Saga of the Soul Dungeon

It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.

Terry Pratchett

==Caden==

Every time I learned something new, I went back to look at Tam’s work.

I had heard stories of professional painters doing the same thing. They continually studied the works of past masters, seeing what they could learn from them.

Tam was absolutely a master at working with runes.

I had only just learned about how the superscript functioned from my increase in skill level. I had known all the strange lines, zigzags, and curling lines of script had to mean something, but now I could actually interpret some of them.

The subscript connected to individual pieces and modified their interpretation. There were a few cases where a subscript could modify the entire framework, like telling the entire system to be interpreted in three dimensions from a two dimensional representation. However, that was not its primary purpose.

The superscript was all about modifying other runes, whether that meant the neighboring runes, or the entire system.

Like so much of rune work I had studied, it was highly contextual.

I had always assumed that Tam created the folerth circles on the floor as a simple marking for where an effect was supposed to go. They did that, but Tam also used them as the baseline for the entire rune. Every rune in the emblem that created a force-field and prevented the floor from being messed with was oriented towards the nearest circle. The circle was used like lines on a college ruled piece of paper; it aligned the text.

This mattered because tilting a rune altered its meaning in the superscript. Generally, the system assumed that the runes in an emblem were all oriented in the direction of the starting rune. That rune could not be modified in the superscript unless a different orientation was defined for the system.

So he achieved multiple purposes by using the circle: to indicate boundaries, to tell the system how to interpret the orientation of the runes, and it let him alter the starting rune.

I could see why this was important now. Once directions had been put into place for one system, Tam used the superscript to define where the effects were to go. He didn’t need to put a second circle on the ceiling and tell the system to affect everything between the two. He could use one on the ground, with some slight modifications to the runes, to achieve the same effect.

Looking at what he had done, I could probably take the three dimensional runes used to operate the teleport tube and replace all of them with a single circle and some small runes on one end of the tube. The compact nature of the runes would save on material and the mana needed to activate it.

I couldn’t interpret all of Tam’s use of the superscript, any more than I could fully understand anything else he had done, but I did understand the basics of other patterns that emerged.

All of Tam’s work was done with pure folerth. I could see hints buried in the runes that showed subtext and superscript performing the same roles as the alloys that I had just learned about. Apparently, using pure folerth was better or more convenient in some way. Gold and silver seemed to be quite a bit cheaper than folerth, so I wasn’t sure why he bothered. Hopefully, I would learn one day.

The beam rune, which had caused me so much trouble, had a switch in it. This was the thing that had been bugging me about it. The switch was composed of two runes, each at a forty five degree angle to the other. One rune lifted the orientation of the beam slightly, and the other lowered it. And they remembered that orientation because of the constant mana cycling through them in a self perpetuating cycle.

So Tam had simply pushed a tiny amount of power into one of the runes and it had lifted the beam rune off the floor. Obviously he had planned for the fact he might want to put runes into the floor.

The emblems that had locked my aura in place had simple switches to turn them into an active and passive mode, too. If I was understanding the passive rune correctly however, it would have attached to the end of my aura, like before, but still let me grow my aura.

I wasn’t sure what the purpose of those were. If I had to guess, knowing what I did about Tam, they were meant to measure something. Probably how much mana went into growing my aura or something.

I spent quite a bit of time looking at the feeder he had created, too. It was one of the simplest emblems he had created. It only had a few components. First was the part that drew mana out of the mana crystal at the bottom. I noted that the repeated uses had not harmed the mana crystal at all. According to what I knew so far, it should have. Obviously Tam’s runes were good enough to skip that problem.

The next part was very simple, the mana was drawn up at a constant, slow, rate to fill the mana crystal above. Actually, while it was simple in execution, I wasn’t quite sure how he made that transmission so slow.

The next part actually inserted mana into the mana crystal. I fully understood this one piece.

The next part had several functions working together. A timer, a switch, and a release.

The timer was one of the pieces I was most interested in. I could program most things in the dungeon to have properly timed responses without too much difficulty. If I wanted a wheel of blades to turn at a specific rate, all I needed to do was direct the axis to turn and create the timing. And then I could go back and alter it at any time.

Emblems were more finicky. In fact they tended to explode.

I was figuring out how to make switches from the many different examples, but that simply turned something on and off. Useful if I needed to create some types of traps and constant effects. I could have it turn off after it was activated once, etc…

However, if I wanted effects to appear with a regular timing, I couldn’t do that with an emblem yet. I didn’t have any particular uses for emblems that could do that yet, but I was sure I would. Also, I would love to figure out the timer well enough to make something engage truly at random. That could make so many things far more interesting.

