I sent a communication request to both Maaata and Chantelle, and they both connected.

"My lord," Maaata said. "Did you need something else?"

"Yeah, what's up?" Chantelle asked.

"On our expedition into the winter realm we came across some weaponry that seemed to automatically enchant and launch shards of ice," I said. "I recovered one of the long-range, highly accurate, versions of the weapons. It seemed like the sort of thing that both of you would be interested in. I'm expecting it to be trapped, so I would like to have a complete scan of it in the magical spectrum, that way we can trip the traps in a simulation."

"Are you sure that's how it works?" Maaata asked. "It shouldn't be possible, by all that I know of enchanting. The wisps are an edge case of that, having something that creates intent before there is an alive wisp to create it, but I didn't understand it, I just put the mana in at the right time and place."

"I'm not sure that is how it's working, no," I said. "But we need a complete and working scan of the thing so that we can figure out how it works."

"Okay, where is it?" Chantelle asked.

"I'm on my way to the ward room floor," I said. "Though we should probably not do it next to the mana crystal pillars. Tinkering with something that could explode near them wouldn't be a smart idea. I'll be there in a minute."

I was walking through my Pocket Dimension to the fastest way to the ward room, which was through the presence that was observing the ward room table. I shifted the presence to the side and dropped down onto the table, startling Chantelle who was in the room.

Chantelle and I left the ward room and picked up Maaata who was standing in the doorway to her room. Most of the ward room floor was still empty, and we headed out into the darkness for thirty meters. Chantelle brought out her enchanted light stone, Maaata doing the same, and I took out a thread portal from my pocket and placed the other side of the portal over one of the electrical lights I had made, fixing it to ceiling above us.

The weapon was still resting on its bed of compacted snow within my Pocket Dimension, and I slid it out to rest on the floor without touching it.

"That's it," I said. "I think if I push my power against it to get a detailed scan then the mana will drain out of it and the enchantments will break. So if you two could make a detailed scan of the mana in it first?"

After a few seconds of not being able to see anything going on I invited both of them to my local simulation, which was then updated with the inputs from their senses. They were both zoomed in and were mapping the mana from the same end of the weapon, opposite the ejection point of the tube.

There was a dense power source in the shoulder rest, and multiple clusters of complicated enchantments there leading up to the trigger. There was also a final enchantment at the end of the tube, above the legs that held the launcher off of the ground.

It took five minutes for the two of them to make a complete map of the mana, referencing each other's model and fine tuning the discrepancies between them. When they'd finished I began pressing my power firmly into the weapon. Being able to see the mana drain from the weapon, from what Maaata and Chantelle could see, was interesting, and I was able to accelerate the process by pushing harder against the mana storage area.

It took a minute for the mana in the storage to drain completely, and then the enchantments winked out one by one as my power pressed over them. Only when the last enchantment broke did my power soak into the weapon allowing me to begin my scan.

Most of the weapon was simple reinforced ice. I did have to use my power to keep it from warming up and melting, the enchantment that was working to do that broke along with the rest. The snow that it had been resting on had long since melted on the warm floor.

What I found with the four complicated enchantment areas was very much like parts of the model I had of the wisp. Not enough for there to be a consciousness, but the mechanism it used was identical, a hybrid bioelectrical and mana system. In fact, I think the weapon was made with the cut up bodies of several different wisps. Parts of the physical makeup of the weapon were direct copies from the wisp model I had.

I finished up my scan and got the mana model from Chantelle, combining it with my model. We now had a digital copy of the weapon to play with.

I moved to the war games simulation, inviting Maaata and Chantelle to join me. The main simulation was being used by Dael and his two wives, using melee and ranged magic to fight off waves of monsters. I split off a new instance and created a copy of the Long Ranged Ice Launcher, the LRIC.

The LRIC was obviously designed to be shot from a prone position, but I decided to hold it while standing up, my left hand along the tube and my right hand in a position to pull the trigger. I was expecting it to explode, or dissolve, or something. I gently pulled the trigger further and further back until it was completely depressed. Nothing happened.

