The Rise Of The Three Crater Alliance

What to do?

The Answer: Make haste slowly.

A hero in a story always has the solutions to the problems and jumps into action. His solutions work flawlessly... He lives happily ever after.

I was in this to save myself, not a bunch of random people from random timelines who had been swept up by gates and deposited on this planet for some unknown reason. I owed these people nothing. I could plainly see that people were dying all over the place. Too bad. So sad.

Morning crept in as it was wont to do. Silver eased in at some point about mid-morning. She was dressed in a brilliantly colored silk caftan that fell to ankle length. Her silk slippers were heavily embroidered with diamonds and rubies. Her morning drink appeared to be nonalcoholic in a plain ceramic mug. She stood watching the various screens. Finally she asked, "I gather that these are views of places far from here that you somehow have gotten to appear. What are you looking for?"

I swiveled the chair around... which seemed to surprise her. "I have been here for about four days. On the surface, the best solution would be to grab some people and ask them what is going on. The problem would then be that I would have to learn their language which would take time that I do not have... and I have a firm belief that the people I grabbed would not have a clue as to what is going on. They are dying of a plague... a disease. The gates have increased their output of predators... I already know that, so grabbing individuals at this point is pretty useless."

"Yet you grabbed me. Why?" she asked with the mug in both hands.

"Silver, you used what I consider to be magic. Your ability appeared to me to be very useful, because... My people say, 'Logistics is everything' which means 'you have to have food, clothing and shelter to make any endeavor prosper'. My people use a set of physical tools to do that. The tools use principles that anyone with enough perseverance can learn. Our magic is called science.

"In the last few centuries, we used science to mass produce food, clothing and shelter. The lowliest peasant could easily acquire enough of the basics to survive. The big problem is that science is very, very messy and fragile to maintain.

"We imagined that magic could do the same tasks, but with less cost and more efficiency. Our problem was that we could never make magic work... at all. We decided that magic did not exist. We wished that your magic might exist, but could never find out how to activate it.

"The three magic tools that I need right now are mana stones, spell chrystals powered by mana stones and items boxes powered by mana stones. All of these together should allow you to do all manner of things necessary to establish a city, like duplicating one of a kind things so the duplicates can be used instead of the originals."

"But first we have to deal with mana stones. We will get to the other things in a bit." I ejected the three intricately inlaid cabinets that Q had fabricated overnight. The first was about knee high. The second was c.h.e.s.t high. The third was head high. Each had seven drawers.

She squatted, set her mug on the smallest cabinet, and opened the top drawer. Inside were thirty tear drop shaped stones in various shades of red that were about an inch across. The stones were in five rows of six. Silver took one out and gasped. She closed her eyes and was silent for a while. She set the first down and then took up another one. She repeated this for five or so stones, then closed that drawer.

The next drawer had various shades of orange. She shook her head, then took up a random five of those and seemed to commune with them. I was astonished when she went through the yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet drawers, repeating her performance. She had more patience than I ever would have.

Silver did the same thing for the second cabinet where the stones were about three inches across. All the time she was checking them out, I got the feeling that she was trying to deny what she was sensing.

When she opened the third cabinet, each of the stones were about six inches across. She took out a few from the first drawer and tested them. She stopped suddenly, put all but one away and then said, holding an angry red stone up to me, "If this was my home, this stone alone would change the balance of power among factions within the government. A mana stone like this... I cannot imagine what application it would be used in... My God, I... How did you make these?"

"Growing crystals is easy, if you know how. The trick is getting the various..." How do you describe lattice structures and element placement to someone who has never considered that atoms exist. "parts to fit in the correct places... I was worried that the coloration would screw things up. Can you detect any major difference between the mana stones based on color?" I asked, now really wondering.

Her eyes blinked for a while, then she said, "You are not understanding. The stones are so pure that... Words escape me. The coloration impurities mean almost nothing compared to the purity of the other parts of the mana stones... Again, why the hell do you need me?"

"I have no idea how to charge them. My best guess is that even after you show me how you do it, I will be no wiser." I touched the translation item on my arm. "This device makes no sense to me. I know that it has a mana stone to power it. I know that a spell chrystal is being powering by the mana stone. My problem is that I cannot see how that is effected. I cannot even understand how the spells are written onto the spell chrystals.

"Think about this a minute... I have hidden the fact that the top of this mountain was shaved off flat by deploying a device that I kind of understand. What the device does is show to the world an image of how the mountain top looked before I screwed with it... In addition, the device produces a sound that causes anything that hears to be uncomfortable around the peak... A bird wanders by. Instead of setting on the top of this mountain, it moves on. Same thing for a dragon or any other flying or crawling monster. If they overcame their innate fear, they could easily walk through that image and do damage to me or the house. Most creatures would never think of doing that without a good reason.

