After breakfast, Sable showed me how to brew the birth control potion as promised, and then we got the game plan for the day, with Lyris passing messages for Taliornen. While they both had some idea of the fundamental theory behind what was happening with the portal crystal, something that went quite a bit over my head, neither had any immediate theories on what to do about it beyond putting more security on their respective portal caves and setting up some kind of sensors to better understand what was going on. Designing and building the sensors would take a little time.
For now, Sable put me in charge of figuring out some technical solution to the security issue. She gave me a budget and sent me out to do some shopping, handing me her company card. Lyris stayed behind to act as a relay. Now finally equipped with my own (lightly enchanted) clothing that fit properly, I went back into town.
I needed something a little specialized, not just a security camera, but something that’d work in the woods. I went to an outdoor supply store, serving both hikers like myself and hunters, and picked out a cellular trail camera. Long battery life, night vision. It’d take a photo or video any time it saw movement and send it to my phone. Hunters would use these to spot game animals on their land. I loaded several into my cart.
On the way out of the hunting goods section, I lingered, and picked out a small hunting weapon to call my own. Something that wouldn’t weigh me down or get in the way while running like a cat through the woods. A slingshot.
After paying with the company card I brought the items home and handed Sable the receipt. She and Lyris had been working on hammering out the plan, but they both seemed pretty interested in the cameras.
“Oh, these look cool. Alright, let’s take a look at the map.”
Sable got out a topographical map of the property on her tablet and marked three points along the edge of the barrier. “These are the gates. Put cameras on those.”
She marked three other locations. “Barrier emitter stations. Cameras there too. Then put a camera on the portal cave entrances. That should do it. While you’re there, Taliornen will send some supplies over for the sensors we’ll need.”
I spent some time getting the cameras unboxed and paired with my account while the others finalized their own plans. Lyris and I then went out to the barrier gate and I demonstrated installing and switching on the camera. We split up to install our cameras around the property before we met up at the cave.
I installed the portal camera while Lyris picked up the delivery of sensor supplies from the other side, where she installed another camera to watch that side’s portal cave entrance. Unfortunately it wasn’t really possible to put a camera on the teleportation glyph itself. Cell signals would go through planar boundaries but not through stone, apparently.
When Lyris came back she had a wooden box. Whatever the supplies were, they didn’t seem to be particularly heavy, but the box was somewhat bulky so we decided to casually walk them back down.
“Lyris, do you want me to carry that?” I felt it would be polite to offer; we might both be familiars, but I was still taller and presumably stronger than she was.
She glanced down at her load. “No thank you. If something were to attack us, I can still fly with this load, but you would need to use your claws for defense, correct?”
“Fair enough,” I said, appreciating the pragmatic thinking.
We walked in silence for a bit. I’d been thinking about, well, her since this morning. We hadn’t spoken more on the subject of our relationship or what we’d done last night beyond banter about technique. I was trying to think of how to broach the subject when Lyris spoke up.
“So Morgan, you are part of the Owens family, yes? Is this a noble family?”
That caught me a bit off guard. “Uh, not that I know of? I honestly don’t know much about my family, from a… witchcraft perspective. I didn’t even know magic was real a few days ago.”
“Ah, yes, the Earth practice of concealing the existence of magic from those who cannot use it. Why do you think that practice exists?”
“Well if I had to guess, it’s because there aren’t that many mages on Earth, and they have historically faced persecution. People used to be burned at the stake just under suspicion of witchcraft.”
“How strange. On my world, true mages generally receive titles of nobility, and even hedge mages are respected for their abilities.”
That reminded me of something. “Lyris, what about you? Are you some sort of noble?”
She didn’t answer for a while, and I could feel a bit of anxiety coming across our link.
“Uh, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”
“No, it is alright. I was born to a noble line, yes. My family was stripped of their noble status and lands, though.”
“That, uh, must have been rough.”
“Rough, yes. An apt word. I left to find my own fortune as a thief shortly thereafter.”
“And that’s where you learned lock picking?”
“I had some interest before that. Getting into boxes and rooms I should not be in was an amusing pastime at the estate.”
“Huh. So you turned it into a career of sorts. How did you end up…”
“Bound as Taliornen’s familiar? I picked the wrong tower to rob. He recognized my talents as useful and bound me rather than incinerating me. I suppose I should be thankful.”
There was a bitterness in her words that also came over the link. Maybe now wasn’t the right time to talk about our relationship status after all.
After we got back, Sable sorted through the contents of the box. There were a number of purple crystals the size of a golfball, cut into precise shapes and carefully packed into individual padded containers, likely to keep them from banging into each other and chipping. There were also a few vials of liquid I didn’t recognize.
