Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Subject: [MG] Forgeries and Counter-Feets Message-ID: References: <1993Apr14.192906.11612@data-io.com> Date: Sat, 1 May 1993 00:32:31 GMT [ADMIN] Another collaboration. Probably one or two more and then maybe Bernie will have caught up with school and Quals and might be able to join in his thread again (grin). ---- Four people wandered the labyrinths of the Mages' Guild. Three were women, two in somewhat outlandish garb - literally: the cut of their clothes was different from the local fashion, and the fabrics and decoration spoke of foreign lands and different climes - and the third was cloaked in thoroughly traditional magician's robes of colorful silk covered in dragons, embroidered and otherwise. The fourth was a man, middling tall and with the frame of a warrior, but twirling a mage's staff, black with gems and shod in metal. Leonaco was standing in front of the lab entrance. He blocked their entry, frowning in massive displeasure. "You would be 'Raelf, if the registry is correct." "Yes, if it is. Do you mind, I'd like to go inside." "Of course I mind. You've usurped one of my production facilities." "Baking powder?" 'Raelf growled, staring at the man. "What?" Leonaco shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the words. "I said, I beg your pardon? This laboratory is clearly marked as part of the Research Department facilities." 'Raelf pointed to the sign painted in neat letters on the opaque glass door-window. Leonaco shrugged. "That's unofficial. I've been using it for overflow production work for the last ten years." "Way cool, sorry to disrupt your schedules, but it's still registered with Research, and I need it for projects, so I signed it out. Check with Archmage Rivy. She handles all this stuff." "I'll do that." Leonaco sketched a sign in the air and vanished, irritated. "You probably shouldn't annoy him." Jameson tilted her head pensively. "Why not?" "I believe that's Archmage Leonaco. Head of Production. From what Nescie's told me, he's very powerful. And very grumpy." "He'll get over it - he wasn't doing anything critical in here, just had it set up as a materials factory. He could do that more efficiently if he had other methods, but then, he'd have them if he didn't keep taking people and facilities away from Research. What goes around comes back around and bites you on the arse." "Just be sure," chided ar'Elya, stroking a dragonet, "that he isn't what bites on YOU." She held the dragonet out for Kardia to examine, noting her continued interest. "Besides, that's MY job." She smiled. Kardia held out a fingertip for the dragonet to sniff and when the little creature rubbed it's head against her finger, she smiled and scritched it behind the ears as she looked at its jewel brightness. "Thanks." she said softly. It chirrupped a welcome. 'Raelf seemed lost in thought for a moment, his eyes focussed deep black on some unseen reality, then he snapped back to the present. "Right. Until then," he touched the staff to the door, <>. The door opened with a semi-nauseating twist in the wrong direction, revealing a room lit from overhead by klieg lights, or something very much like them, with two work areas clearly delimited under the lights. They entered, the door closing itself behind them with a SNAP. They approached the work areas. 'Raelf was working in both of them. Kardia whistled softly, looking from one 'Raelf to the other. Jameson just smiled. "Uhm, forgot to tell you, Kardia. I, uh, have this thing about making time to do what I need to do." "You're just showing off again," ar'Elya said reprovingly. Kardia blinked at ar'Elya's tone and then grinned. "Well, yeah, but not the way you mean." He led them into the closer work area, with a sort of tingle along the skin as a space-warp closed around them. The first thing they felt was the heat - the workspace was an open-brazier forge, but operating much hotter than such forges generally did in the absence of magical intervention. The instantiation of the blond mage working the forge was stripped to the waist, clad only in black jams which were marked up and down with runes that glowed the colors of fire. He had a framework, a foot-shaped anvil, cast in iron, around which he was shaping white-hot metal bands, using a small hammer and his bare hands. He nodded, but didn't interrupt the unusual moaning chant that accompanied his work - he reached into the coals, pulled out a hot strip of metal, laid it along the framework and sang to it as he did so, then fastened it with a word and a hammer-blow to the strip of metal that ran down along the centerline of the foot, providing a spring under the toe of the foot. One more, and (using a pair of tongs) he plunged the assembly into a barrel of black shiny liquid - the steam had a rank, oily stench that vanished as a small whirlwind formed and sucked it up. He pulled the boot out of the tempering liquid, and set it back on the form, then picked a small complex-looking piece of rock and silver wire from the lab-table nearby, fastening it to the toe and nodding, then removed