Empty Names

17 - Embedded Media

 

Rituals, much like the more spontaneous magic of mages’ spells require a continuous concentration of will and intent to manifest the desired change in reality.  Traditionally, the significantly longer time required in such an intense state of concentration comes with the trade off of giving leeway for the mind to wander ever so slightly and to proceed through multiple stages of shifting focus, allowing for more complex effects and end results.  As it turns out, digitally accelerating a ritual that was already an AI-generated mashup of several other divination rituals to simultaneously gather datapoints on multiple aspects of a target means either rapidly shifting focus multiple times a minute, concentrating on multiple topics at once, or attempting wrap one’s brain around the broad concept of knowing everything about the ritual’s target and holding onto it for several minutes. Having a computer handle all of the incantations and glyph manipulations brings the first two options down from “impossible for most people” to “difficult and tiring but very doable.”  Still, in most circumstances the third option of holding the broad end result concept in mind would be far easier. 

Trying to identify, sort, and analyze magic signatures on your confusingly hot and intimidatingly competent wizard teammate whom you’ve stuck in a chamber that you’ve mostly used so far for running secret transformation experiments on yourself is not most circumstances. 

Finally, the procedurally remixed samples of Lacuna’s voice come to an abrupt stop and the glowing fractals covering the testing chamber fade out to stark white.  Lacuna lets out a long sigh as she watches the ritual’s completion on her monitor and then drops her forehead onto the desk just short of landing on the keyboard.  A melodramatic reaction and she knows it, but it’s been a long fifteen minutes; a remarkably short time by the normal standards of the type of divination she just finished working, but still far longer than she’s used to.  Between safety concerns, confounding variables, personal hang ups about privacy, and a desire to get as much reusable data as possible, she’d had to slow this one down considerably.  Among other things, the enchantments on Glassheart’s robe had needed sorted out and separated from anything directly affecting or originating from the wizard himself.  True, asking Glassheart to disrobe prior to the procedure would have greatly simplified things, but Lacuna had chosen exhaustion over the embarrassment of asking him to undress. 

She lifts her head enough to speak into the microphone.  “Alright.  That’s it.  Good to come out.”

She’s fully back upright by the time she hears the quiet swoosh of the testing chamber door open.  Well, slouching in her chair, but that is “fully upright” by Lacuna standards.  By the time she spins her chair around Glassheart is already standing next to her, causing her to bolt ever so slightly more upright in surprise.  She hadn’t heard his footsteps crossing the length of the lab.

“What did you learn?” Glassheart asks. 

“Nothing.  Not yet,” she hastily amends at the sight of an elegantly arched eyebrow.  “Data’s all been collected, yeah.  But it’s still processing.”  She gestures to the loading bar that’s appeared on the screen. “Going to be a bit for the computer to translate it all into something human readable.”

“Is that normal for using a computer, or is this supposed tattoo on the back of my neck truly so complex?”

“A little of both?  But mostly it’s because I scanned a whole bunch of extra data while I was at it.  Once it’s done we’ll have a full physical and metaphysical baseline for you that we can use for comparison if you ever get sick, injured, or cursed or something.  Should make the healing process easier, having a save state to restore your body back to.  Could probably even duplicate the enchantments on your robe if it ever gets lost or damaged.”

A flicker of… some emotion… crosses Glassheart’s face.  Impressed?  Bemused?  Annoyed?  Offended?  Did she say something wrong?  Is talking about replacing a wizard’s robes some kind of taboo?  Or is she reading too much into it?  Once again Lacuna silently curses herself for being so incompetent at reading people.  It doesn’t help that whatever the expression was came and went so quickly like a tiny ripple subsumed by a great lake.  Except the Great Lakes are large enough that they probably have all sorts of waves and currents so probably not a good analogy for Glassheart’s -

“Do I have something on my face?” Glassheart asks.

Oh goddess she did it again; zoned out while facing in someone’s direction so it looks like she’s staring.  She spins her chair back around to keep the creeping redness in her face toward the computer monitors and away from Glassheart.

“No.  Nothing on your face,” Lacuna stammers.  “Well, other than makeup, obviously.  And that’s fine.  Perfect even.  I was just thinking hard.  About a thing.”   Did she just call his makeup perfect to his face?  Someone kill her now, please.  Or in lieu of that, maybe a topic change.

 “Do you mind if I run something by you?” Lacuna asks without turning back to face Glassheart. “Since we’re still just waiting.  Had an idea and thought it would be good to get input from someone with real training on this sort of thing.”

