[Be Gone] Ch 22 – More Words making Power

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“We need it in Arcane, Divine, and Heartsong variants,” Mother Bea spoke up urgently.

            “Understood. I’m doing a Theurgic version of all three. It’s a Spellcraft 19 check to understand it if you’ve any of the three Traditions.”

            Bea clucked despite herself at the usefulness of such a thing. Naturally they all had high Levels, and had the Spellcraft to go with it... and most of them would have a Theurgy to reduce the target number.

            “What would a Sevenfold Theurgic version be?” Rapman asked as all of them wondered about that.

            “+1 per missing Theurgy, cumulative. So, 15, +1 for Valence I, up to a 37 if you are missing the other six Traditions,” I replied easily. “If you’ve Casters, you should get them preparing Write spells so this gets disseminated as widely as possible.”

            “On it,” Rapman replied quickly, eyes unfocusing and lips moving as he sent out commands to their Allegiance.

            “Can you tell us some of the Feats and Masteries you know while you work?” Bea asked, pulling out a scroll of her own, but needing no ink. Basic words were just a Write at Cantrip level, after all.

            “Sure. Let me give you a couple you might find interesting. Did you know that Dawnstopped and Duskstopped Spells are possible at the same time?” The spellcasters all blinked, and their eyes widened.

            TWO twenty-four-hour Buffs?!, Feature saw their lips move for me.

            “The Versatile Channeling Feat allows you to use Channeled Energy as either positive or negative, with the secondary type being a degree weaker. How many uses per day do you have?”

            More to the point, how many could they have by the time the oni arrived?

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            I wrote. I listed out Class Levels and the abilities they received from them. I listed Feat after Feat and what they did, and I reported Masteries one after another. The excitement among even the warriors was palpable, as all of them were at least minor Casters, too, since they hadn’t been able to take higher Levels in their main Classes for a long time.

            I was also fully conversant in what Dragon Warriors gained up to Fourteen, and more than that, I had a copy of The Second Ten for them to peruse. Bronze took it and immediately started Writing up a copy for everyone as he read through it, reporting on important details as he did so.

            I could almost hear people Leveling off in the distance as they realized they had satisfied the requirements and the akasha booted them on to the next stage. The entire Allegiance was racing around out there, heady excitement filling the air.

            As I finished each spell, Rapman ran them out of the room to waiting Casters, who hurried away with them. Literally hundreds of Casters were going to be learning the new spells as fast as they could.

            To save time, they actually showed me the list of spells in the Great Book, a mostly-comprehensive set of Arcane stuff from the game, naturally tilted towards combat magic, and of course lacking of all the stuff we’d come out with since the game had ended, along with a lot of niche specialty stuff, like Nogging for Stats. Casters loved getting all the spells, so they’d had a good arsenal, but the problem had been that they only had access to the spells they’d actually had ON them at the time they came here.

            Among other things, huge chunks of the Divine and Druid Spell lists weren’t on there, because you didn’t use spell books for them, and nobody had carried the prayer books you were taught from and memorized from along with them.

            It was fine. They actually knew what spells they didn’t have from the game, but... they still didn’t have them, and had been unable to gain them without the Akasha backing them. The manafield here wouldn’t fit into the proper paradigm without a greater knowledge backing it all.

            Their Heartsinger list was also pretty short. Minstrels were spontaneous Casters and didn’t have a broad spell selection, and active spell lists tended to be fairly tight among gamers, focused on combat applications. Thus, virtually all of the more specialized or utility Minstrel spells simply weren’t there, while the Bard spell list was drawn from the Druidic, resulting in a considerable overlap of spells that simply weren’t there for anyone.

            It meant that they had lots of overlap in spells among one another, because their choices were pretty restricted. On the other hand, the spells they did have were all effective and useful in combat for the most part, so it hadn’t hurt them too much, other than downtime productivity.

            Oh, and little things, like having access to vivus...

            Dozens of people who’d left Slots open on Named Weapons took Vivic on their Weapons that very day. Those who couldn’t added Vivic Weapon to their spellbooks eagerly.

            The lists of spells I knew were pretty long; writing them all out by hand would literally have taken me months, as spell formulae were longer and took more care and space as they went up in Valence. Listing them out by name and effect allowed the Korbald’s people to cherry-pick the spells they wanted me to transcribe sooner.

            Once I had my Matrix back, thing would move along much faster, as I’d be able to do multiple spells a day, even Chain-Write duplicate spells to make things even faster if needed.

            Raycasters dominated their offensive mages, as they’d optimized to take out big single-target enemies, with some Orbcasters there to add some AoE to small clusters. Shardcasting was something spent on truly weak minions, or to interrupt spellcasters.

            That view had changed over time as they accumulated rep counts on their spells, and Meta after Meta weighted their spells and made even the weakest of them tremendously strong. They were impressed when they saw my range of Shardcasting power, but it didn’t really sink home to them how devastating it could be, and I wasn’t going to harp on it.

