Magic is Programming

Silence filled the room in the wake of Lorvan's announcement. Ressara looked around, trying to gauge each person's reaction. Oh, this new development was so exciting! Friendly and kind high nobles helping her, and now even someone from the royal family was going to show up? And she had been helpful, doing things for the royal guards that even they couldn't do for themselves!

"Well, I guess that's that, then." Haftel idly fidgeted with one of his daggers, then glanced at it as though just realizing what he was doing, and hastily put it away.

Esmorana squared her shoulders and gulped nervously. "How… how quickly will they respond?"

"Minutes." Lorvan gazed at her steadily. "Perhaps up to ten. No more than fifteen minutes. Even that delay would only be because of the need to coordinate, and for a Crown Mage to prepare the teleportation."

Noralt just leaned back against the wall, waiting quietly. Ordens moved next to Lorvan, and the two of them stood side by side in identical postures, staring forwards with backs perfectly straight and hands at their sides, motionless like statues. They were apparently determined to be in that exact formal posture of respect and duty when their prince arrived, no matter what precise moment that happened. The adventurers took their cue from the royal guards and came together in a tight group, standing quietly and respectfully as well, though they periodically fidgeted or shifted posture.

Ressara stood quietly as well, waiting. The silence stretched awkwardly. She watched Haftel take a dagger halfway out of its sheath and put it back, then do it again a bit later half a dozen times. She started counting steadily, trying to better estimate the time passing. Sconter arrived at about six hundred in her count, and after a brief whispered discussion with his party the large but soundless man settled down to wait with them.

She reached one thousand, and still no royal prince had appeared. No one had teleported in at all. Tentatively, she broke the silence. "Um, I think it's been longer than fifteen minutes now. Could something have gone wrong?"

"It has been twenty one minutes. I do not know what might cause such a delay, but the Crown will respond." Lorvan did not even look at Ressara while answering her.

Ressara counted slowly to one hundred before asking another question. "…Are you certain you sent the signal? A-and that it wasn't blocked somehow like divining Carlos's location was?"

For a few seconds nothing happened, and Ressara held her breath. Then Lorvan activated something in his armor's enchantments again, and it briefly pulled Ressara's attention towards it again. "I sent it again, just in case. Receipt was confirmed."

Ressara frowned and narrowed her eyes. "…Is that signal supposed to involve an attention diverting ward?"

"…What?" Lorvan sounded confused, but still did not move from his formal posture.

"Right before you said you'd called for Crown intervention the first time, and again just now, a very small ward in your armor tried to push my attention away just for a moment."

"…Ordens, scan me. Comprehensive enchantments analysis."

"Yes, sir!" Ordens crouched and held her hands on either side of Lorvan's feet, then slowly raised her hands along his body until she reached his head.

The whole process took over a minute, and Ressara watched in fascination as various enchantments interacted in complexities beyond her ability to make sense of. Several times during that minute, a momentary flash of something drew her attention. The first few times, she thought it might just be the natural draw of noticing movement, but by the end of it she was certain. "There were several small momentary pushes on my attention from that. From Lorvan's gear, and from Ordens's. Both of you."

Lorvan turned to face her, and removed his helmet to better stare her in the eyes. "That is an… extraordinary… claim. Either the Enchanters Guild sabotaged royal guard equipment, or someone unknown has capabilities I have never heard of, or you are lying." Ressara gulped, but did not back down. Lorvan sighed and put his helmet back on, shaking his head. "If not for the inexplicable lack of a Crown scion responding to my signal, I would be certain you lie. But the fact remains that the Crown has not responded as they should, and I cannot imagine a crisis that would prevent that response without being known of throughout the kingdom."

He turned towards the adventurers, who were fidgeting considerably more than before. "Haftel, and the rest of you. What is the fastest other means you know of for us to send a message to the capital?"

"Just a moment." Sconter walked to the door, opened it, and leaned out to speak with the city guard outside. "When is the next teleport message exchange?"

"Wha-? Oh. Um, let me check… In three days."

Sconter walked back to his party. "Three days from now at noon, a Crown Mage in Kalor City will exchange message boxes with Dramos."

"That may be too late. I would run, but…" Lorvan shook his head. "It is too far, even for me." He paused to think. "Ordens, take Ressara around the perimeter of Dramos to see if she can find their trail. I will stay here, in case the Crown eventually responds. Adventurers, inform Mayor Stelras, and if you or he find another way to help, let me know immediately. Otherwise, stand ready."

Haftel nodded. "The mayor can signal us if needed." He walked out the door, his party following him with pensive expressions.

Carlos wasn't sure how long it had been. Keeping track of time was difficult, lying there in a dark box being carried somewhere, with a spell making him sleepy. At least studying the sleep spell on Amber was a very obvious constant reminder about his own sleep spell that kept pushing him to pay it no attention. It was also an interesting puzzle to solve, significantly more complicated than any of the spells he'd learned before, but that was hard to appreciate properly with how sleepy he felt. He thought he was starting to understand how it worked, with some help from discussing it with Amber, though actually learning to cast something similar himself was still a long way off.

