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

[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.

[alicornucopia]

"Or we could see if we can map it, and compare that with where you've been doing ialdae," suggests Kaylo.

[missnicegirl]

"That works too. How would you map it?"

[alicornucopia]

"Depends, have you been on the other side of the planet?"

[missnicegirl]

"Yes, I cured a bunch of shrens there. There's probably lots of spilled ialdae."

[alicornucopia]

"Okay. Good for you on that one, by the by. In that case I'm inclined to make an ialdic illusion of the entire planet in midair that highlights where there's any spilled - say in yellow, with the map otherwise grayscale."

[missnicegirl]

"That sounds like it should work."

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo contemplates for a few ticks, and then: bam. Planet. It's square.

[missnicegirl]

And covered in thin yellow fog, with denser areas in some places - partly faded blobs on the bottom of the world and in shren houses where shrens have been cured; trails where high-output ialders have passed; bright dots where high-output ialders currently are. Matilda studies it.

[alicornucopia]

"So it spreads out pretty fast," says Kaylo. "I can't think of any reason anyone would be doing ialdae in the Taavlas Isles, say, or on the other side of the world in the ocean. How long ago were you or some other ialder in these spotted places?"

[missnicegirl]

"Well, let's see - that's where we are right now, isn't it?" She points to the brightest dot. "And I think that must be Terali's building," a blob in Linnip that has a particularly even gradient as it fades into its surroundings. "I'm there pretty regularly. I don't think this map shows Annei or Sarsia at all, I think you have to spill at least as much as a dragon to show up... I'm pretty sure that spot on the bottom is where I cured Jensal. I spilled a lot of ialdae there a few weeks ago, and then there was some more ialdae spilled there a few more times and then it stopped - see how there's that wide circle that's almost faded into the background, and then a smaller circle inside it?"

[alicornucopia]

"Yep. Okay, so there's plenty of it lying around. I'll make a recycler-ward as proof of concept and see if it sucks up enough to make a difference - if a country full of wards would eat up all the stray ialdae between them and then have nothing left it probably makes more sense to actively feed them even though that's more labor intensive." He paces out a square again, hmmming.

[missnicegirl]

The recycler-ward sucks up enough stray ialdae to make their dot on the map noticeably dimmer after a tick or so. After two ticks, when its brightness in magic-sight is comparable to Kaylo's, it begins to actually visibly glow.

"Oh, hmm. Do we want our wards to glow? Sometimes ialdae does that and I'm not quite sure how to make it stop."

[alicornucopia]

"Better if they don't glow. In a state of war they'd have to be on all the time and they'd keep people up at night and confuse wildlife and such. It's better than getting invaded but not ideal." Kaylo peers at the ward.

[missnicegirl]

"I'll try to cast one that doesn't," says Matilda. She makes a recycler-ward next to Kaylo's and then spills a bunch of ialdae on them both. Hers declines to glow even with every bit as much power as Kaylo's. "Well, that seems to have worked, but I don't know if it just has a higher glowiness threshold..."

[alicornucopia]

"We can leave them for a while. Mine has a way to unravel it - obviously the non-test model wouldn't have that - so it won't go permanently to waste even if it sucks up all the ialdae on the continent of Espaal. I wonder if it goes through the ground." He goes and peers at the map to see if the fog is dimming opposite Paraasilan on the bottom of the world.

[missnicegirl]

"I wonder if I can still break yours. I think I'll leave it for another while before I try."

The background level of ialdae isn't changing visibly, but the leftovers from the shren cure - which are indeed located opposite Paraasilan - are slowly being pulled into the two recycler wards.

[alicornucopia]

"It doesn't look like it's traveling. I don't see flow towards the wards, either around the corner or across the top, and it's not dimming the spot opposite us substantially faster than it is the other spots."