Return of the Runebound Professor

Noah slipped from his mindspace and let his eyes drift open. He laid in Moxie’s bed, one of his arms trapped beneath himself and buzzing like a furious insect. It felt like he’d been lying there for quite some time.

Grimacing, he untangled himself and sat upright. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and scrunched his nose in annoyance.

“How long was I out?” Noah muttered.

“Hours.”

Noah glanced over in the direction of Moxie’s voice. She sat at a plant desk, a half-dead flower cupped between her palms. Moxie set the plant down and arched her eyebrow in clear question.

“How many hours?” Noah asked. The last residuals of his headache still lingered on, but the Fragment of Renewal was making short work of it. He was pretty sure his head would be back to normal in another hour or so.

“Around thirteen,” Moxie said. She turned on her chair, the vines that made up its back coiling around her and repositioning themselves to shift the direction the chair faced without so much as raising a leg off the ground and held out a Mind Meld potion. “I got my hands on some more of these while you were gone. Am I going to need it?”

“That would probably be a wise call, yes.”

Moxie removed the stopper and poured half of the potion into her mouth before handing it to Noah. He finished the potion off, then let himself relax as he was yanked from the world and into Moxie’s mindspace.

Noah materialized across from Moxie inside her forest clearing. Two vine chairs had already formed and Moxie already sat in one of them. Noah lowered himself into the other.

“I hope you’ve had more luck with your runes than I have,” Moxie said.

“I suppose it depends on what you mean by luck.” Noah tapped the side of his chin. “If you were referring to somehow making two runes on accident instead of one, then yes. I got lucky.”

Moxie let out a snort and shook her head. “Right. Sure, smartass. So no luck, then. Are you going to have to kill yourself again?”

“Probably,” Noah said with a nod. “But I was serious.”

Moxie paused. She squinted at him. For several seconds, neither of them said a word. Then her eye twitched. “How does one accidentally make an extra rune? You can’t even combine a rune without intent, much less make one.”

“I’m working on figuring out exactly how it happened.”

“Only you could make two runes on accident,” Moxie muttered. “And tossing a whole extra rune into the mix didn’t somehow screw with the other rune and ruin it?”

“That’s why it took me so long. They kind of… lodged together. It was a real pain in the ass to figure out how to separate them,” Noah said with a small huff of annoyance. “But I managed it in the end.”

“Of course you did,” Moxie said with a short burst of laughter. “Well? What kind of runes does one make on accident? Are you planning on telling me, or am I going to have to start taking guesses?”

“Depends. Where’s Lee?”

“Keeping watch over the tent to make sure nobody gets too close or curious.”

“Perfect,” Noah said. “Then we can get right to the point. I don’t know how, but I somehow made a rune of myself.”

“A Noah rune?” Moxie asked, squinting at him. “Do you have an extra one?”

“A Fragment of Self. No name involved, but it was definitely a representation of me. I had a whole ass discussion with myself. It was… interesting.” Noah looked down at his hand and flexed his fingers. The connection to his body here was just as strong as it had been in his mindspace.

“Fragment of Self?” Moxie’s head tilted to the side. “What in the world does that even do? Summon copies of yourself to fling at people? No, that can’t be it. You can’t form magic from scratch until Rank 5. It couldn’t be actual clones. Don’t tell me it’s some form of creepy corpse manipulation where you use your own bodies to fight.”

“Now there’s an idea,” Noah mused. He caught the look in Moxie’s eyes and let out a snort of laughter. “But no, that isn’t it. As far as I can tell, the rune is the connection between my body and my runes. It’s heightened my internal awareness. It also seems to be permanently on as far as I can tell. It’s not even drawing energy. It just… is.”

“That’s weird. I’ve never heard of a rune like that. It’s basically a Body Imbuement, then?”

“Really similar to one,” Noah said with a nod. “It’s literally imbued into the center of my soul. Actually, for that matter, I think it is my soul. A piece of it, that is. But here’s the really interesting bit. When I initially formed the rune, it looked almost exactly like a Demon Rune. The way it was all screwed up was identical to Lee’s Rank 4 Rune. It was just at a smaller scale.”

Moxie leaned forward, her eyes burning with interest. “But it isn’t a Demon Rune?”

“Not as far as I can tell. I can read it but I couldn’t read Demon Runes. That was basically the only noticeable difference.”

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“Are you feeling different?” Moxie asked with a flicker of concern. “Any tendencies toward emotions or the like? You’re not about to lose yourself, are you?”

“Nothing different in that department. I think it would have been pretty apparent right off the bat if there had been.” Noah shook his head. “I was worried about the same thing, but it seems like I’m the same as I was before.”

“If that’s true, then this could be the key to figuring out how to solve Lee’s issue!” Moxie exclaimed in an exited whisper. “Maybe you were able to make a human version of a Demon Rune because of the latent energy in the Damned Plains.”

“We’re on the same page. As far as I can tell, the rune is literally just a representation of my soul and my desires. It doesn’t feel dangerous and it definitely doesn’t feel like it’s going to make me hyperfocus on an emotion. I can’t see that changing, even if I was as sensitive to my runes as a demon was.”

Moxie’s grin slipped as her brow creased in a small frown. “Which means that either the issue lies elsewhere, or you managed to accidentally perfect a Demon Rune. As much as I believe in your abilities, I’m not so sure you just stumbled into an issue that has been plaguing demons for… gods know how long. A while.”