All the spells he'd learned so far just had one effect, some number of parameters for that effect, and if the effect didn't discharge all the spell's mana at once then a loop to keep it going. A few of them did minor tricks with one of the parameters, setting it by a calculation or letting him manually adjust it after the spell is cast, but that was all. This sleep spell had a lot more than that, and what he would have guessed would be the core of it actually wasn't even there at all - none of its effect keywords meant "sleep"! It didn't have anything that meant "force target to sleep", or "knock unconscious", or even "make target feel sleepy", either.

Instead, it did other things that indirectly caused sleepiness. The core of the spell was simply fastening onto the target's soul, and focusing all the rest of the spell on that same target. Several other effects were bolted onto that core, doing various things to the target. The effect most immediately obvious to his observations of the spell's structure and activity was that it smoothed out ripples in the target soul's surface mana, calming and organizing it, and ultimately trying to settle it into still placidity. Even that single effect was actually a more complex bundle of things when he looked at it closely, though. It monitored the movements of the soul's surface mana, did some calculations, and gave precisely calibrated nudges to clip off the peaks of any disturbances, slow down the fastest movements, and so on. Carlos had known that a person's state of mind affected the mana on their soul's surface, but apparently that mana also affected the person's state of mind.

Then there was another part that drained some kind of energy. He knew immediately that it wasn't heat energy, or kinetic energy, but it took him a while to figure out what kind it actually was. The spell drained mental energy, and slowed down thoughts. Thinking of "mental energy" and "speed of thought" as real quantities that could be interacted with in ways similar to the energies physicists calculate was a bit strange, but he supposed it made sense considering that the underlying foundation of magic itself was supposedly that mana naturally responded to the desires of sapient souls.

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In a similar vein of mental influence, the spell manipulated attention and conscious focus, pushing attention away from the spell, and away from concepts of being mentally influenced. Carlos had known that already, of course, but now he'd gained some familiarity with the part of the spell that did that.

The final part of the spell detected certain things and reported information back to its caster. Carlos had a moment of panic when he first discovered the spell was monitoring them, but quickly realized that if anything they'd done so far was going to trigger an alarm it would have already done so. After that, he'd focused his efforts on figuring out exactly what it was monitoring, which turned out to be surprisingly limited. Then again, he supposed on most potential targets the things it reported would work out as a good proxy for whether the spell was affecting the target as intended.

That bundle of detection effects checked for whether the spell was still attached to a pool of mana, whether that mana pool had the same signature as a sample it took when initially cast, whether each nudge had the desired effect, and whether mental energy was draining into its siphon. For the nudges and mental energy drain, having nothing left to nudge and no mental energy left to be drained counted as working properly too.

The normal way to resist this spell would be to have mana so dense that either the spell couldn't nudge it at all, or that nudging it would cost so much power that the spell would quickly run out. Or, failing that, detaching the spell from its target might be doable. It would detect and report any of those failure modes. It was not designed to handle a soul that noticed what it was doing and responded by actively generating more ripples, thanks largely to Carlos's introspector and debugger. This was extremely far from any use case he had ever anticipated for those two soul structures, but he was glad to have them.

Carlos rolled his head over to whisper to Amber. "Hey, I have an idea."

Amber's response came a little sluggishly. "…Yeah?"

"We can resist this thing because it's trying to affect the surface layer of our souls, and that's within what our debuggers can affect, right?"

"Yes, it is."

Carlos coughed, and took a moment to clear his throat. "I think we could make, like, a fake extra surface on top of the real one. Make it just like the real surface as much as possible, but not actually connected to anything. Let the spell think it's still connected. It's pushing the bounds of where our debuggers are able to reach, and mana manipulator can't do it alone, but I think it should work. Can you think of any problems?"

Amber just breathed quietly for several seconds, then started muttering. "Still attached, still correct mana signature, no ripples, no mental energy… That's all the monitors, right? …Yeah. Yeah, it should work. Let's do it."

Carlos turned his mental focus inward, to his soul and the layer of mana wrapped around it. The mana there was split into portions with fundamentally different characteristics. Most of it flowed like liquid, and little bits and pieces of it were siphoned off whenever he did something magical. Even his ability just to passively sense mana was a constant minor drain on it. But it also replenished on its own over time. That liquid mana seemed to steadily condense in tiny droplets on every hard surface of rigidly solid mana in his soul, which included all of his soul structures, and each drop flowed outward until reaching the surface. The other portion of the surface layer was hard and thin, forming a container that held the liquid. To fool the sleep spell's monitors, he would need to fake both parts.

