~Present Day, Hegatha’s Floating Swamp Island~
Jay cracked his eyes open with a smile, amused by two things her saw today from his time hosting in Sweeper’s eyes.
He used all his willpower to stop himself from bursting into laughter when he saw Asra trying to pull away from Hegatha’s healing practice, pulling herself along the table. Jay pitied the young vampire, more so than when he found her in the vine-bear’s cocoon.
And then there was the moment Hegatha approached his cube-bone room. The skeletons didn’t need to give her any verbal warning, not that they could. All it took was for them to crouch into a combat stance and raise their weapons, and as he watched from Sweeper’s eyes he could feel the fear that Hegatha showed when she froze in her tracks before slowly and cautiously stepping back. Her face looked so shocked and she didn’t even dare to take a breath in that moment.
“Heh. Heh heh. Haha.” Jay chuckled, looking at his ceiling as he lay on his bed, replaying the events in his head. It was a welcomed release of tension, something he had built up in the last few days. At some points he felt like his life was fluid and chaotic, like everything was falling out from below him with every step he took, like the bone bridge he made, while other times his constructions and experimenting felt ordered but slow, like he was giving a set of hands the opportunity to slowly close around his neck. But this helped to set his mind at ease, at least for a moment, and he took a little while longer to relax, meditate, and replenish some of his mana.
Jay sighed and sat up, “Alright, I have work to do.” He said, but a voice greeted him back.
“Jay. Vision receptacle repaired. Continuing memory repair.” A little voice said next to him.
Jay glanced at his desk. The black stone orb he named Leech still sat in the small indentation he made on the desk.
“Hang on.” Jay stood up, stretching his back. “I need you to see these runes I copied. You said you could interpret runes.”
“Yes. Current memory repaired—0.001%. Runic Translation has been recovered.” Leeches said, and a small triangle with a round hole slowly raised from its surface.
Jay raised a brow and grabbed it, holding it to his face.
“Can you see me?”
“Yes.”
“What do I look like?”
“Human. Male. Adolescent. Pale skin. Dark hair.”
Pale skin? Jay thought, shook his head, and turned it to face the runes he had scratched into his desk.
“What do these mean?”
“Processing… Runes identified, accessing templates. Processing… Portal. Mirror type. Resonance stabilized. Passive circulation. Two-point vertical linkage. Processing…”
Leech’s eye closed back down into the cube and Jay placed it back down on the desk. He stepped into the doorway and had a look outside.
Archers and Red diligently remained on guard. Red fervently stood at his door while Archers patrolled around the outside, its body still a mix of gray-white and cobalt blue bones of different shapes and sizes. After being summoned multiple times and with no other orders it had went onto guard duty.
The bone well had dispersed the last of its mana from the mass summoning spell, and the once-floating bones sat in a circle on the ground like the nest of an eldritch creature, next to the pile Red had been feeding it.
Jay hastily stashed the bones away, and seeing little other changes outside he went back inside and returned to Leech.
“So?” he asked.
“The triangle rune is a single location; it requires another triangle rune to interact with, forming two points to relay the portal between. This specific triangle orientation is vertical, and only allows the corresponding portal location to be above or below, requiring two to fix a portal in a vertical location.”
So that’s why the other two triangle shapes above the mirror portal were worn down? The mirror portal is directly above the other one. Jay thought.
Leech continued, “The other seven runes help to form the portal shape, the reflective mirror-portal type, to draw in the ambient mana to fuel it, and to stabilize it. In this configuration they must be arranged around the outside, in sets of no less than four for each side. More can be added to enlarge the mirror surface. These types of portal offer a practical application for short-range teleportation, and allow the user to see through to the other side before stepping through. This prevents the occurence of matter-entwining and…”
“Okay I get it. So it’s not too hard to make right?”
“It is considered hard by novice runesmiths. The runes of the lower portal must be kept in perfect alignment with the upper one, so carving them into a single surface, such as a flat cliff face or a large stone, is often necessary. If either moves out of alignment, the portal will break. Also, the triangle runes must be carved at the same time. Furthermore, the portals must both be fueled with mana instantaneously to activate at the same time. This makes a runesmiths mimic tool a necessity in…”
“Hmm… Hegatha probably used her leaves to help her carve somehow. But if she can do it, I can too.” Jay murmured, but Leeches continued.
“Furthermore, as long as the portals are kept in vertical alignment, they can move up and down from each other, to an extent, however its practicality offers little use in most settings, because as the distance increases, so does the likelihood of the portals moving out of alignment, and…”
“Alright Leech that’s enough. Other than knocking down a wall, how do I disable the portal?”
“The third rune in each set of seven needs to be removed. This erodes the resonance, causing the portal to collapse.”
“Removed? Can I cut it or scratched it out?”
“Yes.”
“Alright. Go back to memory repair.”
“Acknowledged.”
Jay leaned his hand over it and left it with some extra mana to absorb and thought to himself.
If she is as bad as Asra thinks, maybe I can trap her underground and burn her house down. But I’ll investigate further. He thought, and went outside to watch over his skeletons to pass the time while his mana recovered.
The rest of the afternoon was quite dull. The hunting skeletons slayed more of the fire-lights and returned with fresh sets of charred bones, bringing with them more of the amber breaking shards and exp notifications.
[430 Exp]
Jay ate more of his cooked meat, but began to get tired of constnatly chewing it, and he rubbed his lower stomach, feeling his guts felt like they were going to be blocked soon. He wondered what else could be eaten, so he sent Archers out to gather the various mushrooms. Everything in this swamp was vying for life, coated in thorns or poison and he wasn’t sure what was edible so he decided he’d need to ask Hegatha. But there was another option.
Perhaps Asra could test the mushrooms? She seems resilient enough. He thought, and watched as an assortment of multi-colored fungus began to pile up; some of which were wet, that Archers gathered after traveling back to the shoreline rather than only from the island.
Jay identified a few types from the Loslan forests, and began to sort them out from the pile accordingly.
As the sunlight began to wane and disappear in the thick fog, Jay pulled a few of his skeletons off of hunting duty and had a fire constructed. The wood had to be floated across the water, making it harder to light, but thanks to the fire-lights, many of the tips still smouldered and the unnatural ever-burning embers dried out the wood and gave him a warm campfire in no time.
As for the light it gave off, Jay wasn’t worried about it attracting any threats; the fog was a shield as much as it was a curtain hiding other threats.
Jay murmued to Red, “I’ll see what Hegatha’s up to tonight. Then we’ll see if we need to do something about her.”
