We piled into Sable’s office, since that’s where the contract printer was located. After futzing a bit with with WiFi passwords and printer profiles, Mom connected to it from her phone and printed a few copies of some PDFs. Haha, no, of course it wasn’t that simple, we spent the next twenty minutes trying to get her phone to talk to the printer using different downloadable printer profiles and opening the file in different apps, and ultimately we just had to email the PDF to Sable to print from her laptop. Stupid printers.
Mom declined to offer a contract to Lyris, since she was a familiar of a wizard currently elsewhere and so he would not be bound by the terms if Taliornen used her senses remotely. Mom politely asked her to leave the room, clearly a bit uncomfortable with her to begin with. Probably due to their conversation that I was absent for. I’d need to get some details about that later.
The contract was, like Sable’s contract, fairly simple. There was a header with the familiar Sufficiently Advanced Technologies logo, but there wasn’t much there in terms of text. Since I was aware of contract magic now, I tried squinting at it and focusing on the page. Yes, it was faint, but there was some sort of magical signature coming from the text on the page. Alright, let’s read it.
SAT Non-Disclosure Agreement
Project PRISM Beta Program
By signing this agreement, you are bound to the following terms until the public launch of Project PRISM or ten years have passed, whichever comes first. This must also be signed by an authorized representative to be valid.
First, you agree not to disclose, discuss, or transfer information, documents, or equipment related to Project PRISM except with those also bound by this agreement.
Second, anything issued to you by the company related to Project PRISM must be returned in a timely fashion if requested by the company or an authorized representative.
Beta Participant Signature: ____________________
Authorized Representative Signature: ____________________
Date effective: ____ - __ - __
I looked over to Sable, curious what she thought about it. She looked at mom and asked a clarifying question.
“I think we can agree that the company didn’t issue us this particular piece of hardware, so the second clause doesn’t apply to it, right?”
Mom nodded. “Right. I suppose so.”
I had some questions of my own. “Sable, you said a witch contract just holds if you sign it, but how does that work, practically speaking?”
“Ah, good question. So, the first clause prevents you from doing something. If you would take an action that would violate the contract, then generally you won’t. Your hand won’t move, your mouth won’t speak, whatever it is, you’ll be restricted.”
“And the second clause?”
“As you might have guessed, it can compel action. It won’t actually make you do anything, but if you refuse or take too long you’ll generally find yourself getting weaker and weaker until you decide to comply.”
“What’s all this ‘generally’ business? And who decides if the terms are being upheld?”
She waved her hands mysteriously, “Maaaagic. Just imagine an omniscient third-party is handling it. Nobody really knows how it works, even witches. It just works, usually, and when it seems like it doesn’t, it usually turns out there was a good reason for it. That’s kind of why mages use fairly low-legalese clauses as well. Whatever force is arbitrating these things can be harder to predict when you try to use more complex language or terms specific to the legal profession.”
That sounded a bit sketchy to me, but if nobody knew and it was standard practice anyway, pressing the issue wasn’t going to be productive. “So, should we sign this?”
“Yeah, it looks pretty standard. That is, if your mom will sign mine too.”
Sable handed a document to mom, which she read over. “This seems fine,” she said and signed it. We signed ours as well.
With that out of the way, mom put on her business face and sat down across from us. “Morgan, you will of course recall what I mentioned earlier about a project to make magic more accessible, right?”
”I’m guessing this little crystal is it, huh?”
She nodded. ”You’ve heard of FPGAs, right?”
”Yeah, we used one in my intro to circuits class to design and simulate a basic CPU.”
“Alright, we can skip ahead then-”
Sable raised a hand, interrupting. “Sorry, what’s an FPGA?”
Mom gave her a quick, off the cuff answer. “Field-Programmable Gate Array. It’s a… logic circuit that can shapeshift, basically. You upload a circuit design from a computer, and it pretends to be that circuit.”
It was a little more complex than that, but a good enough explanation for Sable. Sable looked thoughtful and nodded through the explanation. While she didn’t know electronics, she knew sigils, so that probably made some kind of sense to her. “So, is this related to that sigil designer you guys released?”