He started with experimentally trying to make a partial extra container, but his first instinct of using the regenerating liquid supply didn't work. The mana would not solidify. He could form it into the right shape, but it wouldn't stay that way. With a grimace, he scraped some already solid mana off of his soul structures, and molded it into a disconnected patch that superficially resembled the surface of his soul, far from where the spell touched him. He opened a small hole in its bottom temporarily, and poured liquid mana into it until it was full. Then he closed the hole, and considered. He studied the part of the spell on Amber that monitored what it was connected to, and nodded. His fake patch was larger than the area the spell checked. He carefully slid the patch into place, and fastened it. The spell did not react, and he let out the breath he was holding.

Carlos didn't notice any immediate change in how he felt, but as he continued analyzing his own sensations he soon realized he was jumping from one thing to another more easily, and there was greater clarity in all of his senses. He realized his bottom was sore from lying on bare metal for so long. He let out a long sigh. "That's better."

"Much better," Amber echoed from beside him.

They lay there in relieved silence for a few seconds before they got jostled by a sudden movement of the box. Carlos groaned quietly and sat up. "Ok, now that we're not at risk of succumbing to enforced helplessness, what else do we need to worry about?"

Amber sighed again. "Too much. How did these people get us away from our guards, and how have they not been caught yet? And what are they planning to do with us?"

Carlos shook his head, then realized that was pointless because Amber couldn't see him. "I don't know. I imagine anyone capable of it should have enough resources for teleporting, so why aren't we already at wherever they're taking us?"

Amber chuckled dryly. "Heh. Even commoners know you can't teleport someone who isn't willing. Not long distances, at least."

"Ah." Carlos idly nodded to himself. "Hmm. Whatever they're planning is presumably worse than dying and respawning, so why not kill ourselves to respawn back in our rooms?"

"…Can we do that? Surely they must have thought of it."

"Hmm." Carlos pressed his lips together. He was not at all eager to test trying to kill himself. He looked around with his mana sense at all the other spells and enchantments around them, besides the sleep spell. He quickly found one that would cushion their bodies against a variety of methods of inflicting injury. This one didn't bother with attention diversion at all. Neither did an enchantment that muted all sound within a couple millimeters of the metal surfaces. No wonder they hadn't heard anything from the outside this whole time. Then another thought occurred to him, and he laughed, not bothering to keep it at all quiet. "Hah! They muffled the box completely, regardless of direction. We can't hear them, but they can't hear us either!"

Amber was silent for a moment, then let out a chuckle of her own. "So we've been whispering this whole time for no reason. They might notice if our weight shifts around too much, though."

"Yeah." Carlos lay back down, but put his hands behind his head for comfort. "What else does this box do…?" He tuned out his normal senses to focus on mana. There were still other magical effects around them that he hadn't analyzed yet. Only the sleep and cushioning spells were actually targeted on them; the rest were on the box. He could sense the boundaries of the box by feeling out where the enchantments were. They had just over a foot of clearance past their heads and feet when lying down, they could reach out and touch the sides from where they were, and if he sat up straight his head would almost brush the top. The bottom had some gentle curves in it to make any sliding tend to end up in the semi central spots they'd woken up in.

Two of the enchantments on the box, though they weren't connected to him, seemed to resonate with him in some way. He reached out with his mana sense to investigate, and suddenly his senses hit a wall that blocked him completely. He pushed his senses against that wall for a moment before he realized that he actually was pushing his senses against it. Mana sense was partly passive, receiving signals that existed naturally like with eyes receiving light and ears receiving sound, but part of it was ethereal wisps of his mana reaching out and lightly touching things he wanted to know more about. Those wisps of his mana were reaching for anything past this wall and hitting a dead stop.

Carlos sensed some currents of ambient mana moving through that barrier without interference, however. Before doing anything else, he cautiously searched for any hint of divinations aimed towards them, but it seemed the sleep spell's report on its functioning was the only one. The fact that they hadn't already been subjected to more forceful attempts to make them sleep again suggested that there weren't any, but it was best to be as certain as possible. A bit more reassured that his activity still wouldn't be noticed, he experimented more with the wall blocking his active mana sense. Remembering the lesson from the hostile level five dungeon, he took hold of a tiny bit of ambient mana and pushed it at the barrier. The ambient mana went through, but his own mana pushing it was stopped cold.

After trying a few more variations, he was sure of it: that barrier blocked his mana, specifically. That was why it resonated with him. The other enchantment he felt that resonance from seemed to also be a barrier, from what he could sense while blocked from probing it, but aimed outward and in some kind of metaphysical direction too. It was tuned to him, but oriented to block things coming in from outside. When he noticed part of it resembled an attention diversion effect, he finally realized how that could make sense. It was to prevent other people from sensing him, or divining his location, or any number of other potential ways to track him down. So that was why they hadn't been rescued yet. Maybe a team effort of someone with Ressara might overcome that? He could only hope.

While he was speculating about that, Amber gasped. "Do you feel it? The ambient mana coming in now… It's level ten!"

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