"Maybe it needs to detect a snow man to fire?" I asked.

"That doesn't look like what is happening," Chantelle said. "It looks like the simulation doesn't know what to do with the different enchantments."

"The simulation worked with the wisp..." I said. "Most of the enchantments are the same, why isn't it working?"

"I don't know, I haven't seen the wisp model," Chantelle said.

"Is it possible that the wisp model was self-reinforcing?" Maaata asked. "Once it was alive it was giving its own feedback to the simulation that showed what the enchantments were doing?"

"So, we need to recreate the weapon out in the world and observe it to see what the enchantments are doing, and then add the necessary rules to the simulation here?" I asked.

"That would be the way to do it, yes," Chantelle said.

I sighed. I was still expecting the weapon to have fail-safes in place.

We switched back to my local simulation and Maaata and I made a map of the different points on the original weapon that needed mana added to it to prime the enchantments again. Chantelle and Maaata went through them and got the weapon back up to its original condition, without it exploding in our faces.

"I want to do this outside the Fortress, just in case," I said.

Chantelle and Maaata both nodded, and I opened a portal that connected to the portal at the stairs outside. I slid the gun along the ground in front of us, the enchantments of the gun no longer rejecting my power. I spent a few minutes putting thread portals around the weapon, so any explosion would be somewhat contained. As soon as anything destroyed the threads the portals would collapse, but it might stop some of it.

"We can't see it," Chantelle said. "We'll need to be able to see it to see what the enchantments are doing."

So much for the bomb shield... But there was another way I could achieve the same effect. I reshaped a single thread portal and moved its exit to be horizontal in the Pocket Dimension, then lifted it up on a solid block of stone in and out of the Pocket Dimension. I raised it around us so we were standing with most of our bodies within the Pocket Dimension, just our heads out in the world. I had my left hand wrapped around the front edge of the portal ready to lift it over our heads.

With my right hand I had a single finger going through another small portal ready to pull on the trigger of the weapon.

"Okay, ready?" I asked.

"Ready," Chantelle and Maaata said together.

I took a breath and held it, placing my finger gently against the trigger. No reaction. Pulling slightly back on the trigger, a wave of mana flowed through the enchantments in the shoulder rest and a shard of ice formed in the back of the tube of the weapon. Slightly further and the shard fired out of the barrel and took a chunk out of a tree.

I let out my breath in a sigh of relief. No big explosion. I shot five more times, the LRIC fixed to the ground with my power to prevent any recoil.

"It looks like I was being overly paranoid," I said. "Did you get all of the data you needed on how the enchantments are working?"

"All but one, I think," Chantelle said. "How about you, Maaata?"

"Just the one that is wrapped around the trigger and mana source hasn't activated," Maaata said.

"Maybe it's a low mana warning, or overheating protection?" I asked.

I held down the trigger, firing as rapidly as the ice shards could be created, about one every six tenths of a second. Five minutes of normal time, an hour at our speed, and three hundred shots, later the mana storage was at half full and there was a straight line of damage going through the forest at a slightly upward angle.

"It's not overheating," Chantelle said. "And it probably isn't a low mana warning either with the amount of shots the thing can fire. We have all of data we need on the enchantments we need to create our own Elrics, call it done?"

I nodded, removing my finger from the trigger for the first time. And the gun began exploding into thin fragments of ice. The final unactivated enchantment was converting all of the mana in the mana storage at once to fuel the explosion.

I pulled my finger out of the portal next to the trigger and crushed the two edges of the loop together, a sliver of ice cutting deeply into my finger. At the same time I pushed upwards hard with my left hand, the portal clearing our heads before the explosion hit. Both portals disappeared from the Pocket Dimension a tenth of a second of normal time later.

"That was tricky," I said. "I'd almost let my guard down. Let's remove that enchantment from the model, I think."