Demesne

After literally days of being pressed between two tablets, Lori's notes were finally mostly flat, although little lines from where they'd been curled or folded traced back and forth on the sheets. She carefully separated the sheets from between the blank papers Rian had placed between them to keep the ink from transferring between pages. Clearly that hadn't been necessary, since if her notes hadn't rubbed off on each other when she'd been keeping them together in a sheaf, but she supposed it was good that Rian had treated her notes so carefully.

Now, if he'd just remembered to put it in her pack.

It took her a while to sort the notes in order. Lori vividly remembered the very first page of the notes, as well as the next page, but as she progressed through the pages, it became harder and harder to be sure the notes were where they were supposed to be. She didn't know what to make of the last pages at all, her strongest memory of them being how she'd stopped writing—she didn't even remember what she'd been writing—when she'd heard Rian declare that someone had pissed in the water.

She'd have to remember to clear out all the water, and have the walls of the basin scoured.

Adjusting the stool she was sitting on, Lori leaned back so she was resting on the stone wall behind her at a more comfortable angle and resumed her reading, the familiar sounds around her making a comfortable din to ignore as she continued going over her notes. The pages at the end had a lot of terrible handwriting. She could still read it—it was her handwriting, after all—but a few times she had to actually think about what was written to decipher what she had likely meant. Some of the flow diagrams were confusing, and if taken as they were would result in bindings that would have no useful function besides inefficiently setting things on fire—there were better ways to do it—but knowing that they were supposed to do something and reading her handwriting, she could mentally correct the diagrams, properly redrawing others—her hand had been shaky in some spots— and in some instances filling in missing parts that she actually forgot to write down.

That wasn't the result of her affected thinking, she had a tendency to sometimes not write down things even if she was actively thinking about them when she wrote. It was an embarrassing problem, but fortunately she was aware enough to correct it… most of the time. That meant she was well-accustomed to having to correct her flow diagrams and notes when she read them a second time.

Usually she managed to do it before she submitted her work for grading, but there'd been more than one instance she'd had to do it after.

Given all that, she might actually need to rewrite some of the later pages to fill in the blanks, but at least between the diagrams and the actual notes she would know what blanks needed filling in. Well, she could do that later. For the moment, she'd decided that it would be a better use of her time to concentrate on the notes that were the most complete, which meant starting from the first.

Crossing her legs, right ankle resting just above her left knee, a tablet and paper on her lap and a pen and ink bottle sitting on another stool next to her, Lori began reading the first page.

The lightning ball binding she'd made had been mostly based on the binding on the first page. The dragon had released what had seemed like hundreds of these lightning ball bindings, and she had taken note of them. Her arrangement of a central binding of lightningwisps, a buffer of airwisps, and a shell of both had been an extremely simplified, over-imbued and incomplete version of what was in her notes. The original had other components that she hadn't recalled or included because they had been too complicated, and she genuinely had no idea what they were for.

"Uh, your Bindership?"

According to both her notes and her memory, the binding had produced an intense amount of heat and light, strongly implying it was something destructive… ah, she probably shouldn't test the binding in her dungeon, then. Still, she couldn't help but form the binding as she had noted it, giving both the lightningwisps and airwisps in the 'shell' directionality and… huh, actually, wouldn't this compress the air within the shell? Lori checked her notes, and yes, she had noted that. Directly after that was a note that… ah, now she remembered why this was interesting. The binding had produced an intense amount of heat and lights, the firewisps more than filling the shell before quickly consuming all imbuement and vanishing, leaving only heat that had quickly dissipated…

"Your Bindership? Hello?"

It didn't seem to have been an explosion from the lightningwisps causing the air to explode. The heat and light had been steady for far longer than an explosion would have entailed…

"Your Bindership, are you mad at me too?"

She sighed and finally looked up from her notes. "I'm starting to be," she said, annoyed. "What's so urgent? You were the one who recommended that I peruse my notes."

"Yes, and I stand by that," Rian said. With him standing and her sitting, she had to look up at him, which… well, she didn't like it, but she also wasn’t going to stand up just because he was here. Lori was pretty sure it was supposed to be the other way around. "I have to ask, though… why are you perusing your notes here?"

"It's my Dungeon, I can be wherever I want," Lori pointed out sternly.

"Of course, I didn't mean to imply otherwise," Rian said smoothly. "And what a wonderful Dungeon it is, too. It's just… is there any specific reason you're doing it here in the carpenters' alcove? Because you're making people nervous and affecting their productivity."

"Because I wanted to read here, of course," Lori said, her face now set in an annoyed frown. The sounds of woodworking occurring—

"While I am, of course, in no way, shape or form demanding that you leave… don't you have your own room for this sort of thing? An actual room, with walls and a very nice place to sit and… well, not people bothering you? You know, people? Those whom you can't stand to be around?"

"No one was bothering me but you," she pointed out. Really, everyone had been so thoughtful, ignoring her completely and not bothering her.

"Yes, because it's my job to bother you on behalf of everyone." He sighed. "So, you're just going to read, right? Not actually going to try any bindings?"

"Again, it is my Dungeon, I merely tolerate everyone in it." She had half a mind to activate the lightning ball simply out of spite.

"It's just… you told me that in your notes were interesting ways to use lightningwisps, right? I'm just concerned about having lightning, which can cause sparks, being around all this sawdust. This very flammable sawdust."

…

Colors.

Lori sighed, as she carefully put her notes together, capped her pen, stoppered her ink bottle, and anchored her binding to her bone tablet—not a good idea to just disperse imbued lightingwisps, they might spark—and got to her feet, glaring at Rian. Grabbing her stool, she stomped off to find somewhere else to sit. She'd been enjoying herself, just as Rian had suggested, reading while she listened to the sounds of carpentry and woodworking while—and this was very important—not contributing or doing any of the work at all. She had always felt that the familiar workshop sounds were relaxing, as long as she wasn't actually working. It was either here or the smithy, and metal sounds would have been far too loud.

