Chapter 20: I Would Prefer It
“Drak, maybe I should have argued with Hugh a little more about who was paying,” Gramps said as he stood before the pile of boxes sitting in the yard. “This is going to be expensive.” He ran a hand through his graying hair.
“I’m sorry,” Avalyn said, feeling a little sad that she had caused this.
“No, don’t you ever be sorry about this, kiddo.” Patting her on the shoulder, he said, “This vol might be pretty expensive, but I guarantee you there isn’t going to be a damn thing I regret about this.”
“Are you sure? I don’t really understand how expensive this is going to be, but I feel like it’s a lot.” She still had so little of a frame of reference for how expensive things were, or how much money one needed. Gramps hadn’t said anything at the price of the clothes, but that didn’t mean they weren’t expensive. Then again, he repaired ships for a living; maybe this was at least close to that. “Don’t you have to do this with a lot of the ships you rebuild?”
“Well, most of the time the spellwork is still there. They can go inert, malfunction, and so on, but unless you’re pulling it out and putting it in something else, it’s still there. You though,” he turned to look through the open hangar doors, “are missing every single piece of spellwork. Not only that, but it all has to be old spellwork. So, I won’t lie to you, kiddo, this is pretty expensive, but it would be expensive as all hells if we had to actually hire someone to do the spellwork. Hugh’s going to do this all for free because it’s what he loves.”
That made sense, but it was a little interesting that spellwork would remain even if the ship was dead by normal means. “So you know how to do spellwork?”
“Enough to get me by in today’s galaxy without having to bring in outside help often. I don’t have the knowledge to do it for Stargazer though.”
“Would you be able to teach me? I don’t know how comfortable I would be flying around the galaxy in a ship with spells I can’t replicate if I need to.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t dream of my granddaughter not being able to do her own spellwork on a ship. Though I feel I should point out, you’re more likely to only ever need to fix spellwork than you are to have to do it from scratch, like with you.” He smiled, but that smile faltered a little. “Can you do magic?”
“I…” She felt a tightness in her ghostly chest. “I don’t know. I would hope so, but… I fear I wouldn’t be surprised if I can’t.” Having a soul was probably crucial to being able to cast magic, so she had that going for her, but would not having an organic body hinder her? This felt like a time her regent instincts should kick in, but they felt conflicted. “I think one of the best ways to find out would be to try to commandeer some spellwork.”
“That… maybe first try that out on something small first, just in case something goes wrong.” It was clear he was worried, but he also made it apparent he wasn’t going to stop her. He never did when it came to something about her true nature.
“Well, I’ve only managed to fully fix a few smaller systems wirings, so I think we don’t have a choice but to start small for right now. How do you think Hugh will react?” They hadn’t actually told Hugh about the fact that she could commandeer things, as he was already terrified of her.
“I don’t think he will be thrilled with the idea. He probably won’t want you to even touch his spellwork.”
“Well, they will be touching me when they are plugged in. I’m sure it won’t go horribly wrong.”
“I’d pray to the fates to hope so, but I don’t know if they have any power over you. Alright, let’s get all this stuff inside.”
As they moved everything inside, Avalyn contemplated the idea that the fates of today might not have power over her. Were her people truly so far removed from any part of this current world that the magic of today and its gods wasn’t something that would sway her? What would that mean for her to navigate the galaxy as it was known now? Were the powers that rule today even aware of her existence yet? How would they react to the return of the ancients, because it wasn’t just Avalyn, it was Eternity too? Would it only ever just be the two of them? If she had woken up one god, could she wake up more? If she ever saw Eternity again, maybe she could ask. She had a lot of questions to ask the goddess.
“You’re wearing clothes now?” Hugh’s voice echoed from across the hangar.
Turning Avalyn put her hands on her hips. “Why wouldn’t I wear clothes?” Hugh raised an eyebrow and just looked at her. “Just because I don’t have genitals doesn’t mean I want people seeing me in nothing but my chrome.”
“Alright, let’s not have you digging into each other right away,” Gramps said, stepping out from behind the pile of boxes. “Is this everything you need, Hugh?”
“Some stuff won’t be here for a few days, but this is most of what we need.” He sighed. “Is any part of the ship even ready for me to get to work? I saw how draked up all the wiring was.”
“A few of the smaller systems. The time and location systems are all ready, so we could start with those.” Those were some of the simplest systems to fix as they didn’t rely on multiple instances of spellwork to function. They were also the only ones that didn’t work right when she plugged her heart in and that frustrated her more than she would like to admit.
~~~
“Will you stop breathing down my neck?” Hugh lightly growled out as he concentrated on the spellwork before him. Wafts of blue magic swirled around a central glowing metal cube. Hugh’s hands moved back and forth, pushing and pulling the magic floating before him. The deeper he pushed it into the cube, the brighter it glowed, but sometimes he would pull nearly all of it out to scribe new symbols onto it. Other times he would pour strange concoctions of liquid onto it, which would readily soak up into it.
“I don’t breathe,” Avalyn replied as she peered over the wolf’s shoulder. That just made him growl a little louder. “Look, this is the first real spellcraft I’ve seen, and the goal is to literately add it to my body. Can you blame me for being interested?” He sighed, and then grumbled something to himself.
