I'll ask if Dr. Marleth knows anyone with standards in your neck of the woods; flying is a pain in the neck and goodness knows I don't want to test any of the known functional distance transportation methods I have so far on a person.

'My area' being glossable as 'Chicago', fwiw, in case you did not know.

Ty

Copy that.

I don't think I did, for the record.

Her note for Dr. Marleth now looks like:

- CRISPR/Retrovirii, use as ritual catalysts?

- Lilim bloodlines, impact thereof on sorcerous potential

- Photosynthesis?  Photothaumosynthesis?

- How does the magic-storage obelisk work, even?  There's a vague impression that it's based off of bedrock and possibly life-of-the-planet -

- Chameleon skin as potential sigil anchor?

- So how do esoteric pigments get coded for, she's working on the thing and she wants to get the API pretty close to what succubi already know how to do.

- Bring product-so-far; get anatomy reviewed/input.

- Have a product-so-far.  Right now it's barely diagrams.

- Anyone in Chicago area who does antisenescence and has ethical standards, asking for a friend.  Who is just barely magic, apparently.

...Where did she leave that project off, anyway...  Oh, right, the interface was being annoying.  ...Annnd she's just realized that the pi/tau bonders she made up while translating from Opus Magnum to Spacechem actually breaks triplex bonds wide open for non-transmutable elements, because it's Spacechem and Spacechem only occasionally cares about protons, not whether something is Fire, so now she needs to factor that in to her schematics...

Well, that's going to be interesting to work with.

Sebastian DeGaulle emails her:

Mlle. Marche,

I have been a fool. May we send you previous failed attempts to salvage the precious metal from? I get the impression this will save you effort and mana, and they are useless to my friend Mr. Combs as it stands. If you want layers of separation we can work something out I'm sure. Perhaps a courier service or PO box.

Mr. Combs is happy to owe a substantial favor if you're not sure what you want yet.

Sebastian DeGaulle

Certainly!

Hmm, as to where to send them -

- come to think of it, I could always send you - or, well, Mr. Combs, if necessary through you as intermediary - an access node to an abstracted alchemy space to which I'll upload the ritual when the materials are ready, rather than trusting precious metals to random couriers.  (Though, given that some very fancy things have been successfully passed through the USPS, it would hardly be overmuch risk.)  If we're able to coordinate on a time to do so I could even email it; as long as it's not getting cached the sympathetic entanglement I've worked out should hold.  ...Even if it is, possibly - what matters is if there's no longer an unbroken stream of packets from source to destination, not the rate it flows.

Or I could just get a PO box.

--AM

I recommend a PO box, personally. No offense, but you are yet new and I'd rather trust valuables to more proven methods.

Yeah, that's fair.  I'll get back to you with an address.  If it did fail - and, to be clear, I've only fucked up with this general metaphor once of the dozen times I've used it, by trying to pull together an improperly understood specification, whereas this spell I've already done a crapton of math and geometry to make absolutely solid - though I should really rework the spell to be maximally conservative with materials instead of jumping to the next highest power of two and pretending shaving off the excess layers and feeding them back in to the atomic input would be sufficient...  Anyway, even then, when I did fuck it up, it just kind of threw up the unprocessed reagents, and, I think, the metastructure of the alchemy itself, when it tried to push material somewhere it couldn't.  Unless it's the entanglement you're thinking is likely to up and break on us, which, I will admit, is a fact of such a method - but if I just do the identical-sigil-on-a-postcard method that one will be fine as long as the magic stays stuck to it.

(I've successfully transmitted multiple valuable objects myself, one via my placing it inside the sigil and accidentally awakening a friend who's a ways away by getting them to pull it out of its entangled pair over the Internet, despite that effort actually being the first time I'd tried such a thing.  And they had been pretty sure they weren't at all magic.  So I'm pretty confident that nothing bad will happen, which reinforces the fact that it won't because magic is solipsistic like that.  But I can understand why you wouldn't be, I've been a mage for, like, a week and by all rights shouldn't exactly have any idea how to muck with spacetime like that even if it's technically a trick more of noöspheric transmutation and laws of sympathy rather than actual physical space-warping.  ...Which, speaking of, holy shit I could just, make, an Alcubierre drive.  And they've found an entirely positive-mass metric so what I'd need is mostly a focus to keep the warp stable than active physics-bending that would render the magic kind of pointless by needing too much too fast...  I really need to work out how the heck to generate/filter/manipulate/activate magic without a human in the loop, it's not like it isn't external, there's precedent in solar-powered dryads, and if I could make a magic solar panel, or even just extract more power from Maxwell's Daemon than I put in...)