“It’s related,” Mom said, but before she continued, she noticed I wanted to know all about it. “Right, so Morgan, you probably mostly only know about our products for mundanes… a lot of our ‘like magic’ apps use actual magic on the backend for things like image processing. That feature in our image editor app where you can select a person in a photo and delete them like magic? That’s magic, not AI.”
“You’ve been selling people actual magic services and letting them believe they were AI-based?”
“Yeah, you could say that. Mages have been selling thinly veiled magic to mundane folks for eons, and when the big internet boom happened, we figured we could do it there too. We have to do a little extra work to make sure it doesn’t work too well for the mundanes. Some of the early testers figured out they could delete clothing, and… well, software is hard even without magic. But we also have products just for magical folks.”
“Oh, like that M-Series sensor thing, and the mana-charged battery packs.”
”Exactly. And we make some software for them too. The sigil designer tool Sable mentioned lets you use a printer like Sable’s to draw sigils without needing to spend the time doing so manually. The capabilities are a bit limited but you can do a lot of basic magical tasks that way.”
I suppose I could have inferred the possibility of this kind of thing from the way the magic contracts were printed. “That’s… pretty cool, actually. I had no idea you were doing all this.”
“But back to Sable’s question, in a way a printed sigil is similar, but they have the same limitations as any other sigil drawn on paper. Good for making a scroll or printing out a spell book, but you can’t do anything overly complex with it. We have an industrial wand cutter too, but even then a wand has limits.”
Sable held up the square, pink crystal. “So let me guess, this is one of those FPGA thingies, but for sigils?”
“Exactly. Programmable Rune Instruction Set Module. PRISM.”
Sable smirked at that and nodded approvingly, looking over the crystal with fresh eyes now that she had an idea of what it was.
I shook my head in disapproval. Clever acronyms were too close to puns for my liking, though most coders seemed to love them. Mom was always making up acronyms for things. Pun people, the lot of them.
However, despite the name, the idea of a programmable crystal that you can load sigils into from a file was intriguing to me. “So, that crystal can have a spell sigil loaded in it?”
”Potentially a bunch of them, and some other code besides. Like an FPGA, it has a limited number of programmable blocks etched into it, but as long as you mind those limits you can upload any sigil or combination of sigils, at least constrained to a given PRISM’s runeset.”
From flipping through Sable’s spell books I was aware that higher-tier spells used different and more complex runes than lower-tier spells, and of course wizard and witch sigils used different runes. “I’m guessing a particular PRISM can only hold sigils from a given class and tier?”
Mom confirmed. “Generally yes, though don’t call them ‘classes’, this isn’t a roleplaying game.”
“Alright, so what sigils are programmed into this PRISM?” I asked.
“Hand it to me and I’ll check,” she said.
I did so, and she seemed to concentrate on it briefly, eyes closed. A look of consternation crossed her face, and purple sparks started popping out of the PRISM.
“Shit shit shit,” she said, but put her other hand over it. The PRISM seemed to calm down after a few moments. “Whew. I can’t tell what’s going on with it, the UI’s busted and it seemed like the magic smoke was about to get out.”
‘Magic smoke’ was a common euphemism in mundane electronics, but maybe it meant something else in this context?
Sable asked, with a worried expression, “Can you tell me what this thing is made of?”
Mom shrugged. “That’s a hardware problem.” Typical coder.
Sable nodded, lost in thought, then suddenly got up and left the room, leaving me alone with mom for a bit.
After a bit of awkward silence, I spoke up. “Ahem. So, um, what did you and Lyris talk about?”
Mom grimaced. “Morgan, you need to be more careful. You’ve been on summer break for a week and you’ve already been bound as a familiar, gone through a full gender transition, turned into a narcissistic dragon, and been bonded as some random elf’s wife.”
When she put it that way it did sound kinda bad.
”But, you could also say I got a job, learned magic, won a fight against a manticore, and got a cute girlfriend in just a week”
Mom gave me a slightly exasperated look, but chuckled. “And I hear you’re now in Sable’s coven?”
”Er, technically yes. Sable and I aren’t, well, we’re not really a… thing, that’s just to… appease Lyris.”
”Appease her?”