            That said, Siegecasting didn’t work here, either, which had truly annoyed them. Reserves, however, did, but they’d had lots of time to max out counts on those, and they didn’t have all the Reserves I knew represented in their Great Book, either.

            Fifty years was a lot of time to work on rep counts, however, and if you’ve only a limited number of spells, that focuses your attention nicely. I had seen that when they’d discharged on the demons. Even if they didn’t have the Caster Level that I did, they had good Penetration and a lot of Metas backing everything, resulting in them tearing the demons apart wildly.

            No wonder they impressed the heck out of the locals. The survivors from Terra were ALL Deep Tens by now, and so were a lot of their kids. They had all the rep counts needed to make themselves tremendously dangerous within their specialties.

            There didn’t have to be massive numbers of Tigers around. They were all forces to be reckoned with!

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            Night had fallen. I was out on a balcony with Korbald, drinks on a small table between us. He had informed me that the variety of vintages the Tigers brewed was one of their main sources of income... and protecting their brand name and quality from lots of imitators was a brutal game that the Clan of the Black Cat had taken over fervent responsibility for.

            That Clan was dominated by former Snake Clan dark elf peasants, and was effectively the Tigers’ intelligence network, too. The fact that the Snakes had nobody highly placed in them was probably very irritating to the intrigue-heavy dark elf House, and left them wondering how the Tigers kept catching their agents.

            Duty and Loyalty were very difficult things to fake, in the end. With an empowered Allegiance, a Serpent spy Swearing in was basically a death sentence, as their erstwhile superior would immediately know they were Loyal to another.

            If this place had been truer to the Power of Ten, False Oath would have killed the fakers straight off, or at least hurt them badly.

            I had brought out my personal copies of The First Day, The First Week, The First Month, The First Year, and The First Decade. Korbald had scanned through the summaries of them, and handed them off to be copied and then returned to me.

            Most of the Tens back home who had the patience had their own versions of the books, from their own perspectives. I’d read dozens, some of them enormously personal, diaries of the Fall and the loss and killing that had come with it.

            Not everybody had Gaming Templates to buffer them against the shock of a life like we had now. Life had been literally Hell for so many people and their families...

            The Tigers had histories, too; some of the House, some personal, some of the small Clans within the House.

            They had actually arrived on this world close to the center of the Shadowlands, although they hadn’t seen the Thing to blame for all of this like I had.

            From their landing point, it had literally been constant fighting to hack and burn a way out of there.

            Korbald had lost his wife and his younger daughter on the way. If they hadn’t realized that Sacred fire and holy water could stave off the Corruption, all of them would probably have been Tainted.

            “Not having vivus saved your lives,” I observed softly, staring out at the sky of unfamiliar stars here, sipping at their best whiskey. It wasn’t that bad. I gave him a bottle of Peil’s Golden Barrel Series One to compare. He swore after the QL 38 went down his throat, then coughed as I said that, spluttering a bit.

            “Why do you say that?” he asked, clearly holding his temper. Even after fifty years, those emotional wounds were still there, fueling a rage for the Oni which hadn’t left him yet.

            “Just me, and I’m attracting a full demon army here to get rid of one fellow using vivic fire. Imagine the reaction from the Shadowlands if a force of over a hundred Tens wielding vivic fire started burning an unwhite trail out from the heart of the conflict zone.”

            His face changed. He looked at the bottle of whiskey in his hand for a long minute, and then took another swig from it directly, saying nothing.

            He knew I was right. They never would have gotten out of there alive. Every demonic thing in the Shadowlands would have converged on them, and just buried them.

            Their trek had been epic and terrifyingly brutal as it was, just cutting a swathe through demonic lands as they attempted to get out of there. They had made it on blood and steel and magic the oni weren’t familiar with, but the losses they’d taken had ignited a fire that hadn’t burned down in all the decades since.

            He thought about that further, and swore again. “Only those of us who couldn’t use vivic fire were sent here,” he realized. “It was no accident...”

            “Correct. The others under the Archmage had probably optimized against Fiends, Undead, or Aberrants in the past, and were quick to go vivic. Jotun and Beast-slayers, not so much.”

            “Mithar can be such a bastard at times,” Korbald said hoarsely, looking at the whiskey I’d given him, and then set it off to the side for the others to enjoy as well... and for his brewers to have something to aspire to.

            “He never forgot you, though, or I wouldn’t be here.”

            “He’s still a bastard.” I tinked cups of The Great Tiger’s Piss with him, and we both drank.

            Definitely had a refined, spicy kick to it. Was gonna have to bring a bottle back home for Gould and Peil to sample...

            “Sustained... you need much rest?” he asked me.

            “Two hours a night. Endurance Mastery at Five Tiers, so four hours for you, right?”

            “Yes,” he nodded. “Funny how the time fills up regardless, especially as a Monarch.”

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