“I would be happy to render what assistance I can,” Glassheart replies in that same neutral tone as ever.

“Thanks.  Okay, so, you know how enchantments on items can be created so their effect activates on a touch or simple command word?”

“Those are the most common trigger conditions, yes.”

“And one of the most basic enchantment types out there is to play back a specific sound or message when activated?”

“That depends on the definition of ‘basic’ and your rubric for ranking, but in broad strokes that is correct.”

“And we’ve proven that a recording of a ritual incantation can work just as well as actually speaking.”

“Puzzlingly unorthodox as it is, that is also true.”

“Right, so, the idea is that if you put all those things together, you could enchant something to start playing an accelerated ritual incantation on command.  And then if you also had the glyph circle to go along with that enchantment inscribed on the object, you’d basically have a portable high-speed ritual ready to go on command.”

Glassheart goes silent for a moment and tilts his head in consideration.  “Theoretically one could do that, but why would you?”

“Because it’s more portable than an entire lab and server room and while it’s less flexible than a phone full of pre-saved audio and video files you wouldn’t have to worry about durability and battery issues.”

“But why not enchant the object to produce the desired end effect directly?  The extra steps are additional points of failure.  Potentially catastrophic ones.”

A small smile creeps onto Lacuna’s face. That is the question she’d been building up to.  She lifts her feet and tilts her body just enough to cause the office chair to rotate with what she tells herself is dramatic slowness until she’s facing in Glassheart’s direction.

“Flexibility!  A normal enchantment produces the exact same effect each time - at most with some conditional modifiers set at time of creation - but since a ritual’s output can be modified to some degree at runtime based on will and intent…”

“You seek to emulate a mage’s spellcasting,” Glassheart finishes, eyes wide. 

“I guess I am, aren’t I?” Lacuna lets out a nervous chuckle. “Sort of anyway.  It’d never be as fast or adaptable as something a real mage could do, even with the accelerated incantations, and there’s an upper limit on complexity and range tied to the available surface area for a glyph circle small enough to be portable, but in the right circumstances it could be… useful.”  She could be useful. 

Assuming she didn’t blow herself up the first time she lost concentration.  Volatility on the sort of pseudo-spells she has in mind is an issue she’s still working through. 

“I see.”  Is that skepticism in Glassheart’s voice or disapproval?

“I… got the idea from you actually,” Lacuna says as she lowers her gaze down to her hands. “I don’t know how it actually works, but from the outside it looks like what you do with the kinetic field conjurations are all fundamentally variations on a single concept manifestation.  One core spell with modifications made at time of casting.  I’m sorry for oversimplifying.  I’m sure there’s more to it than that.  And I don’t mean to imply that my hacky workaround is on a comparable level to your art that you’ve spent years mastering.  Just, you know?  Inspiration?”  She trails off into silence at the end of her rambling.

In the periphery of Lacuna’s vision, she thinks she sees Glassheart blink.

“No, you are surprisingly close on a theoretical level,” the wizard speaks up after the quiet moment has stretched long enough to be uncomfortable.  “For most of my training, my mentor emphasized the perfection of a small handful of highly adaptable techniques drawing from a singular concept as the root of our style over trying to maintain a shallower mastery of many disparate applications of magic.  Although given my recent struggles with branching out, I am beginning to wonder if that singular focus was taken too far.”

“Oh.  Really?  Thanks.  Err, good to know,” Lacuna says, raising her head back up to look at Glassheart again.  “And I’m sure you’ll get the hang of branching out soon.  You’re the real mage here, and smarter with this stuff than I could ever hope to be.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but you do yourself a disservice in selling yourself too short.”  Glassheart pauses for a moment and then continues as serenely as ever.  “That said, it would be remiss of me not to advise caution in continuing down your current path.  You are recombining elements of disparate magic systems in novel ways and breaking rules seemingly without even being aware that they exist.  Some would call that reckless.  Some would call it offensive disregard for tradition.  Some might even brand it as sorcery, inherently dangerous or ripe enough for abuse to be taboo for all but the strongest-willed of mages to attempt.”

Lacuna attempts to examine Glassheart’s face for some hint of expression or emotion.  Is he saying that he finds the idea she just ran by him offensive?  She forces a nervous laugh.

“It can’t be that bad, right?  I’m just one amateur dabbler poking around in a lab finding overly-convoluted ways to do what’s simple for anyone else.  I’m not even a real mage.”

“It most likely is not.  But the rituals your system generates are unlike anything else I have encountered or heard of, and that which is unfamiliar ofttimes makes people nervous.”

