A deal worth making

I am tired, but I cannot find rest. That is probably good. I don’t want to mess up my sleep pattern too much. I guess some people would now advice me to seek inner peace by self reflection, possibly aided by artistic expression. I am not going to do interpretative dance or creative pottery. For some reason I harbour a deep aversion against that.

Yes, some Greek wise man told us that introspection is of supreme importance, so that we know ourselves, while another great philosopher told us that small men talk about people, average men about facts and great men about ideas. I may be a wizard, but I am still people. Now what is it? That is not profound; it is just contradictory. I have magic to explore, that is special. I am pretty sure that I count as special in this world, but that is so precisely because I wield sorceries. I better go explore them.

If I understand my memories correctly, I have seven basic sorceries. Can I combine them? My growing inability to tell my sorceries apart with my magical sense very much suggests so. Knowing my combinatorics that would give me twenty one dual sorceries. Systematically investigating that in depth could take years. Eventually I should do so. Right now that is a bad idea. The world is ending. How would you even combine sorceries like fire and life? I will not spend weeks just to find out how to conjure a self-frying egg. Now if I could summon a tame dragon, well that would change the situation. But as far as I know I cannot conjure a live animal.

I have noticed that the sorceries I picked are more concrete. Air is a substance; perception is a process. The exception is the sorcery of spellcraft. Hence I pick that and the fundamentals of spells to investigate today. I am currently using it as far as I can tell. My wards are based on it. I also used it to undo Marental’s spells. That ability saved our lives. I should keep developing it. Yet it is also fairly specialized. If your enemies come at you swinging axes with an intent to seperate your head from the rest of your body breaking spells won’t help you. Breaking enemies would do the job. I have no problem in the lethality department though. If you come close enough to me I have an impressive number of ways of hurting you: electrocution, immolation, poison, sabotaging your metabolism, outright telling your body to die or making you vanish. I suppose I could learn to make images so hideous that my enemies kill themselves rather than look at them, but that would be a waste of time.

I need range, rate of fire and sustained fire.

I create a small tiny fireball over the palm of my hand. By the feel of it I can keep this thing going for days. A regular sized fireball is not as pleasant, but I could still keep it running for many minutes. I am supplying it with mana, though. Let’s cut that supply. Yes, it goes out within a few seconds. But it does go on for a time. Can I simply pump in more energy? My first attempts make hotter or larger fireballs. Having a ball of plasma shining brightly blue a few decimeters over my palm overstrains my new wards. This hurts. Eventually I find a way. But it doesn’t do much good. The relationship between mana supplied and the life time of a fireball is highly non linear. This is frustrating. I have hit a dead end.

Well, if I cannot get more time, than I have to make more out of the time I get. I need to make the fireballs faster. This needs experimentation. At least I have learned how to make smaller and cooler fireballs for safe experimentation. I can make the fireballs faster, but I run into a similar issue. The mana requirements rise in a superlinear fashion. And even worse, there is a hard upper limit.

My time sense informs me that it is not yet dinner time, though I am hungry, having skipped lunch.

I start pacing around. Some people think better sitting still. I am not among them.

What is fire? A mixture of hot gases and plasma with a peculiar chemistry. Free radicals and stuff.

I can shroud my hand in a spell that heats up stuff around it and I can wreath it in flame. The results looks different visually as well as to my mana sight. Can I form a ball out of the heating spell? Yes I can. Can I throw it? No. It winks out immediately. I cut its power. It runs out of mana at once. In fact I am not sure it survives on its own at all. I redo the effort to put more energy into it without more effects. That turns out to be easier. Is that because I know what I am doing? Impossible to tell.

Can I throw this one? No. The result is bizarre. It just stops within a few decimeters, as I cut the connection to my hand, just as I do when I throw a fireball. My spells have almost no inertia but they are affected by friction. But then why can I throw a fireball? Is it using the inertia of something else? Or can I actually conjure inertia? Does that even make sense? There is time for a few more experiments before dinner time. Can I modify my heat spell to follow the air? Yes, but it rips itself apart. Hot air rises in a turbulent way. It is time to revisit my decision. I can control air. Yep, that works and it makes a throwable heat ball, which is slowed down rapidly by the ambient air. Ok, that makes sense. Air just does not have a lot of mass to provide inertia.

That just means that I am impractical. If I can control air, why do I need inertia? I can just tell the air what to do. That also works, but as it reaches a certain distance it unravels. I need to check this out. Yes, it is the same distance my lightning bolts can cover. I am sure this has profound implications. Now if I just understood them. Dinner time. I head back inside.