Victoria’s laughter finally slowed down and she, with a few tears squeezed past her eyelids, straightened back up and smiled at him. “Go and get yourself a chair from upstairs. When we experiment with making spells we have to be in the Sapphire Room which only has one.”

Alex grinned back at Victoria – though he wasn’t sure what she’d found so funny, her laughter (like any) was contagious – spun on one heel like he was back in band doing an about-face and marched over to and up the stairs.

When he exited the staircase on the ground level, he turned right and walked into the common room. Going to the table with five women still dicing, he placed his hands on one of the chairs. The chairs were medieval things: no arm-rests, entirely of wood but recognizable as similar to a modern folding chair with a backrest.

Since he’d approached them, they’d all looked up at him one-by-one and he now had their full attention when he asked, “Do you mind if I borrow this chair?”

One of the ladies from the card game – actually that was the one who spoke to him earlier – asked “What do you need it for?” and Alex, turning, replied “Victoria and I are going to be working on some new spells. I guess she thought it might take a while because she sent me for a chair.”

Several of the women laughed, most groaned, and only a couple stood up and made their way over to the woman who’d spoken. She started handing out piles of money – some large silver coins as well as smaller denominations.

They bet on something. Alex thought. And very few people thought that either Victoria or I would get to this point.

He chuckled at them and took the chair to head downstairs. Even though he hadn’t gotten a response to his question, the casual betting told him how relaxed the Wardens were. Normally, such a chair would be a small burden, but he’d just finished his (losing) round with the Hammer of Gravity so his tired muscles complained more than they should as he struggled to look like the weight didn’t bother him.

A little insecurity goes a long way.

His right foot stuck a bit to one of the last stairs and kicked forward when his growing force freed it. His shin struck and bounced off the back leg causing him to wince and he stumbled down the last stair doing a hop on his other leg to maintain his balance. Luckily, Victoria was already re-seated and the Hammer of MuscleStrain had been replaced out of the walkway so he didn’t fall over it either. Recovering, he walked into the Sapphire Room and place his chair to Victoria’s left where there was more space.

“Where did the front wall go?” questioned Alex, “It was very solid before and there doesn’t appear to be a door …”

“Oh, one of the spells is activated. It’ s still there but you can’t touch it. Here –” and Victoria waved her hand and the pressure of the room gave a very slight whump. Turning around, Alex saw that the wall had reappeared so he asked “Uhm, you called it the Sapphire Room, but it looks like glass to me?”

“It is Sapphire. I made it by grinding up a bunch of sapphires that the dungeon east of Merryville gives out instead of other rewards. After making a powder, I separated out all the impurities and melted the purest form of sapphire I could get to a certain temperature and poured it into a mold of the right size. Then, when it cooled I polished each side with an earth spell, Sandblast, which gave it more strength. Finally, the lines of the spells were scooped out using very fine force blades.”

Alex sat in his newly acquired chair and said, “Okay, so why do spell research in a sapphire box in the basement?”

Victoria looked at him and, with shining eyes, replied “Because spells which have mistakes explode.” After a short pause, she continued, “While I’ve not killed myself yet, I did once make a crater just outside the walls and, in so doing, broke every bone in my right hand, wrist, and arm.”

“After that, the Wardens insisted that I experiment in a safer place. Safer for the town, that is. So I built the Sapphire Room. It’s got all the protections of the Magic Study in Wirthglade and so everyone outside the room should be safe … shall we get started?”

Alex laughed for a few seconds and nodded.

“So” Victoria led “how much do you know that you think you’re capable of writing new spells?”

Shaking his head, Alex replied “I’m not arrogant about my magic knowledge. I know next to nothing about it – which is the entire reason I’m here. I’ve used the basic information from the spell language dictionary to –” “The spell language is called Xigun” “Ah, ok, I’ve used the Xigun dictionary to translate the force spell, Blade, and the healing spell, Heal, to my native tongue. Reading the translation provided by the collective knowledge, I’ve noticed direct connections to the work I’ve trained for and done all my life.”

“I’m well-practiced and quite adept at writing things very like spells, but I don’t know the rules of the spell lan – Xigun and I’m not sure of the effects that are caused by spells and how to predict and use those. So, while I need what should be seen as the most basic knowledge about magic, spells, and the spell language’s grammar I have an extremely good background for trying to manipulate things once we get to the point where I won’t be bumbling about like a blind man in a room full of swords.”

Victoria considered him for a few minutes. “It should be impossible to do that. Nothing else works like Xigun.”

Wincing, Alex said “Well I’m a Traveler. I just got here but in my previous world, Earth, I studied for eight years specifically to work on very complex things like Xigun. My work after that was on creating systems like Xigun myself so that they could be used to create tools that others needed. Hmm … I’ll show you my status. Such a low level should be impossible if I’m not a Traveler so you’ll at least be able to confirm a part of my story.”