“I… Thanks for the warning?  I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

Ashan nods in acknowledgement.

Unsure what else to say, Lacuna looks back over her shoulder at the progress bar on the monitor.  Surely the data compilation must be almost done by now.

Fifty-three percent.

She sighs and resigns herself to an uncomfortable wait in silence.

 

*******

 

Eris and Road have shown up by the time the diagnostic report finishes compiling.  Thankfully, Road’s saving Lacuna the discomfort of having the three of them watch over her shoulder while she reads the report by fussing over Eris and Glassheart and asking about their recovery from the last mission.  

Lacuna can’t help but smile at Eris’s insistence that she’s fine despite a miniature sun having exploded in her face two days ago.  Of course, no one would ever guess by looking at her, and that had been Lacuna’s doing.  As terrifying and tear-filled as those hours had been (don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it), she’d actually been able to help her friend; first with the fireproofing charms she’d made ahead of time mitigating the damage before becoming overwhelmed and breaking (she’d failed to do enough don’t think about it), then with the standard healing ritual sent through a projector mounted on the remote drone in the field to stabilize Eris outside of that wizard Logo’s house (sounds of stomping a man to death don’t think about it), and once more again here in the lab with a tailor made ritual to remove the burn scars and eliminate recovery time (monstrous burning figure seen through the smoke don’t think about it).

Most healing magic just assists and accelerates the body’s natural recovery process, leaving the target exhausted and just as prone to long-term complications.  But the two of them had always figured that Eris’s already-extreme regeneration and durability were more a matter of Eris’s unusually high sensitivity to autogenesis restoring her body to what she perceived as its true state.  From there it was theoretically just a matter of temporarily turning that sensitivity up even higher while simultaneously assisting Eris in de-internalizing the idea that the explosion had a greater effect on reality than she did.  A mind-altering effect, yes, but a minor and temporary one that was in place just long enough for the healing to take effect, and Eris had consented after Lacuna explained the risks.  And there had been some risk that, as the ritual’s caster, Lacuna’s perception of Eris might affect the results, but they both figured she knew her friend well enough for that not to be a problem and neither of them had noticed any side effects yet.

Still, if Lacuna could run a scan on Eris like she’d just done on Ashan, that could be used even more safely and effectively.  She muses that should probably do a couple on Road and Sullivan as well just to be safe.  She already has plenty of data on herself.

Realizing her mind is wandering again, she focuses back on the readouts in front of her.  To be fair, that’s easier said than done.  When she said earlier the divination scan was being translated to something human-readable that was just barely true.  There is still a ton of jargon (both magical and technical), specialized charts, and recursive tables.  And tabs.  So many tabs.  The hardest part of this whole process is quickly turning out to be just finding where in the report the analysis of Glassheart’s tattoo is even located.

Oh, there’s the problem, it’s split between two different sections.  That’s kind of weird, but…

Oh.  That’s why.

And if she’s reading these summaries of the closest matching glyph sequences in the database correctly…

Oh.

Oh…

“Oh.  That makes sense.”

“Find something, sis?” Eris asks, cutting off the conversation that had been going on behind Lacuna.

Lacuna nods, still staring at the computer screen and trying to figure out how to break bad news.  She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, lets it out, opens her eyes, and spins the chair back around to face the others.

“Okay, so,” Lacuna begins, “what we’ve been calling a tattoo is, as we suspected, a seal that’s been imprinted on you rather than an actual tattoo with needles and ink.  Aaaaannd there are actually two of them.  Sort of.  There’s an older one and then a second one that was added on the same spot roughly two years later that incorporates the first, strengthening it and adding on additional effects.”  Lacuna takes another breath. “And they’ve been there a long time.”

“How long?”  Glassheart asks.

“How old did you say you were when you left this iteration of Earth for the first time?”

“It was shortly after my ninth birthday.”

“Yeah, about that long.”

“Okay, you’re being plenty ominous with the buildup here,” Eris interjects, “but what do they do?”

“Right! So, the first one’s a dampener on power draw and output for spellcasting.” Lacuna nods towards Glassheart.   “Similar to what you put on that summoner girl in the cave the other week to make it so she couldn’t use magic, but less extreme.  The second one’s strengthening the first, limiting the kinds of magic you can use, and extending the effect indefinitely by linking you to another mage.  Plus it’s acting as a perception filter and blocking your memory of either one being applied.  I don’t know who that other mage is apart from the fact that they’re the one who put the first seal on you, but as long as they’re around you’re limited to whatever magic they can do, as if you were born on their world.  Maybe even more strictly tied than that.  I could try patching something together to get more info from the limited signature I have but I doubt -”

“No need,” Glassheart interrupts.  “It is Aliana Glassgaze.”

