Over the next hour or so I explain some of the things that computers can do and roughly how they do them. Heather is the most interested, unsurprisingly, mostly by information technology like search engines and databases. I even manage to work through a simple example of a “show me more like this” system, where the computer counts the number of each word in a document and recommends other documents with similar sets of words.

I don’t manage to figure out why they don’t have computers or any other advanced technology. It’s unlikely that knowledge is the blocker; Heather had read reports of Visitors with programming knowledge and I’m sure those Visitors would have made attempts to bootstrap something. So either physics doesn’t support it here because they don’t have electricity or something, or they’re stuck in a developmental trap that makes it hard to get over the hump of physical computers being worse than some kind of magic.

We eventually wrap things up when our stomachs start demanding dinner. Instead of leaving half the party behind to watch Axelos while everyone else eats, we dispatch Heather and Liv to bring sandwiches back from Alfwyn’s tavern and we’ll eat in the guardpost. I ask for something with spicy cured sausage and get a sub sandwich that I almost could have bought at a sandwich shop back home.

I apparently wasn’t the only one that was tired out by a fight, four hours of walking, another fight, another two hours of walking, and then a couple hours of meetings, so everyone grabs their sandwiches and breaks out to do their own thing until bedtime. I notice the light dimming and don’t see any candles or lights or even mysterious glass globes in wall sconces, so unless someone pulls out a light source I think the day will be over entirely when it’s too dark to see. What I think is a standard pre-modern schedule, in other words.

I return to my earlier idea of finding a spell suitable for combat, now with a better idea of what I need. I need something that I can cast in essentially any tactical situation to serve as a go-to plan whenever I don’t know what to do. The spells I’ve gotten to don’t really fit that use case. In fact, offensive spells in general don’t fit well. Not knowing who to shoot is the kind of thing that’d hang me up just as badly as not knowing which direction to run or if I should shoot at all. No, I’m looking for a simple but general defensive option.

In between bites of my sub, listening to Heather scratch away at something on her tablet, Liv’s knife peeling bits of wood away from her carving, and Bob and Ji rustling as they exercise, I flip to the back of my grimoire and start looking for shield spells.

Read Mana looks to be a modification of Find Spellcraft that’s used to inspect spells as they operate. I almost start casting it on the spot. What stops me is the spell’s complexity, almost thirty-five pages of hand-signs. I can easily believe that; building a visualization probably requires a huge amount of special-casing. I reluctantly move on.

Stall is neat; it describes a set of gestures that can be done before another spell’s gestures to delay the other spell’s activation by… some amount of time. There’s a spot where I can tune it by drawing a particular loop bigger or smaller, but there’s no indication of the relationship between size and delay. I wonder if it only works with the spells in the book or if it’s somehow more general?

Make Ready is even cooler, a modification of Stall that would allow me to hold a spell and release it or cancel it at some later point. This is certainly where I’d want to start if I wanted to become a preparatory caster. Just have to figure out a way to maintain a whole pile of them with different triggers, then I could go through the minute-long casting times in the morning and quickly discharge them when a fight starts.

This is definitely what I’d want to learn after a defensive spell. Even if I can only ready one spell at a time, if that readied spell is a shield I’ll have a good way to defend myself in an emergency.

Blast of Fire is a fireball: press button receive boom. I don’t know whether it’s the low-pressure heatwave that D&D sorcerers and wizards get or a concussive explosion, but it says that it’s an ideal weapon for longer-range encounters. Not what I need. Right now, at least. I’m sure I’m going to end up as the party’s nuclear option sooner or later.

Also, Heather would probably get really mad if I learned it right now.

Farhand looks like a lesson in precision. It’s a general-purpose telekinesis spell, basically, a projection of your hand at a distance. It says that it’s exactly like touching something with your own hand, so maybe it also handles force feedback? No strength amplification, though.

Message reproduces your voice at a point you choose. I’m going to have to inspect that one closely to see how sound works in this setting. Assuming it tells me anything about the plane’s physics at all, that is, instead of just imposing my Gift’s idea of what sound is. I’m not sure I’m a huge fan of the subjective-reality thing that this place has going on.

Shield for One! There we go. Flat plane that blocks physical objects and incoming spells. Rectangular, size can be tuned with a pair of loops like on Stall. Attached to your hand using a sequence of gestures that’s similar to the sequence that Lightwrite introduced. Very involved overall, but that probably doesn’t matter now that Make Ready is an option.

I notice that I’m about at the end of the book. Instead of stopping like I did when I reached Find Spellcraft, I decide to read ahead to see what else I have available.

Hold Fast looks to be a permutation of Shield for One that forms around a target to imprison it. Very useful! Once I figure out Mass Hold Ready, or Prepare Spellcraft or whatever I end up calling it, I’ll probably want to make sure I have some of these ready to go all the time. Heather would love that.