Alex brought up his status and flipped it around to Victoria. His name is Alexander Carpenter. Her pupils dilated and her eyes widened as she flipped through the various tabs. She stopped on the translation of Blade and began to bounce her right leg. “What’s this?”

“A translation of Blade to my tongue from back home.”

“Can you write it in Himmen?”

“Yes, I can.”

She cleared a space on the paper-laden table and passed a fresh sheet over to him along with a quill and ink pot. Alex blinked a few times and said “Ah, we don’t use quills on Earth. Do you have something like a charcoal pencil?” Victoria frowned for a few seconds then exclaimed, “I have just the thing!”

She pulled a green slate out from a drawer and placed a bit of chalk on it, smiling again. Alex picked up the chalk and translated the spell from the English of his notes to Himmen. When he was finished he had something like this:

while ( *input? > 0 ) ( *wait? ( 10 ); ); *if ( *target? ) ( ~*makeBlade? (*target? , *self? ); );

…

Victoria said “What are these?” and pointed at the different asterisks ( * ). Alex responded, “It’s the glyph you get by drawing a hexagon and then connecting all the corners to the center of the hexagon.”

It looks like a wagon wheel, but with a hexagon on the outside instead of a circle. He thought. “It doesn’t seem to have an obvious purpose, though I did note that it was before all the things I thought of as names or words.”

“That’s the word glyph” Victoria explained “It just indicates that the glyphs which follow it are a word instead of having the single-glyph meanings. There’s always the space glyph after a sequence of a word. It’s the empty glyph. None of the hexagon or spoke lines are active.”

“Okay, I’ll just omit those characters from my translations in the future. They should be implied when you have a word which takes up more than one glyph in Xigun.”

Victoria nodded and asked “And these?” pointing at the parentheses that were scattered throughout.

“That’s the glyph with only the top glyph line active and the glyph with the top and top-left glyph lines active. They seem to surround sequences of information in Xigun, so I made them simple brackets. All they do is serve to package things together so they should have a simple representation to reflect how common and simple they are.”

“These?” Victoria pointed at the semicolons ( ; ).

“Well, those are a bit more complex. You know that the original spell was a collection of glyphs arranged around each other. I didn’t even consider the order that I should use to translate the glyphs because I’d already cast my first spell. The first glyph is formed, then one is formed above it. The third glyph is formed on the upper left, then each successive glyph spirals around the first glyph counter-clockwise. Within the glyphs, each exterior line is drawn first then the spokes are drawn also in a counter-clockwise fashion.”

“So, I just naturally started to translate the spell using the direction that it formed when I cast the spell and I got that … but when you think about the spell itself, there has to be some kind of punctuation to separate different words or sentences in the spell. Otherwise, you’d just have one massive sentence with the occasional space glyph, word glyph, or bracket glyph. The marks you asked about are the spell-language’s way of ending a sentence. It’s just the glyph which is right after the two parentheses glyphs – it has the top, top-left, and bottom-left outer lines formed and nothing else.”

“And these?” Victoria pointed to the question marks “They don’t correspond to a glyph in Xigun.”

“Those are what English uses to indicate a question. I don’t know any multi-glyph words in the language, so I had to guess from the content of the spell what they meant. Since I’m not sure that those are correct, I added that mark.”

“This one?” Victoria pointed to the tilde ( ~ ) character.

“Honestly, I’m not sure what that character means. It seems like it might be a way to use a spell fragment written elsewhere, but I’m really guessing here. It’s the glyph where six lines are active. Incidentally, I’ve not seen either of the two glyphs with four and five lines active.”

This is amazing! Victoria thought Just rewriting the glyphs helps me so much. I knew that spells contained this kind of structure, but when they’re written as a spell they’re just so condensed that it’s impossible to see the structure of the spell and … because the glyphs are drawn with some of the lines on top of one another there’s ambiguity unless you know the context of the spell or have cast it yourself. Is this line the bottom-left of one hexagon or the top-right of another? Is it active in both glyphs?

By writing the spell in this format, there’s no ambiguity and so things like checking for errors are going to be so much easier! It’s an idea that’s obvious once you’ve seen it but impenetrable until you do. Something that would be called genius when first discovered, but which future generations would take for granted: “Of course you do it that way! It’s so simple!”

His naivete about how easy spells were to write now makes sense. They are easy for him to write successfully. I bet he didn’t have to deal with the explosions from an error either, so this kind of thing could be done over and over again until you got it right. I was lucky I found his innocence funny – this will change the world of magic into one which is far, far more flexible than today. And I’d never have found it without an outside influence.