“Your mentor?”  Eris asks.

“One and the same.” Glassheart sighs and shakes his head with a bitter smile.  “As I said before, our relationship is complicated.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Road says.  “I can’t imagine this sort of betrayal of trust is easy to take.”

 “This is just one more knot in the tangle.”  Glassheart replies.  “If anything, the timeline and effects that Lacuna just described make a number of things make more sense in hindsight.  When my ment- when Aliana first found me she was rescuing me from a monster that had slipped into this world.  Afterwards, when she was examining me for wounds and lingering influence from the creature, she told me that it looked to her like that was the seventh time this had happened to me, judging by residual amnestic magic from other mages.  She followed that up by telling me I had great potential for being a wizard, but that same potential made me - as she put it - ‘a veritable monster magnet’ such that I would be constantly putting myself and those around me in danger without proper guidance and training.  A dampening seal would explain why I did not continue to attract danger on a world with even more magically-sensitive creatures even in the early days of my training.”

“And the other half of the tattoo?” Lacuna prompts.

“Most likely during the second time Aliana brought me to the continental Convocation of Mages.  It is an annual gathering of mages from that part of Orthon to share knowledge, settle disputes, boast of achievements, and debate laws and conventions regarding proper use of magic.  She normally attended as infrequently as she could get away with, but I loved it so much the first time - wide-eyed child that I was - that I practically begged her to take me the next year.  You implied that someone else applied the second seal?”

“Yes,” Lacuna answers, “there are at least three other signatures tied up in that one besides Aliana’s.  I’m guessing there would have been plenty of people at that Convocation who were capable?”

“Indeed.  And, in truth, my memory of that trip is hazy.  We arrived late and missed the first day altogether.  My recollection of  the second day is as clear as any memory from a decade ago can be, but afterwards Aliana told me that I had fallen seriously ill on the third day and had spent the rest of the Convocation in bed.  I suspect that the elder mages she claimed helped me during that period were in fact the ones who placed the second seal.  Of course I thought no more of it than a child’s disappointment at having missed an event I had been looking forward to.  The fact that I struggled with spellcasting afterwards, such that my training was set back by the better part of a year, I readily believed was due to the supposed illness.  I still trusted Aliana implicitly back then.  In retrospect, that was about the same time she stopped encouraging me to try out other styles besides her own.”

“That’s awful,” Road says.  “To do something like that to someone in your care who trusts you…”

“I am not entirely sure that particular betrayal was by choice,” Ashan replies.  “It certainly puts her reluctance to take me back there into a new light, as it does the manner in which she dragged her feet and kept finding distractions along the way.  Were it not for a seemingly chance meeting with an old friend of hers offering transportation, we might not have made it to the Convocation at all.  Perhaps she suspected what would happen if we went and was trying to protect me.”

“That seems like a stretch,” Eris says. 

“In isolation, I would agree, but she had also made it abundantly clear when I first arrived on Orthon how important it was to keep the fact that I was from an anchor world secret and took great pains to keep up that ruse.  She was the one who gave me the name Ashan to blend in better.  While she did not explain the full details until I was older, it is hardly a secret that anchor world born mages have reputations for being dangerous and unstable.  If I had, in fact, been found out, then binding me to herself to limit my abilities may well have been the most humane fate for me that she was able to negotiate.  And if the memory block and perception filter did not come until the second seal, then I may well have known about and agreed to the first at the time.  It may have even originally been meant as a temporary measure before the elder mages intervened.”

“No offense,” Eris says, “but don’t you think you’re being a little quick to defend someone who screwed you over like that?”

“Perhaps,” Ashan concedes.  “Yet still, I find it difficult to truly be angry with her.  She was - is - like a second mother to me.  Apart from her initial sin when she first took me I cannot say that she ever mistreated me.  If anything, she coddled me compared to how most wizards treat their apprentices.  She was clever, kind, and strong.  I wanted to be just like her.  Even now that things are… complicated… between us I still find myself imitating her style and technique.  I still wear the robe patterned after hers, wield the wand carved from the same tree as her staff, and paint my face the same way she does.  The name she gave me feels more true than the one I was born with.   At this point, autogenesis has even molded me until I resemble her at least as much as I do my blood parents.  While she has done things to me that I cannot bring myself to forgive, this is not one of them.”

The lab falls silent save for the hum and respiration of server racks.

