There were a few preparations to make before returning to Mount Agony, but mostly Midnight and I kept our activity light for the intervening ti. The chances of Grand Mage Wrickle attacking us were extrely low, in my opinion, but that wasn't the only potential threat. So local creatures could co for us- maybe so fire elentals that didn't get Ignis' ssage, or so sort of dragon or salamander moving into the neighborhood. Maybe the volcano would erupt, though it seed to be constantly oozing lava anyway.
There was also a decent chance soone would co to try to kill Wrickle. I presud she would try to hide her travels, but she might not be the best. There were archmages above her, after all. Though I wasn't sure if they were actually stronger without testing them sohow. Unfortunately, that would have given away far too much about myself.
Midnight and I went in with Energy Ward already active. Gate took us right to a nice high point we had rembered, a little bit away from the open caldera at the peak and away from any pesky lava flows. I figured Wrickle would be fairly precise, so we were only fifteen minutes early to the seventy hour appointnt. It wasn't a great place to hang out, and arriving too early could cause other problems.
We had alarms ready for the actual seventy hour ti, so we could start looking for Wrickle. However, they were pretty unnecessary as I felt her arrival. I was quite familiar with how magic distorted space. I wouldn't have Master Spatial Magic if I didn't… probably. It was possible that soone with poor senses could still manage to learn over ti.
She wasn't far, just a quick jog around so boulders and stuff.
As I saw her, I was reminded that she was short. Like, really short. Being a goblin wasn't a great start to begin with, and her age probably didn't help. I might have also gotten taller again… though not significantly.
It was probably just the angles involved. She was standing on a slope, leaning into it.
"Sorry it took us a mont," I said. "We were just over there," I gestured.
She nodded. "I know. Anyone that's not magically dull would be able to sense you walking up. You should work on that."
"... I wasn't trying to hide from you," I pointed out. "Is it that important to hide?"
"Absolutely," Wrickle said. "Especially if you were eting the archmages. They were already aware your level was decently high, but they'd probably be concerned that you've grown… five levels since last ti."
Midnight leaned forward. "It's been so ti, though."
Wrickle shook her head. "No it hasn't. Those old coots wouldn't grow that many levels in a decade."
I shrugged. "That's probably because they're already high level." I looked around. "Should we find sowhere more comfortable to chat?"
"No," Wrickle said. "We should make sowhere more comfortable."
"Ah," I nodded. "I actually have a spell that might help."
I was thinking about how I could fit Shelter to a sloped area, I'd probably have to leave out so parts of it to create a proper foundation and affix it to the edge of the volcano. But Wrickle was already gathering mana.
I nearly did the sa in response. Usually people who were using their powers were attacking , either in training or out in the city. However, I couldn't sense any hostility. No, I trusted Wrickle, at least as far as I could throw her. She was pretty small, so it wasn't a negligible distance. Plus with the slope…
Speaking of the slope, her magic went right into it. And then… so of it was gone.
I blinked a few tis. "Hmm. That was…"
"Whoa," Midnight said. "How did that happen? It looks like you used a level editor."
I didn't quite get Midnight's comnt, but it was level now. Whatever Wrickle had done involved cutting out a flat chunk of the mountainside. Or maybe a cube, since the flat horizontal plane intersected with vertical cutouts. If I understood correctly, it had been two or three separate magical phenona in quick succession. At so point, she teleported away part of the dirt and stone.
I frowned. "How did you teleport just part of an object?" I asked. "Doesn't it require taking sothing whole?"
"Simple," she said. "I just separated the space first. Then it wasn't part of the mountain."
I touched one of my tusks, sowhat concerned about the possibilities. Could that sever people? Well, there was so innate magic resistance people had to things happening to or inside their body. It could usually be overco with sufficient power, though. Maybe Wrickle had used that much.