I bet even the Magic Study will be able to produce branches all over the place instead of staying in their tower just outside Wirthglade on the edge of the kingdom! That is if we can work out a way to ensure that the spells we do write don’t blow back on us. Studying them is certainly going to be far easier, but without a way to check that they’re not going to explode, we’re still going to be limited.

And yet she thought, sneaking a glance at Alex, I bet he can help with that too. Some Travelers have been barbarians, some brutes, and the rare Traveler has been a boon from the Goddesses who helped civilization move forward. Alexander is certainly in that last group. And he’ll move magic forward!

“That character is the remote spell activator. You’re right, you can set up spell fragments that you can call from active spells. It cuts down on the cost needed to infuse the spell initially and allows you to reuse complex parts of spells so that you don’t have to check them repeatedly. It also vastly reduces the chance of blowing yourself up when writing a new spell and it shortens the cast-time of a spell. It’s the single most important glyph in all of Xigun, yet it only has the sixth place in the listing of the spells.”

She turned to Alex with joy on her face and a grin and said “Though, I think that the most important advancement will certainly be the way that you translate spells. They take forever to study because there’s inherent ambiguity in the way that they’re written. Most students figure out that it’s easier to study the spells by adding a bit of space between the glyphs, but they’re still pretty impenetrable because of the spiral.”

“It seems obvious now that we should have unwound the spiral and written the spell in a line and then, eventually, we would have gotten to what you’re doing here. Showing the structure of the spell in the way you write it is ingenious … but it’s probably just normal where you’re from, huh?”

“Ah, yes, it is.” Alex said “I wouldn’t feel bad if I were you, though. Besides just having everyone always tell you that this is the way to study spells, you’ve also got the system reinforcing that idea by never giving you the knowledge to study spells more easily. Something like this should be included with the first level of the Xigun dictionary, but it is missing.”

“In some ways, we’ll have to be really careful how we spread this information – it could tear apart the current power structures and cause wars if mages were suddenly capable of far more flexibility and more efficient spells.”

Victoria paused at that thought and sat there for a long time. Alex let her consider the consequences of the information getting around. After a few minutes, he coughed lightly to get her attention. As she refocused her eyes on him, she said, “Yes, that would be wise.”

As her foot bounced she looked off into the middle distance for a few more seconds then returned her gaze to Alex and said “Alexander –”

“Oh, call me Alex” he interjected.

Grinning, she said “Alex, there’s another problem though. Even if we can write spells more easily, we still need some way of making sure we don’t have an error or there will still be great danger with testing them out.”

Nodding, Alex replied “I have a few ideas for that, but I need some information about the explosions first. Do you know what determines the size or power of the blast? Are some mistakes more explosive than others? Do the explosions always center on the person casting the spell or where the spell is forming?”

“But I guess the most important question is this: is it possible to feed power to a spell from a distance?”

Victoria blinked at that question. “Of course you can feed a spell from a distance. There’s a group of linkage spells specifically created to send power along to spells but you have to set up the spell form locally. They’re wildly used during wars – though there haven’t been any of those for quite some time – and they are occasionally used in mining to cause an explosion a safe distance away.”

Victoria paused after saying that … then she face-palmed. After a second she started muttering “… of course there’s a remote activation … used in mining … explosions a safe distance away … the whole of the Magic Study is stupid beyond belief. In thousands of years, no one thought to try out spells remotely!!! Goddesses save us from our own stupidity.”

Alex uncomfortably gave her a small hug and consoled her “The idea was always to succeed at making a new spell. Planning to fail would seem to be defeatist. It took my society many years to figure out that we needed this kind of thing as well.”

Victoria looked up at him and gave a smirk. “We’re still stupid.”

“So am I. So, about the sizes of the explosions and whether they can be predicted?”

Victoria sobered up and replied “Well, the initial cost of the spell determines how big the explosion will be if you simply have Xigun which is improper. If the spell doesn’t make any sense or is missing the punctuation, then you can calculate how big the explosion is going to be based on the number of active lines in the spell you’ve activated. This is the total number of lines activated – even those which are in spell fragments count towards the total.”

“If it’s something else where the spell fails because what you’re trying to do doesn’t make sense in Marin or attempts to do something in an impossible manner … then the explosion is much, much more massive. There have only been a few of these, but they’re so dangerous that any surviving records about the person presumed to have cast the spell are expunged. Not just her spell work, but her name, her genealogy, her appointments to any knighthoods, her children’s connection to her, everything!”

“Having that kind of power available during a war, though it would require a fanatic to sacrifice themselves, is something that society has never been able to even consider allowing.”

Okay, so bugs in large spells are ridiculously bad. Keep it simple, stupid – to survive. Alex thought. He glanced at the time: it was just 4:30. He wanted to design a simple spell which should allow him to far more safely work on future spells … but he didn’t have enough knowledge of the spell language yet to do it. I’ll try to get the information I need to write the spell tonight, then we can test it here tomorrow.

