“Kyle!” Aubrey shouted through the door to Kyle’s office, “I’ve got another spell for you to make!”

“What’s this one do, Aubrey?” he said. He put the loot reports he was reviewing into his desk drawer and stood.

“It’s an upgraded fire mist spell for you!”

That was a not the answer Kyle was expecting. All of Aubrey’s spells until now were academic in nature. This would be the first useful thing she produced.

“Great! Can’t wait to see it!” He hopped up and walked towards Aubrey, who opened up her inventory…

…and handed him a flag.

“Um…” Kyle said, looking at it skeptically.

“It wouldn’t fit on a paper,” Aubrey said. “You can make lines much thinner in your interface than we could manage with a stick of charcoal, so we had to blow it up and draw it on a flag instead.”

“Okay…” Kyle said warily. “How bad is it? Is it…” Kyle unfurled the flag.

It was a disaster. There were a couple of large runes, which Kyle recognized as “fire” and “create”, but there were dozens of smaller runes, some scaled as far down as they could go. Lines spidered out from the tiny runes, wrapping around each other with connection lines that met at harsh angles. The runes were packed in densely, with some of the tiny runes fitting inside gaps in the “fire” and “create” runes. The intricate detail spread out to the very corners of the flag; not a square centimeter was blank. The thing looked like a circuit-board.

Which shouldn’t have surprised Kyle.

“Aubrey, do you have any idea how costly it’ll be to make something like-”

Aubrey handed Kyle two stacks of pages, each nearly a foot high. “This’ll cover it. Probably. Might take another dozen pages or so if you don’t draw the lines exactly straight.”

“What about the mana cost?” Kyle asked.

Aubrey’s grin spread. “That’s the thing;” she said. “Mana cost for a spell is based on the surface area covered by the bounding boxes of each rune, so the path length of the connections doesn’t matter. That’s why we’ve wrapped the lines so tight. We’re trading RP costs up front for greater functionality and power.”

“How the hell did you-”

“That spell we had you cast last week? The one with the circle?” Aubrey said. “It was an optimization approximation function. A genetic algorithm to find the best places to fit the runes to guarantee a pareto-optimal spot on the power-to-mana-cost curve. Let it chug for a day or two, and bam. It drew this on the flag.”

“The spell did?”

“Yeah. Just a low-power fire effect to burn lines onto the flag. No big deal there.” Any feigned nonchalance was completely drowned by Aubrey’s excited tone. “All we had to do is set up what runes we wanted where and how they should connect. And it looked a hell of a lot cleaner in our diagrams.”

Kyle wasn’t excited to scribe this thing. Mason carved the spell circle for Aubrey’s last spell, and it took him almost a whole day. This thing would take at least several hours. “What did you say this would do, again? Because-”

“It’s an upgraded fire mist.”

Kyle was getting sick of being cut off. “As I was saying, is this really a fire mist? Because there’s no ‘mist’ delivery rune. In fact…” He looked around “Where is the delivery rune?”

“No need. We just conjure the fire directly where we need it with the create rune.”

“How do you know where?”

“Vector math and trig. You wouldn’t care. See you in an hour or two?” She said, putting the piles of torn library pages on Kyle’s desk.

“After dinner,” Kyle said. “It’ll take at least that long. And you’re going to help with these loot reports,” he said, opening his desk drawer and handing a sheaf of paper to Aubrey.

“You’d have found a reason to delegate them to me anyway,” Aubrey said. “And this’ll be the last time. After this, you’ll be so stoked, you’ll want me inventing spells the whole time. Which is sad. I like deriving loot tables.” She held up the papers over her head as though tipping her hat, and left the office.

Kyle sighed. That woman was exasperating. In part because she was so helpful she couldn’t be ignored.

Kyle started examining pairs of pages. When he got bored, he figured he could swap to drawing the spell diagram.

And vice versa.

* * *

“Okay, back up, back up!” Aubrey shouted to the eager onlookers. The line of spectators withdrew slightly. “Further!” Aubrey said.