She wandered into the nice area, about ten feet on a side. A decently sized little cutout. A small room for soone my size, but luxurious for her. Then she pulled out a chair and sat down- providing two more for us. A larger one for myself, and one closer to a stool for Midnight.
Ah, she beat to it. Well, I could at least show her so of what I learned. If I waited too long she'd ruin all of my preparations.
First, I pulled out a table- complete with a fancy looking but still technically cheap tablecloth. Then I took out the tea and snacks I had prepared.
Ever since she had shown that trick, I'd really wanted to do it. The tea wasn't quite as hot as I wanted it to be- complete stasis was difficult- but it was the single casting to bring everything out that felt good. I wasn't just limited to where I was touching.
"Not bad," she said, dropping several sugar cubes into a cup then pouring tea into it. "What's all this?" she asked, gesturing.
"Oh, various snacks," I said. "Like the pictures." I tugged on the sides of a package to open a bag of cookies. Maybe I should have gone to a proper bakery, but I didn't realize I wanted to do this until shortly before coming, so I got most of the things from a supermarket during the last couple hours before we showed up. I was glad she had provided sowhere flatter, but I could have managed with a few spots nearby.
She nodded, taking one of the cookies as I poured them out onto a tray. "You've certainly ended up in a strange world. And you've gotten very good at Spatial Magic."
I nodded. "Can we speak freely here?" I asked.
"Shouldn't be any spies on top of a volcano," she said. "And nobody knows I'm here. It's ti for my mid afternoon nap. That one cos before my late afternoon nap, you know."
The little goblin lady was old and wrinkled. Certainly, at her age she might need a lot of rest. On the other hand, I had the feeling that she got up to a lot more shenanigans than people expected during her 'naps'. I didn't have any proof beyond just now, though.
"So…" Midnight asked after taking a few bites of tuna and wolfing down so mini sausages, "Why is it that you can't co to Earth?"
"Well obviously I'm part of the planar barrier," Wrickle said, as if we should already know.
I looked her over closely, even using magic… and I couldn't tell. I didn't know why she would lie, though. "Tell whoever set that up they were super late," I comnted. "Also that it's not really solving the problem."
She shrugged. "And what good would that do? Providing fools correct information doesn't help anything."
How much information we should share had been carefully discussed. If it was up to , I would tell Wrickle quite a few things that might be unnecessary… and leave out a few things that certain groups might want to ntion. New Bay was kind of concerned about a specific spatial distortion vaguely nearby- on a planetary scale- so I figured that should be brought up. Even if I kind of wanted to use it to smuggle people or other stuff.
"Did you know there's a spatial tear that the barrier might not cover?"
Wrickle raised an eyebrow. "Just one?"
I shrugged. "I've only seen one. The others are probably in a supervillain's lairs." I had a lot of questions. "Did you agree to be part of the barrier? What does that really an?"
"I did agree," Wrickle said. "In my case, I just wanted to make sure it was stable so that nobody broke spaceti."
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Midnight's ears perked up. "You know about spaceti?" Midnight asked. "Not just as separate spatial and ti magic?"
She shrugged. "I wouldn't be much of a master if I couldn't see the connection. What's a supervillain? Like a lich?"
She could probably read a lot from my face. "Do you really not know that much?"
"I don't have all the information," the goblin comnted. "Even with my connections. It's not like I'm an archmage."
"I'd bet that many of them are less inford than you," I said. "Anyway, supervillains are villains with superpowers." I turned to Midnight. "How would you explain superpowers?"
"Abilities that aren't tied to the class system but are derived from different sources, so of which aren't magical at all," Midnight summarized. "So are very similar, so are unique. Generally, they have strong capabilities in a narrow field."
"Interesting," she said. "I don't know how many people knew that."
Sir Kalman knew. And many mbers of the Order of the Lion. I was impressed that they'd kept the secret so well with their numbers. Ethus must be keeping secrets as well. Probably only Spellshot and a few others really knew.
