Melody of Mana

"For the record, you are Mary and Sloan, yes?" I opened with.

"That's quite so," the woman said for them.

"Excellent, you may call me Jenna. I'm here to look for issues with the administration of the town and rectify them if possible."

"We're a fairly small town miss, other than a few frankly minor gripes, there's not much," Mary said.

"There's a lack of wood, my understanding being that you two are the only producers in town. While there's enough here for the town to support itself for now, that will cause problems in the long run. Are there any other things like that?" I asked.

Sloan smiled, leaning in. "There were a few monsters a couple of years back, but nothing we couldn't handle." He puffed his chest out, but frankly I'd seen enough monsters that I wasn't that impressed. Though if there was a problem it would need to be looked into.

"What kind? From where, when, how many?" I asked.

"Engorged snakes, around a dozen or so two years back, though we've seen two or three smaller ones since. As for the where, the old mine. They'd nested down there and nobody realized for far too long. Between us and the guards it wasn't too much of an issue, but they had the wicked ability to speed themselves up," Sloan said with a smile.

"He's right, probably from some old busted magical items leaking magic into the mines somewhere. We found a few near the main nest, but there might well be more down there," his mother added.

"Has nobody gone down and cleaned them out?" I asked.

"Sure they have, but there's hundreds of years worth of tunnels down there, following veins in random ways and directions. It's a maze even to the people who know it well, and not really worth it to go off of the main tunnels if you want to find things. They had mages back in the day, at least a few, to shore things up and put spells where they needed to go, but records of what's where get lost," Mary couldn't do much more than shrug.

"Might need to send someone out to check those..."

"I'd recommend against it dear. As the spells off the main branches fail and the supports get older the unused tunnels get more and more dangerous. They collapse periodically, nothing much we can do about it." Mary was just a wealth of information, though none quite what I wanted to hear.

"Very well, I suppose I'll have to inquire with the mayor further about where they go and maps and whatnot."

"I can tell you that they at least extend away from the town," Sloan offered. "I could even take you down into some of them if you would like to..." He cut that attempt off, I suppose upon seeing the deep frown Ulanion was giving him.

"On a more productive note, can I convince the two of you to expand your tree growing operation a bit?"

The mother looked at her son and sort of shrugged. "Sure, might have to ask some of the town to gestalt with us sometimes if you want that though."

"And there's no other magically able person in town, no other members of your family?" I asked.

"I have only one child, and his father is dead," Mary said, continuing after seeing me flinch. "It was a long time ago. As for grandchildren..."

All eyes fell on her son who looked uncomfortable. "I... don't know of any children I've fathered..." he began.

"I'll add a request for a visit from a priest of Lovers."

"Eh, I'm sure it'll work itself out," Mary said, smiling. Like many mothers it seemed she wanted to add 'grand' to her title, though her lack of care on how that happened bothered me.

There were only a couple more small issues to go over for the sake of paperwork. As soon as we were done I went to go and find the mayor. I had questions about those tunnels.

"If there were any full maps miss Jenna, they were lost some time ago," he said. "Though I doubt they ever existed."

"Can you clarify?" I asked.

"Originally the mines were a series of caves, big, but natural, and they were expanded. I know that the orders were specific that they always move away from the town, but beyond that not much. I can dig you up the maps we do have, miss, but I will advise that they are very incomplete."

"Look them up when you can. I don't plan on going down there myself, but I'd like to call in someone to check it out. Particularly if there are monsters down there. Who knows, if they've got some valuable materials in them you might end up making the town some money off of it all."

After that I spent several days setting up to go back to testing. The next part was what would happen if something was inside the gate when it was turned off. I knew what the normal ones would do, since they'd had more than a few protections put in for just that happening.

First and foremost none of our gates were supposed to shut down if there was anything in transit. If something was it would be gently pushed out of the gate while it went through the shutdown process. Gently here was relative, as the force would increase quite quickly if it remained inside more than a second, in order to clear it. We'd discussed trying it out a few times in the past, but with the amount of mana the main gates used normally few things would ever be able to resist, so it was a bit of a mute point.

"Alright, I'm about to drop it," I said to Ulanion as I prepared the off switch.

"Right then, whenever you're ready."

With the flipping of the switch I got to see something truly new. The gates really did not like it, and there was a brief moment where a stream of spacial connected the two, accompanied by a pained ripping sound. I even got to see the plane of the portal roil and leave its place inside the circle for just a few moments.

"Let's go see what we've got," I said excitedly as the process ended.

"Carefully," he advised.

As we walked up to the small pair of magical items I could see the distortion in the air where they'd been.

"Now that brings back memories," I observed.

"Hm?"

"When I was learning to make portals I got that a lot, it's weird, but mostly harmless if it's the same. Hmm, for the sake of safety and repeatability we'll need to move a bit, and see what happens when they're further apart."

I probed the distorted area with a small stick, but it seemed that it was just as harmless as the ones I'd created, just very disturbing to look at.

"Please be careful Alana,"

"No worries, like I said, I've seen these before. I'm also not putting my hand or anything in it," I said as I waved off his worries.

"Will this persist?" He asked.

"For awhile, have to note that down."

The gates had survived with no damage so far as I could tell. I knew a good bit about the construction of magical items and these had no issues at all. A brief test also revealed that they still functioned fine. That was a relief, as replacing any of these would be a real pain, doable, but a pain.

The little metal rod we were using for our tests wasn't so lucky. It had been badly mangled, stretched and pulled in unnatural ways before the portal spat it out. The ends that had been inside seemed to have undergone some kind of spegettification before the portal snapped shut. There was no two ways about it, if you'd been in there the best you could hope for would be severe injury, but a head or vital organs and you'd surely die. That wasn't outside of expectation though, so I just shrugged.

Like all good scientists, I needed to repeat my test.

The results were much the same regardless of distance between the gates. There were a few differences, mainly in the leftover distortion. If they were further away from one another the distortion between the two was smaller, and the bulk of it faded faster. There was still a small one near the gates themselves that was a bit more persistent, but not so much as when they were closer together. Soon enough that line of questioning too had been exhausted.

I finally sighed in relief when we got to the last test. I was spending so much time away from Silversprings that it was beginning to raise questions. There were excuses in plenty of course, and I had all the authority I needed to keep doing as I wished even if they found out that I was lying, but it would be inconvenient.

There was only one question left. Could you make a pseudo-orbital bombardment? We'd be working with much smaller projectiles of course, mostly a small pointed bit of enchanted steel. My main fear was what would happen if we were close when it went off, and so for this test we were on the other side of the pond we'd been using in a comfortable little trench Ulanion had dug for us.

The setup was simple enough. There was a pair of gates, one above the other and facing so that the steel ball could travel down. Plumbing them had been a pain, but very important for this, as were the enchantments on the steel ball, making sure that it wouldn't go off course. It also increased speed downwards, this was needed as there was going to be air resistance regardless of what we did. In space this would be far worse.

Below the first pair was another gate. This one's sister would be pointing the soon to be very fast moving object harmlessly into the lake. I expected an explosion of some size when it was fired, and prepared my wards accordingly.

I floated the steel ball in place with a simple movement spell while we moved to the trench. Wards were turned on and prepped, and finally I set it to go. This was sure to be a show.