“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Lacuna hesitantly speaks up, “but, ‘initial sin’?”

“When she was first convincing me to come with her, she talked me into faking my death and then helped me do it once I readily agreed.  She said it was the best way to cover up my disappearance and save my parents the pain of trying to look for me.  I was naïve and excited to go on a grand and magical adventure.  Child that I was, the full ramifications of that never occurred to me.  Not until too much time had passed to undo the damage.  If I thought about it at all, it was as a passing daydream about how surprised and happy my parents would be when I returned alive one day, and now a wizard.  Afterall, the stories always end with the hero returning home to the ‘real world.’”

“I’m not gonna lie,” Eris says, “that’s kinda fucked up.  What Aliana did, I mean, not you.”

“It is the root of our falling out.  In retrospect, that may have been the reason she doted on me the way that she did, especially in those early days.  A way to assuage the guilt.  She knew what she had done was wrong, but at the time it seemed like the least bad option given the circumstances.  So she said at any rate when I finally confronted her about it.”

“Isn’t that the excuse everyone always gives for atrocities?” Road asks.

“Perhaps,” Glassheart says, “but as I said, she did enough good for me that even if I cannot forgive her, I cannot bring myself to be truly angry either.  She gave me a decade of living out storybook fantasies and dreams coming true.  We never saved a whole kingdom, much less the world, but there were adventures, and I like to think we helped more than a few people along the way.  Then it started to slowly dawn on me that I had grown up and yet there was no sign of us ever returning to the home of my birth.  That dawning realization bubbled into a confrontation.  She admitted her wrongdoing and lack of intent from the beginning to ever bring me home.  And then she agreed to do so now that I had finally asked.”

Ashan’s voice hitches.  He takes a breath, and then continues.

“We observed my family in secret.  No point in breaking the Masquerade until I knew for sure I wanted to go back to them.  They had moved to a new house, but still in the same town.  They still marked my birthday on the calendar and laid flowers on my grave.”

Even Lacuna can tell now that Ashan’s voice is strained.

“I now had a younger brother who had not yet existed before and was now around the age I was when I had left.  Some of my old things had been given to him.  The rest, my old favorite toys and clothes, were in a box in the attic with my name on it.”

Ashan sniffs.  There is a quaver to his words now.  

“They… They had grieved, made their peace, and gotten on with their lives.  There was a tinge of sadness - how could there not be after what they had lost - but they seemed happy, on the whole.  My brother was not a replacement for me, he simply was.  I like to imagine that if I had never left he would still exist.”

Ashan gasps.  His eyes are wet.

“I could not - cannot - bring myself to break that peace and open up those old wounds.  It would be cruel.”

Even Lacuna can tell it is all Ashan can do to hold onto his usual mask.

“And yet… yet I… I could not stay with Aliana any longer either.  I tried for seven… Seven.  Long.   Months.  But what we had was now… tainted.  So I came back… back here, to a home I barely knew and its shadows I knew even less yet was more a part of.  It is harder to be a hero here, as Aliana and I so often liked to style ourselves, but there is still room for it if you look.  As you have proven and provided, Road.”

Lacuna isn’t sure when exactly Road moved their chair closer to Ashan’s, but when they put their hand on his the mask finally breaks altogether.  By the time Ashan is pressing his head to Road’s shoulder his tears are flowing freely.  Lacuna wonders how long this must have been eating at him if he’s falling apart at so little.

When Eris moves in to put an arm around Ashan in a gesture that Lacuna recognizes from being on the receiving end of more than once, she feels a stab of jealousy and hates herself a little bit for it.  She recalls that she’s fallen apart worse than this for less reason. She reaches an arm out, half stands up, sits back down, and withdraws her arm.  She turns away, awkward, unsure how to help, and continuing to hate herself.

“My apologies,” Glassheart says some minutes later, disentangling himself while wiping away lingering tears.  “Monologuing is something of an occupational hazard for us wizards.  Even having practiced that speech in my head, the delivery was more difficult than anticipated.”  He looks down at his makeup-smudged hand and over at the spot of blue that’s now on Road’s shoulder.  “Pray excuse my mess.  I was not able to take my usual precautions this morning while still burnt out.”

It occurs to Lacuna that she’ll need to take another scan later if she wants a medical baseline that won’t risk returning Glassheart to a burnt out state when she uses it for healing.  Stupid.  She should have realized that earlier.  Useless.  And it’s her fault he’s upset and she couldn’t even do anything to comfort him.  She’s just uselessly sitting over her and selfishly making it all about her.  She’s so -

“It’s okay,” Road says, snapping Lacuna out of her oncoming spiral.  “I’m here for you.  We’re here for you.  You’re among friends and it’s safe here.”

