nice and supportive, not too hard and not too soft, as well as pleasantly grassy – plus, you have all that training in How to Fall. "What happened?"
"I attempted to disarm you, and… succeeded well beyond my own expectations," she says after a moment. "Tell me, have you ever practiced mounted combat before?"
…
"This would be the first time," you admit. "Unless you count bumper cars?"
…
"…I would not, no," Altria replies, coughing lightly into her unoccupied fist. "Well, then. This will clearly never do. Back in the saddle."
"Sure, just let me get my sword…"
What follows is an impromptu lesson in old-fashioned combat riding.
How to sit, and how to guide a horse through a fight.
How to hold yourself when striking, so that you channel the momentum provided by your mount, without wrenching your arm out of the socket.
How not to get knocked out of the saddle, at least in theory.
Gained Mounted Combat E
In practice…
"WHOA!"
*Thump*
…not so much.
You also get Altria to show you that disarming trick, which you at least get to the point where you can move your sword in the needed manner to perform. In a void. Making it work against an actual opponent, on the other hand…
Gained Disarm E
With your "duel" having turned into a teachable moment, it is quite natural that you would inquire of Altria how her own training is going – which, in turn, leads to the matter of that Martial Scroll of the Sword Beam Technique that her father won in the Ring of Trials.
"Father has admitted to having some difficulties with the skill," Altria replies. "In large part, it is an issue of time: his responsibilities are such that he can only afford to spend so many hours a week training; and a good part of that must go towards his prior training regimen, to keep up his existing skills and continue their development."
You nod, understanding the need to never skip Leg Day, and the constant temptation to do so.
"That aside, there is also the matter of how this Sword Beam is… not incompatible with our existing abilities, but also not benefitting from a large portion of what we do. It might be a different story if our techniques were based on ki rather than mana, but as it stands…" Altria trails off with a shrug.
This also tracks, as your magical training and your ki training have the same issue. Oh, the theories involved have provided you with a number of insights – Necromancy's focus on souls explained a thing or two about ki generation, and the greater awareness of and control over yourself that comes with being a ki adept is rather helpful when applying Augmentation or Transformation Magic, to name a few examples – and there are some fascinating or just terribly useful interactions between specific spells and ki techniques, but the fact of the matter is that being able to wield magic in greater quantities or with greater control doesn't meaningfully improve your ability to use ki, and vice versa. Consequently, all the time and effort put into developing your practical skills on one side amounts to time and effort that, at best, doesn't contribute to the other field, and more often denies you the chance to do so.
Still, when you and Summoned Altria were fighting Gouen in the Ring of Trials, she stated that she was, "having trouble with the melee application" of the Sword Beam, which implied that she's made some progress from her previous "setting swords on fire" problem. You'd like to see this progress in action.
Altria doesn't object to that, but you do have to return the horses to the stables-
"Take a rest, Khamsin," you say, giving him a final pat on the flank before ending the Summoning Spell.
*Poof*
Altria shakes her head and turns back to her own steed. "Something about that just seems like cheating," she observes.
"It's how I can go for a ride and then just skip all the horse-care afterwards, isn't it?"
"That is definitely a part of it, yes."
-and then get an actual sword for Altria so that she can demonstrate.
"…so, not completely past the problem with burning up practice blades, then?"
"Hush, you."
Her technique is interesting. The traditional form for a Sword Beam is a one-handed sidelong slash, more or less level with the ground, but Altria instead grips her sword with both hands and raises it above her head. Vertical strokes aren't forbidden or anything – a skilled user of the technique can unleash the Beam from any angle, using basically any offensive movement of their weapon – they're just not recommend for beginners. The reason for that is because, with the exception of forward thrusts – which have their own issues – the tricky part of actually unleashing a Sword Beam is timing, knowing the exact point in your swing at which to let the built-up energy fly.
A horizontal swing, ideally level with the ground underfoot, might end up off-target, but it doesn't risk you releasing the Sword Beam too early and sending it flying off into the sky, or letting the projectile go too late, and driving it into the dirt – possibly catching yourself in the blast and accompanying spray of detritus in the process.
Altria proves to have the timing down-
*Fwoom!*
-and while the bolt that she sends rocketing over the face of the pond could stand to be more coherent and longer-ranged – probably an interrelated issue, really – its trajectory is straight, it radiates enough energy to FEEL like a proper Sword Beam, and Altria's aim seems good.
Now, if only she could stop launching Fire every time that she does that.
It's not that being able to shoot flames on command isn't a useful ability, but being able to use a regular old Sword Beam WITHOUT the incendiary element would be better. There are some opponents you don't want to set on fire, after all, and of course, it would be much easier on the Drakes' training hall and practice gear.
That said, Elemental Sword Beams are certainly an interesting thought, though also one that you're not sure how you'd recreate for your own use. If you tried mixing mana in with your ki, you'd just end up creating another Power attack, which… okay, a Power Beam would be neat, but it's not an elemental effect like Altria is throwing around. Your ability to channel pure magical energy, rather than shape it into spells, is also distinctly lacking compared to your friend's. You could certainly try to devise a spell or spells to get the desired effect, but that lacks a certain… spontaneity and convenience compared to the ki technique.
After a moment's thought, you shrug, raise your practice blade, and then pause to consider it for a moment, taking in the wooden construction.
You probably shouldn't directly expose this borrowed training tool to an untested application of Power. Or even to Power in general, really.
Putting that sword aside, you draw your Blessed Blade… and then reconsider THAT as well, as you haven't forgotten the time you made the sword keen due to overstressing it with your energy.
Returning your sword to your pocket-
"What are you doing?" Altria wonders.
"Having second and third thoughts," you admit.
-you perform a quick Spell to Summon a Weapon, calling forth a plain swo-
!
-okay, what the heck?
"Did… you not just put that sword away, Alex?" your friend asks in confusion.
"I did," you reply, eyeing the Blessed Blade, or the summoned facsimile thereof, with a wary eye as it rests comfortably in your grip. "And I was trying to summon an ordinary, perfectly disposable sword, in case the technique I was just thinking of testing went wrong…"
…
"It IS still in your pocket, though?"
You check.
"…it is not."
…
Again, the heck? Okay, yes, your Arcane Pocket IS an extradimensional space, which TECHNICALLY means it's not on your current plane of existence, just attached to it, but Summoning Spells don't normally reach into such places, and the Spell to Summon a Weapon is no exception. So then how did your call for a regular old sword get the Blessed Blade instead?
"…do you suppose it's jealous?" Briar offers.
…
Wut.
"I mean, it IS your Goddess-given partnered weapon, it HAS been drawing on your energy for a while now, and you DID ask Elder Terok to give it a boost after you complete the Trials," Briar goes on. "I'm no expert on sword-spirits, but after everything Robin and Terok had to say about them the other day, I have to think it's been with you long enough to display at least some behavioral quirks."
Like not wanting to let you use other swords if it can help it – which, due to your inherent connection and your use of Summoning Magic, it arguably could. Though this does mean your sword probably won't hang around as long as a mundane weapon would have…
You raise the Blessed Blade before you, flat turned towards your face, and inquire, "Are you sure about this? Because I'm going to be using Power in a sec."
…
There is no answer, no spiritual or magical nudge, not even a shift in the weapon's aura.
But then again, it's still there in your hand. That's arguably an answer in and of itself.
"Alright, but on your own Blade be it."
A part of you is having trouble believing that you're talking to your sword, even if that is exactly the outcome you've been hoping for with the growth of its spirit. The rest of you decides to focus on the test ahead.
A normal Sword Beam doesn't generate too much recoil, which is part of the reason why the default form calls for a one-handed grip on the weapon, but as your various Power techniques have proven to be rather more forceful than their ki-based equivalents in the past, you figure it's probably a good idea to use both hands instead. This results in you taking something of a batting stance, as while it is a bit tempting to mimic Altria's overhead variation on the Sword Beam, you really don't want to risk a Power-based projectile hitting the ground anywhere near you.
You take a deep breath and focus your energies. Although a Sword Beam is already a technique that combines ki and mana, you've never had one suddenly flash into Power on you. Thinking on it, part of the reason for that likely lies in the manner in which a Sword Beam mixes the user's energies with those of their surroundings. Your ability to invoke Power came about because of the traces of the Triforce in your soul, but the world around you lacks that particular touch of divinity, and adding some of its power to your own would dilute and even debase the mixture, preventing it from reaching the "flashpoint" where everything starts burning gold.
It occurs to you that if you ever end up in Hyrule proper, you may need to be careful about where you use Sword Beams – more so than you are on Earth, where it's mainly a matter of not throwing force-blasts at the wrong target. And you will almost CERTAINLY need to be mindful if you make it to the Sacred Realm…
That said, another reason why your Sword Beams don't suddenly burst into golden light on you is because you've typically been focused on using ki to trigger them, which is not actually how it's supposed to work. The Hylian knights who developed this skill weren't trained ki adepts or magic-users, and would have let their energies flow in a simpler, less controlled, but also more holistic manner, combining their own physical effort, focused will, and mystical energies with the influence of their environment.
Granted, your personal variation has worked out perfectly well for you, especially when it comes to using Sword Beams while injured, but you decide to give the traditional method a go now, just to see what happens.
With that in mind, you ask Briar to cast a minor healing spell on you to soothe the bumps and bruises of getting unhorsed, and once that's done, you relax the tight grip you've habitually maintained on your energy pools since basically forever.
Altria may shift a bit to your side in response to the sudden increase in your presence, but then again, that could also be impatience to see you actually do something.
If that's so, you shall oblige.
Focusing your body and your mind while letting your energies flow freely, you swing-
?
-and nothing happens.
Perhaps you're too used to doing things the other way?
Intensifying your focus, you wind up, take another swing-
!
-and though you don't get a golden flash, you're at least able to feel the problem this time. It might be habit on your part, but it's not JUST that; your Blessed Blade is still absorbing excess energy from you, and that's interfering with your attempt to perform a "proper" Sword Beam.
Taking your stance for a third time, you concentrate once more, this time not just focusing on yourself, but reaching out to your weapon.
/ You wanted to be here, / you think in its general direction. / You wanted to do this WITH me, so stop working AGAINST me and HE-/
Something shifts.
Energy SURGES-
!
*SCREE-KOW-SPLASH!*
…
For the third time today, you find yourself laying on your back on some really quite comfortable grass. This time, instead of a horsey face looking down at you in curiosity and concern, you instead see Briar and Altria hovering above you – more literally in the case of the former.
"What happened?" you ask.
"Your sword flashed gold for a moment," Altria replies dutifully, "and something that looked somewhat like a Sword Beam, only rather larger, brighter, and even more diffuse than my own attempts, shot out of it."
"Then it blew up!" Briar adds cheerfully.
"…right away, or after hitting something?"
"Nah, the 'Beam' turned to 'Boom' pretty much the instant it broke contact with your sword," your partner confirms. "Fortunately, the blast wasn't too big, and seems to have been directed away from you besides, so the only thing that really got hit by was the pond; you just took the recoil."
…
Well, then.
Gained Power Beam F (Plus)
Gained Power Blade E (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Power Burst E (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Sword Beam C (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
"Where's my sword?" you ask as you sit up and look around.
"Oh, it up and disappeared," Briar says.
…
You check your pocket, and sure enough, there's your sword, not only back in storage but back in its sheathe. Almost like it got spooked and hid…
"Are you alright?"
The Blessed Blade does not respond to your inquiry, so you slide it partway out of the scabbard and look it over.
…
Physically, the blade's condition appears to be fine, with no chipping or cracking, and the guard and hilt are perfectly fine.
Magically, you can pick up traces of Power and Summoning Magic clinging to the weapon, but nothing that looks harmful. Though on that note, you also realize that the sword has stopped absorbing energy from you.
You aren't sure if that means the sword-spirit is still scared by the explosion, or if it's just holding off until the Power has dispersed.
All in all, there seems to be nothing to worry about, and as such-
"Shall we try that again?"
-you inquire if a re-test of the Power Beam would be acceptable.
*Snick*
From the way the Blade shoots back into its sheathe, you're going to take that as a, "No," possibly as a, "Hell no," and at the very least as a, "Not today."
Fair enough. You can't say you care for being at the epicenter of an explosion of Power, either – otherwise, your Power Burst technique would be a lot more developed than it is.
You do keep the weapon out of your pocket, though, attaching the scabbard to your regularly-worn Belt of Dexterity, so as to give the Power time outside of your Arcane Pocket to disperse.
While you offer to spar with Altria on foot, she has to take a rain check on that, as she has a lesson shortly and needs to get cleaned up after her ride.
Considering that you have a new spell-scroll to decode and study, this is less disappointing than it might have been.
