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After Adarin and Isabella depart, Edarial gets back to juggling projects. Unsurprisingly, Iobel is a large help in this. Once she gets a handle on all of the things involved with being a monarch, he can not constantly be doing that alone. He still helps, he's still there doing monarch things and fixing the country, but now he's got a bit more free time to devote to other things.
Accordingly, there's a project he picks back up that he was only tinkering with before his marriage. He'd like to reinvent the fountain that heals familiars, have there be others in strategic locations, so that spellbinders don't need to rush to the capitol to avoid being unmade. Progress on the project's always been slow, there's a reason that it hasn't just been reinvented immediately after the spell charts were lost, but he's got some very good reasons to work on it with a near-obsessive zeal.
One day, to his utter surprise, when he goes to find another portion of the spell-chart to complete, he can't find it. He stares at the chart, stunned. Then he starts checking his work. It takes him a few days to finish the corrections.
Then he's done. He's remade a revolutionary spell chart.
He picks up the huge spell chart, does his best to fold it down to a reasonable travel size, and then heads off to show the nearest spell binder - Iobel.
royal_obligation
come_midnight
Iobel is reading a letter from her great-aunt, and looks up when Edarial comes in. "Hello. What is it?"
royal_obligation
"Hello." He sets the spell-chart on the table, looking like he's only barely containing his excitement. "I've been working on a project. I think it's finished, but - I'd like you to check over my work. If you don't mind."
royal_obligation
"It's a hex. For the fountain that heals familiars, to make more of them."
come_midnight
"Oh! You've reconstructed it!" And with this she begins to read quite happily. "God, it's huge."
royal_obligation
"It really is, I kind of expected to never ever finish it, but - well."
come_midnight
"My teleport's looking like it's going to be about this big, so I guess if I can cram this into my head that will be encouraging," she laughs, tracing the lines of the chart. "Mm-hmmm. Mmm - you might be able to condense this branch although I don't know if it'd make it much more fit-able."
royal_obligation
"Maybe, I'll try to revise that part -" Pause. "Do you want to help?"
come_midnight
"Sure." Bella turns a page in her current notebook and makes an abbreviated map of the spellchart and footnotes it with things that might benefit from being done - the condensation here, a clarification of a definition up there, a correction of a cyclic section on the far end.
royal_obligation
Edarial fixes a part that was too open-ended, and gives some explanations for why he laid things out in this particular manner for certain sections if required, but otherwise, isn't sure what to change. He retrieves a spare spell chart and starts condensing the branch to see if it's viable before he messes with the main spell chart.
come_midnight
Eventually Iobel has been through the entire thing. "I think with the revisions mentioned it will work. If we can memorize it sufficiently."
royal_obligation
"Yeah. That's half of the problem, there - but if we can't manage it, we could possibly get it into the hands of someone who can."
come_midnight
Iobel nods. "I'm certainly going to give it a try, though. There ought to be one of these in every good-sized city."
royal_obligation
"Agreed. It's also be prudent to get them in foreign cities, too, though that's harder to do."
come_midnight
"Well, we can at least send them copies of the spellchart even if they don't want to let our spellbinders in."
royal_obligation
"Yup. Let's make lots of copies of the spellchart, there's no good reason to keep it on just one copy."
come_midnight
Chart chart chart.
Iobel used to do this sort of thing for a living. She has excellent handwriting and a good sense of how not to crowd the components of the chart and a concise style.
"Oh, I've translated nearly all of my early notes on queening. If you still want them."
Iobel used to do this sort of thing for a living. She has excellent handwriting and a good sense of how not to crowd the components of the chart and a concise style.
"Oh, I've translated nearly all of my early notes on queening. If you still want them."
royal_obligation
Adarin's handwriting is pretty good, too, but he's not as practiced with writing out spellcharts as she is. He's good at it and enjoys it immensely, but he has not done it for a living. Therefore, he will let her do most of the writing and instead organizes things for her so she can work more quickly.
"I do! If you don't mind."
"I do! If you don't mind."
come_midnight
She fishes them out of a stack of things and hands them over while she continues nitpicking the hex.
royal_obligation
He takes them to read, keeping an eye on the hex to see if there's a way he can help, but otherwise leaving Iobel to it.
come_midnight
The notes are fairly straightforward in content: she asked people for information about what to do, distilled it, and then found what resources were available to her and hit the problems with them until the problems went away or shrank behind the specter of the next addressable priority.