Lacuna knows they’re talking to Glassheart right now, but just hearing Road’s voice say the words is enough to calm her down.

“Friends…” Glassheart whispers.

And friends are there for one another, aren’t they?  Lacuna might be useless for anything emotional, but in practical terms, maybe there is something she can do.

“So, um…  About that tattoo…” Lacuna starts.  “The seal, I mean.  Would you like me to, you know?  Fix it?”

Glassheart’s gaze snaps back to Lacuna, “You can do that?”

“Probably?” Lacuna says, rubbing the back of her neck and suddenly second guessing herself.  “I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t be safe to try actually removing it without A- without the other mage it’s bound to present.  But I’m pretty sure - relatively sure anyway - that I could get the system to reverse engineer it to concoct a second seal that could be applied to cancel out the effect.  Well, third seal I guess, but you know what I mean.”  She gives a smile that she hopes is reassuring but probably isn’t.  She’ll need to try harder to copy Road next time.  “It’ll take a while though.  Between iterative compilation and simulations for safety testing, we’re talking days.  Maybe weeks.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Ashan says.  “That would mean the world to me.”

 

*******

 

Once again, it is long after everyone else has turned in for the night and Lacuna is stepping into the testing chamber, preparing to run an experiment on herself.  This has become something of a habit over the past few weeks.

She’s also hating herself a little bit again.  She hopes that doesn’t become a habit.

She justifies her current actions to herself, telling herself that a few hours of switching most of the server load off of what she promised to do for Ashan and onto her personal project is hardly going to make a dent in the final runtime locking up her equipment for the next few days.  Besides, what she’s doing has the potential to help out the team as a whole, not just her.

She knows she’s mostly doing it for herself though.

Dressed in old loose-fitting clothes that she doesn’t mind getting singed or vomited on, heavy gloves, and dark-tinted safety goggles, Lacuna raises the first of the newly-enchanted objects to test.  It’s an engraved metal tube the length of her forearm, too long to call a wand but too short to qualify as a staff.  A scepter perhaps?  It seems an apt description as any given how one end is capped off with a twisted 3D printed ornament; a ritual circle extruded into three dimensions.  If this works out, she’ll make the next iteration from a more durable material than the rapid prototyping plastic.  

On the far end of the testing chamber strands the training dummy she dragged in from the gym.

She presses her thumb into the designated section of the scepter, gripping with intent, and the pre-recorded accelerated incantation begins emanating from the tube, causing the ornament at the tip to begin glowing in response.  The glow brightens, slides off of the ornament and coalesces into a fist-sized glowing ball floating in the air.  After having only run for a second, the near-static noise of the incantation stops but the floating mote of light remains.  It briefly flickers as Lacuna lets her concentration slip in a moment of astonishment that it worked on the first try, but quickly stabilizes when she refocuses her attention.

She repeats the process three more times at different spots in the testing chamber, and then on the fifth she allows the recorded incantation to loop long enough to draw the shaky approximation of a cat’s face in the air.  She laughs and the lights pulse in time to her voice.  It’s an unexpected side effect that causes her laughter to redouble until the lights almost wink out before she gets a grip on her concentration again.

The next time she runs the portable ritual it is with slightly different intent.  She points the scepter at an empty spot in the air and the previous conjurations begin to converge and orbit the target point in space.  She sweeps her arm and the lights move to the new focal point some yards away from the scepter.  At Lacuna’s will they draw closer and then move further out.  

Grinning wildly, Lacuna begins waving the scepter about and clumsily twirling around the testing chamber to the off-kilter rhythm of a half-remembered theme song.  The conjured lights trail behind her like streamers for a drunken ribbon dancer.  She stops for the briefest moment of catching her all-too-easily-winded breath while holding the scepter as straight up as her wobbling arms can manage so the lights begin swirling above her, and then she swings the scepter down to point at the training dummy on the other end of the testing chamber.  

Disappointingly, the lights don’t so much streak toward their target as drift in its direction at a brisk pace, but at least that gives Lacuna ample time to close her eyes when the first glowing ball misses its target entirely and bursts into a bright flash upon hitting the wall behind it.  When the floating cat face manages to clip the edge of the dummy, its dying flash is enough to leave her seeing spots through tinted goggles and closed eyelids.  