Wishing Altria success in her class-
"What are you studying, anyway?" you wonder.
"Etiquette," your friend replies shortly.
You have to frown at that. "Are you somehow not polite enough?"
"Not in French, apparently, or so my tutor insists."
-you turn to make your way back to Ambrose's quarters-
!
-only to pause as you recall something terribly important.
"Oh, yes," you say, as you turn back to Altria. "I almost forgot…"
"Was there-"
*Pat*
"…I am armed, you realize."
"But I am faster."
Altria feels the need to test your claim.
And so it is that the servants of the Drake Estate bear witness to a large, rather startlingly fast-moving guest-
"Meep, meep!"
-being pursued across the yard by the youngest lady of the house-
"Get back here, knave!"
-as she swings a wooden training blade at him with retributive intent using one hand-
"Don't you have class?" you call back at one point.
"I can practice apologizing!"
-while the other hand holds a metal practice weapon down and to one side in a distinctly non-aggressive manner.
On a related note, you may need to figure out how to do that trick of kicking a dropped weapon into the air so that you can grab it without having to bend over…
You allow yourself a couple of minutes of fun before pulling out the Body Flicker and dashing in the nearest available door-
"Sorry, Yvaine!"
"Mrowr!" the little Remlitt exclaims in shock, ears, tail, and fur all standing on end as you zip past.
-which you manage to close behind yourself and lock before Altria can catch up.
The subsequent rattling of the door is followed by frustrated tiny dragon noises from the other side, to which you simply reply "See you next time, Altria!" before hurrying back to Ambrose's quarters to make your escape return home.
On your way back to the teleportation room, you spare yourself a moment to glance into the wizard's workshop, but as the old man said earlier, he is currently engrossed in the contents of your scroll, muttering to himself as he glances from the unfurled length of material to several tomes that he's set up on lecterns that weren't present when you were in here a little while ago.
Knowing better than to disturb a wizard at work, you tiptoe the rest of the way to the closet, perform a Ritual of Teleportation as quietly and unobtrusively as you can, and blip back to the outskirts of Sunnydale.
It would be more convenient if you could just open a Gate to your Mirror Hideaway, but unfortunately, the nature of the place – a temporary extradimensional space, lodged between the Material Plane and the Mirror Plane – makes it too unreal for you to accurately target with such magic.
…well, you COULD extend the spell to last indefinitely – which you might actually be able to do without drawing attention to your home, thanks to the combination of Ambrose's Wardstone Array and your highly-refined Mana Concealment – at which point it would be possible to attune a key to the Hideaway's extradimensional locality, but that would run into the issue of leaving an unsecured back door into your home for any of those mirror demons Ambrose mentioned to make use of.
Given how often you make use of the Mirror Hideaway Spell, it's kind of surprising that you haven't run into any such creatures yet. Has your habit of using the Hideaway as a spellcasting chamber for high-level magic scared them off, or do those entities just not hang out around the Hellmouth?
A question for another time: right now, you have a scroll to decipher.
Even staying up late, you have to eventually call it a night and leave completing the study of Ambrose's Scroll of Simulacrum until the following day. You know you've got it when the strangely glittery, red-tinted words on the page glow for a moment and then disperse into nothingness, causing the remainder of the scroll to burn to ash in your hands while leaving the arcane notations themselves shining brightly in your mind's eye.
Learned Simulacrum
Lost Scroll of Simulacrum
That's the good news.
The bad news is this spell is capital-E expensive, requiring a quantity of powdered ruby that starts at a value of some eight hundred dollars, and only goes up from there, as the strength of the creature being copied increases.
Suffice it to say, you do not have that much ruby dust on hand, and the fact that Simulacrum is a seventh-circle Spell of Illusion, which is on the cusp of what you can cast normally, makes your practice of substituting additional mana for such reagents completely unfeasible for the foreseeable future. You'd need to be able to work tenth-circle Illusion Magic to get ANY use out of that skill in this particular situation, and eleventh-circle casting would be required to forego the cost for creating a duplicate of yourself.
Aside from material costs, the contents of the also Scroll confirmed the various limits on the performance of the spell. Unlike the Spell of the Dark Self, which duplicates the target's abilities in full, the Spell of Simulacrum creates a replica that has only a fraction of the knowledge and powers of the original – a trait which incidentally makes this magic a rather poor choice for trying to learn things about the original – but in exchange for that, the Simulacrum is under its creator's control at all times, obeying the letter and spirit of whatever orders it is given, as opposed to a Dark Self's more… uncertain allegiances. Also, where a Dark Self can be created quite quickly, producing a Simulacrum is a time-intensive process as well as an expensive one, and further requires the caster to have a small sample of the creature he intends to copy, traditionally a measure of blood.
A Simulacrum cannot increase its personal abilities, which extends to being unable to heal itself of damage or replenish spent magical energy. It can be repaired and recharged with outside assistance, but this is also a slow and somewhat costly procedure, if not nearly so much so as its original creation. Similarly, Simulacra are unable to reproduce, whether you're talking about having one create more Simulacra – most likely Lesser ones, given the power loss – using something like a corpse-demon's ability to spawn more of its kind, or even just having children.
In spite of its fundamental nature as an Illusion, the inclusion of actual physical matter and the biological sample of the entity being copied give a Simulacrum enough "reality" to use other abilities, like Summoning Magic or item-crafting, but the fact that it has only half the power of the original does hinder how well it can employ such skills. Furthermore, Ambrose's notes include some calculations which indicate that it's not possible for one caster to create multiple Simulacra of a single entity at a time; if a new double is created, the previous one is simply unmade.
The numbers don't conclusively indicate what would happen if two different magic-users tried to create duplicates of the same creature at the same time. Ambrose included some non-magical notes about his own experiences with this spell, and among other things, they mention that he's never personally seen or heard of anyone's Simulacrum unexpectedly melting down without an obvious cause like being introduced to a Fireball.
/ But then again, / the wizard's handwriting declares, / there ARE a number of old stories about Simulacra developing erratic behavior quite out of line with the original, with no obvious cause. Likewise, some avowed experts in the field suspect that if a Simulacrum persists beyond the life of both its original and its maker, it could potentially gain free will and become a full-fledged life-form. /
...how unsettling. Maybe you should include a self-destruct function?
"See you next time, Altria!"
"Until then," your friend calls back through the door, in as polite a tone as can be managed. Then, somewhat less politely, she adds, "And I will get you next time, Alex! Do you hear me? Next time!"
Yvaine adds a yowl of displeasure that strives to be menacing, but ends up somewhere around "frustratedly cute."
"I look forward to it!"
And then you head home for some arcane study.
Even with the translations necessary to convert a spell of Earthly wizardry to your personal offshoot of Hyrulean sorcery, having a spell's formula written out for you beforehand really DOES make a remarkable difference in how quickly you're able to internalize the magic. The work of weeks and even months becomes a matter of mere hours, days at the outside.
Anyhow, with your new spell obtained but untested, you spend a few days looking into the relative costs of ruby dust and "plain" rubies, quickly coming to the conclusion that it would be less troublesome for you to buy proper gemstones with the necessary properties to empower a Simulacrum and then convert them into dust yourself, rather than trying to acquire loads of pre-crushed ruby that fit the bill.
It's not that you can't get ruby dust on the open market or that it would significantly change the cost, it's just that you'd need a rather large quantity of the ground-down stuff to compare with the intrinsic value and accumulated energies of an intact crystal. Too much of both are lost when the gems are reduced to powder and then left to sit in storage for extended periods of time, especially when the work is done using modern Earthly methods that care little for preserving magical potential. By leaving the rubies intact until you actually NEED them, you can save and direct far more of their power into your work, not to mention how destroying the stones yourself would add a certain sacrificial element to the whole affair that would be lacking with ruby dust produced by some machine somewhere.
Whether commercial grade or homemade, you will definitely need to wait on your first payout from the Silbern Loot to afford enough ruby dust to produce a Simulacrum of yourself, but the sort of gem required to create a basic Simulacrum for testing purposes is doable on your current funds. It wouldn't cost any more than the Ruby Lenses you obtained for your Spell to Analyze Dweomers, if even that much.
At the next convenient opportunity, you take another trip to Japan to visit the quiet little jeweler's that Gen introduced you to a while back, and spend half an hour or so inspecting their goods of a rubine nature – using your Gold and Ruby Lens and the Spell to Analyze Dweomers, so as to get a more precise reading on the properties of the stones in question, a sight which at first startles and then rather delights the older woman who has been helping you (and, implicitly, keeping you from stealing anything).
"Some of your work?" you guess, doffing the monocle for a moment as you guess at the source of her reaction.
"As it happens, yes," she replies with a nod. "If I may ask, how has it been treating you?"
"Very productively."
"I am pleased to hear it. Though I must say, I hadn't known that particular spell could be used to assess gemstones."
"Only their mystical properties," you clarify, "and even then, it's not specifically what the spell was designed for. It works well enough for my purposes, but a more precise spell would be able to get better results, and possibly for less power."
"Would you happen to know anyone who knew such a spell?" she wonders lightly.
"Not that I am aware of, ma'am."
You spot a few rubies that have the right qualities for a Spell of Simulacrum, but since you're still operating on a limited budget for the moment, you decide to limit yourself to buying the minimum amount to make the magic work.
Spent $833.33
Also, you're in a supernaturally-aware jewelers' shop, and one with whom you've built up a certain amount of trust as a client in your own right, as opposed to just being an odd kid and "business partner" referred to them by a friendly non-rival in the business. You COULD offer them a few Rupees to study, to see what they make of the otherworldly crystals.
"I can ask around, of course, but I can't guarantee anything."
"Of course, of course," she replies. "The consideration is appreciated."
"You do take gold and silver, I hope?"
"We do. Will that be coin, bullion, or goods?"
"Coin, at least for today. For future reference, though, what are your terms regarding goods?"
"The terms," as the lady explains them, are a little complicated, but to sum up, if you can prove legal ownership of whatever you're hoping to sell or trade, they will offer no less than 50% value for gems and jewelry pieces, be they mundane goods or magical ones. Payouts of 75% or more are possible if the items in question are in good condition and you're willing to wait a while for the store to find a buyer.
That said, the business prefers not to conduct deals worth more than $50,000, and likewise doesn't deal in enchanted items more potent than third-circle – fourth at the outside.
"Not interested in dealing with bigger stuff, or just not set up to do it?" you wonder.
"Somewhat of both," the jeweler admits.
You are not surprised. There are some protections on this shop, but they're mostly in the way of anti-theft and accident-prevention wards rather than anything that would stand up to a serious magical or demonic assault. Even then, you suspect somebody like La Renarde could get in and out of this place without too much trouble.
Considering how powerful magic items tend to attract proportionate amounts of supernatural interest, it makes sense that a modest business like this would prefer not to dip their toes in those particular waters. Their insurance almost certainly wouldn't cover the losses.
Items that don't have an established paper trail are more difficult to handle, and usually don't go for more than half their market value. Gold and silver, however, spend as well as cash.
Spent 8 gold coins and 20 silver pieces
You hand over a Green Rupee and allow the woman to examine it for a minute. You're a little surprised when she doesn't take out a loupe or other tool, instead limiting herself to what she can see with her unassisted eye – though from the faint pulse of magical energy, that does include her Mage Sight.
"…this is not an emerald," she finally says.
"It is not," you agree, as you produce additional Rupees, one of each color grade.
She studies these new examples, visibly comparing them to the original – the identical cut, transparency, and weight; the same purity of color, even if each stone is a completely different hue; and the similarities in their auras – before turning back to you.
"What are these and where did you get them?"
"They're called Rupees, and no," you clarify quickly, "they don't come from India. They're the primary form of currency in a place that some of my friends have taken to calling a 'magical fairy kingdom,' which I have some business dealings with. Mostly plants and spices right now."
You avoid giving too much information about Hyrule or the people you know there – and from there – instead focusing on the Rupees and what you know about them. Not being a jeweler yourself, there are limits to your knowledge, which quickly become apparent as Mrs. Kanemaru asks some questions that you can't offer answers to.
If anything, you probably learn more in that exchange than she does.
Gained Gemology F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Regardless, it is safe to say that the lady is curious about these stones and would like to study them. As they don't have any established value on Earth, you note the conversion rate to silver in Hyrule, and accept that value in exchange.
With the understanding that you won't be getting all of them back, and possibly not any, depending on how the jeweler's studies go…
While you're here, you also look into the store's supply of diamonds, to see if they have anything suitable for the Spell of Limited Wish, specifically for the cleansing ritual you've been meaning to use to settle your memories of Ganondorf down again. Although there are certainly plenty of diamonds on display and a few more in storage that Mrs. Kanemaru is willing to get out for your consideration, none of them have the necessary properties.
