Vacant Throne

After slipping back down to her room a few days after the lesson with Tenebrael, Alyssa found a servant waiting for her. A servant with a plethora of requests for more meetings. All very formal looking, they were written out in flowery ink and signed in a big round hand. Unfortunately for about half of the meeting’s participants, she had more important things to be doing today. So she redirected the servant off to find Kasita while Alyssa worked.

She was getting close.

Instead of creating a pizza all at once, which she fully intended to do some day, she had decided to simplify everything by starting with the component pieces.

And, in her opinion, she was getting quite good at it.

Alyssa knew that it was just a research problem. She wasn’t afraid of eating magically conjured food. That would be ridiculous. Sure, she had spent a great deal of time researching exactly what food was in the most basic sense of the term and had come to understand quite a bit about how people processed the food they ate, but that was just a side note to identifying the properties of plant-based life. Sure, she probably didn’t need to figure out the effect of cell walls on white flour and the mere term of ‘popped endosperm’ had put her off wheat-based products for a good full day until she realized that she was being silly, but all that research had helped to progress her to where she was today.

Namely, waving a hand to create a flat dough. The base for all pizza, whether that be vegetable, fruit, or regular pepperoni. It looked like dough. Felt like dough—specifically, dough that had been kneaded and allowed time to rise. She hadn’t actually tasted it yet. She was planning on it. A servant had taken a small sample to the kitchens to be baked, which she was currently waiting on. For some reason, creating it already cooked was posing problems to her. Much like creating pizza in general, she assumed that this was merely a lack of experience and research and would be resolved sooner or later after a bit of effort.

But for now, she wanted to switch topics to something new. Her task was to get the tomato sauce working.

Arrayed out on the desk in her room was a number of ruby red orbs. Tomatoes. Six of them. Six successes. She had deleted far more failures than she cared to count. After slicing the first open and finding its insides to be that nasty primordial goop, she was quite glad that she hadn’t simply bitten into it as she had been tempted to do.

Primordial goo didn’t seem to hurt her when she touched it, but there was no telling what would happen if she actually ate it.

Creating a fruit knife, Alyssa started slicing into the tomatoes. She moved on to the second one that she created. The moment she punctured the skin, sticky green goop started leaking. Although a tomatoes insides were often similar, this was obviously not what was supposed to be inside a tomato.

Alyssa destroyed it and the knife immediately.

The next tomato was much the same. Little more than a water balloon filled with primordial ooze.

The fourth tomato actually had flesh inside. And seeds. A partial success, though she supposed she hadn’t thoroughly investigated the first two for seeds. However, between the seeds and flesh was more primordial goop. Or maybe the tomato was just rotten. It was a bit hard to tell.

The fifth one was even harder to decide. It looked normal. It smelled normal. She still wasn’t willing to lick it, however. Just to be on the safe side. Instead, she destroyed it.

But before she could slice into the final tomato, someone knocked at her room door. Alyssa did a quick check through her soul sight, just in case—she really didn’t want to deal with Decorous or anyone else from the meeting—but found a familiar soul on the other side. Well, Decorous would have been familiar as well, but…

“Irulon?” Alyssa said, opening the door without further hesitation.

“Need you look so surprised? We are friends and companions, are we not?”

“You normally send a servant if you want to talk and I have to go all the way up to your room.”

“Ah. Yes. But today, Companion is… occupying my room for a variety of reasons.”

“Do I want to know?”

“I doubt it.”

“Mhmm…” Stepping aside, Alyssa allowed Irulon entry to her room. It was, as far as she could remember, the first time the princess actually came down to visit. As Alyssa had said, normally Tess or another servant fetched her.

Irulon took a moment to look around. Just a moment. The room wasn’t large. Basically just the bed and desk. Alyssa didn’t even have a bookshelf. She did stop and stare at the last remaining tomato. However, when she started to reach for it, Alyssa grabbed her hand.

“I don’t know that it is ready for consumption.”

“This is a tomato?”

“You know of them?” Alyssa asked, genuinely surprised. She wasn’t sure if tomatoes simply didn’t exist in Nod or if it was just this region, but nobody had actually tried a tomato outside Teneville as far as she knew. Though, that probably explained it. “Teneville,” she said before Irulon could comment. “They weren’t grown when we visited, were they?”

“They were. You abandoned the town immediately after the statue construction, or you would be aware of that.”

“Ah.” Alyssa shrugged. She had been a bit out of it at the time, knowing how much attention would have been on her. So she had gone home. Or to her house? Could it really be called her home at this point? Either way… “Then you’ve eaten one before?”

“Indeed. Quite a strange taste. Sweet yet somewhat sour, even a bit bitter. Hard to describe.”

“Then…” Pulling out another knife, Alyssa cut the tomato in two. It looked normal. But Irulon with her extreme powers of observation… “Does this look like what you ate?”

“You don’t know? It is fruit from your world, is it not?”

“It has been a long time since I had a tomato and I don’t have perfect memory.”

“Hm.” Irulon leaned forward, first visually inspecting the tomato and then even going so far as to smell it like she was some kind of hellhound. “It is normal as far as I can tell.”