All in all, a successful test apart from her poor aim.  She’s panting and working up a sweat, but that’s to be expected with how she got carried away.  Maybe she should give joining Eris at the gym another try.  Her hand does seem even hotter than expected though…

She looks down at the scepter and realizes the metal tube is beginning to glow ever so slightly from heat and the incantation has dropped to barely audible instead of stopping altogether like it’s supposed to.  The heat gets painful even through her safety gloves and Lacua drops the scepter on poorly-trained reflex.  She has just enough presence of mind to turn away before the fragile 3D test print of the ritual ornament on the tip of the scepter hits the ground and shatters.

Examining herself after the ensuing flash, Lacuna finds that much of the color has been bleached out of the backside of her clothes.  Touching the back of her neck - exposed from putting her hair up as a safety precaution - she winces.  She’ll need to be sure to keep her hair down and in place for the next week or two so the others don’t notice the new sunburn.

So, still a few bugs to work out with that design, but that’s what iterative testing is for.  It does give her some pause before moving onto the other item she brought in to test tonight, but she makes the snap decision to hope the adrenaline spike of that near-accident will push her through better than stopping to rest.  Stopping to rest might lead to chickening out and then having to wait another few days to test again while the fix for Ashan’s seal compiles.

She takes off her gloves, reaches into a cargo pocket on her pants, and fishes out a thin metal sheet, slightly longer and wider than her open hand with the fingers pressed together.  A spiraling, branching mess of mutilated glyphs cover both sides, one for the incantation recording and one for the desired end effect.  

Small, simple changes compounded over time.  That’s the way to do it.  Just alter one body part at a time, and control the speed of the ritual to keep the change gradual, only pushing further when it feels right.  

She’d tried almost this exact same experiment a week back, and the change had lasted a solid twenty minutes after the ritual ended.  Far longer than the seventeen seconds she got out of the full body attempt, but still shorter than what someone with proper training and experience could pull off and nowhere near permanent.  Shortly after she started visiting Crossherd regularly she’d found an alchemist’s shop selling potions that claimed to do the same thing for a full day.  Sure they’d only ever lasted about an hour for her, and that was before she built up a tolerance from drinking one every night for a month straight, but at least they never left her chest itching all the next day like her last experiment had.  The effect on her psyche of seeing and feeling them wear off earlier and earlier until they barely did anything at all had probably been fuel for her current autogenesis issues though.  But that’s what she’s fixing now.  Hopefully.

The idea of tying the transmutive effect to an object was one she had been toying with even before the last mission, but seeing all those natural-born shapeshifters with their abilities tied to a token of some sort made her all that more confident that there was something to it.  And if she has to carry around a veritable deck of enchanted metal cards everywhere she goes to keep a body that feels right, then that’s a small price to pay.

Having learned from past mistakes regarding sudden shifts in center of mass, Lacuna takes a cross-legged seat on the floor, clasps the metal card to her chest, activates the stored incantation, and focuses on the new reality she wants for her body.  

It only takes a few seconds for her to be able to notice the first signs the portable ritual is working.  It starts as a soreness, familiar from those first few months when the hormone therapy was working its own mundane magic of biochemistry to enact its ultimately disappointing changes.  The intensity grows to how she’d often imagined it might feel for those who hadn’t been so unlucky as her and gotten more out of their treatment.  It’s nothing she can’t tolerate though, and she tells herself it will pass soon enough.  If anything, there’s a certain euphoria to it, not in a masochistic sense of enjoying the pain itself, but in the knowledge that hurting means it’s working.  

The more outwardly apparent changes follow.  Her hands, crossed over her sternum and grasping the ritual card, are pushed ever so slightly away from her torso.  The contact surface area between loose-hanging shirt and skin increases.  A fractional increase of weight tugs her forward and forces her back to subtly readjust to maintain posture

Lacuna shifts her grip on the metal card, pausing the incantation.  The just-noticeable change doesn’t immediately undo, so she takes that as a good sign.  She sits in silence, making slow, careful breaths until the soreness dies down and the adjustment feels almost comfortable.  And then she restarts the ritual and continues pushing outward.

She keeps this up through several more cycles of adjusting for seconds and acclimating for minutes until the loose shirt begins to grow tight.  There’s a part of her that wants to keep pushing, but she’s mentally exhausted from the effort of focusing and physically exhausted from the late hour turned early.  Besides, she hears back pain can be a serious issue.  And if this all goes well she can always make future adjustments.

Laying back on the floor, Lacuna gives a series of voice commands and the test chamber dims.  Soothing music begins to play and the screens change so it appears as if she’s floating in a field of stars.  The stars on the cleverly-hidden ceiling above her gather into the shape of a timer.  Lacuna closes her eyes and begins running through meditation exercises her therapist recommended to clear her mind.