There are a few that would be suitable for lesser spells in your repertoire, though.
While you don't want to expend any of the few high-denomination Rupees that you've acquired, you've got more than enough of the common ones to spare a few. Letting a couple of Yellow Rupees go as well is a bit more painful to your Wallet, but you can make it all back relatively easily.
Spend 2 Green Rupees, 2 Blue Rupees, and 2 Yellow Rupees (32 Rupees total)
"Is there something special about the red and purple ones?" Mrs. Kanemaru inquires, as you take those two crystals back.
"Mainly that they're valued considerably higher than the other three," you reply, before indicating the different colors in turn. "One, five, ten, twenty, and fifty, respectively."
"…and if the exchange rate of eight pieces of silver to the one green Rupee holds… yes, that would be getting a bit expensive, wouldn't it?"
The better part of three hundred dollars for the Red Rupee, and almost seven hundred for the Purple, yes.
On a related note, you consider giving the lady conjured copies of the Green Rupee Dust and Green Rupee Shards that were left over after some of your experiments, but then you think better of it. Your conjured materials don't perfectly reproduce the qualities of the originals, which could throw off any analysis of the Dust and Shards – but more importantly than that, it seems like a bad idea to risk letting on to a professional jeweler that you're capable of making physically convincing forgeries of precious gems.
That said, you do have more than one sample of each, er, product. You could just leave the lady a bit of each. You're a bit hesitant to do so, however, considering that these ARE the remains of items you'd previously enchanted...
You have a few specific diamond-consuming spells in mind as you look through the collection, and Limited Wish aside, you manage to find suitable specimens for most of them.
Mrs. Kanemaru actually has a fairly large quantity of diamond dust specifically selected for its use in the Spell of Nondetection available, and notes in passing that it's one of the shop's more frequent sellers on the supernatural side. She also has the slightly higher-grade material necessary for casting Stoneskin in stock, though in much smaller amounts; it apparently doesn't do nearly as much business, partly due to the greater cost and partly because the spell just isn't used as often as Nondetection.
Which makes sense. Most spellcasters make a point of avoiding getting into fights, or at least of getting into melee range when violence erupts, but ALL of them are at least a little concerned about having their secrets revealed.
Intact diamonds of the proper value for a standard casting of the Spell of Restoration are also fairly abundant, although you do have to go through a few specimens before you find one with the correct mystical properties. It's the diamond required for the more potent application of the spell, the one meant to address energy drain, that gives you real problems, but you do find it eventually.
You do not, however, locate any diamonds that have an aura of Goodness about them.
Since payment in gold is an option, you cover most of the cost that way, and make up the remainder with cash.
Spent 20 gold coins and $333.33
Gained Diamond Reagents
Business concluded, you thank the lady for her time-
"And thank you," she replies, nodding politely. "For the immediate business and for the future opportunities."
-and depart.
You could argue that you don't want to confuse Mrs. Kanemaru's study of the Rupees you've already provided her by handing over fragments of other Rupees that had been imbued with some of your power as one-shot restoratives – and that is true enough.
In the end, though, it's really your concerns about secrecy that have you deciding not to mention the broken Rupee-bits you're still carrying around.
Once you're safely home from this jewel-purchasing outing, you spend some time in your workshop carefully examining each of your newly-acquired gemstones, fashioning a conjuration template for each of them.
Gained Conjuration Templates
Then, just to see if your skills have increased at all, you call up your Mirror Hideaway again, step inside, and cast the Spell of Major Creation a few times to produce copies of each of the diamonds for testing purposes.
And since you're already in here, you go ahead and perform the Spell of Planar Binding to get the other reagent you require to create a Simulacrum.
"COME FORTH, ASSISTANT!"
*Poof*
"Octo!" the Octorok declares cheerfully, as he appears, tentacles raised in triumph. Then he pauses and pats himself down. "…octo-to?"
"Yes, you're actually here this time. I have a request that requires your proper presence."
"Rok?"
"I need to borrow a bit of your blood…"
You fully expect him to be dismayed or wary, as many an otherworldly entity would be in similar circumstances, or to request some payment of comparable value, as all of the entities you've been making bargains with in Gen's basement have.
"Rok, ock, octo?"
Instead, Assistant just wants to know how much you need.
…is this loyalty, or some kind of demonic brainwashing? You hope it's the former, but…
There's a good chance that using mostly-but-not-wholly accurate rubies in the casting of the Spell to Create a Simulacrum will just cause the whole thing to collapse, which would be a frustrating result for a twelve-hour ritual. That said, there is a certain symmetry in using "fake" materials to create a "fake" entity which you feel merits investigation.
If it doesn't work, you will have confirmed that, and know not to waste your efforts trying it again.
But if it DOES work… well, you'll see what happens when you get there.
If you'd had to ask Assistant for a significant quantity of blood, there's no question that you'd be sending him straight back to Hyrule to rest and recover. As it is, though, donating a few drops poses no threat to his well-being, even if his total body mass is rather less than your own, and it just seems a shame to have called him all this way and then not allowed him to see anything more than a room made of mirrors.
In the end, you decide to leave it up to Assistant. "While you're here, would you care to see what my home is like?" you offer.
Assistant's eyes bulge in shock, and his many arms wave frantically. "Rokto?! Octo-ock, rok-to-rok!"
This is apparently the cephalopod equivalent of someone declaring their unworthiness.
"It's fine, really," you assure him. "Just don't be surprised if my family stare a bit or the dog tries to sniff you."
"Ock?"
"Yeah, we don't have Octoroks around here, and the only ones they've seen before this were participating in some Trials."
Assistant nods in understanding.
"Oh, and my little sister may poke you. Or hug you. Or tackle you."
"…octo?" Now he looks a bit more hesitant.
"Yeah, she's a bit… enthusiastic… oh, yes, and mind the mirror, here, going through it is pretty unpleasant."
A minute later…
"…Alex," your mother says slowly, "why is there a large red octopus in our house?"
"Mom, this is Assistant…"
Introductions go over well enough, although your mother does hesitate for a moment when Assistant extends a tentacle to shake. Fortunately, despite what some people might claim, Octoroks are not slimy.
If he were a Chu or a Zol, now…
Anyway, you explain that Assistant helped you out with some magic lessons you gave to the members of the School of Five Elements on your recent trip to Taiwan, and since you needed aid with a magic project you're going to be working on in the near future, you naturally thought of him. Showing him around your house and the backyard is just part of repaying him for his help.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" your mother asks, glancing out the kitchen window. It's late in the afternoon, but still some ways from dark.
"Not entirely, no," you admit. "Hence why we're not going to leave the backyard, and why I'm keeping a few particular spells in mind – just in case."
Daze to stun a witness, Invisibility to hide the Octorok, Modify Memory if you really need it…
Speaking of memories, you haven't overlooked the fact that Assistant seems to have managed full continuity of consciousness between the times you summoned him and his current self. It would be one thing if this were just another summoning, as consistent memories between different periods of service aren't unusual, but this is the real Assistant currently exploring your house-
"What the-!?" your father says from the living room.
"Octo," Assistant replies, raising one tentacle in a wave of greeting.
-and making new acquaintances.
While it's not IMPOSSIBLE for an entity with no magical training or special control over their mind to consciously recall summoned experiences, the odds against it are quite long. As a result, you've been probing Assistant's aura with all the exotic senses at your disposal almost since the moment it became clear that he remembered – because once again, you can't help but wonder, and worry, if this might not be an aspect of demonic power at work.
As far as your senses can tell – both passively and actively – Assistant is just an ordinary Octorok, with the main exception being how his demonic energies are actually rather weak, implying that he's part of a natural-breeding bloodline that is pretty far along in the process of becoming naturalized inhabitants of Hyrule.
While that doesn't explain how he managed to remember you, it does at least ease your concerns about the Curse being directly involved.
Maybe it's just Octorok Loyalty in action? You DID show off your Power, admit to being the reincarnation of Ganondorf, and then tell Assistant about the Curse and your intention of breaking it, followed up by extracting his promise not to tell anybody about you for the time being. Any one of those would be the sort of thing he'd really WANT to remember, and with the magical influences thrown in…
You become distracted from your thoughts when you open the back door and allow Assistant to step outside, only for him to freeze in his tracks as he nears the rear edge of Ambrose's purification ward.
"Octo…" he says with wide-eyed wariness.
"Yeah," you sigh. "It IS pretty bad, isn't it?"
Gained Octorok E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
You won't say that Ganondorf never laired in a place as nasty as the Hellmouth before, because his hideouts over the ages have ranged from "fortress of doom floating over a river of lava" to "Plane of Evil and Darkness" to "labyrinth of the Underworld." And really, the Dark World was arguably worse than the Hellmouth, because for all the immediate danger to life and limb and the long-term mental, physical, and spiritual health issues that come with living in Sunnydale, at least the place doesn't transform people into warped reflections of their hearts the moment they arrive.
But this is another reason why you felt it was a good idea to let Assistant out of the Mirror Hideaway. Aside from Batreaux – who is a celestial, whatever his origins – and that Poe trapped in Moblin's Ball – which is an undead entity, and also somewhat protected by the makeup of the Ball – this Octorok is the first Hyrulean monster you've properly called forth on the Hellmouth. The day may come when you consider performing another such calling, and if so, it would be a good idea to know in advance what effect the aura of Chaos and Evil that hangs over and seeps into every unprotected inch of this place may have on the demon-spawned monsters from another world…
Assistant spends a long minute cautiously waving one tentacle – and ONLY one tentacle – in the general direction of the edge of the wards. You know that he doesn't have the magical awareness to register the ward itself, but the demonic taint that it's keeping out is another matter, especially with the manner in which the leyline-fueled purification effect burns that crud out and sucks it away.
"Octo…"
Taking a deep breath that momentarily swells his mantle, the Octorok tentatively tip-tentacles his way outside the field.
…
He does not suddenly break out in crawling black veins of doom, swell into misshapen enormity, or begin glowing. This is all definitely good.
He also doesn't start writhing in pain, cackling malevolently, or building up a stronger demonic aura. These facts are also good.
You're keeping your fingers crossed, though, as this is all strictly short-term observation.
After the first few wary strides, Assistant starts to move with less of that sense of impending doom, though you note that he does not truly relax.
"To?!"
Then he spots Snappy, blinks in surprise, and wanders over to the garden-
"Rok?!"
-and if the sudden start and exclamation halfway there are any indication, it seems like he may recognize some of your other Hyrulean plants besides the little Deku Baba.
Assistant pokes at Snappy, gets a tentacle nipped in response, and then reaches up with another arm to give the back of the budded maw a slightly more forceful poke, accompanied by a warning, "Ock."
Snappy goes still for a moment and then, slowly, opens its mouth and leans away.
"To," Assistant says firmly, nodding. Then he looks up to you and makes an inquisitive gesture at the whole garden.
You explain how the whole thing started as part of a deal with a Kokiri druid, and how the Deku Seed got included in the shipment of seeds by accident, with Briar deciding to plant, raise, and adopt it.
"To rok, octo?" Assistant inquires, gesturing first at Snappy, then around at Sunnydale in general, and then extending his arms and puffing himself up as far as he can for a moment, mimicking something growing to massive size.
"That IS a potential concern," you agree. "On the other hand, if it does happen and it turns out he still listens to Briar, it could be really useful."
"To?"
"This town's got a real problem with demon-possessed walking corpses…"
Assistant considers that for a moment, and then shrugs and goes back to looking about. Given you said you were sticking to the backyard, there isn't a whole lot for him to see, even peeking through the fence. At one point, after making sure there's nobody around, you let Assistant climb the fence-posts to get a better look at the surrounding homes and yards.
"Alllleeeex-!" comes the cry of the little sister from indoors.
"To?"
"Why is Mom talking about a- OH WOW, AN OCTOPUS!"
"Oct-OH!"
Zelda was up in her room when you and Assistant came out of the basement.
Now, she isn't.
Also, you totally called that tackle.
After a few minutes' fuss, and then Zelda insisting on a chance to play with your new friend for a while – which turns into a rock-free game of catch, Assistant finding the Nerf ball that your mother brings out to be absolutely fascinating – you eventually send your Octorok associate home.
He didn't meet Moblin this time around, your dog apparently having been content to take the opportunity to nap while Zelda was otherwise occupied.
After Assistant is gone, you sit down for supper, letting your family know that you're going to be unavailable for the evening.