Ah, anyway, my rambling aside, I'll get back to you shortly with that PO box.

To the university post office!  Surely this will be a short conversation that she doesn't need to pay overmuch attention to, she's busy being distracted by !!magic!!

A PO Box can be had by waiting in line and paying money. It's not hard.

She might notice the traces of several unfamiliar magical signatures. Three are kind of... Vermin-y, and one is distinctly BIRD.

She very carefully doesn't react to the familiars? she is feeling on the edge of her perception in any physically visible way, though she does find herself mentally murmuring the mantra from Rogue One meditatively.  Is there any particular...  Intent, attached to their presence here, she supposes?

They all seem hungry, as much as these faint impressions can capture. And skittish.

...Okay, that's worrying.  She texts Wren, focus divided.

Do hivelings ever disguise themselves as not that?  I'm getting some weird sensory impressions.  Maybe want to bump up that meeting with the local MG if that can happen.

...If she just...  Grabs a screenshot/capture of the 'windows' around the signatures she just made up, leaning on her spatial awareness (and practice with third-person cameras) to position them, with a mental motion that's almost inscrutable to anyone but herself but makes complete sense to her...  What do they look like?  Are they actually what they seem?

I thought you decided no MG meeting? Ok sure. I'll put out feelers.

Oh hey look a... Ghost... Rat-mole-lizard-thing? Also some sort of iridescent crab, and what almost looks like a tiny, ugly Bulbasaur. The window looking for the BIRD signature captures nothing. Also the BIRD signature is gone now.

I decided it wasn't urgent; given new information I'm re-evaluating.  ...What the fuck are these?

[picture] [picture] [picture]

, she captures, framing them between her fingers with muttered frustration.

There was a fourth one that was pretending to be a bird... VERY LOUDLY... but it vanished before I could screenshot it.

Diggby, Scoola, Bulbling. Annoying pests. Or weeds, I guess? Bulblings are parasitic, kill with fire.

Welcome to having a lot of mana and not concealing it well. All three of those eat mana.

....Greaaaat.  I don't even have any blasty stuff yet!

Fine then.  You know what she needs right now?  For her mana to be Secure and Contained so that she is Protected from random gribblies trying to eat her.  She focuses, and visualizes the Foundation's sigil as a focus for locking down her runaway mana.  It's not allowed to do that to begin with!

(It's kind of hard to tell if this does anything.)

Blasting is not really that difficult. And none of these things are any more a threat than like... A particularly stubborn goose, unless you ignore one actually growing on your skin/chewing on your leg or w/e

...You literally have the concept of fire written in your DNA.  I'm trying to build combat spells off of the principles of alchemy-inspired videogames.  I feel like there's a bit of a difference in our toolsets.

Well, I tell a lie, I'm expecting to branch out soonish.  But.  I did not plan to need this capacity, at all.  So it is a bit of a stretch from the paradigm that actually came to me naturally.

...On the other hand, I can probably make frickin' laserbeams, so...  I expect I'll be more fine than my pessimism wishes me to think I am.

...And, y'know, the good ol' standby of 'chuck a heavy object at them with my miiiiiind'.  Can't forget that either.

girl EVERY SORCERER I know has a blasty thing, at least one

every single one.

Telekinesis works.

Yeah, I'm just sayin, my body of work so far hasn't lent itself to blasty.  I'm going to fix that, mind.  But right now I'd have to have, like, copied down the formula for gunpowder first.  ...Oh, I could do that, couldn't I - hm, no, we want things that are not precisely magical at the interface because magic can be resisted -

...Goddammit I need to be able to deal with gamma radiation if I do this the stupid(ly obvious to me) way of just mumble mumble manipulating quantum foam excitation mumble spontaneous hydrogen-antihydrogen annihilation reaction mumble.  Maybe if I also throw in - shit, but enough even pseudo-space to cause significant redshift would, presumably, either induce hella lag, or crater my mana efficiency - and I can't exactly build an object for this because the whole point is that it needs to be a spell -

You don't need to stick like glue to your one thing

You can always start doing new ones

Yeah, I just...  Systems, with inputs, and outputs, and rules.  They're good.  I like them.  And then the messy squidgy Everything Else?  Kind of sucks.

inb4 installing another person on my soul so she can handle the messy squidgy bits or something.

...Oh no.  I thought that was a joke.  But I'm not sure it is.