"Anyway," I continued, "Doctor Doomsday is the one causing most of the trouble. His power…" I tilted my head. "Is kind of like being smart, but not really. Similar to an artificer, if you know what those are. He kind of makes things that do stuff that's not possible. In many cases, the powers of tech supers bridge the gap between functionality and intention."
Wrickle nodded as she sipped her hot sugar. I wondered if the tea was bad. I couldn't rember how she'd looked the first ti, with various other mages around. "Sounds like a complicated situation. And I don't imagine this Doctor Doomsday is a nice fellow with a moniker like that."
"He's not," I said. "Anyway, he was previously recruiting a whole ton of people from this world and ripping open portals. He's probably still doing so of that."
Wrickle nodded. "Who else with him?"
"Just him, at first. He's got so people with class powers now, but I doubt they're involved with the portal stuff," I said. "He kind of had that handled already."
For just a mont, Wrickle's calm smile faltered. "Is that so? He does all this alone?"
Midnight confird it. "He's one of the top rated threats on Earth for a reason. His abilities don't seem to be faltering, and he's been getting his hands on new devices all the ti."
"Does that matter?" Wrickle asked. "If this doctor can just… make things work."
"He can replicate actual, functional technology more easily," Midnight said. "And then perhaps make it do things beyond what is normally possible."
"Wow," Wrickle said. "Sounds like a huge problem. Good luck with that. Anyway, congratulations on your mastery of Spatial Magic. You know everything there is to know about the subject."
"That seems unlikely," I said. "If nothing else, I can always get better at it. But…" was she saying there was a higher category of mastery? Should I even ask? By the ti I thought about the potential consequences, I had already asked.
"A higher category, huh?" Wrickle asked, opening a different bag of cookies and crunching down on the coconut topped chocolate fellows, "Let ask you this, what is the highest rank for a spell?"
"20," I said. "Everyone knows that."
Wrickle nodded. "Like Gate. It's the strongest spell you've ever cast, right?"
"Well…" I couldn't exactly say that. No, I was pretty sure I'd technically cast a stronger Grease spell. "Not really? It's very strong. And it really might be the strongest, but I couldn't guarantee that."
"Another question," Wrickle asked. "What's the biggest number?"
"There isn't one," Midnight answered quickly. He lapped at so tea. I was pretty sure he'd use a little bit of magic to cool it first. "Even if you construct a number, you can always construct one a digit higher, or an order of magnitude, or… well, it's possible to get far crazier."
I rembered our first eting. "Are you saying there are more secret spells of a higher rank?"
"No," Wrickle said, shaking her head. "For that to be true, we would need many people capable of casting such spells. Mastery alone isn't sufficient."
I'd been trying to figure out what level she might be, since she so closely determined my chance since our last eting. Even now, I couldn't figure it out. Maybe I just needed more years of experience, but I'm sure she was also hiding it to so extent. The one thing I was certain of was that she was at least level 60, simply because of the magical combination she had used to carve out the flat section of ground we were on. If she had done it more slowly I wouldn't have a clue, but at that speed it was close enough to being a single spell with multiple phases. Fatigue limit would be a factor.
Was that what Zentha Qitris had done? If she could predict enough of the future to know what she needed to do, sequentially casting a number of spells as one larger spell that didn't have the ti lag between spells… still wasn't sufficient. But it might help. She was also clearly faster at mana manipulation.
"What's the most mana you can use in a spell?" I asked Wrickle.
She looked dead in the eyes. "You can't use more mana than the rank of a spell. It's a hard limit."
Nobody believed her. She certainly didn't believe her, and Midnight and I already knew that wasn't true. But maybe she wasn't comfortable admitting it, even here.
"Right," I said. "Can't believe I forgot sothing like that." I shrugged. "Oh well. At least I can keep getting upgrades."