It took another forty-five minutes of work before Hugh finished. Avalyn stepped out for a little while to help Gramps with more debris removal, but she and Gramps made it back in time to watch Hugh finish. For as long as it took, there was no flashy end to the spellcraft. Just a few simple words chanted with the magic fully being pushed into the square, leaving it with a gentle blue glow.
“That’s it?” Avalyn asked.
“What did you expect, a big flashy show?”
“Honestly, yes, I did. Well, not everything can be a big visual display like the movies.” Moving closer, she got a better look at the cube. Upon closer inspection, she could see small, little indented circles placed on the faces, and she knew that’s where the cube would connect to the ship. “I want to touch it.”
“You are not touching my work,” Hugh growled.
“It will literally be touching me when we plug it in. What harm could I do to it by touching it now?”
“More than you would thi—”
“None,” Gramps said, cutting Hugh off. “Gods, Hugh, it is going to be a part of her body, and both of us know touching it won’t do anything.”
Hugh gave a loud growl before saying, “Fine.” With a huff, he stood up from the table and waved her on.
On the one hand, Avalyn desperately wanted to touch it, but on the other, she didn’t want to work up Hugh. As much as they pissed each other off, she needed his help, and she didn’t want to worsen relations. Now feeling a little nervous, she glanced over at the cube, and regent instincts suddenly kicked in. Without even realizing it, she walked up to the cube and reached out to it. The second she touched it, she felt her commandeering take over.
This was so different from anything she had commandeered before. The tech on Stargazer had felt cold, the womb had felt warm, but this was different. The best way she could describe it was it felt like how menthol tasted. It was so strange and fluid-feeling. Though the object was solid, she could feel the magic ebb and flow within it. Feel the connection this magic had to some place she had never seen before. There was something else that bugged her about the feeling of the magic. It didn’t feel wrong, but it didn’t feel like what her nature told her she should be feeling. As her commandeering spread, she felt her control take over the magic, but everything inside her just told her this wasn’t the magic she was meant to control. Not that it was wrong or that she shouldn’t do it. It just wasn’t ancients’ magic, what she had been built for.
“Avalyn!”
She jumped as her unblinking stare finally pulled away from the cube. Turning to the two men, she found both of them standing farther back than she had remembered them being. Hugh looked like he was about to run with his arms up to protect him, while Gramps looked more ready to run up and pounce on her. The worrying thing was both of them looked scared. “What?”
“What the drak did you just do?”
“What do you mean? I didn’t do any—” she turned back to look at the cube and found the glow was no longer blue but a yellow amber and far brighter than it had been before, “—thing…”
“Didn’t do anything my ass!” Hugh screamed with a voice still filled with fear. “You touched the cube and then all of a sudden it started shaking and glowing like it was about to explode!”
“Avalyn, you just kept staring at it, and I kept trying to call you, but you didn’t respond.”
Turning back to them, she felt a little scared herself. “I don’t… I don’t remember any of that. I just touched the cube and started commandeering it, and then suddenly you were screaming my name.”
“What the drak do you mean, commandeer it?!” Hugh asked.
“Kid, just step away from the spellwork.” There was so much worry in Gramps’s voice.
“But it’s safe.” To show that it was she looked back and poked it again. Nothing happened, but she could hear both of them jump a little. There was nothing unsafe about the spellwork though; every part of her being told her that. It was part of her; she would know if it was unsafe.
“What did you do to it, Kid?” Gramps sounded more at ease, but still clearly on edge. Nervously, he walked over to her.
“I don’t know. I just did my normal commandeering thing, and now it’s amber and brighter.”
“What is commandeering?” Hugh asked, not stepping any closer.
“It’s a Regent thing. It’s how I take control of stuff. I basically assimilate stuff into becoming part of me. I don’t really know how it works, but it’s a very natural part of what I am. It’s how I was designed to work, so that I really could be a regent and take care of everything. I hadn’t ever done it to magic before though.” She turned back to them. “I will openly admit that the magic feels off. Not wrong, but maybe just different from the ancients’ magic I should be working with.”
“None of what you said is comforting in any way.”
“I completely understand,” Avalyn admitted. “But it’s what I am, and I can’t change that.”
“What did you actually do to the spellwork though?” Hugh asked, finally braving a step forward. “It shouldn’t be that color.”
She shrugged. “Just made it a part of myself. Is magic not like color specific to a person?”
“What?” Both of the men asked, confused.
“I don’t know. Olina had green eyes and green magic, and I just assumed all her magic would be green.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s green because she actively makes it green, Kiddo,” Gramps said. “Elves are like that.”
“Well, I don’t know anything.”
“I hate to admit it, but some magic actually does have a color that associates to a person,” Hugh said, still taking slow steps towards them. “But that kind of magic is deeply personal and powerful.”
“I’ve never seen any of that,” Gramps admitted.
“Because that giff is hard to achieve. It basically has to be magic truly original to the person.” Oddly Hugh almost sounded a little impressed mixed in with the scared. Now he was finally close enough to actually take a good look at the astrolabe.