I was also hoping to learn more practical runes.

For now, I was messing around with space.

I had created a number of copies of the original teleportation tube design.

I had removed the runes that assigned an identity to the packet, but otherwise I had left them exactly the same.

When I activated one with a small bit of paper inside it, the paper would vanish, as would any air inside the canister at the time. A few minutes later, they would reappear in the same place that they had disappeared from, even if the tube had been moved.

With quite a large number of experiments running simultaneously, I ended up with lots of paper raining down amid puffs of air.

If something was occupying the space now, whatever was teleported away previously moved to an unoccupied space upon its return.

Except for air, which didn’t count.

That made me test with objects appearing into water. That didn’t work. Maybe it worked with air because it was so easy to compress?

I supposed it was good that it worked with air at least, otherwise everything would get shuffled away into the nearest vacuum. Most of the time I assumed that would be in orbit somewhere. It wouldn’t actually be all that hard for me to set up a vacuum chamber… Eh, something to think about later.

I could feel when things popped in and out of space. It only lasted for a moment, but I was a bit amazed that something in me could sense it at all. Dungeon cores had amazing senses, even if it seemed we had to refine individual abilities to make them useful.

The way that the canisters worked, for the moment, was by creating a burst of teleportation and then burning out.

What if I created something a little different?

I made the entire teleportation emblem out of folerth. I tweaked the emblem and altered the tube a bit, making it very strong but not as air tight as the others. If this worked a lot of air would be flowing through it.

I expected my first attempt to fail, but I’d learned quite a bit from my experiments and the increase in skill level.

It worked perfectly on the first try.Air rushed into the tube, a steady vacuum creating a howling vortex around it. I could feel that space was continuously being altered. I couldn’t see or feel anything specific, but it was like getting goosebumps. Just a feeling of otherness.

A few minutes later the vortex ended and air began to flow out. Since I had kept the tube in the same place, space twisted oddly for a moment. The space there tried to constantly teleport matter into and out of the same volume of space.

A moment later, apparently the spacial forces fell out of balance.

There was… I hesitate to call it an explosion.

A large amount of air teleported in at the same time that the canister and some surrounding stone disappeared from existence. The air expanded rapidly in a concussive wave. Technically, I think that makes it an explosion, but it wasn’t all that strong. I could get a much stronger explosion by causing an imbalance in an emblem.

The tube reappeared in the air a few minutes later, along with the stone that had accompanied it. It was still red hot and I absorbed it quickly before it exploded from melting runes or spacial anomalies.

It really was a miracle I hadn’t blown myself up when I was messing with Tam’s emblem and popping out entire runes. I shuddered to think of how careless I was being at the time, even if I didn’t understand that then. There had to be some powerful safeguards that prevented an explosion in Tam’s runes for that emblem, but I hadn’t found them yet. Not terribly surprising, I still had a ton to learn about it.

And apparently, the precautions on the canister were not sufficient after I modified it like I had. I would either need to make a switch for it, move the canister while it was in continuous use, or figure out a way to teleport to somewhere else.

I had been thinking about that quite a lot. Teleportation was one of the more useful abilities I could gain. Even if I could only teleport objects into empty air. That was actually a rather nice restriction, too. It prevented me from killing things by accident.

For now, I needed to mess with teleportation some more.

I had been wondering why the canisters had a section that prevented them from being searched. If all the action of receiving a teleported packet happened in a second emblem, why was that section even necessary? And that section was made with a bit of folerth. It retained a tiny bit of mana even after a tube was expended.

It implied that the transfer of the teleportation packet had to be at least a little bit of a two way street. There were sections of the tube that I didn’t completely understand yet, I assumed this function was inside of those.

So that meant teleportation to the identifier might work, assuming it was close enough.

I started by just inscribing the identifier onto a nearby wall, and then activating one of the standard teleportation tubes. The piece of paper inside it teleported as normal. A few minutes later it appeared exactly where it had teleported from. A failure.

My next thought was that it might be searching for mana. Not an unreasonable thing to search for. By not searching for mundane material, it would presumably be able to cover a much wider range.

That proved a failure as well.

The next test was an obvious extension. I made an emblem with the identity sequence, and a simple activation rune. The same logic that applied to ignoring ordinary matter could be applied to mana as well. There was quite a lot of mana, in random patterns, everywhere. An emblem was much rarer, and I hadn’t seen any of those show up in nature yet.

I set up another teleportation tube once the very simple emblem was ready. I activated it.

The were two pops of displaced air, instead of the usual one. Air and a message disappeared from the tube, and reappeared in midair next to the identifier on the wall.

Success!