Ar'Kendrithyst

Erick woke up, had lunch, and let Poi sleep in as he went to speak to the petitioners. Teressa was his backup today. The large woman stood behind Erick, towering over the proceedings, wearing large grey armor that only helped to make her look even more imposing than before.

The actual process of helping people went about as smoothly as it did with Poi. Erick got through 78 requests; a full 7 more than yesterday. He felt he had acclimated to the process, and he probably had. It helped that all the liars were rather obvious, and that Teressa was just a bit better at truth-detecting than Erick.

Her skill with her mana sense allowed her to see all the same facial tics and spikes in heart rate that Erick saw, though she was better at interpreting that data, if only a little bit. But mostly, unlike Poi, Teressa could give her opinion on what she was seeing. It wasn’t far into the meetings that Erick and Teressa found out that they could communicate with each other outside of [Telepathy], by subvocalizing the words they wished to say to each other. Once the two of them established that communication channel, Erick sometimes asked Teressa what she was seeing, to know if she saw the sweat, and the increased heart rate, and all the other tiny signs of a liar. She did, every time, and Erick appreciated the backup.

Erick was, of course, also conducting his own investigations while he listened to the petitioners, but having a second opinion on hand helped to ease his own conscience when he told the lying petitioners that they weren’t getting what they wanted. Thankfully, there were only three groups that necessitated that sort of decision, and none of them took Erick’s refusal too badly.

As the sun set, Erick and Teressa went back to the yurt. Teressa’s hermetically-sealed armor vanished into grey motes of light as she hopped up onto the deck of the vehicle. Inside, Jane and Nirzir were making gridlights and humming magic to themselves, respectively, and on opposite sides of the yurt.

Three dinners were on the table, under [Cold Ward]s.

Poi was still asleep in his bed, completely zonked out.

Erick looked at the sleeping man. “I wore him out. I should stop doing that.”

Nirzir stopped humming and opened her eyes, blinking a few times to reorient herself in the moment.

Jane didn’t look up from her gridwork, as she said, “He hasn’t even gotten up to go to the bathroom.”

A wide grin spread on Teressa’s face as she looked at Poi. With a quick step, she moved to his bed and lightly kicked the furniture, sending a heavy jolt through the eternal stonewood frame. “Wake up!”

Poi launched awake, briefly flopped around, shouting, “Oh gods!” And then he calmed, and groaned out, “Ah. Shit.” He glanced at Erick, then at the twilight beyond the window, then he turned his head up to stare at Teressa. “I can understand that none of them woke me up, but you should have woken me hours ago.”

“I was having fun playing ‘Mind Mage’.” Teressa shrugged. “I think I did okay.”

“Sorry, Poi.” Erick said, “I shouldn’t have run you ragged like that. And yes; Teressa was good. Very suitably threatening in her giant grey armor and she helped me confirm when other people were lying. We had no false positives either, so I think we did fine.”

Teressa said, “I can add some shoulder pad spikes with skulls on them to make it more scary, if you like.”

“Not having any eye holes in your armor is terrifying enough,” Erick said.

Poi sighed, decided that he was not needed for anything too important, and laid back down. He fished around for the covers that had fallen off of the bed, and then promptly threw them back over himself.

Teressa went to the dinner table, and Erick joined her with a smile. He removed the [Cold Ward]s, and cast some [Heat Ward]s across the stews. They’d take a little while to warm up—

Poi sighed, tossed the covers off of himself, reluctantly got up, then moved toward the bathroom in the back of the yurt.

Eventually, Poi joined Erick and Teressa for dinner.

That night, Nirzir tried her hand at telling a story with the accompaniment of illusions. Hers was the apocryphal tale of the founding of the Songli Highlands; a romance between a princess and a newly appointed general for the other side, and the many Polite Wars between three ancient grass traveler tribes. It was a good story, put together rather well, and Nirzir told it well, too. Nirzir had notes, and her illusions looked practiced. It was also clear that Nirzir’s tale was a small part of something much larger.

A silly little grin had been plastered on Jane’s face almost the whole time; she liked romances, too, but she didn’t like other people to know that she liked them. Whenever Erick glanced her way, she lost her grin.

When it was over, Erick said, “That was a wonderful story, Nirzir!”

“It was,” Jane agreed.

Nirzir blushed as she smiled. “Thank you.”

“How simplified was that from actual history?” Teressa asked.

“A lot.” Nirzir rapidly explained, “The historically accurate version is only available in books, and those take weeks to read. The plays are a bit better for time, but those come in nine hour and twelve hour versions. All the shorter versions are simple stories that don’t do history any justice.”