The Spell of Simulacrum takes a long time to set up…
Even allowing for the fact that it's a ritual – and quite a long-lasting one at that, meaning its energy signature will be considerably more spread out than is usual for such things – the Spell to Create a Simulacrum is still seventh-circle magic, and thus involves too much energy for the wards on your house to hide. The easiest way to deal with that would be to do all the work in your Mirror Hideaway, but you do also have the option of raising a Private Sanctum in your basement; while a fifth-circle spell would normally still shine through the wards, it's also a ritual, and your Mana Concealment skills are nearly sufficient to hide such a thing normally.
Then there is the matter of supplies. The (conjured) rubies and the small quantity of blood are already covered, leaving only the ice sculpture of your intended target. While you could probably get away with using conjured ice, part of the point of this first casting is to determine the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of using "fake" rubies, so it makes sense to eliminate a potential point of confusion.
Besides, water is easy to come by, and turning it into ice isn't a big deal for you.
This decision results in you casting the Spell of Minor Creation to produce several wooden buckets, which you fill up in the bathroom and then move downstairs via a bucket brigade of Unseen Servants, to be emptied into a similarly conjured wooden tub. It takes a while to fill, but once you have enough water, a Spell of Ice suffices to freeze it solid, giving you the basic block to be whittled away into the needed replica of Assistant.
…
Even with magic to hone your visualization of the desired result and guide your efforts in bringing it forth, the final product of your ice-carving session is rather disappointing.
"…so," Briar observes. "I take it that Fake Assistant got sat on-"
"Shush, you."
"-and got a couple of his tentacles eaten?"
"I said silence, fairy."
Then again, Ambrose's notes on the Spell to Create a Simulacrum didn't say that the sculpture needed to be a GOOD one, just that it be of the intended target.
Gained Ice Sculpting F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
You suspect that the accuracy of the focal reagent is going to be reflected in the appearance of the Simulacrum, but for testing purposes, that is perfectly fine. You'll just have to make sure that Assistant never sees his test-run duplicate, which is easily done.
Keeping Briar from telling him about it may be another matter…
Though that does beg a question: what ARE you going to do with this Simulacrum of an Octorok, once it's complete?
Keeping everything on this side of the Mirror speeds up the process of filling your tub of soon-to-be ice, and spares you having to walk back and forth through the portal. You also have to admit that it's more comfortable in general – your basement workshop is no great den of luxury, to be sure, but just having central heating, surfaces where you can keep the materials you're going to be working with in easy reach, and a decent chair all put it well above a room full of nothing but reflective surfaces.
Anyway, after a few delays-
"Moblin, don't drink the water."
-involving certain curious individuals-
"Zelda, if you want to splash around in a tub, ask Mom to run you a bath."
-you eventually have your working materials in order-
"Briar, stop encouraging them!"
-and get to work.
…
In hindsight, a twelve-hour ritual is a LOT more mentally taxing than you were expecting it to be. The fact that you're doing this towards the end of a normal day doesn't help, to be sure, but even if you'd come to it fully rested, this is more focus – not more POWER, mind you, just more mental effort – than you've ever dedicated towards a particular task all in one go.
You can't call it a single sitting, because at some point in the ritual's history, somebody thought to include short breaks that would allow the caster to rehydrate, grab a light snack, quickly visit the bathroom, and/or just catch their breath, mystically speaking.
There are also regular pauses afforded for making sure the ice sculpture you're working with doesn't melt. Past a certain point in the ritual, that largely ceases to be a problem, the built-up magic helping to hold the frozen water together in its current state and physical position, but you do have to actually GET to that point first.
The whole business is not entirely unlike crafting a magic item, though at the same time, it's still distinctly like casting a spell. Honestly, that fuzzy indistinction probably contributes to some of the headache you end up with…
Anyhow, thanks to a little Ritual of Fatigue Resistance you pull together, borrowing elements from the Spell to Keep Watch, the Spell of Lesser Restoration, and a few other places, you're able to work the whole night through and into the next day. And so it is that, when the sun rises high enough to send a few rays creeping through the basement window, its light finds you running tests on Assistant 2.0.
As you expected, the quality of the ice sculpture has a direct impact on the final form of the Simulacrum. Your creation still looks like an Octorok, to be sure, but rather than the eight-armed and relatively rounded body that Assistant possess, this one looks like… well, as Briar said, it's like a heavy weight fell on it, possibly severing a couple of limbs in the process. The half-squashed appearance gives the fake monster a rather gloomy air.
One might even say that it seems depressed.
Most of the tests that you run return expected results. Appearance aside, the Illusionary Octorok's basic physical qualities otherwise match up to those of the original Assistant, with the singular exception of its resilience – which you don't stress-test, not wanting to accidentally "dispel" your creation so soon after activating it – although when you test its ability to apply those qualities via learned skills, you notice a few shortcomings.
A particular one concerns the matter of spitting rocks. The Simulacrum didn't come into existence with any stones in its gullet, and while you're able to address that easily enough by scrounging around in the yard for ammo, when you test its aim by summoning up Timmy the Third, the Octorok turns in a rather unimpressive result. Where Assistant managed to blast Timmy Two's skull off with one careful shot, his replica – firing from the same distance – instead hits the skull more along the side, causing the bone braincase to spin halfway around, but otherwise remain attached to the rest of the skeleton.
When you question the Octorok on its knowledge, the answers come out very hit-or-miss. It's able to recount the events of your meetings with Assistant in a general sense, not too unlike the limits of ordinary memory, but it can't give you a description of where the Octorok makes his lair, apart from "somewhere wet."
And there is something else you note. According to Ambrose's scroll, once the Spell to Create a Simulacrum is completed, the product should be sufficiently magically stable that a Spell to Dispel Magic cannot affect it. That doesn't appear to be the case here, and it's not something that the description of the ritual or Ambrose's notes said anything about. More than that, when you probe your creation with Mage Sight, its whole being registers as rather unstable – far from a potentially permanent creation, it's actually slowly breaking down, just like the matrix for a typical spell would.
It would seem that using conjured rubies did indeed have a drawback. The question is, why? You've used materials produced via the Spell of Major Creation as substitute spell components in the past and not had this problem – mostly Gold Dragon Incense for the Spells of Communion and Vision – but then again, you do recall your conjured Ivory Focuses for the Spells of Vision and Literary Vision almost burning themselves out, once upon a time.
Is it the attempt to create a permanent physical entity rather than merely acquire information that's made the difference here, or is the gap in mundane and mystical value between the materials you've brought into being before and the rubies you conjured for the Simulacrum the reason? Or could it be that there's something else you aren't thinking of?
You're going to take a two-hour Restful Blanket-assisted nap, but after that…
DARK MASTER, I BESEECH THEE!
"I RETURN!"
*Crack-a-THOOM*
You spare a moment to be glad that a) you left the Private Sanctum up, and b) it doesn't just muffle magical signatures.
"So, my student, what- MY GOODNESS!" Batreaux exclaims abruptly, as he catches sight of your latest violation of the laws of magic. "Whatever has happened to this POOR Octorok?"
"Rok."
"An Illusion, you say?"
"Octo."
"Made of ice, you–OOOH! A Simulacrum, is it?" Your instructor in DARKEST SORCERY turns to you. "Ambrose, or Blake?"
"The former."
The Risen Demon frowns. "Did the wizard mess about with the spell at all? Is that why…?" He gestures at the unfortunate-looking Octorok.
"Ambrose did include some notes in addition to the formula, but this" – you nod to one side – "actually isn't his doing. Since the spell didn't call for the sculpture to be of any particular quality, I tried my hand at ice-carving to see how it might affect things, and just to see how well I could do it."
"When you say 'by hand,' I take it you mean in the literal sense, as opposed to the Spell of Fabrication," Batreaux states.
"With some magical assistance, but yes." You shrug. "Clearly, I need more practice in that field."
"I would not recommend seeking a career in it at this time, no. SO! What matter has driven you to seek my guidance?"
"Well, if you'll examine Assistant 2.0 with Mage Sight…"
What follows is very much a repeat of the arcane side of your investigation of the Simulacrum's properties, and it doesn't take Batreaux more than a minute to figure out that something is off with your fake monster – and it only took that long because your DARK MASTER does not know the Spell of Simulacrum himself, and needed a little time to recall that its creations are not supposed to be dispellable.
From there, you quickly recount the ritual process and the materials you used in it, presenting Batreaux with a few conjured rubies that you whipped up before calling him. You also show him the original gemstones and explain where you got them.
"Hmmm…"
You wait while he considers the evidence, and his response to it.
"Well, the issue is certainly not with the original rubies," your tutor states after examining the jewels in question. "They would work perfectly for this purpose. As to precisely WHY their conjured duplicates failed… I admit that had you asked me such a question at the beginning of our association, I would have been QUITE BAFFLED! For I know of no other practitioner who has ever been able to use typical conjured materials to fuel their spellcasting – indeed, until the first time I saw you include conjured silver in a Magic Circle, I had always believed it was impossible!"
You nod, because warnings about that are written right into the Spells of Minor and Major Creation.
"Similarly, there is your ability to substitute raw magical energy for material components," Batreaux goes on. "While this was a well-established facet of magical theory, the ease with which you employ it and the extent to which you have taken it ARE quite unusual."
You nod again. "So if you would have been QUITE BAFFLED at the time, are you less so now?"
"INDEED! I investigated the matter – quietly, of course – and based on my findings, I theorize that your particular capabilities are the result of the influence of the Triforce that lingers upon you and your magic. Specifically, it is the blessing of the Triforce of Power, and through it, of Mighty Din, for it was SHE who created the physical substance of Hyrule, she whose philosophy of power and self-determination most resonate with you, and she who, of the Three, most favors you."
…alright, that much tracks, but it still leaves the matter of your failed "fake reagents."
"That, I suspect, is not so much a failing of your magic as it is a limitation of your knowledge," Batreaux states. "You do of course recall the issues you encountered with adapting the Spell of Mending and the Spell to Make Whole for use on this world's technology?"
…
He's saying your understanding of rubies is incomplete, or at least insufficient to reproduce a copy of the needed quality?
"How well do you understand gemstones?" your teacher returns. "Their composition, structure, history, energies, associations, uses?"
…
"Not that well," you admit, thinking of the modest insights you recently picked up in the field of gemology, just from talking to Mrs. Kanemaru. "So you think I have to learn more about gems, or minerals in general, to conjure reagent-grade versions?"
"I think it could not hurt, though studying geology and geomancy might also be wise."
You consider this, and a thought quickly occurs.
"But wait," you say. "I don't know much more about metallurgy than I do gemology, so how have I been conjuring reagent-grade silver all this time?"
"I suspect that the answer to that is, you have NOT been conjuring actual silver," Batreaux says. "Half the time when you set down a Magic Circle, you just form the array out of raw magical energy. Your conjured silver, itself being a construct of magical energy, would not be that different in essence, regardless of what it looks or feels like."
…
You run through the list of objects and materials you've conjured.
Gold Incense? That's made from plants – or so the box claims – and while your grasp of botany is, uh, limited, herbalism IS something you can claim a modest understanding of.
Those Ivory Statuettes? Between your understanding of zoology and necrology, you've picked up a fair bit about bones, teeth, horns, and the like, and the statues ARE focuses rather than materials consumed by the spells they aid you in casting. Even then, they DID warm up in concerning manner a few times early on – a warning sign of what Batreaux is talking about?
Your Conjured Books, business cards, and Augury Sticks? Again, you don't know much about proper botany, but woodworking and general handicrafts have given you some familiarity with the properties of wood and paper, and you've read quite a few books, besides.
Your Spidersilk Suits? Silk and mundane spiders are other topics you haven't studied in detail, but between your experiences as a tailor and your (occasionally unfortunate) understanding of supernatural spiders, if you ever decide to use one of your suits as fuel for a spell, you think you'll be covered.
Conjured glass? You know a bit about glass and glass-like substances through geology – see sand and obsidian – but this might just be a similar case as the "silver" dust, with the stuff you've created not being quite as real as you thought. The fact that you've never used any of your conjured glass as spell components likely prevented you from noticing any issues.
As you consider all of this, you come to two realizations:
First, the amount of supplementary studying you would need to do to make the Spells of Minor and Major Creation effective across the full range of potential spell components is… impractical, at best. Particularly when compared to the alternative of just learning the Spell of True Creation.
Secondly, you missed a chance to reveal another magical "impossibility" to Ambrose.
…
…
"We're off to see the wizard!"
You turn to Briar, and in an even voice, say, "I should tell Ambrose about this."
Your partner nods, and in much the same tone, replies, "You should."
"After all, it's only the responsible thing."
"Has to be done."
"It's not MY fault that he chooses to express his objections to magical anomalies through drinking."
"Totally a personal choice."