“So my magic is just amber colored then? Like my eyes?” That felt cheesy that her magic would be the same color as her robotic eyes. Granted, she did just believe Olina’s magic was green because her eyes were green.
Leaning in hesitantly, Hugh said, “Maybe. But you shouldn’t just be able to take over other magic like that, let alone then change it to be that personal to you.”
Joining Hugh in inspecting Gramps said, “She did just literally make it a physical part of her body.”
“Still, the power required to do something like that is beyond anything a normal person could do. Gods, arch-fiends and fay, and celestials maybe, but normal people, no…”
“Well, we can add Regents of the Ancients to that list.”
“Regents being that powerful is a terrifying thought, but I wouldn’t put it past the Ancients.”
“Drak, is the brightness linked to power? I’ve never seen an astrolabe glow that brightly.”
“I don’t understand how you could power it more than it is. It’s simple magic that doesn’t need to be improved upon. It’s the same damn spellwork we use today. What would giving it more power even let you do?”
Now Avalyn felt like she had been forgotten in the conversation as both the men stared at her astrolabe. Was it really that big of a deal? Maybe it was, but then again, both of these men were all about old ships and spellwork. Before she could even ask herself if this was going to happen to all the spellwork she commandeered, she knew it would happen.
“Is it going to be a problem with the judges?”
“What?” Gramps asked, poking the astrolabe.
“When I commandeer other spellwork, this is going to happen again. By the end of it all spellwork is going to be amber and visibly more powerful than normal. Is that going to be a problem when it comes to the shows?” Both of the men turned to her with wide eyes. “What?”
“You can do this to all the spellwork?”
“Well, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be able to?”
“Even the boring drive?”
“I’ve never done it before, but I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to commandeer everything in my body? I don’t know why, but it feels wrong not to commandeer the spellwork in me. Why do both of you look worried?”
Gramps turned to Hugh. “What would personalizing the magic of the drive do?”
“I’m not an expert by any means, but from what I’m aware of, personalized magic tends to be extremely stable.”
“So the reaction with the dirtian would be more stable?”
“Well, her magic might change the workings in the magic of the drive enough that—”
“Commandeering doesn’t change how the spellwork works.” Unsure why, she felt a little insulted that the thought of her commandeering would hinder what she had commandeered. “I haven’t really changed the astrolabe at all, except to make it part of me, which is inherently personal and by my very nature extremely powerful.” Looking at the astrolabe, she said, “I can tell you exactly how that works now that it’s me, and I guarantee you I in no way hinder anything by commandeering. If anything, I make it more efficient, but that might just be because the magic of this society isn’t as advanced as ancients’.” There was an awkward silence. “Alright, I will admit regent instincts took over after getting a little insulted that commandeering would hinder something. What I said stands, though.”
More awkward silence permeated the room before Gramps said. “So it would be more stable?”
“Yes, but the reaction would still be hindered by the output of the old catalyst. They were powerful, but we’ve come a long way since then.”
“But Avalyn isn’t hindered by the output of the catalyst. She inherently powers everything to, as far as we can tell, max capacity.”
Hugh’s eyes went wide. Slowly, he turned back to her. “How much power do you put out?”
“Don’t have the foggiest.” Both of the men looked confused. “Fuck me, how many sayings aren’t people going to understand? I have no idea. All I know is every system down to the wire is at max capacity, and I don’t have any understanding of how I don’t overload things.”
The two older men turned back to each other and in unison said, “Scevi.”
“Okay, I need you two to start talking to me, please. I really want to understand what’s happening.”
“We need to know how much power you can output, and Scevi is a friend that would be able to help,” Gramps said.
“Alright, that isn’t unreasonable to want to know, but I still feel like I’m not getting a clear picture of why you want to find that out.”
“For a boring drive to work, you need to cause a reaction with the dritian fuel that allows for boring to work. To do that, you need two things: high electrical power input and the right spellwork. The spellwork is very tricky and typically very unstable.”
“Just because it’s unstable doesn’t mean it’s unsafe,” Gramps added. “It just means there’s a lot of fluctuation, which, though easily manageable to ensure safe travel, means that the process of causing a reaction in the fuel isn’t nearly as efficient as it can be. Of course, people are constantly working to make it more stable, but the magic is just by its nature pretty unstable.”
“So if I commandeer the spellwork, it will make it more stable, and that combined with how much of an energy output I can produce will mean?”
“You could travel very fast.”
“How fast?” Both of the men shrugged. “Okay, well, that’s interesting. Still doesn’t answer my original question.”
“Which was?”
Avalyn sighed, but could she really blame the two for being more focused on just how she could change space travel? “Is me commandeering the spellwork going to hinder scores with judges at the shows?”
“Uh…” Gramps turned to Hugh. “Think we could say Elven magic was used to thematically color the spellwork and get away with it?
Hugh sighed. “Are you going to commandeer all the spellwork?”
She hesitated. “I would prefer it as it feels wrong not to.”
“Giff. I wouldn’t put it past someone to figure out ways to thematically color spellwork, so I’ll see if I can find any precedent for it, but I can’t make promises.”