"That you can," Wrickle agreed. "There's no limit to numbers. Well, there are practical limits. But if we're talking purely about numbers, they can go as far as you want." She suddenly transitioned as she finished off her second cup of sugar tea. Or maybe it was her third. "What are your plans?"
"... For what?" I asked.
"Today, tomorrow, the future."
"Training," I said. "I'd like to gain a broader understanding of how non-mages interact with class powers to help so others I know. Not that I'm at the limit of understanding how mages work. I t so that use an entirely different thod to manipulate magic, you know."
"In another world?" Wrickle asked. "Yes, that's to be expected. After all, not everyone has a class."
The way she said that…
"What is a class?"
She took so ti to ponder that. "A necessary limitation so that we don't kill ourselves." She narrowed her eyes, "It's already far too late for you to change anything about it."
"Do you an… ? Or the world?"
"Either," she said. "You would have to completely rebuild your magical flow with your own magic. And regardless of what else I might think about limitations, classes are far more beneficial than not having them."
Midnight figured out his first question before I did. "What would happen without them?"
Wrickle shrugged, "Barbarians would summon fire inside their muscles or warriors would slice their own hands off. Assuming anyone could figure out how to use mana to begin with. Most people would just be powerless."
"Like Earth, then," I said. "I agree that wouldn't be the best." I turned to Midnight. "That sounds like a good reason for power exclusivity."
Midnight nodded. "Yes, people are aligned with a certain sort of supernatural force. Locked in on so thod of tapping into things. It makes sense that it's the sa with classes."
Fully investigating power exclusivity would probably require a very specific kind of ta-power to observe in detail how people's powers worked, but this explanation fit with the various speculations people had. It wasn't actually new information, but it was nice to see that multiple worlds agreed. I wondered what the Many-Colored might have to say about… classes. Though I supposed the way they controlled mana might provide the necessary safeguards for survival without a fundantal change to their magical structure.
I had so many ideas.
Midnight nudged . "You're thinking about sothing weird now, aren't you?"
I shrugged. "Just so thoughts for unethical experints I won't do."
He sighed. "Like what?"
"Seeing if soone from this world who hasn't chosen a class could get a power. But that's too unlikely."
"Eh," Midnight said. "I guess that's kinda unethical if you believe everyone should have powers. But you also have ways to guarantee other powers, right?"
I thought about that for a mont. "I guess they could beco a magical girl. If they hadn't chosen a class for so reason, maybe they were unsatisfied with the options. Though getting kinda random powers might not be better."
I didn't actually think Humuruns provided random powers, but they couldn't guarantee how they would manifest in a person before seeing the results. Just a general feel. So not really random, but not entirely predictable like a class.
Wrickle set down her cup pointedly. "Napti is about to be over." She reached out for the table, leaving behind a pile of books that completely hid her from my sight. It was only five moderately thick tos, though. She was pretty short. "You can have these. Don't abuse your knowledge."
"What would you consider-"
"Just don't try to take over the world or sothing dumb," Wrickle said. "Can I have these?" she gestured to the rest of the snacks.
"Sure," I said. "But the plastic wrappers won't decay."
"Neat," she said. Then a few monts later, she was gone- with the rest of the snacks.
I was going to suggest how to dispose of them, but I supposed a handful in an entire dinsion wouldn't be too worrying. She could always toss them into the sun or just into space.
I looked over at the books. "I feel like we've learned a lot and also very little today."
Midnight nodded. "Sa. Hopefully there's sothing useful in those tos."
I hit my fist into my palm. "Ah, dangit. I didn't get to give her a copy of my book."
Maybe I could teleport it to her sohow. Could I use Gift cross-dinsionally? Probably better to test it with soone else first. Oh, maybe Santa could- no wait, he only delivered on Earth, I think. He'd given so stuff that was from outside Earth, but it wasn't the sa to do it in reverse.
Well, I'm sure Wrickle would have plenty of corrections for about mastery anyway. Maybe I could do another editing pass before showing it to her… but editing was so boring.
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