Keep Food appears to be a portable refrigerator. Basic but useful. Probably will reveal a bit more about how my Gift thinks heat works. Or, given that Keep Food looks to be totally unrelated to Tinder, it might be that my Gift thinks that microbiology isn’t a thing and disease and spoilage result from something other than bacterial growth. That’d be hilarious and also very annoying. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Tinder will turn out to be lighting fires by making a bunch of light and Keep Food is so much more complicated because it has to do scary things with thermodynamics.

Gather Water is another basic survival tool. It shares a large sequence with Keep Food, raising my hopes that they both work by cooling the air. In that case Gather Water would be like a dehumidifier on steroids, pushing air through a cooling-and-heating cycle to reduce the vapor pressure of water until it condenses and can be captured. Dehumidifiers don’t produce potable water because their heat exchangers don’t use food-safe materials and capture too much aerial fungus and bacteria, which this spell shouldn’t have to worry about too much. Only problem is that it’d still produce distilled water, which will mess up your electrolyte balance badly. Eh, something to research.

Gather Water is the last spell in the book. I suppose that the book’s author thought I’d be able to figure out the rest from there. To be fair, mixing and matching from those would probably take me a good ways?

I know that I should probably learn Shield, but I’m really itching to dig into Read Mana, Stall, and Make Ready. I want to know how magic works so I can tear it apart and make it better.

It’s sitting there taunting me.

You know what, I’ve had a really stressful day, I deserve a reward.

I start going through the hand-poses for Read Mana. It takes me a bit more than twenty tries to get the spell cast, maybe forty-five minutes of waving my hands. It’s a long spell, but I’ve gotten a decent amount of practice, the hand-poses are a lot like Find Spellcraft, and I’m not busy walking and holding the book.

A cube of air in front of me blooms with yellow light, exactly like the cone of Find Spellcraft but far more subtle. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on until I move my head, the shift giving me another perspective that lets me assemble the gentle glow into shapes. Smeared-out pastel ripples enter the cube on the side nearest me and flow across, slowly spreading out and dissipating as they move. By the time they’ve reached the far side of the region, about a yard away from me, they’ve almost vanished, slowly smoothing out into the background’s uniform yellow wash.

Mesmerized, I stick my hand into the field, holding the mana-dragging feeling. The ripples are much more apparent, both brighter and more colorful since they haven’t had time to lose momentum. It takes me a bit to figure it out because there are no depth cues or shadows to help, but by moving my hand in different directions and looking at the boundaries of the display I slowly piece together the geometry. Each wave starts out as a single hard blue edge, but it quickly spreads out into a green-cyan-green band, then a wide smear of green that fades into yellow and vanishes.

The most interesting and useful effect, though, is constructive interference. Two fresh blue ripples overlap to form a flash of purple. Whatever is being measured is a simple rainbow colormap, a roughly linear sweep through hue-space holding saturation and value more or less constant. Though that’s not exactly right; it’s purely emissive so there are big chunks of the perceptual color space that it can’t represent, like black.

When I do the obvious experiment and overlap as many ripples as I can, I get a the bright red point where they all meet and it stays, a little spot hanging in space.

I stop drawing ripples and the entire field winks out.

Okay, same mechanism as Find Spellcraft. And I almost certainly can cast multiple spells at once, otherwise Read Mana wouldn’t be useful - it really feels like the intended use-case is to cast Read Mana and then cast your other spell while watching it on the display. That’d be the same way that Stall and Make Ready work, too.

I feel like the room is way darker with the light from the spell gone.

Then I look at the book and realize that it doesn’t just feel that way. It’s suddenly dark enough that I’m having trouble reading.

…Sunset isn’t usually that fast, right? I didn’t spend an hour staring at Read Mana?

“What happened to the light?” I ask.

“Oops, sorry, should’ve warned you,” Liv says. “Sunup and sundown on Land tend to confuse Visitors. Something about the way our plane is flat when a lot of others are curved?”

“Oh, that makes sense,” I say, working through the geometry in my head. They can’t have the sun moving across or around since it’d never fully set because it can’t go below a horizon that doesn’t exist, so instead they probably just dim it and brighten it on a schedule or something.

“We typically go to sleep about now,” Heather says, “And rise in eight or nine hours. You can stay up if you want.”

It’s kind of weird to be sleeping in a big room with a bunch of other people. I guess I can deal with it. I’ll definitely need my own room at some point, but for now I’ll just treat it like I’m back at summer camp.

…I’ll probably sleep in my clothes tonight, though. Even if I have a feeling that Liv, Agnes, and Heather would straight-up murder either of the cultivators if they got any ideas.

“You might have to drag me out of bed,” I say. “I have trouble sleeping so I’m persistently somewhat short. And, um, feel free to wake me up if I’m having nightmares?”

“I can do that,” Liv says. “Have a good night!”

I can’t say that I sleep well, but at least I do eventually get to sleep, which is more than I can say about some days.