“So … how do I define a spell fragment to be used in a more complex spell?” Alex asked.

“Oh, that’s actually really easy” replied Victoria “All you have to do is make sure you have a unique name, then you cast a spell which is basically just a definition of the spell fragment you’ll want to use later.”

She spent a few minutes with the quill she’d gotten out for Alex earlier and wrote an outline on a piece of paper:

*uniqueName ( ... )

{

…

}

She pointed at the curly braces and said “Those define the spell fragment. They’re just the brackets you missed at positions 4 and 5 in Xigun. The brackets after the spell name are used to pass any information you need for the spell fragment to work.”

It’s just a function definition. Alex thought, Even though an improper use of the function blows back proportional to the number of active lines in the entire spell, it’s great to have modularity. In fact … I bet I can speed up all my spell casts to something like ~spellName ( … ). That will give me the greatest flexibility with the fastest speed possible. With spells that I need to cast rapidly, I can even make sure that the spell name is short to cut down even more on the cast time.

“Okay,” Alex responded, “Then I’d like for you to teach me what each of the … uh … 4096 single glyphs mean if you can. I know that’s a long bit of time so if you like, we can go to the West Inn and get supper while we work.”

“That sounds like fun!” Victoria responded.

So, she activated the spell which removed the wall and they headed upstairs. As they passed the common room, the ladies playing cards all turned and looked at them. Alex didn’t notice but their eyes were bugged out.

Victoria giggled internally, thinking We’re not even remotely interested in each other, but I bet there will be rumors all over the town tomorrow that I’ve finally found someone. Hopefully, Alex isn’t the type to want tons of ladies because this will slow many from approaching him: if he likes the crazy lady who blows things up, how sane could he be?

They went to the inn and Victoria made sure that she paid for her own meal. Snagging a table in the corner they started to eat and Victoria spent the next four hours talking about the first 2048 single glyph meanings in Xigun. That’s about eight per minute, but she was lucky because there were classes of meanings.

For instance, the collection of glyphs with only the spokes active were just numbers in Xigun. 0 was when no spokes were active – this was an exception to the rule about numbers and was a dual usage of the space glyph. The context was important when you needed to tell 0 apart from a space. 1 was when the spoke to the corner between the top and top-left was active. 2 was when only the spoke to the corner on the left was active. 3 was when both the above spokes were active. And so on.

With a short description here, Victoria covered the first 64 integers and explained 64 glyphs in a matter of seconds. Other collections ran through easily described patterns of the basic glyph structure as well.

At the end of their time, Alex had a great start to understanding the entire structure of Xigun. He also discovered that the first level of Xigun dictionary covered all of the remaining 2048 single glyphs. Thus he’d learned the alphabet of Xigun in a single day as well as most of the structure for a programming language and some of the conventions that needed to be followed.

He and Victoria said goodnight and she headed off to the Wardens’ building. Apparently, she was given a small room there as a concession. As it turned out, she was actually level 25 – the highest in all of Scottstown – and though this by itself wouldn’t guarantee her lodging her insatiable drive to learn more about spells, Xigun, and magic caused her to sign on to be a Warden so she could occasionally try out new spells to decimate the local monsters and constantly experiment with writing new spells.

When she inevitably cause a huge explosion, the city council forced her to get some kind of protections in place for her fiddling. That led to the basement of the Warden’s building having the Sapphire Room and Victoria spending all her time hanging around the room. Since she’d often forget to get lunch or supper, she ended up going to the West Inn at all hours of the night. Then someone had to be woken up to let her back into the Warden’s building because she frequently forgot her physical key.

So … they just gave her a room in the building and built a door which she could open with magic. She was one of the few people with a room in the Warden’s building just because she was waking people up in the middle of the night. She somewhat hesitantly explained this to Alex when he seemed surprised that she slept in the building.

He laughed with her afterward and said “Well, it seems like they made the right choice! An unhappy nerd is dangerous after all!” This led to a conversation about what a nerd was and a new joy for Victoria: Alex’s world had so many people like her that they had an entire word to describe them. Having a dedicated name that described some of her personality let her feel like she belonged – even if the class of people she belonged to didn’t exist on Marin.

As she left to the Warden’s, Alex moved from the table he was sitting at to a bench outside the door. When he asked Marin what they were for, she explained that mud was a pain to clean off the floors with the number of people she served so the porch had been built on the front of the inn and the benches added to give people a place to sit when it rained and have their feet cleaned of mud. One of the barmaids knew and was very proficient in a simple water spell which she could use to soak and brush the mud off entire groups of feet if people would all sit on one bench and lift their legs at the same time.

Since it hadn’t rained in the last three days, Alex hadn’t seen that first-hand, but he had a couple of hours before Erin should arrive so he waited on the bench and constructed his first spell.