"Then come, Briar! Come, Assistant 2.0! …Master, if you don't have anywhere else to urgently be, would you care to-?"
"MWAHAHAHA!"
*Crack-a-THOOM!*
"I will take that as a yes. COME, THEN! WE'RE OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD!"
Fortunately, it's late enough in the morning in California to make it after dinner in Wales.
Ambrose greets you in his teleportation chamber. "Right, what have you done this time, why was it serious enough to bring your DARK MASTER along – pleasure to see you again, by the way-"
"Likewise," Batreaux replies with a nod.
"-and what on or off of Earth happened to that poor cephalopod?" the wizard finishes.
"Octo," Assistant 2.0 sighs.
"I'm sorry, I don't speak Squid or have a translation spell up at the moment."
You explain.
"Oh?" Ambrose studies the Octorok closer for a moment, then turns back to you. "Used a low-effort ice sculpture, did we?"
You shrug. "I figured I could use the practice doing the work by hand."
"Fair," the wizard agrees with a nod. "There's always some benefit to be had by knowing how the job is done the non-magical way, it's just a question of whether or not said benefit is worth the time and effort it takes to learn…" Having pulled out a pair of enchanted glasses to inspect Assistant 2.0 during this sideline, the old man's voice trails off. "Why does this Simulacrum look like it could be dispelled? And why is it running down?"
"Now THAT is the reason why I wanted second and third opinions," you reply, before explaining.
…
"AGAIN with the nonsense?!"
Even as he's saying this, Ambrose is dragging you and Assistant 2.0 into his spellcasting chamber for tests, which end up eating up the better part of an hour.
In the end, the wizard can't offer any alternatives to Batreaux's theory about your divine backing and understanding of the materials you're working with being the key to your conjured materials' extreme realism. Whether that's because this genuinely is the reason or because Ambrose needs time to think – and drink – on the subject before coming up with his own explanation is another question entirely.
"How's the Literary Vision Spell working out for you, anyway?"
Ambrose looks up from the glass he was about to take a drink from. "Hm? Oh, that. Sanely, unlike SOME things."
Sensing that he has more to add, you give him a moment to take a sip.
"I've only had the opportunity to cast it the one time, but based on prior experience with the Spell of Vision, I certainly appreciate the lack of any risk of developing a pounding headache in the aftermath of invoking the information."
Yes, that was one of your major motivations in developing the magic.
"Having a hard copy of the information for later consultation or sharing out with others whom it may concern also struck me as distinctly beneficial," the wizard goes on. "Against that, however, I did notice a couple of potential drawbacks."
You blink at this. "Oh?"
"Before I explain, serious question: how often have you used the standard Spell to Invoke a Vision?"
"Not terribly often, and pretty much never since I developed Literary Vision," you admit.
"Understandable, but it may have resulted in you missing something. You see, when the original spell shoves the information into your brain, it does so with a certain… focus… on details of major importance. If you try to identify the previous owner of a magic weapon, for instance, you'll likely see their face or hear someone calling their name, if not both; if you call up a Vision while standing on the location of a great battle, you may witness a portion of the conflict as if you were there; and so on."
Ah. "And the written form doesn't do that," you conclude.
"It is, alas, not quite that masterfully written," Ambrose agrees. "That isn't to say that the information isn't there, but it lacks the immediacy of the, shall we say, 'video' format? So I would expect that it's quite possible to overlook an important detail or two if you aren't thorough in your reading, and perhaps even then. Plus, they DO say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and being TOLD what someone or something looks like is oftentimes less helpful than being SHOWN it."
And the Literary Vision doesn't provide pictures.
"Not in its current form, anyway," the wizard says. "I suspect it wouldn't be difficult to adjust the formula to provide drawings in addition to the text, but given that my attempt at casting the spell returned information seemingly written in my own hand-"
He glances at you, and you nod, because your prior castings have had the same effect.
"-then the quality of the imagery produced would likely be influenced by the artistic skills of the caster, if not completely reliant upon them," the old man finishes. "And while I'm an old hand at arcane diagrams, anatomical sketches, and other technical imagery, I'd hesitate to try identifying a person by a sketch I made of their face. Landscapes are right out."
Even so, he'd be better off than you, whose drawing skills can kindly be described as "lacking."
Still, shoring up your artistic skills might be something to look into. The idea of a "Comic Book" or "Grimoire" Vision aren't without their appeal…
While you're at the Drake Estate again, you consider seeing if Altria is around, but Ambrose informs you that the Drakes were invited out to dinner at a friend's place, so you take your leave.
"A malfunctioning Simulacrum?" the Merlinean Master muses. "Interesting…"
"Seems pretty functional to me," Dave notes, while poking Assistant 2.0 in the nearest tentacle-
"Octo."
*Smack*
-only to get his finger lightly slapped away in return.
Luck, personal experience, and pattern-recognition were all with you when you decided to look in on the Arcana Cabana before making your way back to Sunnydale, as Balthazar – like any good evil instructor – has not hesitated to take advantage of Dave's "free time" to provide additional lessons and/or homework, and the ongoing summer break has provided an abundance of said time.
You suspect that if Dave were a few years older – or, like yourself, looked the part – Balthazar would have him in the Arcana Cabana for a few hours every day, under the guise of a part-time job. As he's obviously young enough for such an arrangement to violate a labor law or three, Dave has instead had to endure another hit to his schoolyard reputation by becoming known as one of those kids who are so obsessed with a given topic that they'll spend every hour they can get away with hanging out at the nearest store which specializes in goods and information on the subject, talking to the staff and other customers and definitely not reading books off of the rack or handling other merchandise, no sir.
If this were a comic book store and Dave was eyeing the four-color pages or the shelves towards the back where the role-playing games are stocked, he'd just be another sci-fi and/or fantasy geek, but his apparent interest in "real" supernatural stories and artifacts has him being pegged as a weirdo even by the standards of the nerd brigade.
Not that he wasn't already, what with the Old Man Shoes and everything…
Anyhow, while Balthazar is explaining the unusual nature of your current creation to his student, you notice that Batreaux has drifted down one of the aisles of the shop and is looking at a few of the wares with some interest.
"Did something catch your eye, O My Dark Master?"
"A few curiosities," Batreaux admits. "Were we in Hyrule, I might even be tempted to make a purchase or three, but alas, I only have Rupees on me at the moment."
Hm.
While you're willing to exchange as much as half of your on-hand gold for Rupees, and Batreaux is happy to make the trade, he turns out to not be carrying that much.
As he puts it, the afterlife has rather less need for physical currency on a daily basis than the mortal plane does, though admittedly "less" need is not NO need. The habits of a lifetime are not always easily left behind, particularly not with periodic exchanges of goods and services with magic-users seeking aid from the servants of the Goddesses to keep the uses of trade and currency fresh in memory.
And of course, some people just like shiny things.
In any case, after considering the exchange rates of Rupees to gold and gold to dollars, your Dark Master ends up handing over half a dozen Rupees, noting that he wants to save a few for later.
Gained 1 Red, 1 Yellow, and 4 Blue Rupees (50 Rupees)
Exchanged 6 gold coins
That still works out to $600, which is enough for Batreaux to purchase several of those "curiosities" he mentioned, or perhaps a more significant item or two, depending on what exactly has caught his eye.
While your tutor considers what to buy, you return to Balthazar and Dave to explain what exactly you did that made your Simulacrum "malfunction."
"Wait, we can conjure our own spell components?" Dave exclaims.
"As a general rule, no, 'we' can't," Balthazar replies. "There are certain spells that can create real materials from scratch, such as the Spell to Create a Wall of Stone, but they're highly specialized in what they produce, and rarely turn out anything that's useful as a spell component – or at least not at the time of its creation."
"You've done something with a Wall of Stone?" you guess.
"A few times," the Merlinean Master admits. "Pieces of one can make for acceptable components for other spells – not ones that call for specific types of rock, usually, but if all you need is 'stone,' just chip a piece off the greater Wall and you're fairly well set. And magic-users conjuring Walls of Stone just to get a lot of raw building material, whether for structures, item-crafting, or both, is a practice that probably started about five minutes after the spell was first cast."
Yeah, Wall of Stone isn't at the level of an Instant Fortress or anything, but somebody who understood architecture could still use the spell to create themselves a tough little stronghold, eventually. Not a particularly NICE one – you can't conjure something like marble with that spell, as far as you're aware, nor does the spell allow for detailed work – and it would take a lot of supplementary effort and resources to make such a base livable in the long term, but you could do it.
Combine that with the Spell to Shape Stone, the Spell of Fabrication, and other such magic, and the possibilities become… considerable.
But, as Balthazar says, even a spell like Wall of Stone is limited in what it can be used to acquire, whether in terms of quality, shape, or simple variety. At the other end of the scale, you have the Major Spell of Creation, which can produce a tremendous range of substances in a multitude of forms – provided you have the skills to do any necessary work – but cannot normally turn out anything suitable for use in magical endeavors.
"But you don't do normal," Dave observes wryly.
"Only when I must, or if it seems like a good idea – which it sometimes does," you admit.
There is such a thing as standing out too much. You wouldn't be using the Spell of Mind Blank on a daily basis if there weren't.
"Besides," you add, "my not being normal keeps Ambrose on his toes."
"Always a worthy goal," Balthazar agrees. "Though there are times when I worry a bit about the old man's liver…"
"Would it help if I said I know the Spell of Regeneration?" you offer.
"…it does, actually," the senior spellcaster replies after a moment's thought. "Now, getting back to this cephalopod Simulacrum of yours… what made you pick this particular creature, anyway?"
"Octo?"
"Nothing personal," Balthazar assures the Illusion. "I've just had some unfortunate run-ins with giant mollusks and mollusk-like monsters in the past."
"Rok."
You walk your fellow sorcerers through your thought processes, citing that since your first casting of the Spell to Create a Simulacrum was always meant to be a test of its basic functionality, it made sense to copy a creature that you could speak with to get a better idea of the limits of its abilities, but also something that wasn't strong enough to be a concern if it somehow went out of control.
"Uh, is that usually an issue?" Dave interjects, giving Assistant 2.0 a cautious glance.
"To?" the Octorok asks innocently.
"Not with a properly cast Spell to Create a Simulacrum," you assure him, with Balthazar nodding in support. "But I'm told that it can be an issue with the Lesser Spell, I DO live on the Hellmouth, and I was cheating a bit with the conjured rubies, so taking precautions against a worst-case scenario seemed like a good idea."
You also note that, while you have access to a considerable variety of creatures through Summoning Magic, you picked Assistant in particular because he has demonstrated loyalty to you, which was a useful trait for this trial-run copy to have.
"Rok," Assistant 2.0 declares proudly.
Balthazar does a few light tests while you speak, but holds off on more in-depth investigations until Batreaux has decided what he wants to purchase. This happens to include a couple of the least-expensive variety of Balthazar's stock of restorative potions-
"Want to compare them against Hyrulean make?" you guess.
"Indeed!"
-a fine crystal ball-
"It would make an excellent gift for a far-sighted lady of my acquaintance."
"Isn't that the one that produces mist, light, and ghostly noises?" Dave wonders, giving the glass globe a guarded glance.
"Why, yes." Batreaux chuckles. "It is quite a charming little device."
-and a little statuette that doesn't carry any sort of supernatural aura, beyond a wisp of bleed-off from the other items in the shop. It's of some sort of demonic-looking creature – horns, wings, hooves, the usual – with a face that would probably be terrifying if it were atop a body of human size – let alone anything larger – but which somehow manages to be weirdly cute on something a mere three inches tall.
Once cash and coin have changed hands and your teacher's purchases have been bagged, Balthazar flips the sign on the door to "Closed" and leads the way down into his workshop for a bout of mystical analysis. The methods are a bit different from Ambrose's, but that's just accounting for the differences between sorcery and wizardry; the end results, meanwhile, are basically identical.
Is there anything else you wish to discuss while you're here?
No, head home and move on.
Once your business at the Arcana Cabana is concluded, Batreaux takes his leave and returns to Hyrule, while you, Briar, and Assistant 2.0 head back to Sunnydale – which, given your preference to land somewhere outside of town to avoid drawing attention back to your home, is a bit more complicated than it sounds.
Since Octoroks aren't suited to deserts, you forego your usual point of arrival at the old gas station, instead making use of the spot in the woods to the north of town. Then, with an Extended Spell of Invisibility on Assistant 2.0 to make sure nobody sees a giant land-going cephalopod, a Spell to See Invisibility on Briar and yourself to make sure that you don't lose track of your illusory creation, and a modified Spell of Haste on all of you to move things along, you make your way back to town.
