exploratory kidnapping

[alicornucopia]

In this room are two women, one gray and sixty years old, one just thirty and red-haired, both wearing elaborate outfits. The younger casts a spell.

In this room is now also a third person. (On whom the elder woman promptly also casts a spell, which she had at the ready.)

Comments

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not completely sure. It seems to be harder for people who aren't me to get ialdae to do things."

[alicornucopia]

"Why?"

[missnicegirl]

"It's probably related to the fact that as far as I know I'm the first person who ever got ialdae to do things. Maybe it's very hard for most people and I'm just especially good at it. You could try studying my lie detection and then seeing if you can copy it - you can see it, right?"

The fact that it's on Matilda makes it a little hard to pick out against the glare, but it's perfectly legible once identified. It's a very tidy little thing, surprisingly elegant for the complexity of its results; rather than having a rigidly defined structure for sorting statements by truth value, it rides on a fuzzy conceptual understanding of what truth means and evaluates statements from both the speaker's and listener's perspective to identify mismatches. The display method is similar to ialdic magic-seeing, but applied to an imaginary written version of spoken statements, never directly interfacing with one's visual field.

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo peers at it. "Sort of hard to see versus the backdrop of Look At All This Ialdae - say, how is this going to react if someone speaks unclearly and you can't quite hear what they said?"

[missnicegirl]

"It doesn't give me information about things I can't hear... but for things I only sort of hear, I think it would probably tell me I didn't hear it right," she muses.

[alicornucopia]

"Oh, nice, I don't think there's a wizarding lie detection invented that'll handle that by itself. Hmmm -" Kaylo attempts to copy the spell. "What I'm wondering is what traits being good at ialdae correlates with. Being a good wizard is about - up to a point, anyway - good fine motor control and diction, and then memory, especially working memory, and at the upper levels conceptual intelligence."

[missnicegirl]

"Well, I am very smart. But I don't know if that's why I'm so good at ialdae or if it's just a coincidence."

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo blinks at the statement as it appears under his copied lie detection. "You know, this could be adapted to convey a lot of extra nuance, sort of like wolfrider backchannel but on top of a functional verbal vocabulary and grammar - off topic - anyway - okay, I am also very smart, do I seem or look better at it than less smart people who've also caught the stuff?"

[missnicegirl]

"Well, you're not as far out of range for dragons as I am for humans, when it comes to how fast you generate ialdae and how much you carry around. I'm out of range for any species on those. I can't directly see a parameter for how good you are at teaching it things... but that doesn't mean there isn't one, it just means ialdae hasn't learned how to see it yet, probably because it isn't as obvious. And I don't think I've seen you do enough ialdae to know how good you are at it without just magically seeing the answer. You did copy my lie detection really fast..."

[alicornucopia]

"All right, so I should invent something. How about a ward? Heck, if I can do one that will keep out ialdic teleporters it might be worth deanonymizing to collect a trillion aaberik for re-warding the entire nation of Esmaar."

[missnicegirl]

"Sure."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. Let's go out of the building, someone might find it inconvenient to have randomly warded locations inside the school, but first -" Kaylo puts back the lie detection book and collects and checks out a book entitled Wards For All Volumes.

[missnicegirl]

"Do I get to learn all about wizard wards? I want to learn all about wizard wards!"

[alicornucopia]

"Sure, why not? But figuring out the practical problem of 'how to not have Linnipese soldiers ialdically teleporting into Daasen after declaring war' should probably get handled first. I don't expect to make it to a couple millennia without anybody trying to conquer wherever I happen to be living at the time, but if somebody has to I'd rather it was, oh, an Oridaanlan coalition or Mekand or something, not Linnip. Selfish reasons. So I'm going to try to make an ialdic ward that is to wizard wards in general as your lie detection is to wizard lie detections."

[missnicegirl]

"Selfish reasons because of how they are wrong about boys?" she guesses.

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. Oridaan would suck for some people, Mekand would suck for some people, but they wouldn't suck for me as much."

[missnicegirl]

"Well, let's see about making some very clever wards and then maybe Esmaar won't have to be conquered by anyone."

[alicornucopia]

"Excellent. All in favor." Kaylo flips through his book as they head out to a non-building part of campus. Eventually he paces out a square on the lawn, closes his eyes -

- and wards it.

[missnicegirl]

Matilda inspects the ward. She tries to teleport in. She fails.

She inspects the ward some more. It's very neat and elegant, but it doesn't look very... sturdy.

She tries the teleport again, and this time she puts effort into it.

The ward shatters, Matilda lands inside, and the power she used to break it spills everywhere amid the dissipating fragments of the ward itself.

"I think," she observes, "that ialdic warding might need to work on different principles. I don't get the impression that it's possible to do that to a wizard ward. Not that Annei or Sarsia could have done it to yours, but there's at least one dragon living in Linnip."

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo flinches when his ward snaps. "Yyyyeah. I'm not actually sure it's impossible in principle to brute-force a wizard ward with more wizardry, but there's a ceiling on naturally occurring channeling capacities, so this never comes up, nobody who exists can in fact do it. Unless ialdae can increase CC. Which would be revolutionary as all get out. I suspect there are no dragons in the Linnipese military - this would be extremely unexpected for a few reasons - but they might be able to bribe one. What if I did a few layers? It'd take me longer - less effective for blanketing the entire country, that's for sure - but would it hold up better?"

[missnicegirl]

"You could try it," she says. "Or, hmm - you could design the structure so that you can add more power into it afterward? And then you and I and maybe some other high-output ialders who live in Esmaar could sit around powering the wards for a few angles a day, or however much time we can spare, for a while. And I wonder if it's possible to design a ward to pick up spilled ialdae within its area of focus, then you wouldn't even have to actively feed it and it would just sit around getting stronger all the time..."

[alicornucopia]

"The recycling idea's got definite potential, although we'd have to be sure that wouldn't introduce a vulnerability - anything that can feed into the spell might be able to damage it if approached maliciously. How much spilled ialdae is there around, anyway? This stuff needs units..."

[missnicegirl]

"I don't know how to measure it very precisely. But I'm spilling a bunch all the time, and so are all the ialdic dragons. I'm not sure where it all goes."

[alicornucopia]

"Well, that seems some combination of wasteful and dangerous, let's find out," says Kaylo.

[missnicegirl]

"Yes..."

She ponders this, and the problem of how to safely pick up spilled ialdae.

"We could try designing a spell that picks up spilled ialdae and just holds onto it and doesn't do anything else, to test whether a spell can be messed with that way and see how much there is within reach," she suggests.