Chapter 39 — Leon’s Affinity

Ria got two bowls and a bag of salt from Grandma Fana. The dry grass, grass seeds, and grass straw required a trek out into the rain-soaked backyard and, at least for the dry grass, a bit of magic. The last item she needed was the crystal to do the affinity testing for light and shadow, but she had a plan for that.

Leon was surprised when he saw what she had returned with. "Somehow, I was expecting something a bit more magical."

Ria laughed as she used her waterstone to fill the bowls with water. "Guess you could say that the magic is up to you."

"Now that's just cruel…," Leon complained.

"Don't worry. I failed all of these tests the first time since I don't have an affinity," Ria reassured him.

Leon didn't really believe her, and that she perfectly demonstrated each test certainly didn't help her credibility. As for Leon, there weren't any successes until the earth affinity test. Ria made a perfect salt crystal during the demonstration and was surprised to see crystals forming in the water of Leon's bowl.

"Ah! I think I did it!" Leon exclaimed excitedly.

"Ooooh, not bad," Ria congratulated him. "With crystals that size, you probably have a strong earth affinity."

"Really?!" Leon's joy filled face was so cute that Ria couldn't wait to hit him with the truth.

She grinned and let him have it. "Of course, that means you're pretty doomed when it comes to air magic now."

"Wha-? No way?!" His shocked face was pretty good too.

"Hahaha, just the way it is," Ria chuckled. "Still, earth magic is a pretty good fit for you. Strength and hardening spells are great for a knight. If you've got a light affinity too, then you could be like a holy knight bringing down justice on the forces of darkness or something."

Leon gave her a wry smile. "But the girl I like is a witch…"

Ah! Her heart! This guy had better become a magic knight, because there was no way she was going to settle for being a baker's wife.

"Ehem," Ria coughed into her hand and looked to the side to hide her face. "Let's move on to the last two tests."

Ugh. His sly grin was proof that she gave away too much there. Well, she’ll let him have his victory this time, but she would have to be more on guard for sneak attacks in the future.

Ria made the salt crystal glow and darken, then handed it to Leon for him to try. The result: no light or dark affinity.

"Dodged a fireball there," Leon joked.

"Hmm… if it’s dodging you want to work on Mr. Knight, maybe we should have you switch to my instructor," Ria replied dryly.

Leon made an ‘x’ with his arms. “Hells no! Your instructor is seriously scary. And crazy too!”

“Heh,” Ria snorted, unimpressed. “Guess I’ll take the bowls back down to Grandma Fana. There’s still some time before dinner. Did you want to run over to Master Rigure’s and buy a focus tool? Or keep practicing with the heatstone?”

Leon visibly wilted at the thought of more heatstone practice. “I’d feel bad leaving you to work on the scrolls alone…”

Ria shook her head. “Don’t worry about that. Dinner shouldn’t be until sundown. If the visit to Master Rigure goes quickly, you might have enough time to interview some of the pet owners. They should be home already because of the rain, right?”

“Ah, that’s true. How is the work on the scroll going?” Leon asked. “I took a peek while you were downstairs, and it looks… complicated.”

“I came up with a really promising idea for the divination, so the rest is mostly just figuring out how to display the results. We’ll have to test it on Ranger first, of course,” Ria reported.

“Oh! Sounds like it’s going well.” Leon nodded to himself. “Alright, I’ll go then.”

“Ah, hold up a second, Leon.” Ria retrieved a few empty potion vials from her satchel and washed them out. “Use these to get hairs from the pets’ bedding and such. Use one vial for each pet, and label them so we know whose it is.”

“Ah, I see what you’ve got in mind.” Leon nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

He put his coat and helmet back on before heading out. The oiled leather made them mostly waterproof, so it was a good idea.

With Leon expected to be gone for a while, Ria didn’t hesitate to take a nice warm bath and change into her blue summer dress, adding the black shawl over the shoulders. She did her hair up nicely with the blue ribbon, carefully checking everything in her mirror.

Leon had been rather shocked when he saw her new mirror. Remembering his reaction still made her chuckle.

Refreshed, Ria went back to work on her ward design. Her best bet to solve the display problem was to use a long duration ward with an activation and deactivation condition. While the ward was active, she could have a beam of light, or maybe just a shape, point in the direction of the divination result.