You did consider going on ahead and letting Assistant 2.0 find his own way back to you, but even with almost half the day left before sunset, that seemed more likely to result in you losing the Simulacrum earlier than you needed to, and you would like to see just how long the faulty spell can persist. Thus, the somewhat slower route home.
"To?!"
"That's a car."
"Octo?"
"No, it's a kind of machine, not a monster."
"Octo-to?"
"No, it's not a man-eating terror weapon…"
Although when you consider the size, speed, and noise of the things, you can see how Assistant 2.0 might have come to that conclusion.
Maybe you should have let the original Assistant out into your front yard under another Spell of Invisibility when you called him, just so that he could see your family car parked in the driveway and get a look at some of the traffic in the neighborhood? Something to consider for future callings, whether of your Octorok ally or other off-world entities likely to be unfamiliar with Earth's technology, if only because you'd rather not have to keep telling future Simulacra that cars aren't going to try and eat them.
Assistant 2.0 is still in good working order a couple of days later, when you are due to make a trip to Taiwan to pick up the first part of your order from Sing's Suits.
Leave your fake minion to watch over Zelda in your absence.
There really isn't a reason for you to take an Octorok to a clothier. You don't need a bodyguard, and even if you did, pretty much anything that would be a threat to you would go through Assistant 2.0 without blinking. You also aren't taking him in to get fitted…
…
…okay, the mental image of an Octorok wearing one of Sing's suits is kind of interesting, but even if the tailor and his employees were prepared to deal with a model with an entirely non-humanoid anatomy, you aren't going to spend however many hundreds of dollars to get a suit for a strictly temporary Simulacrum that you're not going to re-create in its current malformed state.
Maybe if it was the original Assistant, and you had a pressing reason for him to appear in formal wear, but not for his soon-to-disperse copy.
Besides, Sing's is already in the middle of filling an order for you. Quite aside from the owner's stated preference to finish with "old business" before dealing with new, it's just a better idea to wait and see how the two suits turn out – especially the high-quality custom one – before you place any more orders.
As such, you leave Assistant 2.0 to watch over Zelda in your absence. Since you leave for Taiwan just after supper, your sister won't be going anywhere, meaning the Octorok doesn't require a disguise.
"Let's play!"
"Octo-?!"
Though he might be regretting the lack of invisibility.
Cleaning up a bit and dressing in your Spider-Silk Suit once again, you enter your Mirror Hideaway and cast a Greater Spell of Scrying. This time, instead of aiming for the roof of the local convention center, you mean to open a Gate to an alleyway that you noticed on your previous visit, as it's much closer to Sing's Suits and won't involve any trespassing or (technically) forced entry. But you can't say for certain what traffic around Sing's is like on a regular basis, hence the Scrying Spell.
Looking before you leapt turns out to have been a good choice, as there is a car moving past the mouth of the alley. You let it go by and then watch for a couple minutes more, during which time only one more vehicle and a couple of pedestrians pass through your spell's limited field of view.
Once you're reasonably confident of the timing, you open the Gate, putting the exit end flush with one of the alley walls so that nobody sees a hole in space hanging there. Then, glancing from your scrying globe to the open portal and back again, you step through, dismiss the spells, and step out onto the street.
There are a few passersby, but nobody gives you more than a second glance, and from the evaluating or impressed looks involved there, you think they're focused more on your clothes than where you came from.
You reach Sing's without incident, and while you don't recognize the young woman now behind the counter, Mr. Zhu Jun is once again working today, and actually out in the front of the shop when you arrive.
"Ah, Mr. Harris," he greets you. "You're right on time. We have the first part of your order ready, if you'd care to follow me for the final fitting check."
And then he leads you to the fitting room in the back.
One complete, Alex-sized suit and three sets of four dress shirts – one each of red, green, blue, and white – await you in the back room. As you change out of your Spider-Silk Suit, Mr. Zhu folds back the front of the steel grey suit jacket to reveal two-tone gold and red iridescent lining, done in a pattern of repeating triangles.
"No luck with the three-tone variety, huh?" you state.
"Nothing that looked acceptable, no. Mr. Sing might have been able to do better, but he's been rather… preoccupied… with the matter of making your other suit tolerant of so many different energy types."
Ah.
"Especially the Golden Power?" you venture.
"Especially that one, yes."
The shirts fit well, requiring no further adjustments, or at least not at this time. As requested, there's some extra material carefully incorporated into them, which can be let out as you grow. They're also quite comfortable – though at the equivalent of a hundred dollars apiece, they had darn well better be! – a trait that isn't lost when you do a few quick practice maneuvers to see how the material stretches and breathes. The Fighter's Fit lives up to its name, and when you extend your ki through the shirt, you register so little resistance compared to regular clothing that you could almost think you were imagining it.
Gained Sing's Shirts (x12)
Spent $1,200
As for the suit proper…
You've always been rather proud of your magically homemade Spider-Silk Suits, which felt fairly competitive with Lucia Drake's more conventionally produced Red Suit as far as comfort and style went. Yet now that you're wearing something made by professionals, you can't help but notice that it simply feels better. The differences are at once subtle and yet stark, a bunch of minor details such as the texture of the material, the distribution of its weight, how it moves with you, and some other factors you can't even put into words, but which nonetheless add up with everything else to provide an experience remarkably unlike wearing your other suits.
And that's before you get into how much easier it is to move through a form or run ki about yourself in Sing's Suit than your other outfits.
What Lucia Drake achieved with a long-time hobbyist's experience and passion, and what you managed with rather less developed technical ability and a great deal of magical cheating, Sing has outdone, and mostly on mundane skill. It occurs to you that, if you can't describe some of the qualities that make this new suit better than your old ones, much less how they were implemented, then you can't tell your magic to incorporate those same techniques into your attempts at tailoring – and indeed, thinking back, it hasn't really done that.
Oh, there have been flashes of insight in the middle of your magical fabric-weaving exploits, but like the spells that brought them on, the knowledge they gifted you was a transient thing, the details existing for a moment and then fading from memory as quickly as they appeared once the magic had run its course. Rather than teaching you new or "secret" techniques, much of what your enhancement spells do is to make sure that you clearly recall what you already know about sewing clothes, and that you apply it to the best of your ability – and somewhat beyond that.
But true knowledge, true GROWTH? That, your spells can't give you. Those only come with time, experience, and observation – like now.
Gained Tailoring C
And if it's like this for tailoring, shouldn't it be the same for the other forms of craftsmanship and artistry that you've tried your hand at?
Considering your architectural agenda in the coming months, these seems very important to know…
In any case, you paid about a third of the cost of your new suit when you ordered it. The remainder isn't affordable with your current supply of gold, and certainly not when you take all the shirts into account, but you have plenty of mundane cash to cover it, even with the added charge for converting currencies.
Gained Sing's Suit
Spent $1,300
Do you have any questions for Mr. Zhu while you're here?
While the thought of arranging a fitting for Assistant does come to mind again, your ready funds are a bit diminished, and will be even more so when you pay Mr. Sing for the suit that is still a work in progress. Considering how much time, effort, and extra material would likely have to go into a suit for an Octorok, and what that would do to the costs…
Actually, are waterproofed formal suits a thing? Mr. Sing mentioned making an outfit for someone with a Fire Affinity, as well as working with other elements from a ki-based perspective, so some manner of treatment for water resistance ought to at least be possible…
…anyway, you should probably wait until you have more disposable income in hand before you place any further orders.
Thanking Mr. Zhu and the teller girl for their time, you head out, wearing your new suit so that you can start breaking it in with a good run back to Sunnydale.
You take a note from Assistant 2.0's book and make use of a Spell of Invisibility during the trip, though, because no matter what time of day or night it is, a kid your age running around by himself in a formal suit is unusual even for Sunnydale.
Now, if you were attending a wedding or a funeral, that'd be another story, but nobody holds weddings in Sunnydale this late in the day unless they absolutely have to, and never after dark. Nocturnal funerals are apparently a thing, though, which seems… hazardous, to say the least.
Maybe you should look into the schedules for after-hours services, and then have your Dark Self – and later, when you've got the rubies to create him, your Simulacrum as well – patrol the graveyards as a deterrent to vampire attacks and general supernatural nastiness? It might not be as monetarily or materially profitable as actively hunting the creatures at their confirmed stalking grounds, but there is the value of cash and goods, and then there is the worth of lives.
As much as you hate to admit it, you just don't have any time to spare for something like graveyard patrols right now, even on a "part-time" basis. It might be a different story if you already had a Simulacrum of yourself up and running, but both your schedule and Shadow Alex's are pretty solidly booked for the foreseeable future – and really, a fair bit of your current plans already have a number of tasks lined up for the newest copy of yourself.
Under different circumstances – or rather, in a different environment – you might consider going with summoned help, but you're leery of setting any of your usual roster of conjured creatures loose on the Hellmouth. Part of that is because you don't entirely trust any Hyrulean monsters not to start causing problems if they're out of your sight for too long, whether due to the Curse behind them, the Hellmouth they'd be stationed on, or the distinct possibility of their getting over-enthusiastic in your service, but there are other issues that would apply even to your non-Hyrulean allies.
When you think about it, just deploying a force of summoned monsters in this town stands to be more of an annoyance than it really ought to. If you summoned them in your house, you'd have to provide additional spells for both mystical and mundane stealth so that your minions wouldn't leave a trail leading right back to your door. If you summoned them in your Mirror Hideaway, not only would it get VERY crowded very quickly, you'd have to open a Gate to drop them off in or near the town, and you can't really see that passing unnoticed OR unchallenged with how many magic-users and magically-sensitive demons you suspect live in this place. That's not even getting into whatever measures the Mayor has put into place to keep tabs on his territory.
Summoning monsters out in the open doesn't strike you as an optimal idea, either, and not just because you'd have to actually go out there. Maybe your previous exploits have spoiled you a bit, but being able to assemble a force, brief them on their objectives, and provide magical or material support before sending them into harm's way has just proven far too effective an advantage for you to want to give up if you can avoid it.
Honestly, what you could really use for this is a base of some sort out in the town, warded against the ambient corruption and magical detection and close enough to home for you to travel to and from with a cut-down Spell of Teleportation – but not so close to your place or the residences of any of your friends as to generate suspicion – where you could both summon and outfit your troops in privacy and have them hole up in when they aren't patrolling. You'd need to fortify the place to some degree, too, because sooner or later something would track your summons back to it, so maybe include a permanent defense force with a leader capable of standing off most local threats… but at that point, you might as well just call it a new Underworld and be done with it.
Definitely a long-term project. A VERY long-term project.
Putting all of that into a mental box marked "Currently Impractical Ideas," you finish your trek home.
The next fifteen minutes or so involve an impromptu fashion show, as Zelda and your parents are curious to see your new suit, and (in your parents' case) what made it worth the two grand that you paid for it.
After showing off your new outfit – a process that may have involved a couple of high kicks, and subsequently, you changing back into your regular clothes and handing Sing's Suit over to your somewhat-disbelieving parents to examine for burst seams and the like – giving it a quick magical cleaning, and then putting it and the rest of your new purchases away, you check on Assistant 2.0.
Zelda didn't manage to damage the Simulacrum in your absence, at least not physically, but the manner in which he has taken refuge in that wooden tub you whipped up during the process of creating him suggests that some emotional trauma may have occurred. You've been keeping the tub about three-quarters full of conjured water, replaced each day, ever since you confirmed that even a somewhat faulty Simulacrum is still accurate enough to recreate the biological requirements of its original – which is to say, a copy of living entity still needs to breathe, eat, and sleep, an amphibious creature needs to spend at least some time in the water each day, and so on.
It's not a surprising development, given that Shadow Alex has demonstrated the ability and willingness to eat and drink when the opportunity has come up, but you were never quite sure if your Dark Self truly NEEDED the sustenance, or if he was just indulging himself in the relatively brief periods for which he existed. Likewise, one of the major uses for a Simulacrum is to replace the target with an agent under your control, a task that's difficult enough to pull off as-is, given how much of the original's knowledge and skills don't transfer to the copy. How much more obvious would a Simulacrum be, if it wasn't subject to the pangs of hunger or thirst, or couldn't feel the same range of emotions and sensations that its original did?
While this does mean that your food bill – or the need to cast spells to supplement it – will increase as you craft more Simulacra, you weren't exactly planning to make an army of the things. It could also be viewed as something of a long-term safeguard, in case any of the illusory entities somehow went rogue on you, but that would rather depend on who and what you made copies out of.
