I realized this morning that I forgot to work on Willow’s gift yesterday, her birthday is tomorrow.

I was able to get it to work how I wanted to, as effectively as I wanted it to, but it is in no way mana efficient. Given another day or two I could make it cost a tenth of what it does now to recharge, even more given a week.

The physical armor was easy enough to do, the hardest part of that was the actual design of it. The hard part was the magical armor. The way the armor works is it pulls apart any nearby mana, effectively turning it into ambient mana. There is no way to turn this off short of turning the whole armor off, and it can’t distinguish between friendly and hostile magic. On top of that, it messes with your own spells as you cast them, assuming you don’t cast them on yourself. I was able to make it so it doesn’t affect the person inside the armor, meaning it won’t hurt the occupant nor will it disrupt spells you cast on yourself.

It does interfere with the bodies of mana based creatures like myself, but whatever it is that drives my body makes me more resilient to that kind of effect than a non-animate spell. A similar, though not quite as drastic, resilience is present in spells that are still being actively controlled by the caster instead of fire and forget spells.

I’ll give it to her tomorrow and tell her that I still need a couple days to create the final version, but might as well let her have the prototype in the meantime just in case.

I didn’t really do much else today, I spent all my time rushing to finish Willow’s gift on time. I hope she likes it. It will take a bit of work to get accustomed to it, particularly the magical effects. But, she is a rather talented mage, I’m sure she’ll figure it out in no time.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.