[Ok... One 2-week timeskip in 3... 2... (bloop)]
Weird rocked the wooden chair back against the wall. He had re-arranged the furniture in his room so it would be safe to do that very thing, as he hated chairs that enforced proper posture. He'd requested a rocking chair since none of the carpenters had even the faintest idea of what a recliner was, but the looks he drew asking for the rocker was ample proof they had no concept of one of those either. Stuck with the stiff, straight backed ladder-back chair, redecorating had been the only viable option.
Things had been pretty calm the past few weeks. Hugo was doing lots better; turns out dragons have a pretty strong constitution. He had been visiting him off and on over the course of his medical sabbat, and the big scaly oaf was stumbling around the hospital on his own now. He wouldn't be ready to leave for awhile yet, but he was doing much better.
Eric had taken it upon himself to designate and rapid-build several new security features, and to complete the magma plumbing. All the furnaces and heat requiring workshops were now fully magma lit, dropping the charcoal requirements down to just that needed for producing steel, which had picked up considerably since the "calcite discovery" took hold weeks before. Many miners and woodcutters were now sporting quality dwarven steel instead of crappy iron and copper.
As for himself... X's plans seemed sound enough, but he couldn't quite reproduce X's yeild tolerances. He lacked X's intrinsic ability to simply meter his energy consumption, so he had to resort to building modified versions of X's aparatus just to take measurements with. The "sympathetic feedback" property in particular. In a nutshell, whenever magic is directly used, it releases some of the energy in an uncontrolled but predictable manner, which can be picked up using a properly designed instrument. By measuring the rate of collection in that device, you can get a coarse measurement of magical expenditure, so long as no other casters are using magic nearby enough to throw off your figures. The trouble was, X's values were always well under the yields he was using. Maybe X was just using it moe efficiently? He wasn't sure.
What was really interesting though, was the results he had gotten when playing around with the sensors... just to see what it would do, he had picked up a couple mussel shells from the fishery, and had blasted them with as much necromantic energy as he could draw. The figure recorded by the sensor was many standard deviations higher in terms of total energy released than his earlier measurements using thari's healing magic on an injured kitten.
The thing had gotten itself mooshed pretty good at eric's construction site for the new fall-away floor ubliette he was putting underneath the portcullus gate leading into the now finished outer courtyard wall, and had required enough healing energy to seriously fatigue him in repairing the major tissue damage, much like he had done when healing hugo. The finding was astounding, because he could handle necromantic energy with almost no penalty in terms of fatigue, while the normal magic used by X to make ice, fireballs, and electro-plasma discharges all wore him out terribly.
He had taken to looking over X's plans for his G-core again, with a different goal in mind. The G-core absorbed and stored raw magical energy, and didn't seem to care about the type. It didn't seem to be too picky; it really just picked up the sympathetic resonations of other casters, and soaked in ambient energies, then converted them on the fly into the kinds used for a given directed magical invocation. The design was spartan, but highly flexible. The discovery that it reacted to his necromancy is what had given him the new idea.
Leaning back in the chair, he looked over his notes one last time.
The device used a simple, but precisely cut rock crystal as the focus and storage medium, with a specially designed cage around it made of various metals. He had incorporated the design into a much smaller package, and comissioned a pair of soft pigtail gloves made incorporating the motif as an aesthetic accent on the backs of the hands. he put the notes down, and looked at the handware laying neatly on his desk, then took out the brush and pot of dimple dye he had prepared for the experiment.
Carefully, he painted a very highly modified necromantic seal around the outside of the rock crystal bauble on the backs of each glove; the tablet had not conferred this knowledge, this was something radically untested, and apparently, never before tried. Realy, the seal didn't do a whole lot. It just circulated void energy around in a very tight circle around the crystal in the center, and created a conduit for the collected and processed energy back to the caster. He had to take a page from Crowley's school of magical application to make it though, and had to INVENT a few glyphs used in the seal's construction. Any other necromancer looking at the thing wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of what the thing was doing. He hoped it wasn't going to funnel more energy than he could handle, but that was one of the new sigilized concepts he had created a sign for; a kind of filter concept. The rate of flow into the caster would only match the rate the caster actively drew, and acted kinda like a check-valve.
He hoped he wouldn't have to order another pair of gloves...
Setting the brush and dye down, he slipped on one of the gloves...
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 265464 times)