4.22: Modelling Accuracy

Okay. Calm down. I’d dealt with scars that didn’t make sense before. I could do this.

I’d start with what I knew. I grabbed some paper and a pen and pulled my bedcurtains closed; I didn’t want to be distracted right now.

Fact 1: at some point, somebody had cut this rune pattern into my chest, with perfect precision and perfect healing.

Fact 2: I didn’t remember any of it.

Fact 3: the rune pattern was a little different from Max’s diagram in ways that suggested some distortion due to skin growth, but not very much.

All three of those things couldn’t be true at the same time.

Okay. So. Possibilities.

Possibility one: my parents had done this to me as a baby, and were hiding it, and the pattern was magically not distorted by growth. The differences between the one on my chest and Max’s diagram were due to other things; Malas’ copying mistakes, Max’s diagram being imperfect, stuff like that.

I looked at Malas’ sketch again, then googled how wide a baby’s chest was. The pattern was wider than a baby’s chest, so the pattern had either grown with me, or been cut into me when I was much bigger. Okay, so maybe it grew over time, but kept its shape? No… now that I’d identified it, the distortion caused by my breasts was too consistent to be something else.

Hmm.

Okay. Possibility two. Maybe Fact 2 rather than Fact 3 was the sticking point. This had been done to me when I was older, and I didn’t remember it, for some reason. Well, I’d just thought through that, and it made no sense whatsoever. The coverup was both completely pointless and impractical. The time it would take to heal –

Hang on, no! I was an idiot; it wouldn’t take much time at all! We had potions specifically for quickly healing the skin – one of them had been the first potion I’d gotten comfortable making! Given how neat and consistent the cuts were, a decent potion could probably heal them in an hour or so. You could get the pattern done in a few days, if you worked consistently and did a few cuts at a time on different parts of the chest.

A few days was hideable. Not many memories to erase. My parents could’ve gotten it done over a long weekend and I’d be the only person who had to be made to forget.

Hmm. No. They wouldn’t do that. Even if we had someone cut the pattern, why erase my memory? They wouldn’t have approved that; they would’ve seen it as cruel and dangerous. And completely unnecessary. Sure, being cut up probably wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was a pretty minor surgery, all things considered. I’d been as desperate to bind the curse as them as a young teen, I would’ve been happy to agree to such a thing; heck, looking at how I’d been the one pushing to go to Refujeyo, I probably would’ve been the one to convince them to –

Hmm.

Now there was an idea.

What if my parents hadn’t omitted that little rite from their list of cursebreaking techniques? What if Dad hadn’t been lying about not knowing what I was talking about, when I talked about the cuts?

What if they didn’t know it had been done? What if I, a desperate and reckless thirteen-ish year old, had sought this cursebinder out myself?

That… made a disturbing amount of sense. It sounded like something a younger me might have decided to do. (Something that, if I were being completely honest with myself, I might still decide to do today, if I had to.) Maybe I’d heard of some accomplished cursebinder with an effective but dangerous technique, and rather than try to convince my parents that the risk was worth it and be told ‘no’, I’d gone myself. We could take our time carving the design; all I’d have to do was not mention it to my parents or Chelsea and Melissa. I paid for the cursebinder’s services (somehow), we worked for however long it took, I kept it to myself, we went our separate ways. And I.. forgot. Somehow.

Why didn’t I remember, though?

Was that part of the cursebinder’s terms of service? They didn’t want to be remembered? Would I have agreed to a memory wipe as part of the deal? Maybe, if I were desperate enough. If I had enough reason to believe that this binding would actually work.

But that seemed… weird. Why would a cursebinder want to be forgotten? Wouldn’t they kind of need to be known to get more customers? Was it something about the method itself; if I remembered something about how it was done, it might fail, somehow? That didn’t seem logical.

Also, could memory potions work like that? Memory was really complicated, right? Sure, somebody had taken memories from Max and Kylie and me, but we were just missing a chunk of time, it seemed. Could you tease out something as specific as ‘stuff related to these cuts on someone’s chest’? That seemed unlikely, if only because if potions could precisely edit memories, people would be abusing them all the time. Maybe they were. That was a disturbing thought.

Ugh, why wasn’t this kind of information about memory potions readily available? Okay, so they were dangerous, fine; don’t tell us how to make them then. But why couldn’t I go to the library and look up their effects? Why was that considered dangerous information?

Alright. So. Two decent theories, so far. The baby thing, and me seeking out this cursebinder behind my parents’ backs and forgetting. I really hoped that the second theory turned out to be false. I had absolutely no idea how to track down this cursebinder if it was true.

Bright side, it would mean that my parents weren’t lying to me about the whole thing. That would be nice.

I didn’t have enough information to draw any solid conclusions. Yet. I’d have to think on the issue some more. I put my notes aside and came into the main part of the room. Max must have been waiting for me to be free to talk, because he spoke as soon as my curtains were pushed aside. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Fine. What’s up?”

“The workshops you use for potionmaking. Do they have any equipment for measuring luminosity?”

“Uh. Maybe? I haven’t had to use anything like that, but it’s important for some advanced potions, so I’m sure it’s available. They definitely have devices to measure particulate matter.”

