Adamant Blood

Mark grumbled, tapping the ‘System Call’ button on his setup on the roof of his soulhouse. The amalgamation of parabolic dishes and screens and computer tech sent out signal after signal with each press, echoing ripples of flexed darkness out into the prismatic black dream beyond.

Still no return signal.

“Ugh! Why aren’t you working!” Mark said, as he hit the button again. “It was working at the settlement! It was working yesterday— Oh!”

The screen flickered and blue replaced the black, almost like it was starting to connect, to show Mark his Status… but then the blue vanished and Mark scowled.

It was Friday of the Winter Ball, and the last 4 days had all been mostly the same.

People wanted to talk to Mark, and so Mark had had meetings with them about the Reset Quest and about Okuana and about goblins and about much less immediate concerns, like funding for this project or that project. That’s how the weekdays went here at the Winter Ball. Everyone was here to mingle and talk and plan and make connetions.

Mark took the afternoons off so he could study Basic Enchanting and talk to Rylan and Tulo and Andria and Tartu about all of that stuff. He had given them all more adamantium for their own projects, including Rylan’s cousin who was deep into Swords of Empire creation, but he had not gotten anywhere with that direction in a long time.

That cousin was named Yadono Drakemore, and he bowed and scraped at Mark when he was there, giving Mark the distinct impression that he was a dragonist, like Rylan. It was uncomfortable to talk to Yadono because of that, and Mark didn’t do a great job at hiding that fact. Rylan talked to Yadono in private for a moment in the middle of that meeting, though, and Yadono came back much more normal-like, though his vector had still been full of deference.

It wasn’t that bad, honestly.

Mark had spoken to Walaria a few times since Monday, and each time she quickly updated Mark about the situation with Okuana, and each time it had been basically ‘Nothing is happening yet. Might happen soon or not at all’, and then she went on to see if Mark needed anything. Mark had said he was fine, each time.

The Understanding Party for Basic Enchanting would be happening Sunday, provided nothing happened at the main event tomorrow.

Mark had been going hard at Basic Enchanting on his own, figuring out how to make magical items and ‘cheating’ a whole bunch, because adamantium was very good at not doing the one thing that all other magical items did.

Adamantium did not degrade if you made it properly.

All other magical items eventually either condensed improper mana onto them, causing cascading failures in linkages and ‘short circuits’, or the base item itself dissipated into the manasphere, the mana used up as it did its functions. Adamantium remained adamantium, and yes, it could condense other mana onto it if you did it wrong, but it was easy to ‘do it right’, as long as you used mithril coatings and mithril bridges. Mithril flowed easily, meaning that even if mithril did condense other mana onto itself, that mana rapidly flowed away when it was used up by the actual enchantment. The mithril might degrade if all you used was mithril, but when you used an adamantium base the mithril remained strong.

Way back when Mark actually used a spellbreaker to give himself an automatic 4-ish seconds of complete immunity to whatever magic specifically targeted him, those spellbreakers needed to recharge for days at a time before they could be used again.

Mark never really understood how or why they ‘recharged’, but now he knew how and why they recharged.

When a spellbreaker was being used by a person, that spellbreakers gathered the appropriate mana to activate the Protect-effect from the user and the atmosphere. When the spell activated, that buildup was transformed into effect. That’s why it took days to recharge them, and why you could concentrate on a spellbreaker to make it recharge faster, and why mithril was one of the main components of a spellbreaker.

If, however, you made a spellbreaker with an adamantium core and a mithril overlay, and if you accounted for multiple atmospheric mana condensation possibilities, then you could charge it effortlessly and it would last a lot longer than usual. It was even theoretically possible to have a continuously-running spellbreaker. It was difficult to do, but the primary hurdle to such a creation was the adamantium demand.

Mark solved that big demand long before he solved the rest of the demands, but he had been working through those smaller requirements slowly and steadily. Binding work to understand the architecture of the spell in the first place, Sigaldry to understand the individual parts of the spell, Manawork to understand the individual parts even more, and finally Basic Enchanting to pull it all together into a workable whole.

Usually Quark did most of that for Mark when making signs and using Mark’s adamantium mana to cause effects, but Basic Enchanting allowed Mark to put all of that into an item that other peoplecould use…

Theoretically.

“I just need this fucking System Call to work so I can check our work,” Mark mumbled, as he pressed the System Call button again. The signal went out. Still nothing. Mark sighed, “Dammit.”

Quark, floating to the side and standing tall and proper, said, “Master Drakemore and Armsmith Khava have given their approval to the proposed design, and we have replicated it in adamantium well. Perhaps a System Call to check on the working isn’t necessary?”

Mark frowned a little. “Yeah, but Addavein said it was ‘passable’.”

He had also said that Mark could do better.

Mark had been doing the Protect spell for months, though mostly he had not. Not directly. Quark did it for him. Mark did have the Protect spell and a few other basic spells in his Status, though, sitting on a shelf in his house downstairs, along with his new Protect-like magic which he still wasn’t sure would work for his enchanting needs. When Addavein had seen that Mark was still working with basic Protect, Addavein said he had expected Mark to expand his capabilities past that initial magic. Maybe even to ‘Continuous Protect’, which Mark hadn’t even known existed until Addavein had talked about it yesterday.

“ ‘Repetition is the mother of learning’, according to many sources,” Quark added.

“… Fuck. Yeah. You’re right. I’ll do it with what we got, but I’d like it if this System Call would work and tell me if I even managed to make the spell— Ohh! It’s doing something!”

The jumble of machinery and antenna pulsed, and then a blue box filled the air slowly. It did not dissipate this time.