Kyle had wondered why Aubrey chose the edge of the forest for this demonstration. But if the fire mist was that big, then Kyle supposed it made sense the spell should be tested away from the town. “How big is this thing?” Kyle said. He had to project his voice. Aubrey was nearly fifteen feet away.

“You have six pebbles in your inventory, right?”

“Yeah?”

“Back up!” Aubrey shouted again. “To here! Behind me!”

Kyle sighed. “Okay, ready?”

“Yep!” Aubrey said, finally satisfied.

Kyle opened his spell tab and cast the spell. He felt a slight twinge; the spell cost just slightly more mana than his max, and took a sliver off his health bar.

But nothing happened.

“Aubrey? What… did anything happen?”

“Yep!” she said, beaming. “Neat huh!”

“Like… is it invisible?”

“Yes! Obviously! Now walk towards the woods!”

“So, I guess it follows me?” Kyle asked.

“Yes! Now just go!”

“Won’t that set the forest on fire?”

“No! Just go!”

Kyle sighed, and walked towards the forest, wondering what on earth the mad dwarven programmer was getting him into.

A high pitched squeal echoed from the forest, and Kyle saw a kreyfa on a branch near the edge of the forest drop from the tree, smoking.

Kyle paused in alarm and looked back at Aubrey. She motioned him forward.

Kyle kept walking. As he did, he saw flashes of light from deeper in the forest, and heard animal screams and muffled thumps. He walked into the woods a yard or two to approach the location that one of the flashes had appeared. When he got there, he found a Tekka, one of those hard-shelled lizards, roasted and dead.

He turned back and looked at the others through the yard or two of trees. Aubrey looked ecstatic, and her assistants were giving themselves high fives. Everybody else looked confused.

“It’s… surreal,” Kyle called out. He flinched as he heard another kreyfra screech. “Cooked game is raining from the treetops.”

“It’s perfect!” Aubrey said, jogging towards him. “No, don’t!” she shouted behind her, turning and holding up her hands as the other started to follow. “It’ll burn you unless you’re in his party. Stay back!” Aubrey turned her attention back to Kyle. “Sorry. But yes! Perfect! It’s invisible until it affects a target. It follows you around. It ignores your party members. And it can last for up to an hour!”

“An hour?” Kyle was flabbergasted.

“Yes!” Aubrey said. “You give it an internal battery of mana when you cast it, and it drains the mana slowly when not in use. It can only be on for a minute or two, because when it’s actively burning something it depletes its mana stores fast, but still! That’s a full minute of AOE damage!”

“That’s… that’s really cool,” Kyle said. He was impressed. He was already starting to think of the possibilities. “Does this thing go through walls?”

“Yep! Kinda. It can go through nearly a yard of wood or a foot of stone like it wasn’t there. But no more. And it won’t go through lead at all. But otherwise, yes! Can’t be stopped by shields. I think it bypasses armor. Don’t quote me on that. And it can be modified on the fly! Remember those gray pebbles?”

“Yeah? Kyle said.

“The spell affects an area two yards square per gray pebble you have, centered on you. Max of eight.”

“Square? Not a circle?” Kyle teased, opening his inventory.

“The looping hacks we needed to use are poorly optimized for polar coordinates. Deal with it.”

Kyle looked in his inventory, and found that there were four or five different colors of pebbles. The exact number of each color was… impossible to determine. The number below their icon was changing so rapidly it was basically a blur. All aside from the gray pebbles and the blue ones.

“What are these fifty-seven blue pebbles?”

“Mana bar,” Aubrey said. “Spell’s over when you reach zero. Cragus insisted I put that in. It removed some of the power, but I guess given that the spell’s invisible, it would be useful to know how long it had left and whether it was still on.”

“Okay. Okay, I can get a lot of use out of this,” Kyle said. “This is a big upgrade.”

Aubrey beamed. “And this is just the start.”

“We need to get this to every adept in the village. This could… oh, crap,” Kyle finished.

“Yeah?” Aubrey said with a glint in her eye.

“I’m the one who’s going to have to scribe these spell scrolls for the others, aren’t I?

“‘Fraid so,” Aubrey said. “And then you can go play in another dungeon somewhere.”

Kyle sighed.

It’d be worth it.