“Rule one of magic - preservation. Rule one of life, really. Keep your form together. Rule two’s reproduction, but that’s for later, pretty girl.” She lightly turns my face to face hers, and I see the thousands of gears turning, softly glowing. Two eyes are set into the flat mask covering most of the face, like blue gems set into grey nuts.
I don’t flinch. “Right. How?”
“All magic is based on runes. Or on mandalas. Purposeful marks, whatever. I use norse runes as… like, computer shortcuts for the half-mandalas, so I call them runes to you, so you won’t copy my shitty formalistic organisation. That’s the second element of being a good teacher I think, setting you up to be able to learn from other people with different styles. Off-track. Sorry. They’re called half-mandalas, cus all spells need a specification half and an actualisation half. They’re usually not the same size, saying ‘half’ is just pedantic or something whatever the word is cus some early idiot thought they were equal. Expect the actualisation rune half thingy to be bigger with spell or mandala complexity. So. Runes. Runes. Mmm. They’re formed of glyphs, which are formed from three different dialects, Dionysian, Hermetical, and Apollonian, and the structure’s like Hangul morpho-syllabic block formulations rather than latin left-right word ones, though you’re not really familiar with that. You’ll learn them later. Get all that? Glyphs make runes, and there’s two types of runes, specification and actualisation, and you need a specification and actualisation rune for a single spell. We’ll trace in the sand. You’ll need to memorise it.”
“Couldn’t you give me, like, a photo? Drawing in the sand seems weird.”
“One, I can’t be bothered. Two, runes can’t be kept on normal storage, and the way I store them, you’d need a few years of education to decode. Three, it’s not like you’re old enough to have knee problems, so you’ve nothing to complain on, so now hush and let me draw.”
“Alright.”
We stop walking, and I stay quiet, and watch, as the mechanical lady sketches out some great logo on the sand. Most people wouldn’t be able to memorise these dozens of strokes. It is still a feat for me. Though practice makes easy utilisation of the three or so petabytes of data storage a human brain has. Those meditation classes were worth it. The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Done.” She gets up and stretches. I simply stare. “Well? What’re you waiting for? Copy on.”
I stoop down into the dirt a ways to the right and get to work.
“Fast learner. Fucker. Fuck. Forgot the spec half. Eh. That’s for later. This is just for the gist. Memorisation. Won’t power it, anyhow, so it won’t do anything. This rune hardens anything, simply put. Spec rune specifies what, and where, and you’ll need to dynamise it either procedurally or fluidly, depending if the thing being hardened is following a predicted path, or not. That’s because it’s hardening anything in a region rather than the object particularly. Usually, for dynamised objects, we create an imaginary object that’s a bit larger than the actual object, especially at high speeds, for latency. Cus you need to power the rune to make it work, and that isn’t instant, though the rune certainly is.”
“Interesting magic. Seems like your people’ve got it all figured out.”
“Yeah. That’s because we built it, built physics from the ground-up, and gave ourselves a backdoor and called it magic.”
She pauses.
“I have many questions,” I say, half-ask, awkwardly during the pause.
“Course you do. Search them up in your spare time. Hallucinogens, internet stuff. I know you know what the internet is. We haven’t google but it should be intuitive. Back to the lesson. When you draw the rune, when you’re finished, there’s a wire in your tube, the thing in the back of your head. Reach for it and it’ll jump into your hand. At higher levels, it’ll work with your thoughts. You plug it into the open end of the rune to power it. You tie together runes with a simple canal, and that becomes a sentence. You’ll have a… starter sequencer device that can store a few runes in advance and deploy them either in sequence or on shortcut command, it’s linked to your Hallucinogens. I’ve personally used my clockwork brain to create a more advanced version of this, though most mages rely on innate channels for magic, or carving, essentially, runes into their brains. More efficient for energy, and doesn’t use mana. That’s a lesson for later. You’re pretty new, probably Fugued a bit, so you won’t have an innate channel right away. Next, setting shit on fire. The kids love this one.” She rubs her hands, smiling devilishly.