After all, some individuals wouldn't have an issue with stealing food to survive, and many more would rather do that than starve. Other entities wouldn't see a problem in eating people…
Just stuff to keep in mind.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, your recent experience with the Spell to Create a Simulacrum has caused a few details of Illusion Magic you'd previously been investigating to fall into place. The Spell to Project an Image is, after all, another manifestation of Shadow Magic, and indeed, another one that involves creating a copy of a pre-existing entity (in this case, you). You may have been taking a few too many cues from the Spell of the Dark Self beforehand, as Shadow Alex's demonstrated potential for independent thought and action are qualities distinctly not shared by a Projected Image – it is, in fact, quite incapable of either – but being able to contrast the workings of a Dark Self against those of a Simulacrum, which is tied to your will even if not directly controlled by, highlighted certain formulaic differences.
You aren't quite sure how a breakthrough with Illusions led to you unlocking a new spell of Enchantment Magic, but the Spell of Antipathy just started making sense not long after your success with Project Image. Maybe it has something to do with how the Image is sufficiently linked to your mind and spirit to serve as a point of origin for your spells, and likewise, how even a Simulacrum of a hated enemy will remain loyal to you? If you can extend your will to a different locale and impose it upon another entity, creating a magical field that causes other beings to avoid an object or location is… not completely unrelated. Probably.
Another line of spell research also resolves, this being the Spell to Make a Limited Wish. However, this one runs into the issue of you not having a diamond of sufficient value to actually cast the spell – thus making your "mastery" of it questionable.
Learned Antipathy
Learned Limited Wish
Learned Project Image
At the moment, you don't have any idea of where you could look to acquire a Wish-grade diamond on your own efforts, and the time it would take to investigate such a matter probably isn't worth spending, when you've got considerable funds incoming in the near future.
That said, you did pay Balthazar to look into acquiring suitable diamonds for you, months gone. Now's as good a time as any to see what he turned up…
"Balthazar!" you declare, as you stride into the Arcana Cabana the following day. "I come bearing a gift to exchange, and a business deal to conclude."
"And with one less cephalopod than last time," the sorcerous shopkeeper observes. "Did the spell wear off?"
"No, it's still going, I just didn't see the point of dragging Assistant 2.0 along with me again. Although speaking of assistants," you add, looking around, "is Dave not here?"
"Summer camp," Balthazar replies with a shrug.
"…as in actual outdoor camp, or one of those in-city community center things?" you inquire curiously. Because you have an easier time picturing Dave doing one of those than the other.
"The latter," Balthazar says, confirming your suspicions. "So, gift and business, you said?"
"I did, and here is the gift." And with that, you produce your second Scroll of Literary Vision.
Spent $1,400
"Ah," the Merlinean Master says, not reaching for the Scroll even though you're holding it forth. "If you'll give me one minute to fetch my 'payment'…?"
"Before you do that," you say, lowering the Scroll, "the 'business' I wanted to discuss involved the diamond reagent you agreed to look into a while back."
Balthazar pauses, and then says simply, "You figured out Wishing."
"Limited Wishing, but yes."
"Well, then. Give me two minutes."
And then he's off into the back, leaving you to wait and look around, ignoring the whispers and giggling from the books. They seem somewhat louder in Dave's absence – is that because of the lack of the distraction he provides, or are they genuinely better-behaved when the other boy is around? Questions, questions…
Not quite two minutes later, Balthazar returns, a Scroll in one hand and a small locked box in the other.
"One Scroll of the Greater Spell of Shadow Conjuration," he says, handing over the first item.
"And one Scroll of the Spell of Literary Vision," you reply, exchanging one bit of high-grade parchment for another.
"Thank you, sir."
"Pleasure doing business with you."
…
"…the act is less fun when Dave isn't here," you sigh.
"Straight man is just one of many roles an apprentice is called on to serve," Balthazar recounts, as he sets his new Scroll down to one side on the countertop, puts the box down directly in front of himself, and fiddles with the magical lock for a moment. "Now, as to the diamonds…"
*Click*
Opening the lid, he turns the box about to let you see that there are no less than three small diamonds inside, and that the cushion or whatever it is that they rest on has spaces for five times as many gemstones of similar size.
"I only asked for one," you say absently, as you take in the physical sparkle and the magical auras.
"And I only mean to sell you one today, at least in accordance with our original agreement," Balthazar replies. "Though I wouldn't object to you buying the others at full price. But as I recall, you were a little vague about exactly what sort of Wish you intended to make, so it made sense to get a bit of variety, just in case."
Ah. Well, looking at them, two of the gems would be suitable for use in addressing the bothersome elements of your memories, though one of them is definitely better-suited for that than the other, holding a stronger affinity for Light and purification. The second stone has a somewhat more balanced aura, Earth and Fire and Light and Time blending together more or less evenly. The last… feels a bit Shadowy, actually.
Spent 14 Rupees
Spent 5 gold
Spent $3,250
Gained Light and Normal Diamonds
Diamonds are expensive.
It's not that you didn't already know that, but the fact bears repeating, particularly when you've wiped out most of your ready funds acquiring two of them.
On a side note, you are kind of glad that Mr. Sing is having trouble with the second suit in your order…
You indicate which of the three diamonds you're interested in, which prompts Balthazar to inquire what sort of Wishes you intend to make.
"Well, with this one," you say, as he hands over the Light-rich gem, "I want to perform a major purification on myself, though not right away."
"Thinking about that spiritual examination at Urahara's?"
"Yeah, I figure it makes more sense to let him scan my current condition, monitor the Wish, and then re-do the scans in the aftermath. That gets the largest and most varied amount of data in the shortest amount of time."
Balthazar nods, and passes you the second jewel. "And this one?"
"This one, I'm thinking will go to my first actual Wish, though as to what that should be…" Your recent thoughts about making an Underworld come back to you, as do your more concrete future plans about creating a workshop on a demiplane. "…something in the field of construction, maybe?"
"…I don't quite follow," Balthazar admits.
"I'm thinking it might be a good idea to test out how well the Spell to Make a Limited Wish works for compressing spells with extensive casting times," you muse. "Just to make sure I've got that part down."
Because that trait is one that has the potential to be fairly handy, in and of itself. Not as a day-to-day thing, no – even with your upcoming windfall, that would get much too expensive – but there are some ritual spells in your repertoire that, while very reassuring to know, would be even more so if you were certain that you could cast them the moment they were needed, rather than having to wait half a minute, or several minutes, or even an hour or more.
Sadly, as useful as that trick would be, it isn't an option for the Spell to Create a Simulacrum or the Spells to Create a Demiplane. At least not with Limited Wishes…
Another thought comes to mind, involving ameliorating the high cost of Wishes through a bit of personal sacrifice, but it occurs to you that you probably shouldn't use the Spell of Blood Money to cast your first-ever Wish. Leaving aside Briar's dislike of a spell that requires you to injure yourself, there is a certain significance to the first successful casting of any given spell, which is particularly pronounced for Wishes – even the Limited ones – given how much they involve bending the normal rules of magic. Considering your magic's origins, mixing blood sacrifice with reality-warping magic seems like an ill-advised idea, even if it is your own blood and not the lives of innocents, sacred guardians of a magical kingdom, or betrayed allies that stains your hands.
…actually, if you turn your head and squint, you kind of count as an innocent AND a guardian of Hyrule, don't you? And while you wouldn't be betraying yourself in any sense, you WOULD be shedding an "ally's" blood… so, yeah, DEFINITELY not a good idea to pull Blood Money out for your first Wish.
While you're on the subject of bad ideas, you eye the diamond that remains in the little box and briefly consider asking if Balthazar would be okay with you making a conjuration template of that one. Then you consider that you'd effectively be asking him to give you a diamond worth twenty-five hundred dollars at no charge, and think better of it.
Even if you can't currently make any mystical use of anything produced using that information, its potential future value is not inconsiderable – and in the interim, you could get plenty of mundane utility out of being able to conjure another sort of diamond.
Getting back to the matter of your First (Limited) Wish… what should you use it for? Just digging a big hole seems kind of underwhelming, not to mention hilariously wasteful.
Save that for the testing of Blood Money, and use the Normal Diamond to Wish for something else.
"I am still not sure this is an entirely good idea," Arthur Drake says.
"Very little in this life or the next is entirely good," Ambrose replies.
"You know what I mean, Ambrose."
"Yes, Issa's description was rather vivid…"
As it happened, you came up with a rather better use for your First Wish than digging a really big hole somewhere, this being to perform a sped-up version of the Ritual of Hallowing. The rite in question normally takes a full day's vigil, twenty-four hours of alternating chanting, humming, and silence, careful tending of burning incense and anointing of various objects with blessed oils and sacred unguents, and short breaks every few hours in deference to the frailties of the mortal form. It is one of the most time-intensive spells in your repertoire, and from what Briar, the Holy Books, and some of Ganondorf's fleeting memories indicate, that is very much by design.
Hallowing a site creates an effect much longer-lasting than most spells can ever hope to match – at least in other people's hands – not to mention more multifaceted, and while it is a long way from being the greatest demonstration of a deity's power, it is still a non-trivial investment, though that has more to do with the territorial claim that the spell's effects represent than the amount of divine energy it consumes. Considering the potential for clashes with other Powers that such a statement of intent can trigger, it is not a blessing that any deity can afford to grant lightly, and thus, the ritual to invoke it is designed as much to test the caster – mentally, spiritually, and physically – as it is to prepare the chosen spot to receive the final touch of divinity.
While you don't wish to give the impression that you would cheat on a test, much less one administered by the Goddesses – at least not without a good reason – some points must be kept in mind.
Firstly, you're not actually a priest, but an aspiring Chosen One. The rules are a bit different.
Secondly, you're not casting this spell in the divine manner, but through sorcerous means. Once again, different rules apply.
And finally, while you respect and revere all three Goddesses, you are and will remain a devotee of Din, meaning that, if you actually have the Power to make this work all on your own, she's not going to stop you or take offense.
Definitely not.
Aside from proving your mastery of the Limited Wish and testing just how far you can cut down the casting time of a spell using this method, setting up a Hallowed site will also let you look into another matter, that being how the Powers That Be are likely to react if you start consecrating land and building one or more temples to the Golden Goddesses in the future.
You don't think Earth's divinities have grounds to interfere with this particular spell, as casting it is within the reach of modern priests – although from what you understand, group casting is the norm these days, a skill you haven't had the opportunity to investigate – and likewise something they would need to be able to do to create major sites of worship and empowerment. Then again, you really weren't expecting your first attempt to Commune with the Goddesses to get interrupted the way it did, so who knows?
Aside from Nayru?
Aside from Nayru.
Yes, yes, very funny.
Incidentally, the misfiring Spell of Communion is part of the reason why, when you asked the Shuzens, they expressed considerable reluctance to let you borrow a patch of their private demiplane to try this out. Between that incident, the unexpected awakening of Castle Shuzen, and some vampire-specific concerns about having a patch of holy ground in their yard, Kahlua's parents were perhaps understandably leery of loaning you the use of any part of the grounds for the next year. The Shuzens still weren't terribly keen about offering you the use of some property outside of their private realm, but might have been talked into it if you'd made an effort.
Considering your concerns about leaving traces of your spellcasting signature somewhere they might be picked up by unfriendly parties, you didn't press them on that account.
The grounds of the Drake Estate made for a reasonable alternative, especially with Ambrose in residence and the wards he's laid down on and around the house to thwart attempts at remote viewing or other forms of investigation from a distance.
That said, you had a few choices. What was your favorite?
There's a modestly large rock out back. Not part of a ruin or a resting place for a magic sword, just a rock.
The stone is about four feet across at its widest point, though if you're being honest, it's more like a rectangle that's three feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide, and a bit over two feet tall, with some additional rough bits that jut out at various points. Mostly white on the top, grey on the bottom, and ringed with grass, it's the largest of several similar rocks loosely clustered together in this part of the grounds.
It is also apparently not a natural formation.
"The area just looked terribly boring and empty," Lucia says. "I thought I might spruce it up a bit."
"With rocks?" Altria wonders.
"Hey, don't underestimate rocks," Briar warns. "They can really add to a landscape."
"Umu!"
"They break up the terrain, force intruders to go around them rather than charge right through the area, and provide a surface to inscribe messages or magical effects on," you note, as you measure the size of the rock against the area of effect of your intended spell.
"…umu?"
"They're also a great way to hide an opening or secure a buried treasure," your partner goes on.
Altria eyes the not-quite-a-boulder with more interest.
"I did not hide gold under the rock, Altria," Lucia advises her youngest with a smile.
"…of course not, I was just… never mind."
"And if worse comes to worst," you conclude, "you can always pick up a rock and throw it at your enemies."
In unison, mother and daughter blink at you, turn to study the rock, and then turn back to you, their expressions doubtful.