That was about as good of a review as Alyssa was likely to receive. A part of her wanted to wait until she could talk to Tenebrael and get the angel’s opinion on whether or not these would be safe to eat… but…

Alyssa had told Tenebrael that she would be ready in a week. Calling her up now to have every step babysat would be… embarrassing. Beyond embarrassing. But with Irulon saying everything was fine with the tomato, Alyssa picked it up. She took a breath, staring just a moment before biting down into it.

It tasted… normal. The taste of tomatoes was hard to describe, as Irulon had said, but Alyssa had tasted enough in her life to know what the baseline should be. This certainly met that baseline. She didn’t detect any funny or out of place tastes to it either. It was a success.

A success for just the tomato.

Tomato sauce made for pizza had a whole bunch more stuff in it. Garlic, onion, salt, basil, red pepper, and a million other things. She could probably skip out on a lot of those things and still have something edible for an end product, but…

With creating a human body, it had gotten much easier once she got it the first time. Even the different organs, all of which were incredibly different in structure and form, came together almost naturally once she had created the first one. So, with a successful tomato, perhaps a red pepper wouldn’t be that difficult to create either. Then she could work on mixing it all together, creating the tomato paste all at once.

There were sure to be a number of failures. Even some failures that looked like successes, like some of those tomato attempts. It might be prudent to catch a few rats and make them eat some primordial goo just to see if it had any harmful effects when consumed. In fact… Alyssa made a mental note to send a Message to Fela as soon as Irulon left.

She still wasn’t quite sure how to cook something. Figuring out how to make water that was already hot had taken some effort. Alyssa imagined creating something cooked would be similar. With two days already having gone by since Tenebrael’s little challenge… she was starting to wonder if she had enough time to figure it all out.

Especially because, although Irulon was tasting the other half of the tomato now, it was doubtful that the princess had stopped by for a culinary chat.

“Was there something you stopped by for?” Alyssa asked, setting the tomato down.

Wiping up a bit of tomato juice near the corner of her mouth with the knuckle of her thumb, Irulon nodded. “Indeed. I had a thought. A way to simplify a mystic circle in motion, changing and altering the pattern as needed. I wished to run the idea past you to see if you could come up with any flaws or errors.”

“You wanted to run it by me? Me? I barely know anything about spell crafting.”

“It isn’t so much the spell crafting that I want your observations on, but the method I have chosen to use. It is something inspired by your world, after all.”

“Really?”

Reaching into the folds of her clothes, Irulon pulled out a small bronze box. One end had a protrusion with a thin glass lens. The other looked like a series of slots, all roughly the size of a spell card. She set it down on the desk—Alyssa quickly destroyed the remnants of the tomatoes to keep the surface clean—and pulled out a series of spell cards. Most looked basically the same. She was pretty sure a few of them were the same as each other.

“The general goal with this is to create many small changes that will propagate out into larger changes. I found this easiest to accomplish by creating a card with the initial form of the spell and a second card with the end result. Then I draw out step-by-step changes that would be required to get from the first card to the last card.” As Irulon spoke, she slotted the cards into the box’s slots one by one. Now that Alyssa was actually looking, they were all different. Barely. There were fifteen slots and fifteen cards. “It is a time consuming process, but it shows promise in these early tests. Best of all, it does not consume the cards as a regular spell casting does. The box itself contains etchings that read each card and display the result via this lens, drawing it out using focused beams of light. This is the main point of inspiration. Both the way the spell is animated as well as the drawing device.”

“You’ve… made a magical projector?”

“Ah. I suppose that would be a good term for it.”

“We have similar devices that convert electrical signals into light. You should probably ask Jason if you want a more in-depth dissertation on how they work.”

“Hm. I’ll make a note. But this was modeled after those green lights that were in the… music video, you called it.”

“Oh, this is more of a laser show then?”

“Why don’t I just turn it on and you can see the result without me having to explain.”

Taking out another spell card, Irulon slotted it into a side panel that folded out. “This is the only card I have to redraw with this system,” she said as she closed the panel. There was a small hole that Alyssa hadn’t noticed before the card was in—the metal box was all the same bronze material and the panel was thin enough that it didn’t make a big divot. “I have to keep my finger on it, then… Moving Light.”

The lens came to life. Irulon likening it to a laser pointer had definitely been accurate. It looked like it came straight from a concert. Though concerts tended to use green laser pointers. Sometimes blue. Given Tenebrael’s usual color, Alyssa would have expected for the beam to be black, somehow, but it wasn’t. It was a brilliant pure white. Not quite a laser, but more like a really powerful light shining in a specific pattern.

The pattern shining on the wall was the same that Alyssa had seen on the cards earlier. All the cards. It seemed to switch between them fast enough that it looked like a smooth animation. A lot smoother than she would have expected from the fact that it was projecting individual cards. It was simple. Basically just some of the symbols of the mystic circle spinning. A far cry from when Alyssa actually used divine magic to manifest miracles. But much closer than static cards.