“How do they measure that?”

“Um, with a tube with a black X on the bottom. You put the liquid in until you can’t see the X any more, then measure the height of the liquid.”

A smile ghosted his lips as he turned back to his increasingly complicated wooden model. “How very advanced.”

“Hey, it works. What are you building?”

He shrugged. “Something to catch fire. Don’t worry about it.”

“If you didn’t want me to worry, you shouldn’t have described it like that! What do you mean, something to catch fire?”

“Exactly what I said. I mean, I hope it catches fire.”

“You’re being obtuse on purpose.”

He tossed one of the long wooden sticks he was building with at me through his force field. I inspected it carefully. It just looked like a long matchstick, except… oh, there were very thin metallic lines painted on them. Silver, maybe? And, at each end, tiny runes, the old kind that Max had been experimenting with.

“You’re making some kind of three dimensional runic circle?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m trying to. Absolutely no idea whether it would work. I want experiment more with discharging magic and I don’t want to put another crack in the floor.”

“Or break your arm bones into tiny splinters?”

“That won’t happen again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am sure that that specific thing won’t happen again.”

Suspicious wording. “At some point, you became the reckless one and I became the cautious one, and I don’t know when that happened and I definitely don’t like it.”

“You’re still reckless.”

“So the most cautious one among us is Kylie? We’re doomed. Why do you need to measure light?”

“I want to check the specific concentration of magic in empowered water, and that means measuring very low amounts of luminosity at very specific frequencies.”

“Huh? Why? Empowered water is standardised. Just buy it from the shop, it’s all standardised for you. We know how much magic is in it.”

“Right, but how much magic is in the lake and streams of empowered water in the school?”

“Um. I don’t know. More, presumably? So they can water it down to the standard? Is it important?”

“Maybe. If it’s acting as a buffer between the spells in bodies up here and the spells in the labyrinth below, it might be important to know how it works. Unless you plan to somehow find a way to just blow up a cave network full of innocent people, we need a way to non-destructively free the spells, and for that, we need an accurate model of the system. I want to know how much magic is in there, and I want to know how much magic bleeds in from us moving about the runes up here.”

“How would you even calculate something like that?”

“I have a few ideas.” He reached over his bed to snatch the wooden stick from my hand and carefully ad it to his model.

“Right.” I hoped he wasn’t going to do anything super dangerous. Whenever I messed around with that empowered lake, I nearly got eaten by a lake monster.

Actually…

“Hey,” I said, “that lake monster is kind of weird, isn’t it?”

“The what?”

“The thing in the empowered lake that tries to drown people. I was just thinking. It’s kind of weird.”

Max looked up again to give me an exasperated look. “It nearly killed you on your first day, and you’re only now thinking it’s kind of weird? Yes, Kayden, a murderous entity living in an underground reservoir of potion water is very weird.”

“Right, so… what’s… up with that?”

He shrugged. “I’m not a biologist. Alania might know.”

“You’re not curious? You’re a scientist!”

“Not a biologist, like I said. It’s obviously some kind of extremophile, a plant that’s been evolving for a long time in empowered water. Which lends a lot of credence to the idea that we’re built on some kind of natural wellspring of empowered water. Something like that doesn’t evolve in the short span of time that Refujeyo has been around.”

“A plant? It grabbed me!”

“So does a Venus flytrap. It might be an animal or something I guess, I mean, coral is an animal, but the way you described it made me think of seaweed with reflexes. It should be pretty easy to find information on it if you’re interested, though; somebody in the school must be actively looking after it.” He paused in his work. “Wait, do you think it might eat magic, or… affect the magic, somehow? Ugh, if it does then I do have to learn about it. This empowered water system is complicated enough as it is.”

“Why does someone have to be looking after it?”

“It must be getting fed, right? It clearly has a sophisticated method of trapping and killing prey since it can control the water level in the cavern, which means that access to meat must be vitally important to its survival. Things don’t evolve complex behaviours for no reason. But it’s not like students are constantly drowning in there, and apart from familiars there’s not exactly a whole lot of animals running around in these tunnels. So someone’s feeding it. I’m sure that person can answer all of your weird biology questions.”

“Hmm. If someone’s feeding it, then it must be important to the system, right? So it probably is affecting the magic you want to model.” I grinned. “I bet you’re going to have to learn so much biology.”

“Argh, why can’t anything ever be simple!”

“I think complexity is something that the universe puts on to stop you, specifically, from getting bored. What would you do with your time if you weren’t spending it mapping this magical Rube Goldberg machine of a school? Argue about spell classification systems, probably. How boring.”

Max hesitated. He gritted his teeth, resisting the bait.

He failed.

“Okay, but you have to admit that the Liona spell classification system is bullshit, right? I mean, the error rate alone. And what’s the point of a system that puts the majority of spells into a single category? Change spells is a stupid category; it’s too big, break it up! Make it more specific! You know, I bet if I grabbed a dozen randomly selected ‘prophets’ under the Liona system and took them to Duniyasar, barely even half of them would actually – ”

I let him talk. It was nice to know that, whatever other chaos might be taking place, some things just never changed.