the thing and put it back on the lab table, then put the boot onto the floor. "Pardon," he said to Jameson, reaching past where she stood by a cabinet, for a small block of silvery-grey metal, with a patina that in a high-tech place would definitely say "aluminum". "Step back a few feet, or hey, be useful and screen these folk," 'Raelf-working-metal said to his counterpart. "Rude boy," he replied, and extending his staff forward, <>. A dark-tinted wall sprang up between them, nearly opaque where the heat and light were greatest, nearly transparent elsewhere. The other nodded, and, chanting again, made the fire start growing much hotter - his body began to glow as the heat and light lit him internally. <> The bar of aluminum began shimmering, and began to sweat. Droplets of melted metal ran into the man's hands, and he began to spread the metal onto the foot form, where it foamed under his continued chanting, puffing like shaving cream. When he had the form covered, he clamped the boot around it, squeezing the last bits of aluminum-foam out the bottom. He scraped them loose, and pulled the form up off the anvil-stand, then removed the foot-shape, finally re-fastening the contraption of rock-and-wire into the toe, and clamped an ugly metal toe-piece down over it. <> he said, and, grabbing his shirt, waved, and vanished. "HEY! darnit!" 'Raelf shouted, and then began muttering to himself. "Oh stop, you knew this would happen," ar'Elya remarked, as 'Raelf began methodically shutting down the forge and cleaning up the work area, muttering in some old goblin dialect. Jameson's eyes widened slightly as she listened to him, then creased into smiles. "Uhm..." Kardia swallowed but still sounded petulant when she asked, "Aren't... aren't there supposed to be... uhm... problems...?" she shrugged, trying to find the words, "Uhm.. problems when someone travelling in time meets up with themselves? Oh... man... just thinking of how you'd have to be able think of time to do that makes my head hurt..." Jameson looked away from 'Raelf. "Try not to hold to reality too much. It helps." She began bouncing on the balls of her feet and looking about intently. Kardia sighed with resignation, "Right." 'Raelf finished wiping out the brazier with a cloth that he stuffed into a non-space, and returned to where the others were waiting. "Great. All cleaned up. Now, would you like to see what that ugly foot provided?" He grinned, and jabbed upwards with the staff, turning off the klieg-lights over the work area. A tingle of warping space, and they were standing in a small alcove of the lab between two work tables. "Are you supposed to be reconfiguring space in here?" ar'Elya asked, skeptically. She removed a dragonet from the table where it was trying to get into an alembic. "Nobody said not to, and besides, Urcohea knows that I know the control codes, so he has to know that I can do remote configures. We went over all that stuff when I helped him shut down the power taps." He shrugged. The other work area was a similarly expanded place, but the machinery was somewhat different. On one of the lab benches, 'Raelf's deck was out, with five different strangely-shaped crystal sticks inserted at various points. Instead of a holographic globe, though, four of the crystals were projecting rays of light that flickered, laserlike, over the chair-and-dome structure where a time-folding of 'Raelf was working. He ignored them, concentrating, as he looked through a double-eyepiece, moving his hands inside a pair of gloves. Inside the dome, tiny spots of light were moving across a small crystalline spider. Attached to the spider was the stone-and-wire contraption which had been inside the boot - in fact, the boot lay on the lab bench beside the deck. "Almost done," 'Raelf whispered, pointing to where his doppleganger was disconnecting the spider from the contraption. Jameson looked on curiously, walking around it in order to get a clear view, but avoiding the rays of light. "This is _not_ a machine, at least, not solely - you're using law of similarity to operate the waldo." "Most perspicacious babe," 'Raelf muttered to himself. "And I don't think the local Mages' Guild has anything that so nicely mimics a high technology design/fab unit," she wagged a finger at him. "Really getting into your work, eh?" ar'Elya chided, restraining the dragonets from getting into the deck. 