4.41: Battery Power

I spent the remaining time before the holidays training for the upcoming treasure hunt, doing the bare minimum of work in my classes, and researching contract spells. Specifically, researching ways to remove a geas. I probably could’ve saved a lot of time by just asking Max about them – not only was he well-versed in magical theory of pretty much any kind, but he had a contract spell, there was absolutely no way he hadn’t researched the entire topic to death – but I didn’t want to involve him. I didn’t want to give the impression that my geas was bothering me. It might encourage him to do something heroic and stupid.

So I was in the library. Researching. Again.

It wasn’t nearly as hard as last time. There was plenty of information around about geases. Apparently a lot of people (presumably people placed under them) were interested in strategies to break them. Unfortunately, all the quick and dirty methods involved specific loopholes in specific spells, and I had only the vaguest idea of how the Voice’s spell worked. So, not useful.

There were two methods that tended to work in general against most geases. The first was, of course, memory erasure. I dismissed that out of hand. It’d probably work – the geas was partly dependent on my conception of it, so if I didn’t know I’d been compelled, I presumably wouldn’t be – but it was impractical, dangerous, and created more problems than it would solve. I had no idea how to obtain a memory erasing potion, for one thing, and I certainly wasn’t going to try to find the ingredients to illegally make a dangerous, advanced potion by myself and then drink it without a proffessional testing it. Even if I got the potion perfect, I’d probably mess up actually administering it. They were controlled for a good reason. And even if it worked perfectly, I’d just have more missing memories. I’d already had my memory erased once, almost certainly against my will; missing more at this point would just lead me to draw wild, incorrect, and very distracting conclusions.

It was too late, anyway. Being under a geas tied into too many other things I’d done, too many conversations I’d had. It was entangled in too many tangential memories, and even if I somehow managed to clean it out, too many other people knew about it. It wans’t practical, or safe.

Anyway, the idea of losing more memories left a bad taste in my mouth.

The other method to break a geas was to kill the mage who had cast it. Apparently most long-duration contract spells either eventually ran out of power on their own (everything about my sentence implied that it was permanent, so this probably wouldn’t happen with mine), or eventually faded to nothing if the casting mage lost their spell. Obviously, even if I knew how to find the Voice, I wasn’t going to kill someone just so I could talk about curses. Maybe that’s why he’d had a cut throat when we’d met? Someone had tried to escape their geas by killing him? Poor guy.

Anyway. Apparently I was stuck with the damn thing. Okay.

I still hadn’t told Chelsea and Melissa about it. I figured that I’d either need to talk about curses with them or I wouldn’t, and if I did, I could explain it then. Or have Max explain, if he was around; that’d be safer. If the nature of curses didn’t come up, well, no need to distress them. Same for moving to Fionnrath; no need to bring it up unless it became relevant. And hopefully it wouldn’t become relevant, if we managed to save the world by then.

I didn’t shave for a couple of days before the holidays, just to make a point to my mum. She didn’t say anything about it as she pulled my into a firm hug. “You need another haircut,” she said.

“You say that every time you see me.”

“It’s always true.”

“Maybe I’m growing it out. Going for a rockstar look.”

“So you’re finally going to learn a musical instrument then?”

“Heck no.”

I met up with Chelsea and Melissa in Melissa’s room, like old times. Chelsea was late, also like old times, and I found myself hanging out awkwardly while Melissa went to meet her at the door. The room had changed a fair bit over the last couple of years. More books added to the bookshelves, some old books removed. Old band posters taken down, but the background image on her computer was still some singer I didn’t recognise. There were odds and ends acattered around that I didn’t recognise, probably school projects or something.

One particular thing caught my eye. It looked familiar, even though I’d never seen it before. It was a… spinning top, maybe? And clearly home made. Three thick transparent discs of perspex had been glued together to make a kind of short cylinder. On each, something had been scribbled in marker; blue on the middle disc, green on one outer one and red on the other. At first glance I thought it was magical runes, but it wasn’t; it was the kind of random scribbling people did to kind of indicate a general mess. The middle of each disc was a cross, but the rest was just squiggles. The crosses in the middle of each disc weren’t easy to see because they were obscured by two wooden cones, one in the middle of each flat face. On one cone, blue stars had been drawn in blue pen. On the other cone, red hearts.

Yeah, it might be a spinning top. Or a wheel? I pressed fingers to the tips of the cones and rolled the ‘wheel’ along her desk. The cones acted as an axle, as expected, but why not just drill a hole throught the ‘wheel’ and put a normal axle in properly? Well, if it was a school project, maybe there was a specific way it had to be made.