"I would have to turn into a giant first," you admit. "Possibly with some additional strength enhancement, depending on how much the rock actually weighs… but for some of these smaller stones, I could probably manage with a Spell of Telekinesis."
"You could," Ambrose interjects, "as that's how I moved them into place when I got press-ganged into doing half of the work for this originally."
"And the big one?"
"Much as you said, a Spell to Enlarge a Person and a Spell of Bull's Strength, cast on a few strong young lads…"
Many hands make light work, is it? Well, you can hardly argue against making intelligent use of minions.
Seeing as how the stone isn't magical in and of itself and hasn't been touched by any significant effects, you don't need to take any special precautions. With the permission of the landowners – reluctant as it might be on Arthur's part – you are set to begin.
Ambrose and Briar usher everyone back to a safe respectful distance-
"This far, really?" Arthur wonders, from a good fifty feet away. "Are you SURE there isn't going to be an incident, Ambrose?"
"The Spell of Hallowing is designed to be able to affect entire buildings, Arthur. Picture the nave of a church, or maybe just the chancel of a larger one…" The wizard pauses for a moment, visibly considering the dimensions of imagined structures himself, before shaking his head. "Anyway, the point is not to stand so close that you might accidentally change faiths."
"I'm pretty sure that's not how that works, old man."
"But are you certain?"
Arthur doesn't respond to that question, but that is an answer in and of itself.
-and then your partner rejoins you as you prepare to work your magic.
In one hand, you hold the diamond.
With the other, you shape the mana of the spell, directing some of it to and about the stone before you – which does not visibly react – some to the gem in your other palm – which begins to glow – and more in a direction of a spiritual nature.
"I hallow this site-"
"-in the name of Din, Goddess of Power!"
You're only casting a seventh-circle spell, but despite that fact, golden light flares as you make your Wish.
Some of the energy is concentrated within the diamond, which shines brilliantly in your palm, casting beams of aureate light through every tiny facet.
More of the light comes from the stone resting on the ground in front of you, a coherent aura that rings around the rock.
The majority, however, comes from beneath you, where a great golden triangle – and only the one – briefly whirls into being underneath your feet and the underside of the stone that you have just sanctified in the name of your primary patron deity. A red glyph glows at the heart of the symbol.
Then the light and the diamond in your hand vanish, leaving you blinking and taking in the quiet aura of divinity that now hangs over your immediate surroundings.
Expended Neutral Diamond
…
"Is it-?" Arthur begins.
"Hsst!" you, Briar, and Ambrose all say at once. For your part, you have one hand raised to gesture for silence, just in case.
…
I believe we're clear.
You're sure?
Yes.
Darn.
Honestly, you two…
"We good?" you murmur to Briar.
"I think so," your partner replies.
"We good, Ambrose?" you call over your shoulder to the wizard.
"I'm not picking up anything trying to hammer down or set unholy fire to my wards, yet," comes the cautious response.
A hopeful sign, to be sure.
While you wait to see if anything is going to happen, you walk a slow circle around the sanctified stone, investigating its condition and getting a better feel for what changes have been made to it and its surroundings.
Physically, nothing is different, at least not now that the golden light has faded, but spiritually, the presence of the power of Din is hard to miss right now. You know that a good part of that is just the residual energy of your spellcasting and will fade a bit in the coming hours; within a few days, the aura will level off as a mild presence, maybe a hint of heat or pressure to indicate some part of Din's attention on a visitor.
Of course, there's also the upwelling of radiant energy to consider. It's not strong enough to be harmful to the walking dead or other entities vulnerable to such power, but any creatures of that kind which happened onto the Drake Estate would probably prefer to avoid this patch of earth if they happened upon it. The inherent ward against evil would likely keep them out anyway, as most creatures that are vulnerable to positive energy ARE of unholy origins.
Then again, considering how far you are from the borders, the house proper, and the outbuildings, it's pretty unlikely for any intruders to come out here, unless they're really into landscaping and see Lucia's efforts in the field.
Ha-ha, a pun.
"So," Arthur Drake says a moment later, having come up alongside you.
"So," you reply.
"A year, you said."
You nod. "I'll de-consecrate the location at that time. Otherwise it would last… well, potentially until there was a local geological event, or somebody brought some earthmoving equipment in."
And you aren't entirely sure that an earthquake or a volcanic eruption would do the job. Earth and Fire ARE Din's elements, after all.
"And it's not going to do anything?" the patriarch asks, not for the first time.
"No, sir," you assure him again. "Well," you add, correcting yourself, "not unless the Forces of Darkness invade again, or somebody tries to reanimate a corpse here."
"Hm. And we don't need to do anything to it?"
"No, sir."
The image does briefly come to mind of a much larger and magically strengthened version of yourself trying to pick up the stone as some sort of tribute to Din, but while a feat of strength might make a decent display for your favorite goddess, actually picking up something that is technically now sacred to her is a distinct no-no. Maybe if you'd had the idea beforehand, or been involved in the original (re)location of the rock…
You make a mental note for when you get around to making a temple to the Goddesses.
As it stands, though, you would call this a successful test.
The Spell to Make a Limited Wish is classified as part of the Universal School, a relatively rare category of arcane magic that consists of spells which tap into the forces aligned with every school on a more or less equal basis.
With the simpler Universal Spells, each style and individual practitioner still puts their own particular spin on the magic in question. When making an Arcane Mark, for example, a Necromancer is likely to utilize a mixture of negatively-charged spiritual energies, or perhaps a bit of blood and bone dust; a Fire Elementalist will probably just burn their Mark into the target surface or sketch it with ash, though the more talented pyromancer may create a tiny effigy of flame that consumes nothing but air and its inherent magical energy; and an Enchanter might well leave no actual physical mark, instead creating a tiny magical construct that makes observers think they're seeing something which isn't truly there.
For all of that, though, as one advances through the Universal School, the distinctions and differences of the other perspectives quickly fall away, with spells becoming more focused on the underlying, ever-shifting rules of magic and their manipulation. Quite a lot of the associated theory is put to use in the field of Metamagic, but at the highest levels, Universal Magic becomes very much what its name implies – magic that can invoke any effect, of any style, without limitation or constraint.
…as long as you can muster the raw power and the diamonds required, anyway.
As such, it is perhaps no surprise that, following your first successful casting and subsequent analysis of a Limited Wish, the next time you go back to reviewing your spell research, numerous details that were previously stymying you finally make sense.
Admittedly, the main reason that the Spell to Create Waves of Exhaustion was giving you any trouble is probably just the fact that you were more focused on other spells you felt you were more likely to actually use. Not that being able to sap the vigor of a hundred or so hostile creatures in one go isn't a good trick to have up your sleeve, if you ever need to deal with a lot of unfriendly targets that you don't want to harm – a mob of panicking civilians or victims of mind control come to mind – but to date, the only groups of opponents you've had to deal with on anywhere NEAR that scale have been of a… more disposable nature, for which you have a great many suitable spells.
The Greater Spell of Shouting, meanwhile, was giving you trouble for a different reason, namely the annoyance in finding a convenient place to test it. Your Mirror Hideaway was absolutely out of the question, and while the Spell to Create a Private Sanctum gave you the means to keep people from hearing the noise, your run-in with those joyriding teenagers a while back has made you more conscious of the possibility of people spotting a Sanctum – a possibility that only increases as the Sanctum in question gets larger, making it harder to tuck into or behind any convenient geological formations. And using a Sanctum to completely muffle a Greater Shout requires a pretty large area to be concealed in grey mist – nothing you aren't capable of producing, at this point, but big enough to be a major pain to hide.
In the end, you gave up on finding a spot near Sunnydale and just hopped over to Bali Ha'i to do your field testing. Even then, you still used the Private Sanctum, not wanting to needlessly disturb the tranquility of Kahine's island any more than you absolutely had to.
You also aimed most of the Shouts out at the ocean, at least until you were sure you had the actual "yell really loudly" part down. When testing the actual destructive force of the spell, you got permission to use some of the rockier areas of the beach itself, on the condition that you cleaned up and put everything back together after you were done with it.
Good thing you're so skilled at Earth Magic…
Another thing stopping by Bali Ha'i gave you was someone – or rather, something – to test the Spell of Healing on without having to worry about local magic-users showing up in response to a seventh-level spell going off, or medical professionals making their own kind of fuss. Kahine has seen healing magic used before, if nothing quite so powerful, and she was perfectly content to let you test the spell on a couple of her island's larger animals.
Though you did have to find and subdue the creatures in question first. The injured boar was troublesome enough, throwing off Spells of Sleep, Binding, and Paralysis just on sheer stubbornness, but the real pain in the backside – almost literally so – was the crocodile.
"Where the heck did you even GET a crocodile from?" you asked the volcano-spirit, when she informed you of its existence.
Kahine shrugged. "She just turned up one day."
Some investigation determines that saltwater crocodiles are native to Southeast Asia, Australia, and the adjacent islands. Bali Ha'i is rather northeast of their usual stomping grounds, but maybe not so far as to be entirely impossible for a healthy animal to make the trip, if it got lost in a storm or caught up in a current or something…
You had a much easier time testing the offensive application of Heal, simply summoning a few progressively stronger undead into your Mirror Hideaway and then blasting them with life-affirming energy.
Briar thinks you could still use some work when it comes to the finer details of the spell – as she puts it, you're still no threat to a Great Fairy in this area – but as far as healing gross physical trauma goes, you're all set.
Then there is the Spell to Impart Mind, which you haven't been able to test yet. You can't use your Blessed Blade for this, since it already has a mind of its own, however sleepy – or possibly just lazy – but you have other magic items aplenty that can serve in that regard. The issue is your lack of suitable diamond reagents, which your end-of-summer financial pinch has left you unable to afford on Earth, and which your Hyrulean sources aren't able to provide.
Learned Greater Shout
Learned Waves of Exhaustion
(Mostly) Learned Heal
(Probably) Learned Impart Mind
You want to know where this crocodile came from. Divination Magic, go!
The first order of business is figuring out which spells you can use. Although this crocodile is pretty big – counting the tail, you'd put her at nine and a half feet in length, give or take a couple of inches – she's not so massive as to suggest some kind of legendary stature or heritage. Factor in the lack of any sort of inherent supernatural aura, as opposed to the touch of the ambient energies of Bali Ha'i which she's picked up a bit of, and you're pretty sure that the Spell of Legend Lore and either format of the Spell to Invoke a Vision simply won't work.
Surviving a trip across hundreds, if not thousands of miles' worth of open ocean is an impressive feat, but it's not quite "legendary" enough to trigger that sort of magic.
You check anyway, measuring the intensity of the beast's life-force with your senses and spellwork, but as you guessed, she's as mundane as an animal of this size can be, which means getting at her history won't be as simple as casting a major Divination and reading the answers out of a book.
You run through your repertoire, seeking something suitable.
Nomenclature notwithstanding, the Spell to Know the Enemy is a perfectly valid choice even if you don't actually mean to fight this creature. However, while you do cast it, you already know that the magic is designed to provide general information about the type of creature that you aim it at, rather than specific details about the individual. As such, when you get a lot of mostly mundane data about where saltwater crocodiles can be found in the wild, their hunting practices, and their (general lack of) natural predators, as well as some more mystical information such as the suggestion that Ice Magic would be reasonably effective – though not to the extent that it would be against a Fire Elemental or, more relevantly, a red dragon – but nothing about this specific croc's experiences, you aren't surprised.
…
"Could you ask her, Briar?" you say at one point.
"If it's all the same to you, Alex, I would rather not disturb the enormous reptilian predator when she's in the middle of a nap," your partner replies.
You glance at the croc, who is currently stretched out on a nice slab of sun-warmed stone near the mouth of one of Bali Ha'i's lesser rivers, and then nod in understanding at Briar's preference.
Well, if direct conversation is out, there are some other options.
Sparing a moment to be relieved that you have a sufficient grasp on Metamagic principles to increase the range of a spell that's normally limited to touch to something less likely to get your hand bitten off, you cast a Reaching Spell to Share Memory at the crocodile, seeking the memory of "how you got to this island."
…
My, that's a big storm. Possibly not a hurricane – or typhoon, rather, in this part of the world – but big enough to give most air-breathing ocean-going creatures problems. It's not just the wind, the waves, and the periodically lightning-split darkness and accompanying crash of thunder, though; there's also a feeling of something push-pulling at you/not-you/the crocodile, a force that isn't damaging in and of itself, but which is too strong to resist, at least with the storm added in.
Caught in a current of some sort, was she?
The memory is brief, but full of annoyance and frustration-
Shark!
-which you/not-you/the crocodile happily vented on the first target that presented itself.
Well.