“Alright Morgan, there should be an onboarding link for Slack in your inbox, get on there and you can coordinate with Sarah about dropping these off. I gave her a heads up earlier.”
She started packing more things into the box while I went through the onboarding steps. Once I was in, she added me to the #backyard team channel. There were a few other people in the channel, though they were mostly marked as Offline or Sick.
“Okay, ground rules. You could probably figure this out yourself, but don’t talk about magic stuff directly on Slack. We can’t know who might read the chat logs. Ward Pharma has a lot of mundanes who aren’t in the know, not to mention Slack employees who might have access. Also, no NSFW stuff, obviously.”
Browsing through the member list, I found “Sarah Clark (she/her)”. Kind of a mundane name, I suppose, but I guess not everyone in the magic business is born into a witch family that insists on cool names. Her profile picture showed a professionally dressed brunette. Probably in her late 20s. I’d have to set up my own profile pic later and briefly considered how I should look in it, but that was a problem for later. I sent Sarah a DM asking where to drop off the supplies, and she sent me back an apartment address, noting I could drop by now.
I browsed back through the chat history a bit. The most recent message was from Sable from an hour or so ago, noting that access to the yard was being restricted due to a potential security issue and that existing access tokens were being revoked. That was around the time we’d left to set up the trail cameras.
Lyris had gone back to her room, so with nothing immediately better to do, I left with the box of crystals and a note from Sable.
Sarah’s apartment was in a reasonably nice neighborhood, nothing particularly upscale, but probably out of the range of students like me. I rang the bell, and after a bit of a delay, Sarah opened the door. Unlike her profile photo, her hair was purple and she was wearing a tank top. She had a cast on one leg and was propped up on a crutch.
“Ah, you must be Sable’s new gofer. Come in.”
I honestly hadn’t heard the term ‘gofer’ before, so I misinterpreted her.
“Cat, actually,” I helpfully clarified, carrying the box into Sarah’s apartment.
“What’s tha— oh, right, she did say she was hiring for a familiar… can I see?”
“See what?”
“Y’know, the cat bits.”
I pulled off my hat and stuck my tail out from under my t-shirt.
She looked me over, incredulous. “Wow, you’re… adorable. So she used Luna, huh?”
“Yeah. Anyway, where should I put these?”
“Right, yeah, right this way.”
Sarah lead me through her apartment, which was decorated with what I would probably call an abnormal amount of crystals, rocks, and bottles of colored sand. It looked like she’d robbed the Denver Gem & Mineral Show and hadn’t planned on where to stash the goods.
She put away some work in progress from a workbench that had a bunch of what I would guess were lapidary tools and unpacked the contents of the box there before reading the note and frowning.
“So the other side is getting monster incursions too?”
“Yeah, they thought we were attacking them. The wizard who lives on the other side sent one of his familiars through to try to bust out, but we came to terms.”
“Really… what kind of familiar?”
“Elf-slash-raven, name of Lyris. She’s staying at the house right now as a relay.”
“I see… okay, so Sable wants a sensor network spanning both sides to figure out what’s going on. Can do.”
Among the items Sable had added to the box were a stack of cardboard boxes with the SAT logo. Aside from the logo, they were plain brown, with a model number and the label ‘M-Series Sensor Link’.
“I knew SAT made made some consumer hardware but what’s this?”
“Ah, yeah, you won’t find this shit on their public store page. Anything M-Series is magic-related in some way. This hooks up to a sensory sigil to transmit readings. Mesh network, streaming data, yada yada. We mostly use these for plant growth surveys or sensor collars for some of the animals in the yard.”
She opened one of the boxes and passed me a device from it, maybe a two inches square and just thick enough for an antenna to plug into it. It had a few ports along the side that looked like bare wires were intended to clamp inside. Hearing that my mom’s company was involved with magic in some vague way was one thing, but actually seeing a piece of… well, let’s call it magitech, seemed to hammer it home.
Sarah finished unpacking the supplies while I inspected the device and then said, “Okay kid, I think I know what Sable wants. I can probably knock this out today if you help. What’s your gift?”
“Uh, I’m decent at programming?”
“No, I mean your magical gift. The thing you can do. With magic.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I only learned I was a witch a few days ago.”
She straightened up at that and narrowed her eyes, looking at me like I was some sort of crazy person. “You’re a full on witch? And you don’t know your gift yet? How does that even happen?”
I guess Sable hadn’t shared my background with the team yet. “I… don’t want to get into it right now. Suffice it to say, I didn’t know about magic before I started work this week, so I’m learning from scratch. I’ve only got one spell sigil so far.”