"I know that there is another device that could shield me from invasion by pushing the animal away, but that would take more power than I am willing to expend right now... I perceive that you know a spell that could produce the effect that I have described, but you would be loath to deploy such a spell, because it would take too much power from your body. On the other hand, a spell chrystal could deploy the effect on demand, if a big enough mana stone was somehow attached to it. How long the mana stone could power the spell chrystal would be..."

Silver cut me off with, "A mana stone this big," She bounced the red crystal in her hand. "could power a spell chrystal like you describe for hundreds, if not thousands of years... As for charging them, I do not know whether I am capable of charging a mana stone this big."

"Could you create a spell chrystal that could charge these mana stones?" I asked.

Silver blinked, then her jaw worked up and down for a while, then she got a look of consideration in her eyes. She finally said, "Yes... I see how to do that. I could charge a small mana stone that could then power a spell chrystal that could charge a large mana stone like this one, but it would take forever."

I turned off all the images on the wall... I posed an important question... "What if we were to be living at a power node? I believe that you mentioned that a power node would have even more mana than is normal," I said.

She froze... After a while, she put away the huge mana stone, picked up her mug and sat on a cushion that she pulled from her items box. Silver sipped her drink, thinking. Finally she said, "Living at a power node... Rock, you presuppose that such a thing exists on this planet. What is more you never even knew that a power node existed until I told you... All right. Let me think about it. I know a spell for locating a power node... I have not used it for at least a hundred years, but I think that I can invoke it without much trouble.

"I would warn you that normal power nodes are not really great places to live for non-wizards... Wait... I have been to power nodes back home. None of them had the level of mana that exists right here... Normal power nodes back home are gloomy places with a lot of cloudy days and too much rain. I would expect that a power node on this planet would be surrounded by a permanent rainstorm... My God, in winter, the place would have snow deeper than most tall buildings." A thought suddenly hit her. "What happened to the mana stones that I gave you?"

"I used them as the basis for the stones you see before you. Why?" I asked.

"I assume that we are going to do the same thing with spell chrystals. Can you make new spell chrystals without destroying the old ones?" she asked tensely.

"Probably... I had the ingredients for these mana stones on hand in my Pocket. If the ingredients for the spell chrystals are kind of rare, then we may have to go search for them... I gather that you have quite a few spell chrystals with information that you would be sad to lose."

Silver snorted and said derisively, "Of course I would be sad. Some of these spell chrystals have been with me for my entire life."

I said, "Okay. Come along." I got up and started for the workroom.

As we walked, I asked, "I assume that you have eaten."

"Yes. Your food is... different. I was a bit surprised that it did not make me ill." Once we were inside the workroom, she said, "Your food is much more nourishing than mine. Did you add something to it to increase its... goodness?"

"Yes. In my travels, I visited quite a few restaurants, eateries and just plain stalls. Wherever I found something I liked, I got the seller to make me as many as one hundred copies of a given dish. Then I stored them in my Pocket." Her silver eyes and black l.u.s.trous face gave nothing away, though I sensed that I had surprised her yet again. "I used some instruments that I have to determine what your body was lacking as far as calories, vitamins and trace elements. Then as the meal is ejected into reality I add what is lacking either for an entire day or just that meal.

"In your case, I sensed that you have not been eating well. Plus you have been under a lot of stress. I added some nutrition that was lacking in your body. My passive scans of you say that your condition is much improved. Doing that huge mindless task yesterday was just the thing to shift your mood from hopelessness to something closer to hopefulness." I motioned to the tabletop. "Drop all the spell chrystals you have on the tabletop and we will go through the same process as yesterday." For once she visibly balked.

I smiled and said, "Because... As I said before, we need mana stones, spell chrystals and items bags to survive... Ensconced on top of a mountain means that we are relatively safe, but sooner or later we will have to... well, live. Humans are not meant to live alone. We need to find that power node and settle in. At some point we need to invite others to join us. I can see a situation where we offer the age old bargain... 'I will protect you from a very violent world, if you will work the land for me and do as I tell you to do.'"

She sighed, then her items box vomited a vast array of spell chrystals in all shapes, sizes and colors... I looked again. I saw no crystal that I could positively identify as indigo or violet and very few of them were blue. Most of them were just coal black like they had been burnt in a fire of some type.

This time the sorting process took two days and left Silver wrung out. At the end, I had to prod her to tell me which crystals could be disassembled. We went down the five rows of crystals. She would verify that a spell chrystal was either empty or had something she could do without. Q would let me know that she had it marked down. In essence we were going through someone's library that had been carefully assembled over a 234 year period and discarding those that she could do without... basically, a very painful experience.