”Yeah, uh…” I started, but decided to just show her. Sable’s bedroom was connected to the office, so I popped through the connecting door and fetched the English copy of the “My Human Love Coven” manuscript and handed it to her, trying to keep a straight face.
She frowned as she read the cover and flipped through a few pages. “Fucking Ward family and their weird bullshit, they’re writing smut for elves now?”
“Yeah, and… elves seem to have a loose grasp of what fiction is.”
Mom put the smut down and looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “So now you’re encouraging your elf girlfriend who doesn’t know any better to be a fictionalized harem domme?”
Again, her way of phrasing things just wasn’t very generous.
”Well… Sable said it was better than letting her try to impose the family dynamic from Lyris’s world.”
“Why not just tell her how a real coven works?”
I opened my mouth to retort, but that seemed like a fair and rational point, and mom continued, “Are you sure Sable isn’t just into this idea? This is her copy, right?”
”Well… yes, but-“
”Never mind, if you want to let girls tell you what to do, you’re an adult and that’s a valid relationship dynamic. Just, please look before you leap into these things, okay? I don’t want you ending up pregnant before you graduate college.”
Why did everyone keep assuming I was going to be the one to get pregnant? Between Lyris and me, I was the one on birth control, and it wasn’t like she could cast spells or brew potions to give herself a… well, all this talk about covens and… that kind of thing reminded me of a burning question.
”Mom, who’s my dad? You can tell me that now, right?”
Mom looked immediately uncomfortable. ”Er, that’s… well, you probably guessed by now that they’re a woman, right?”
”I got that far.”
”Right. Well we don’t usually call the… providing partner a ‘dad’ in that case. It’s a bit archaic but most witches use ‘sire’ instead.”
“Doesn’t that mean exactly the same thing?”
”Well yes, but it’s tradition, it doesn’t have to make sense.”
Ah, that much I could understand.
“But as to who, I’m sorry, I couldn’t really tell you, sweetie.”
“You… couldn’t tell me? Is there a contract?”
”No, that’s not the problem. I just don’t know who it is.”
”Wait, was I a one-night stand!?”
“No! No sweetie, you were planned. You were wanted. You are wanted. I just, uh… well, my whole coven was… involved…”
The discomfort on her face deepened.
”Mom, are you telling me I was intentionally conceived in an orgy with your coven?”
”It wasn’t a— well, kind of, yes.”
”Wow. And… Sabrina?”
“…the same way”
”Why?”
”Well, someday when you find yourself surrounded by beautiful women who can’t agree on who gets the pleasure of siring your children, you might find yourself doing the same thing.”
Sable had chosen that moment to return, and was standing in the doorway. She smirked. “Like mother, like daughter.”
I did not appreciate the insinuation. “Heeeeey”
Mom glared at Sable as well, but didn’t contradict her. Instead, Sable walked in and put a bag of different-colored crystals and rocks on the table.
”Touchstone and a few samples. Let’s try this.”
I had heard the term before, but didn’t know what it actually referred to. “What’s a touchstone?”
“Well, normal touchstones were mostly used in the old days by merchants to test the quality of precious metals. You’d rub metal against the stone and it’d leave a streak that you could compare to a known sample.”
“Okay, but that’s for metals, right? This is a magical crystal.”
”Yes, this one’s not a literal touchstone, but it’s kind of the same idea.”
She picked up two identical green crystals and touched them both to the spherical black ‘touchstone’, about the size of a fist, and it changed color to match them. Definitely not how a normal touchstone worked, from the sound of it. Then she tried it with a green crystal and a yellow crystal, and it returned to its former dull black color. Neat.
It was fairly obvious what she was trying to do, so without further ado, Mom held the pink crystal against the touchstone while Sable cycled through her bag of samples, trying the obvious pink ones without reaction, and then touched a purple one to it. The stone turned purple.
”Just as I thought. This sample is from one of the crystal veins in the portal cave. The PRISM is made out of portal crystal.”
I looked knowingly back at her and nodded, the implication clear. Our investigation was getting somewhere now, but what would we do about it?
The touchstone uncurled like a giant pillbug and tried to walk away, so I grabbed it and it curled back up.
Mom looked questioningly between us. “What’s a portal crystal?”