The red hearts on their wooden cone were all drawn facing the same direction, giving the object orientation. The heart cone was at the bottom, then the red circle, the blue circle, the green circle and finally, the star-covered cone.

Yeah, that seemed accurate. This was really, really familiar, somehow. Why did I know this?

Melissa returned with Chelsea in tow.

“Heya, Kayden,” Chelsea said. “Fantastic to see that you’re alive.”

“I texted you yesterday.”

“Could’ve been some sinister person stealing your phone.”

“Melissa, what’s this?” I brandished the object.

“That’s a map of your school.”

Oh! I knew this structure because I’d seen Max’s diagrams. He hadn’t made models of it, but the structure was the same. Star cone for Duniyasar, green tunnels for students around an X for the Pit. Belos them, blue rivers of empowered water, around a blue X for the lake with the weird spellbinding monster in it, and below that, red tunnels for the Labyrinth of Dreams, surrounding a red X for the room under the lake, the room in the middle of the layrinth. A straight line of key places right through a Place of Power, surrounded by a support network of tunnels for each subterrainian layer.

“What’s the bottom cone?” I asked.

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“You’re working with Max on this.”

“Yes, of course. He thinks it’s like a battery – do you know how a battery works?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, so electricity is just moving electrons, right? Electrons moving through a wire. So, to make a battery, you take two different metals. Well, you use metal oxides to – never mind, let’s keep it simple. Metal A has a lot of electrons and doesn’t really care about them much. Metal B wants electrons, and wants them much more than metal A.” She tapped the two outside perspex discs; the green student one and the red labyrinth one. “Between them, you put a buffer, something that will allow protons through but otherwise keep the metals separate.” She tapped the middle disk, the blue empowered water one. “You’ve got something conductive connected to your anode and cathode, and if you put a conductive wire between them…” she used a thumb and forefinger to pick up the map by the cones, connecting them with her hand, “then electricity can flow through that wire, see?”

“I see,” I lied. “And that’s how the school works?”

Melissa snorted. “That’s how Max thinks the school works, because he doesn’t understand electricity at all. He’s one of the most airy-fairy people I’ve ever met.”

“Max?”

“Yeah. Very philosophical. Always on about energies, thinking that if it seems like something should behave in a certain way, then it will. The structure of a battery depends on the specific physical characteristics of electrons, you can’t just look at something that seems vaguely the same shape and decide that magic also behaves like electrons for no reason. The school is completely different. There’s no ‘wire’ that anything’s being channeled through, and while the spells are being stored, they’re not being stored for that purpose. In practice, the school is more like a power generator. But when I mentioned that to Max, he got all excited and went to research power generators and started trying to match specific parts of the school to parts of a normal power generator even though there’s no reason for them to match up. Dude might know his magic but he’s a terrible physicist.”

“… Huh. What’s the bottom cone in this model?”

“No idea. Max says there’s something in there that you guys need to prepare somehow. But we don’t have enough data to make predictions.”

I nodded. I wasn’t as worried about that as I used to be. There wasn’t anything I needed to do about it – Max needed to make the tools, obtain the ‘secrets known to no mage’, get our memories back (somehow??), and then he’d tell us what to do. Until then I just had to… wait, and help however I could, I supposed.

So we hung out. We did fun stuff. I tried to forget everything happening at Refujeyo for a bit, but that wasn’t easy, largely because being away from Kylie sucked. At first I thought I was just being paranoid, feeling the absence more because Max had warned me that I might, but when I got that strained, washed-out feeling after a mere four days of separation rather than a week I knew he’d been right. This was a problem. Under normal circumstances I’d say that an increased tolerance for carrying magic could only be a good thing, but as part of this connection to Kylie, it could become actively debilitating. What if it kept getting worse? What if it got to the point where we couldn’t spend more than a day or two apart before it became intolerable? I liked Kylie, and I wasn’t exactly sure what our futures would be like after we broke Refujeyo, but however things shook out I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the concept of being shackled to her permanently.

Oh man, what if we went to prison, and they separated us? Did my familiar rights to be with my mage still apply if we were in prison?

Well, maybe it wouldn’t be an issue. Maybe it wouldn’t get worse; maybe it would get better. I didn’t know how this stuff worked. Anyway, our current separation was pretty unpleasant, but not intolerable. Maybe it was something I could get used to, if I had to, like people who have mild to moderate chronic pain. There was no need to panic on so little data.

There was no guarantee that we’d survive long enough for it to matter.

I shook that grim thought off and returned to the arduous task of having fun with my friends. All that could wait.