“Twelve hours!” Jane exclaimed. With a soft smile, she said, “I remember 12 hour movie marathons.”

Teressa sat a bit straighter, as she said, “I tried out a play group once. Acting in one of them. It was okay, but not for me. I absolutely did not have time for the 9 hour plays, though. That’s what killed it for me.”

“They are difficult to watch sometimes, too.” Nirzir said, “I used to have time for them, before Matriculation. I think the 12 hour version of the Warring Clans story is better. The 9 hour one is rushed, in my opinion, but some people prefer that one. This half-hour version cut out 90% of the characters and it focuses on—” Nirzir blushed a little, then she forced herself to professionalism, and said, “This version is the romance version. Other people prefer the other versions, but I’ve always liked this one the best.”

Jane said, “I like the romance version.”

Erick was surprised to hear Jane admit that.

Nirzir happily said, “We should take in a professional show, sometime! You know… Later? Whenever we’re done here.”

Jane smiled. “I’ll have to take you up on that.”

Erick said, “Thanks for the story, Nirzir. Now who’s on first watch?”

Poi and Jane spoke up.

The night wore on, with people sleeping, waking, and watching, all on schedule; normal stuff, really.

- - - -

In the morning Erick had a quick breakfast, and then he hopped off the side of his yurt and went to his workbenches. As he stood before his various electrical parts, and with a day delay on getting to it, Erick had a new project and new short-term goal. Erick was going to make an electric motor.

By noon, he might even have a prototype!

There were some problems to solve, first.

One of the most major ones was that [Battery] was lightning-in-a-bottle. The difference in electrical potential, the voltage, between the positive and negative terminal of whatever iron bar Erick chose to cast [Battery] on, would be way, way too high for [Battery] to be used in any conventional application.

In [Battery], Erick had actually made more of a [Power Plant], than a [9 Volt]. Erick wasn’t sure how high the voltage of [Battery] actually was, but he had an estimate based on half-remembered knowledge about the voltage of a real lightning bolt; it was anywhere between 200,000 volts, to a billion volts.

As for amps, lightning was anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 amps.

This meant that an average lightning bolt was about 500,000 volts, and 50,000 amps, which translated into 25,000,000,000 watts, since the formula for all of that interaction was VxA=W. This meant, over the course of an hour, and for 3000 base mana, that one [Battery] provided 25 million kilowatt hours of power.

The average house used about 11,000 kilowatt hours of power per year.

One [Battery] was enough to power the devices in 2250 American homes, for a full year.

To put it another way, the energy usage of the entire United States was about 4,000 billion killowatt hours. With a bit of math, Erick worked out that 960 casts of [Battery] was all it would take to solve the entire United State’s energy needs, by himself. With a bit more math, and with Erick’s own modifiers, he would expect to spend around 25,000 mana to cast that many [Battery]s.

Or maybe less, since Erick’s lightning was likely above average in power.

He regenerated that much mana in half an hour.

Huh.

Anyway.

At least Erick didn’t have to worry about the lightning inside [Battery] being of varying positive or negative types, like it was in nature. He was pretty sure the lightning inside that spell was negative, and it would be negative every time he cast the spell.

The problem of [Battery] could be (and would have to be) solved with transformers. Very large and very resilient transformers. Transformers that were likely far, far beyond Erick’s ability to create today, or even this year.

Which led to the next problem in using [Battery]: Erick had to invent power plant-level transformers.

Which led to a related problem of insulation. Insulation was needed so that stray voltage didn’t accidentally kill someone, or melt any metal parts. Erick needed massive, industrial-level insulation, but also smaller scale insulation, on the level of tiny wires and tiny electrical parts. He’d never be able to get a motor running, with all its precise little parts, if he only had lightning to throw at the problem.

Ah! And come to think of it, he needed paper magic, too, for paper was a great, primitive insulator, and there were Paper Mages all throughout Songli. Those people made their livings on their Paper Magic, producing many of the paper products that fed the bureaucracy of the Highlands, and many of its fine arts.

Erick also needed mineral oil. That’s what they used in transformers to both insulate them, and to control their temperatures. [Cool Ward]s would be useful there, too, but Erick wanted to invent a (mostly) non-magical electric motor.

He stood at his workbench, and paused.

He would probably not have a working electrical motor prototype by the end of the day.

Unless...

Maybe someone else had created a spell that was smaller than [Battery]?

Erick checked the Open Script, querying a bunch of different possible names—