The next morning, she slept late again... Silver did not appear in the den until well after I had lunch... When she did appear, she was very hesitant. "Just so you know. All of your spell chrystals that I did not use are on the table in the workroom." I ejected a single cabinet with seven drawers. "I do not have all the ingredients necessary to make any big spell chrystals... which is kind of strange." She opened the top drawer and took out a red crystal. "The spell chrystals are mostly made of quartz which is composed of silicon and oxygen. Quartz as a mineral is very common, so being unable to create vast quantities of these spell chrystals is kind of upsetting." Silver closed her eyes and started sensing the crystal. "We call that shape a regular dodecahedron, twelve sides, each in the shape of a pentagram. Since you would not sacrifice what you had, I could only..."

"Quiet... Stop spouting shit about things you know nothing about. These crystals are so pure that... words escape me... I have over a thousand spell chrystals. I could put all the spells from those crystals on this one small one." The crystal was about half an inch across. I had made all the spell chrystals a quarter inch, half an inch and one inch in diameter. "I am unsure whether I could invoke a given spell without accidentally invoking another spell on the same spell chyrstal." Silver was almost hyperventilating by now. "Spell chrystals come in many variants. Some are used for storage. Others are used for magic devices. Still others are for offense." A belt appeared from her items box. Somehow it reminded me of a bandoleer. "If I were going for a serious fight, I would stock this belt with multiple spell chrystals. I would feed a little mana to a given chrystal to activate its spell." She paused, thinking, as she gazed into the top drawer. "Reforge these. Spell chrystals for attack should be about half the size of your smallest stone." An eighth of an inch? What was up with that? "Your smallest spell chyrstals could be for devices hooked to mana stones. Your largest could be used for storage." An inch in diameter was huge? And here I was thinking that the thing was way too small. "Your intermediate size is... unusable." Okay. So half an inch was too big for attack and too small for storage. That seemed very strange.

She looked me in the eyes. "Rock, that you are getting these results dumbfounds me." The belt disappeared. I put the cabinet away into my Pocket and instructed Q to fix the problem.

"What is strange is that my people used something like quartz to store information as well. We..." I halted. I could tell that she was not really interested in silicon wafer.

At the moment, she was so agitated that she could not much care.

"All right... Let us move on to what you call items boxes." I arose and led her to the workroom. The number of spell chrystals on the table looked very daunting as far as putting them away. I mean, I had forced the poor woman to empty her library. Putting everything back in its place should have been a major chore... Instead... one minute the spell chrystals were there and the next they were gone. "Ummm... what just happened?"

She blinked and said slowly, "I just put all my spell chrystals away in my items boxes... What do you mean?"

An idea hit me.

"Are you saying that inside your items boxes all the entries have a specific place to reside... and they automatically drop in that spot each time they enter their items box?" I asked excitedly.

Very confused and somewhat amused she asked, "Why is that important? Rock, to do duplication, I need to know where everything in an items box is in order to make anything work... I mean, when I duplicate something, I use the resources in my items box to build a duplicate... Don't you have an exhaustive index of what is in your... Pocket?"

I chuckled and said, "I must apologized. I was under the impression that you would not have an accessible inventory of your items box... I kind of expected that you had to pull things out in the same order that you put them in."

"Ahhh... That was how we did it a while back, but someone came up with a spell that does exactly what you implied... makes a detailed index of whatever is put into an items box. The number of categories that you can look things up is very large. I have never much used that function, except when I duplicate things... In fact duplicating something becomes almost impossible without using the indexing spell... I mean, before you had to pull everything out of the items box in order to duplicate things."

I paused, then asked, "How many items boxes do you have?"

Silver was wearing a long gauzy robe with full sleeves. She stuck her right hand deep into her left sleeve and removed three containers and set them on the table. Then she plunged her left hand into her right sleeve and came up with three bags. I was tempted to speculate as to where these were stored, but decided to remain silent.

Each of the boxes was unique. One was an intricately carved wooden cube. I assumed that the symbols on it were significant, but they only appeared to be decoration to me... One was a tiny rectangular gold box with a silver latch and silver lock on it... Another looked like a small wooden wine cask complete with a tiny cork on the side. Three golden bands at the top and the bottom held the thing together... The remaining three were bags... One was a full backpack... Another was a large flat burlap bag that seemed to be empty... The last was just a moderate sized woman's purse.

All of the shapes begged the question as to why they looked so familiar to me. Cultural convergence seemed unlikely, but again, I decided not to question her about why they looked the way they did.

I said, "Okay. To work."