'Raelf laughed, but didn't say anything else, so ar'Elya finally spoke. "I'll explain, since my mate is being his usual obscure self. The tool is a complex high-order illusion, projected from a design which he has on that blue-green memory crystal. He reinforces the parts of it that need to be more real, using some of his own virtual mass, which is a trick that he invented to cheat on an examination where his tools were limited." "Wasn't cheating, luv. Therr'u let us use whatever tools we could build, I just used what was available, to build better ones." "Virtual mass?" Jameson and Kardia started to ask at almost the same time. "Surreality check," 'Raelf grinned. "I told y'all we were from someplace different. You've seen Raye changing state all the time, right? And just now you saw me with my elemental-fire component turned all the way up. Well, the mass for this has to come from somewhere, so we keep it imaginary until we need it." "'Life is complex, it has a real part and an imaginary part.'" Kardia shook her head. "Does that make sense to you?" Kardia asked Jameson. Jameson nodded. "No. And Yes. And No. It makes the right kind of nonsense. Paradox embraced and also circumvented. Most magic is a matter of style and imagination." "Breaking the rules with panache, so you can get away with it?" "Exactly." She grinned at Kardia. Kardia shook her head and smiled back. Inside the dome, the spider came to life, scuttling over to a small box containing, among other odds and ends, a small bar of gold, from which it began scraping bits and pieces. It then went back to the stone-and-wire conglomeration which had been fastened to it, and spat out some thick gray liquid which dissolved the stone, leaving a tangle of wire and small precious gems suspended in its grasp. It began to weave a web of spun gold, fastening all the pieces in the web, making a small lump which it then spun into a lattice resembling the bones of the front quarter of a foot. After a few minutes, the web began to expand on its own, and the spider resumed the task of devouring the gold bar, secreting more web which spun itself into the growing structure.. Gradually, after a few minutes, the form of a foot became visible, and the spider began eating the silver wire, then some bits of other metals, bone, things which had been in the box with the gold bar. The last thing it did was to crawl onto the toe of the foot-sock, and after shaking for a moment, it melted, flowing into the toe. Kardia shifted her foot a little uncomfortably. 'Raelf-in-chair pulled the magnifier away from his eyes, blinked, and reached _through_ the dome to pick up the foot, then inhaled sharply, stretching. He walked over to the deck and touched a rune on its top, and the fab-station vanished. While the others waited, he dis-assembled the projector and stowed it away then came and stood next to himself, and addressed Kardia. "So, do you like the foot the way it is now? You've had it for ...hmm about three-four hours, would you like the non-prototype version or is this one fine?" Kardia blinked at the question. She shifted on her left foot again. "This works beautifully. I think I'll keep this one." "No you don't," ar'Elya said, grabbing him before he could vanish. "Give her the full details, stop being so obscure." "Sorry," 'Raelf said, abashed. "I keep assuming that really competent or powerful people will know the details. The foot itself hasn't been completely installed, that's why it's a prototype. If you like it, if you don't want to go for a different design, then you'd get the complete installation kit. It's a full cyber unit, it would become permanent." "Oh. Well. Without surgery?" "Of course. That's where magic has the advantage over tech." "OK ... do it then." "Great." He touched the gold foot-sock in his hand to the one she was wearing, and a slight SNAPing noise failed to echo through the room. The sock began to tingle, the skin on her foot feeling like she was standing in seltzer water. "What's it doing?" She pulled her sock down curiously. "Installing itself. You know the story of Lugh of the Silver Hands? Well, you'll be Kardia of the Golden Foot. See ya earlier." He vanished, leaving that annoying sparkly trail behind him in Kardia's vision. "What are the side effects?" she demanded, standing and facing the remaining 'Raelf. "What did you just do?" "Nothing serious. It won't come off, of course, like the eyes. It makes the nerve-connection better, and helps get rid of the problems with the support structure and the bones. It also prevents any nerve injury and rejection problems. And you get better control of the toes." "What was that weird noise?" "Oh. Installing the feedback information about nerve systems and bio's into the earlier foot so it could work more efficiently." Kardia thought for a moment about the feedback information being installed, before she ever had the foot on, realized what that meant, and decided not to try and think about it any more. "Well, finally," ar'Elya muttered. "They've gone. Except Little Rat." "What, you mean, the coast is clear?" 'Raelf grinned. "Right. Do you want to do the honors?" "Sure. Here goes." He repeated the motion he'd used earlier, raising his staff and pointing it at the klieg lights overhead, but when they went out, and the space closed around them, the room changed more suddenly. They were in a perfectly cubical room, twenty feet on a side, made of some hewn stone, glimmering with lichens. Through an open door, they could see an enclosed courtyard with a garden laid out. "Welcome to our lighthouse," ar'Elya said. ----- Kelly J. Cooper kjc@cs.rutgers.edu Liralen Li | "What you feel can make it real aka Phyllis Rostykus | real as anything you've seen..." li@Data-IO.com | - Peter Gabriel, _So_ Hutch (Combinatorial posts are such fun) hutch@ibeam.intel.com