The timer beeps marking, that ten minutes have passed.

She resists the temptation to look at or directly touch the part of her that’s changed for fear of quite literally breaking the magic of the moment with the unaccustomed sight and sensation.

Twenty minutes.

The transmutation is still holding strong.

Thirty minutes.

Did she actually get it right this time?  She shifts her position on the hard floor to get more comfortable and the feeling of unfamiliar weight moving with her is euphoric.

Forty minutes.

She had planned to wait for a full hour before moving on to the next stage of the test, but she’s grown excited with her apparent success and the excitement makes her impatient.

She gives the command to return the test chamber screens back to their default white, sits back up, stretches, revels in the feeling, places the ritual card on her lap, and pulls out a second card.  Time to try stacking changes.

Almost as soon as the second card’s stored ritual activates, Lacuna's face alights with the burning of all the lasers and electrified needles that failed to help her.  That should have - would have - helped her only if she weren’t cursed with a screwed up version of the regeneration that Eris has been blessed with.  She was expecting this though.  Maybe not quite this bad, but she was prepared.  She pushes through it.  Through the tears of pain and frustration.  Through to the other side to get what she wants.

She won’t scream.  

It’s just so unfair.  How come her best friend gets to have that ridiculous superhero goddess physique?  How come Ashan gets to be prettier than her and effortlessly pass as femme while being a man?

She won’t scream.

How come putting testosterone into a body will make facial hair start growing but taking it out doesn’t stop it?  How come she gets a body that seems to hate her as much as she hates it?

She won’t scream.

Doesn’t she deserve to be happy?

No.  Of course not.  

She’s always just been given things.  She doesn’t deserve anything.  Even now she’s trivializing other people’s struggles to make herself the victim.

She screams.

The incantation stops and all the stubble that’s grown back already since she shaved nineteen hours ago flutters down from her face like shed pine needles.  The pain is gone as quickly as it came, leaving behind only its all-to-vivid memory.

Hesitantly, Lacuna touches a hand to her cheek, flinches back from the mere unmet expectation of more pain, and then traces her fingers down her cheek, along her jaw, across her lip.  It’s smooth.  Smooth and wet from tears and snot.  She sniffs and a new round of tears begin to flow for a new reason.

Fearfully, she gingerly pokes her chest with one finger.  It’s still there.  The changes stacked without disrupting one another.  They’re persisting even after the ritual ended.

It worked.

It was worth it.

Lacuna smiles.

The nausea hits all at once, doubling her over and making her dry heave.  Her face begins itching all over and she can feel the hair regrowing unnaturally fast to replace what she just tortured herself to be rid of.  The burning returns even though she presses the card to her ear and she knows the incantation is fully silent, unlike what happened with the scepter.

The facial hair falls out again.

The itching starts.

The facial hair regrows again.

The burning starts.

This time her eyebrows and eyelashes go too.

The itching starts.

Her chest grows tighter, not just beneath her shirt, but internally.

It gets harder to breathe.

The burning starts.

All the hair on her face falls out.

The itching starts.

The hair regrows again.

Her chest gets tighter.

It gets harder to breathe.

Her vision swims.

No, wait, not her vision.

Her hands themselves are shifting, bubbling, sagging, losing cohesion.

She feels her bones shift inside her.

The burning starts.  She can feel it on her scalp now.

No!  Not there!  Anywhere but there!  It’s an unkempt mess that hasn’t seen a barber in years and it’s already shorter than it should be for the time it’s been without cutting it, but it’s still longer than she ever thought it would be.  

It’s hers! 

Please not there…

She throws both cards across the test chamber.

Everything snaps back into place, leaving Lacuna spasming and retching on the floor.  Surprisingly little comes out, and a distant part of her remembers that she forgot to eat dinner again.  Did she have lunch today?  No, wait, it’s yesterday by now.  Did she have lunch yesterday?  She can’t remember.

She doesn’t pass out.

Too bad.

When she finally pushes herself back up and wipes her mouth, the back of her hand brushes against a beard that’s grown longer than she’s ever let it get before.

Good thing she’s all out of tears at the moment.

 

*******

 

“Hey sis, you’re in here early today.  I know you practically live upstairs instead of the apartment these days, but if you weren’t so put together looking right now I’d think you’d pulled another all-nighter.”

“Eh, what can I say?  I made some good progress with what I was working on last night and was eager to get back to it.”