“You didn’t know magic existed last week and you have a spell sigil already? Damn girl, maybe your gift is just being gifted. Hedgies like me are lucky if we learn any spell sigils. I still don’t have one.”
Huh, was it really that tough? I guess I shouldn’t underestimate or under-appreciate the advantage that being a full-blooded witch gave me. Creating and operating a spell sigil must be a lot harder without mana sense. “Okay, back up. What’s this gift thing?”
“Right… anyone who has enough mana for it to be useful tends to develop some in-born way to use it in childhood. It’s how hedgies learn they’ve got magic, and how mage families know when to start training their baby mages. Generally some sort of expression of their personality and potential, that sort of thing.”
Sable hadn’t mentioned anything like that. “Wow, I don’t think I’ve got one of those, not yet anyway. What’s yours?”
“I can sense things about rocks and earth and reshape it with my mana, just a bit. It’s what makes me a geomancer, basically. A formal mage can do geomancy with the right combination of sigils, but it comes natural to me.”
“That’s pretty cool. I thought all magic was sigils.”
“Nah, witches and wizards like to pretend they’re the masters of magic just because they can make sigils, but people were doing magic before that was formalized. Like, a lot of modern alchemical recipes use a sigil as a shortcut, but people have been brewing weird magical bullshit for millennia. Sigils make things more accessible, but don’t underestimate a hedgie just because we can usually only do one kind of thing.”
“Good to know. So, how should I help with this?”
“Oh right, yeah. Well you’ve got nothing I can work with, so for now just unbox everything and organize the parts…”
As an example, she made a small pile consisting of one of the ‘sensor link’ devices, an antenna, a purple crystal, three short wires of different colors with the ends exposed, and a USB battery pack that also sported the SAT logo.
“Oh, and something you can do is charge these batteries. There’s a hidden sigil inside, just push your mana in there and it’ll suck it up. Given the size of these batteries I imagine you’ll only need to recharge this sensor network monthly, assuming the boss wants them up that long.”
She tapped a message into her phone, then we started to work. Sorting out the antennas, crystals, sensor links, and battery packs was easy enough. Sarah didn’t have a bunch of conveniently pre-cut wires, but she did have spools of the stuff and a set of wire cutters, so I handled that. Channeling mana into the battery packs was somewhat time-consuming but not terribly difficult.
Meanwhile, I watched Sarah work. Using some sort of notebook of reference material, she designed a series of a few runes to form a simple sigil and carefully etched them into the faces of the crystals using lapidary tools and a head-mounted jeweler’s loupe. Once the etching was done, she’d fill the lines in with some sort of ink or paste from one of the potion bottles that came in the box, then bathe the whole thing in the fluid from the other potion. The crystal turned an odd green color after she did so.
“What exactly are you doing there? Didn’t you say you didn’t have any sigils yet?” I asked.
She looked up and flipped the magnifying lens aside. “I can’t do spell sigils. Those are the ones you can draw with mana and keep inside you to use whenever. Even a hedgie with the right reference material and theory can just draw a sigil with ink or whatever, though as you can see it takes a while.”
“Okay, got it, I think. Anyone with training can draw a sigil. Mages make spell sigils. Spell sigils are the glowy floaty mana ones.”
“Exactly. This sigil I’m etching is for converting the crystal’s planar vibrations into a coherent mana signal. The potion bath that turns it green at the end makes it hard to damage, so we don’t need to worry about weather or animals chewing on it.”
She pulled out a soldering iron and plugged it in, then proceeded to solder the ends of the wires on some of the runes.
“I can do that part,” I offered.
“You know how? Cool, you can do the next one.”
She drew me a little reference of which which runes I should solder which wires to, and where they should plug into the sensor link device. The final step was apparently to hot glue the crystal on top of the sensor package, which seemed a bit haphazard to me, but hey, she was the expert.
After an hour or so of teamwork, the six nodes of the sensor network were completed and their batteries charged.
“Good job, kid. I should borrow you more often. Alright, see you at work once I’m officially back. I’ve got a few more days of leave and I’m gonna milk those to finally finish watching One Piece,” Sarah said.
“Subs or dubs?” I asked almost automatically.
She smirked. “I like my anime like I like my men…”
I blushed a bit at the unexpected answer and started to stammer something out, but she interrupted.
“Speaking a foreign language.”
“Um. Right. Yes. I’m… gonna get those sensors delivered then,” I said, pulling my beanie back on to go.
“Oh, you’re gonna be fun,” she said and waved while I made my retreat.