Fundaments:
Energy 2, Matter 2, Force 2, Entropy 1, Cognition 1, Space 1, Time 1
Crafts:
Alchemy 1, Talismans 1, Enchanting 1, Animacy 1,
Cores:
Attunement 13, Mastery 6
Emma’s new “statline” following her few days in Vichin as an actual resident was pretty nice to see. A point here, another there. It was progress. Helpful. Everything was helpful to her, really. She was hardly spoiled for choice in terms of picking up new tools.
But most of the changes that had really struck her hadn’t simply been seeing her own numbers go up in her own eyes, it’d been the new abundance of resources. Time, equipment and, to her surprise, a new measuring stick. She’d spent much of her early hours in the new residence playing with those.
To Emma’s surprise, she’d quickly been taken into a large hall by several of what she had learned were called rune-priests. Or runepriests, or rune priests. She’d asked about the spelling, gotten confused looks instead, and concluded that whatever magic was translating everything she said and heard was not quite so good at the written word as it was with the spoken. That was a secondary concern, of course, compared to the nice, big instrument plopped ahead of her.
“Resonator.” One of them said, as if the word were in any way some sort of explanation.
In fact, it was an explanation. To a knowledgeable magic-user who possessed all the mastery and understanding that Emma had lied about as a way of securing her position. Ragni seemed to have made a lot of assumptions when he’d handed it to her, and over the last few hours she’d had to pretend they were all correct.
Clearly, they expected her to recognise it. She didn’t, and would look suspicious and stupid if she pretended otherwise only to be caught.
“How do I use it?” Emma asked.
They both stared at her, frowning, confused.
“I think I know what this is,” She “elaborated”, but I don’t know how your people’s versions function, or how I can make use of it. They did things differently in my homeland.
By making magic wands that fire little bits of metal instead of waving staffs around. But they didn’t need to know that, did they?
“You strike it,” One of the runepriests explained, “With your magic. However that is done.”
Ah. Emma thought about that.
An energy lance was probably out of the question. This “resonator” looked toughly built—lots of steel and glowing runes—but she’d grown much more powerful from her early days here, and her magic had already been capable of cratering stone even then. Even if she just dented it, that seemed like it’d be poorly received.
So Emma blasted out a jet of wind instead, standing close to keep the gas from uselessly dispersing and concentrating it onto the metal plane that seemed to be inviting her power. She saw the machine tremble slightly, only slightly, and watched as the runes along its edge started changing colour. Purple, dark blue…Then a slightly lighter shade. Huh.l
She looked back to the runepriests, expecting disinterest and apathy. Instead she saw their eyes practically bulging.
“Blue.” One of them croaked, as the other practically sprinted for the resonator and began checking it.
“Two hundred…” He whispered. “Two hundred units, unbelievable!”
Emma didn’t find it quite so unbelievable as that, not having a clue what he was talking about helped, she imagined.
“I’m unfamiliar with your people’s units of measurement.” She added, and saw them eying her with yet more confusion. A misstep, apparently.
“They’re near-universal.” One of the runepriests noted. “How have you not encountered them?”
It really didn’t feel like there were any good answers to that. Emma tried for one anyway, she didn’t exactly have an alternative.
“I didn’t learn magic in the normal way.” She explained, slowly. “My teachers were informal, weird. A lot of what I know is self-taught.”
She saw their eyes frost over instantly.
“A hedge-wizard.” One of the runepriests grunted, not doing quite as good a job of hiding his blistering contempt as one might have been expected to in more polite society. “And Earl Ragni made you his wise-woman?”
Emma paused at that, studied him a moment. It was tempting to get apologetic, defensive, try to justify herself. But…No. She remembered how these assholes had been bowing and scraping around her before. Clearly, she had one up on their stations. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
No point in over-complicating things.
“Alright you pair of bastards,” Emma barked, “I’m getting sick of your questions. What rating are you on this fucking thing, anyway?” She nodded to the first man. “Let me guess, deep purple?”
It wasn’t entirely guesswork. The machine had started with a paler light, and slowly moved from purple up to a lighter blue. If Emma remembered right, that meant it was beginning at one extreme of the visible colour spectrum and drifting over to another. There was probably some weird fuckery going on with electromagnetism and mana converting down into light—stuff she might’ve been able to explain if she’d stayed awake during college—but she could use the snippets of knowledge she had at least.
And it seemed she used them well, the man she’d addressed swallowed, paused, and nodded.
“I thought so.” Emma scowled. “And is there even a single cyan-ranked magic user in this city?”
She was less confident about this. It could have just been a coincidence that blue had come right after purple, she might be about to embarrass herself and destroy their confidence in her.
But another pause followed, pursued by a chastened nod.
“Only one. The High Priest, Hagor.”
“Well that’s something.” She spat. “And why did you idiots turn away from him and join Earl Ragni’s side, then?”