She'd have to find somewhere else. Maybe she could go to the sawmill—no, there was sawdust there too. Colors. Where else could she go where there were sounds she was familiar with that she could ignore while she worked so she could study better.?

…

Hmm… actually…

Lori hummed to herself as she leaned back against the stone wall behind her at a comfortable angle, the familiar sounds around her making an uncomfortable din to ignore, as she continued going over her notes. Annoying and distasteful as the sounds were, it reminded her of studying late into the night back in her student days, giving her a degree of comfort and letting her slip back into her old study habits.

With the wisps of the shell of the lightning ball formed with additional inward directionality—the lightningwisps' to keep all the loose lightningwisps within the shell, and the airwisps' to create a spherical area of where air was trapped and compressed—when activated very carefully, the binding had resulted in a… well, a ball of bright, burning fire as the lightning had caused the air itself to ignite. The directionality meant that the flame remained contained, even as it released copious amounts of heat and light.

The light had actually been near-blinding, and the heat expelled by the binding in the few moments that it had before Lori hastily deactivated it has been searing, as if Lori had actually thrust herself as far into a forge as she could without touching the coals. After she finished blinking and recovering her vision—or at least enough vision to see around the sudden white spot now seemingly burned into the middle of her gaze—Lori had actually touched her face to check if she was missing her facial hair. Thankfully, that wasn't the case, but the very fact she actually felt the heat rather than simply being comfortably warm meant that the binding's heat had been significant.

…

Perhaps she'd conduct any further testing on that one over the river, far away from her.

Reading her notes had been difficult until her vision had finally returned to normal, but she had managed. In hindsight, given the confines of where she was it would have been prudent to place the binding inside of a shell of lightningwisps to contain any lightning the binding might have released at random, as well a firewisps to contain the heat—

The sounds coming from the next room peaked beyond her ability to relegate to background noise, and Lori cringed in response, instinctively raising her hands over her ears. The binding to block all sound from reaching her ears was already half-formed before she recalled she was the Dungeon Binder now and didn't have to simply endure such things. "Keep it down!" she called out, and was gratified as the sounds reduced. Nodding in satisfaction, Lori turned back to her notes. Let's see, what next…

Lori was in the middle of preparing both a lightwisp binding—from both the notes, the diagram, and her own hazy memories, she was fairly sure this would producing piercing light—as well as a target of darkwisps—so that if the binding did produce piercing light it wouldn't melt through the stone walls—when there was a knock on the door.

"Inay, I'm studying," she said reflexively, realized what the words that had come out of her mouth were, and hastily corrected, "I mean, go away, I'm busy!" Far too late, Lori realized that statement wasn't an improvement either.

"Your Bindership, could you please open the door so we can talk?" Rian's muffled voice said, coming in through the hole high on one wall that let in both light and air. "Please?"

Lori glared at the door, then grudgingly got to her feet and took the two steps to reach the door, pulling back the latch, swinging the door open. "What?" she demanded.

On the other side, a blank-faced Rian held up a waterclock. "I've been asked to inform you your time is up, your Bindership. Also, there have been reports of some rude person yelling at people and weird smells. Would you happen to know anything about that, your Bindership?"

"It's the Um, Rian. Weird smells are its default state." She'd swept the entire room with unseen light when she had entered, and even then she had been reluctant to sit on the bare wooden bed, opting to sit on her stool instead.

"As you say, your Bindership. In any case, your turn is done, so I'll have to ask you to stand aside for the next people who want to use this room."

Lori frowned, then reluctantly actually paid attention to the sounds coming from the other rooms. There were more muted now, but… Oh, right. She checked her awareness of the demesne's wisps, noting which rooms had voids in them. "There are still other empty rooms, Rian."

"Ah, you'll be taking another turn? Then I should note that by doing so I'll have to include your name with the list of people who have to clean the interior at the end of the—why is this room so hot?"

Oh. She'd thought the room had cooled down since it was comfortably warm…

Rian was waving his hand over Lori's head, feeling the air. "And that smell… have you been making lightning bindings in here? No, of course you were, the smell is obvious. Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

"I know what I'm doing, Rian," Lori said defensively.

"Lori, I distinctly remember what your lightning has been looking like recently. Bright, hot, and deadly. Why would you possibly think it was a good idea to make bindings like that in an enclosed room that has you in it!-? What if your lightning had gotten so hot you set the air on—" Rian paused and waved his hands over Lori's head again. He sighed, closing his eyes. When they opened again, he glared at her. "You set the air on fire?!"

Lori averted her eyes.

Rian groaned. "You set the air on fire in the same room you were in and you still thought it was a good idea to keep making more bindings?"

"I deactivated it right away," she said defensively.

"You already had a perfectly good and safe idea to do your lightning tests in the middle of the river where no one could get hurt, why did you think it was a good idea to do it in an enclosed room instead?" A look of horror came over Rian. "Oh—gah! You were going to do this in the carpenters' alcove, weren't you? You would have done this practically on top of sawdust!"

"No, I wouldn't." She honestly hadn't considered the sawdust, which was why she had left.

Rian just stared at her and sighed. "Could you… please step out? Please? As your lord, I need to insist that you don't do your 'setting the air on fire' bindings in an enclosed room, never mind the fact there are other people around. "

Well, listening to people had been getting annoying, anyway. "Fine," she said, turning to pick up her notes, both old and new.

She should probably try this next binding outdoors in any case. Yes, that's definitely why she was leaving and not for any other reason…