“That would be a bit of a stretch,” Noah admitted. “I’m going to be doing some testing as soon as I can. I don’t want to mess with Lee or get her hopes up until I know more.”

“Smart. That’s for the best.” Moxie gave him an approving nod, then followed it up with a pointed glance. “So… rune number 2. Is it equally as odd?”

“No clue. I haven’t tried using it yet,” Noah replied. “I was just about to get to that. I know what I was hoping it would do, but with all the bullshit that surrounded its creation, I’ve got no idea if it’ll function the way I want it to.”

“What are the chances of you blowing yourself up?”

“Blowing myself up? Probably pretty unlikely. Dying? Eh. I wouldn’t bet against it.”

“I suppose I can’t ask for more than that,” Moxie said with a small sigh. She gestured at the forest around them. “You can’t test it in here. We aren’t in your soul and I’d rather not break anything important in mine. Anything else vital that needs to be said?”

“Probably, but I don’t remember what it is.”

“I see, I see.” Moxie nodded sagely. “So I suppose that means we’ve got some time to kill.

Noah grinned. “I suppose we do.”

***

Thirty minutes later, the Mind Meld Potion ended. Noah and Moxie found themselves back in the real world. Lee had clearly been doing a good job of making sure nobody got too close, because their bodies were mercifully unstabbed.

“You know, Azel isn’t in your soul anymore,” Moxie grumbled. “Why does it only last thirty minutes?”

“My soul is probably still disproportionately large. I did kind of shred him up a bit, and I’ve got a number of other things fiddling with it.”

Moxie let out an exaggerated sigh. “I guess so. Unfortunate, but that’s how things are. Go on, then. I want to see what you made.”

“What happened to not wanting me to get killed?” Noah smiled wryly and pushed himself upright in bed.

Moxie’s eyes narrowed. “Sacrifices must be made in pursuit of the greater good, and right now, the greater good is me wanting to see what your new rune does. If you’re going kill yourself, I’d prefer you do it when I’m somewhere nearby. At least that way I don’t have to worry about someone else having to put on your clothes.”

Noah paused and looked down at himself. He was indeed wearing clothes, and he definitely hadn’t put them on himself considering the last thing he’d done before sinking into his mindspace was kill himself.

“Fair enough,” he admitted. “That somehow slipped my mind. I’d have preferred to be present for that.”

“I’m sure you would have,” Moxie said dryly. A thoughtful expression passed over her features and her head tilted to the side. “Hold on. When you said you had a discussion with yourself, were you being literal?”

“Fairly. There was a clone of me. Why?”

“Just asking for later reference,” Moxie replied, coughing into a fist. The bed bucked beneath Noah and she sent him a pointed look. “Rune. Come on. Aren’t you supposed to be the impatient one?”

Noah laughed as he swung his legs out of bed and sent a tendril of mental energy into his soul to connect with the Warped Matter rune. Power slithered to meet his call and coiled down his arm. He felt it infuse his body and buzz beneath his skin.

Moxie watched with rapt anticipation as absolutely nothing happened. A second ticked by. Then two. Her brow furrowed.

“Does it not work?”

“Give it a second,” Noah replied with a laugh. Moxie glared at him as he turned his hand over. The power had completely saturated his arm. It was a lot slower to activate than any of his other runes. He wasn’t sure if that was because the Warped Matter rune just needed to use more energy, if it was struggling because it wasn’t a flawless rune, or if that was just how it was.

A shimmer of gray energy arced between his fingertips. Blocky fractals twisted out from his palm and into the bed at his side, expanding like fingers of frost as they tore through it. The vines crumpled in their path as blocks of gray matter practically exploded outward.

Noah hissed in surprise as he felt every scrap of power in Warped Matter forcibly ripped out and consumed by the gray tendrils. The rune ground to a halt as it ran out of power to consume and the magic abruptly stopped, dissipating like mist on a sunny day to leave giant furrows running through the vine bed. Noah and Moxie stared at the ravaged plants in a stunned silence.

“What was that?” Moxie asked, swallowing. “Did you just use my plants as fuel?”

“They’re matter. I… warped them, I guess,” Noah replied, running a hand along the edges of the vines left by the wake of his spell. Easily half of the bed had been heavily damaged in a split second.

“I’ve seen magic punch through solid material before, but that was scarily fast,” Moxie said, shaking her head. “Did you really have to destroy my bed to show that off, though?”

“I wasn’t trying to do that much. I just wanted to test it on a single vine or something. The rune kind of activated itself,” Noah admitted.

Moxie frowned and leaned closer to the bed as she studied it intently. “You know, this pattern kind of looks like what would happen to some of our fields when a really nasty soil virus attacked them. We usually stopped it before it could get this bad, though. I think you’ve created a matter-eating virus in the form of a rune.”

“That may be an apt way to describe it,” Noah allowed.

“That’s terrifying. If it treats all matter the same, what do you think it’ll do to a person? I’d imagine their runes would interfere with it, but if you could combine it with Crumbling Space…”

“I could do some really serious damage,” Noah agreed, letting out a whistle and running a hand through his hair. “Well, shit. I’m really glad I decided to test this on something else before I used it on myself. I had the vague idea of trying to teleport with this.”

Moxie extended her leg and nudged the bed with her foot. “I don’t think that’s going to be happening. Not if you want to arrive in one piece.”

“Probably not,” Noah grumbled. The bed, devoid of its structural integrity, started to sink under his weight. He cleared his throat and sent Moxie a pleading look. “Say, do you think you could fix this thing? I don’t really want to get up yet.”

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