Another pause, this time it was long enough that Emma worried whether she’d overstepped a bound and royally pissed the pair off. Fortunately, they seemed plenty receptive to even that abuse, and she got her answer.
“We…Followed Guldin.”
Ah. Emma should’ve guessed, little rat bastard would have dragged a few people along, she supposed.
Guldin was still on Ragni’s side, funnily enough. Even more funnily, he hated Emma after essentially losing his position to her. She got all sorts of very justified, smug satisfaction from that, but more from the practical knowledge of knowing that he was, apparently, quite powerful. In fact…
“What rank is Guldin?” She asked abruptly.
The runepriests eyed one another.
“Purple.” One answered.
“Deep purple.” Added another. So, probably lower in power than Emma. She assumed the machine was designed to test magical oomf rather than anything like fine dexterity. That suited her perfectly, she was awful at the latter.
That interaction did not yield much more fruit to Emma. What did was her free time spent on other things. She’d gained a new point in Matter, after all. And had already gotten more in Force prior to it. Now she had the chance to properly knuckle down and figure out what was new in her box of arcane tools.
As it happened, gauging the new abilities of her Matter Fundament was not that difficult. Everything was instinctual, with magic. Easy…Sort of. It wasn’t that she didn’t need to put effort in, more that she knew exactly where her effort was going and what it was doing without needing to exhaustively check. Like having some expert give her feedback while she figured things out on her own. It turned everything into a game of hot-and-cold.
Soon enough, at least, she got hotter. Hot enough that her powers began actually doing the things she was trying to make them.
It turned out her new ability was conjuring…Stuff. Wood, dirt, stone. Emma had asked Larry about it before trying it out herself, and he’d let her know ahead of time that, for whatever reason, those specific materials came most easily to an Untethered using Matter.
She needed to experiment a bit for more detail than that.
Dirt, wood, stone. How were these things defined?
As it happened, vaguely. Sand, apparently, counted among dirt, and Emma succeeded in calling on wood and rock of many varieties. She had softer, springy shit, hard and unyielding, dense, light, everything above. The variety in stone was less readily apparent—it just wasn’t as easy to feel out such things with her puny human arms when dealing with the inherently high mechanical properties of just about any rock.
At a thought, Emma tried calling on some coal, too. Nope. That would’ve been too convenient, she supposed. Well, there was plenty to work with here anyway.
Volumes appeared to scale down with the density of material. Lighter woods came easier than dirt, the heaviest woods harder, and almost any variety of stone hardest of all. Emma guessed, but couldn’t be sure, that it was because her actual conjuring was based on mass rather than volume. She made a note to try and find some way of testing that later. Probably with water tanks.
Emma could form shapes out of her conjured material, too. And that gave her some ideas.
She formed spherical ones. Or close enough. The stone she was calling on now always seemed a little bit jagged, chipped almost. She could never get it perfectly rounded, but she got it approximately right and then formed much neater spheres of energy around them. Then she propelled them out.
Normally, her energy constructs weren’t good for longer-ranged attacks. They just didn’t have the momentum. Drag force slowed them impossible fast, air resistance and wind through them far off-kilter. It was better than jets of air, but far from ideal. These ones, though, shot true and fast, then hit the far wall with a great deal more weight than Emma was used to. She actually winced, hearing the stone of the wall meet the stone of their cores.
There was, fortunately, no real structural damage. A few pits in the rock. She’d restrained herself deliberately of course, all too aware that her powers were growing and growing fast. An energy lance might well bring down the ceiling on her, now, and she didn’t want to risk discovering one of her new techniques was a match for it that way.
With that success under her belt, Emma moved onto other matters. It was, of course, more to do with magic. Because when one was as tall as most fantasy dwarfs and half as heavy, one used whatever non-physical tools one was given.
Last time she’d been in a real fight, a large fight, Emma had found her shield amulet did a lot more good than anything else. It was just a game-changer. She was small, fragile. She was a squishy little human who, even were she not a great deal squishier than most, would’ve been far too vulnerable compared to the kinds of power she could throw out. Fighting undefended, Emma was never more than one lucky hit away from the grave.
And now she had a good deal more material to work with in rectifying that weakness than Aexilica’s shack had provided.
As before, Emma’s amulet needed a body and a bond. The thing dangling from her neck, and the thin it dangled from. She went for a solid steel plate, this time. Not a huge, limb-covering one which might’ve been shaped into a single piece—as far as she could tell those didn’t exist even in the relatively-higher-tech-than-Aethiq-place she now resided—but rather one which would have been bonded to many others in some scale coat. The bond was similarly improved from before. Not a length of frayed fibre from cloth armour, but rather an actual chain link.
The major hitch was assembling them, steel links were a lot sturdier than mere fabric of course. But the great thing about being Ragni’s Wise Woman is she could just yell at a bunch of people to do it for her, and soon enough she had her new shield amulet.