“Drawbacks:” Irulon said after watching the looping animation for a minute. “It must have a wall to project onto. This makes the device incompatible with fieldwork. Secondly, it is extremely limited as it is. This is one of the more complex animations that I have created. Pushing the box’s limits even with just this. It can theoretically be scaled up to an unlimited number of spell cards, but as cards occupy a physical space, it will become quite a large device if I wish to replicate even the most basic of your creation miracles. Lastly… it is inconsistent.”

“Inconsistent? As in spell casting-wise? I thought you needed special ink and… wait, you can cast an animated spell circle like that?” The former might be surprising to someone who worked at the Observatorium, but the latter would surprise anyone, Alyssa assumed.

“Not right.”

“Not right? Which part?”

As Alyssa asked, Irulon started removing the cards from the back of the device. One by one, she removed them all, setting them to the side. The animation on the wall became far more choppy with it snapping from the last image to one of the ones part way through. But that wasn’t a concern soon enough. Irulon left the final card right at the very bottom of the device. With that one still in place, she stepped to the side, moving to reach her hand to the wall. She rested her fingers on the brick, hovering just above where she would start to cast shadows on the pattern.

“Window Jall,” she said.

The wall exploded in a smattering of glass shards. Each unfolded from the last, leaving no seams at the folds. The facets continued to spread across the wall like a flower blooming. It stopped with the smooth mirrored surface covered a two-foot diameter circle. There was a brief moment where Alyssa could see herself, the little box, Irulon, and the rest of her room.

It was quickly replaced by a view of Earth. And it was definitely Earth. She could see Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, India, and maybe a sliver of Africa over on the side. The view was from somewhere out in space, like what a satellite might be able to photograph. Half was the night-side of the planet too, which meant that she could see all the electric lights of modern civilization highlighting cities and the veins of society.

“Interesting,” Irulon said with a hum. “Haven’t seen this perspective before. Nine times out of ten, we get either pure darkness—presumably somewhere beneath the surface of the oceans—or a view of endless water. This is the first time I’ve seen the view from this far away from the surface. I’ll have to call Companion down. She’ll want to see this with her own eyes.”

“It’s beautiful… How long will it last?”

“Not long. Spells cast in this manner tend to be… unstable. It is extremely useful in that I don’t have to draw out a complicated card every time I want to do this—the light spell is far simpler than this window spell—but I am working to make it last longer.”

“That’s… too bad.” Having a little porthole back home would have been nice to keep around. Especially with the current view. An empty ocean might have been neat, but couldn’t compare to a view from space. Although… Alyssa thought, stomach feeling a little tingly all of a sudden. It was a bit too high to trigger any fear of heights, paradoxically enough, but there was another concern. “When you said unstable… this isn’t going to collapse and create a portal or anything, is it? Because there is nothing on the other side of that window. If it breaks, all the air here will be sucked in. Us along with it.”

“That would be extremely improbable. All other tests have simply faded away as the magic in the spell wanes.”

“Good.” Alyssa let out a small breath. A little more relaxed, she got a little closer, peering through the porthole. “I wonder if you can see the space station at all…” The perspective was probably too far away. Pictures she had seen from the space station all looked much closer to Earth. You couldn’t even see the entire planet in any of them, unlike the view right now.

“Space station?”

“Scientists from my world launched rockets up into space and built a small building up there, just floating like the moon.” Alyssa wasn’t sure how much Irulon knew about space—or anyone from this world knew, for that matter. She was a little surprised that Irulon didn’t seem surprised to find a spherical planet. The view seemed locked in place. As such, it was obviously rotating. Irulon was attentive enough that she wouldn’t have missed that.

Then again, she was pretty sure that ancient Greeks and Romans had figured out the Earth was round back at the dawn of history, so maybe something similar had occurred here.

“I’ll show you a few things on my phone later,” Alyssa said, wondering what Irulon might think about the space station. “First… why Jall? What does that mean?”

“Nonsense. I simply haven’t refined the spell yet. Its activation phrase will eventually be Window Earth, or something close to that.”

“And all these cards?” Alyssa said, waving to the fourteen spell cards that had been pulled from the box.

“Simply created for proof of concept of an animated spell. None of them will function properly due to the minor differences from the original.”

“Ah… so you haven’t actually cast an animated spell yet?”

“None exist,” Irulon said. She rotated the box to face the wall and reinserted the spell cards. She had to pull out a fresh light spell to get it running again—apparently the activation of the projected spell shut off the light. “This is an entirely new branch of casting spells. I truly do not know if it will work at all. However, just this much is already enough to get my name in history books. Imagine the effort it will save if I can further reduce the complexity of the light spell. It won’t be useful in combat, but it will save so much time in more domestic tasks.”

“You aren’t satisfied with just that, are you.” It wasn’t really a question. Alyssa knew the answer even before Irulon put on a wide grin.

“Of course not.”

Alyssa nodded. No. Irulon was ambition personified. If she wasn’t known as the greatest arcanist of all time, why even bother? Alyssa had different goals, but now… seeing Irulon excited and engaged in her new form of spell casting…

A pizza might not sound as glamorous as a revolution in understanding magic, but Tenebrael would be expecting a pizza nonetheless. And after she had proved to Tenebrael that she could do the work and could work the magic, her own future might be far more within her grasp than it seemed.

She had a lot of work to do.