After thinking about the display options for a while, Ria decided that a triangular shadow that stayed on the scroll would be easy and efficient. A shadow would also show up more clearly in daylight than a triangle or beam made of light and would be more discreet.

Defining the shape and its position on the scroll took more math than Ria was used to, but she was pretty sure she got it right. Further tweaking would require live testing.

That left the activation and deactivation condition. Voice activation would certainly be the most convenient, and the condition needed to be simple to be energy efficient. Ria was hoping to just use a one- or two-word description of the scroll, but that approach had some obvious flaws.

First off, calling out the name of a trap ward would tip-off everyone around about what the ward would do. Second off, all of the scrolls with that same activation word would all activate simultaneously. Both were problems. One more so than the other.

She could add a contact condition to require the scroll to be touched to activate, but that would reduce the efficiency and prevent remote activation which would be needed for explosive wards. What Ria needed was a way to uniquely identify the scrolls she made. But no useful ideas were forthcoming.

Ria spent a good ten minutes wracking her brain about it. She was leaning back in her chair about to go downstairs and ask Grandma Fana and Grandpa Orlan… and maybe Oscar for ideas, when idly allowing the pages of her grimoire to flip by, she stopped on the first page.

Would Luventi have an answer for her? She wondered, looking down at the title page with his name. Her eyes suddenly widened as they fell upon a line she had never really paid much attention to before: copy #257.

There the solution was, plainly written and given to her. Numbers!

If she used a unique number for each scroll, then only that scroll would be activated! And calling out a number wouldn’t have any meaning to an enemy, either. Plus, it would be fast enough to use in combat. This was a wonderful solution!

Her solution reduced the activation divination to just ‘meaning’ and ‘activate’ plus the scroll’s number and deactivation to ‘meaning’ and ‘deactivate’ plus the scroll’s number. Drawing those conditions was easy.

And with that, Ria had her finished ward spell. All that remained was to draw it up and test the effective range using different energy to duration ratios.

Using her standard scroll-making brush and pen together with her enchanted ink, Ria crafted the first test ward using the weakly enchantable ‘low-quality’ paper. The ink by itself was enough for this paper without adding the ground magicite.

She used her bond to call Ranger, and after combing a loose hair from his fur, she wrapped it around her brush handle and tied it off into a knotted circle, trimming the loose ends before slipping the loop of hair onto the ‘sample’ circle on the paper.

Blood would be better. Using hair still had the disadvantage that a strong wind or tilting the paper would cause the contact to be interrupted. Setting aside those concerns, Ria activated scroll #1. It was her first scroll, and as the dark-gray arrow followed Ranger around, she knew she had created a great first product: a scroll of locating.

The range lasted until a little after Ranger moved outside the room. The arrow disappeared once he was out of range and reappeared as soon as he returned into range.

Ria tested deactivation and reactivation, then left it activated to test the duration. The result was certainly acceptable at around five minutes or so. She thought that was a good duration to range ratio. It would allow a person enough time to walk around their house and find something or several uses of finding something within a single room.

Changing the primary divination to accept a verbal phrase after activation would increase the general usefulness of the scroll at a cost to range or duration but would definitely be a modification she should experiment with. The solution might be as easy as ‘voice’ and ‘significance’ plus ‘meaning’.

For now, with the ward completely drained, the next was testing rechargeability. Touching one place on the ward, Ria carefully flowed energy along the ink until it was distributed about the same as the originally created ward. She needed to buy an hourglass for more accurate testing, but re-activating the ward seemed to demonstrate only a slight loss in duration and range. That meant that her scrolls were reusable and could be recharged.

Happy with the overall design, she just made some tweaks to the math for displaying the arrow and continued testing with the low-quality paper until she was satisfied. Ria also experimented with the effect of thicker and thinner lines on range and duration.

Five copies later, Ria felt she was ready to make a full power locator scroll using medium quality parchment and magicite-boosted ink. She even used her phoenix quill to draw the ward. The work was painstaking in the amount of care needed, but having drawn the same design several times already, she didn’t make any mistakes.

Sending Ranger out into the now slowing rain showed that the range increase was less than linear in terms of energy required, but still significant. The locator ward done on the medium-quality parchment had a range of about sixty paces. It should be enough to walk around and find the pets if they were still in the village.