Clumsiness is not often the cause of high adventure, but for James Strathmore a mild head cold and a moment of inattention sent him falling into the epic. A struggling college student, wavering between majoring in Chemistry or something in computers, James was walking briskly while trying to fish out a handkerchief when a quiet buzz made him look up. That same instant his foot caught on the slightly raised lip of a brick in the walk and he tripped, falling, and crashing into someone as he fell.

He was roughly shoved off of the person even as he was stammering apologies, and caught only a short glimpse of a tall, slender man looking at him with irritation and contempt. James' vision was blurred by the sudden light of a noonday sun, which he found startling and disturbing, as he was quite certain it had been dimming towards twilight only a moment before. He struggled to his feet, his heavy backpack hampering his attempt, and managed to straighten enough to have a brief solid look at an oval opening in the air, the tall man on the other side walking away into the dusk, before it suddenly vanished, leaving him on a grassy path under a warm sun.

He shrugged the backpack off and jumped forward, far too late, but there was nothing to show the portal had been there, save a thin slice in the grass, as if someone had pressed a shovel in but not turned up any dirt. James stood dumbfounded for a few moments, then began turning in circles, staring about him, wondering when he would wake up.

That the tall man was some sort of traveler was obvious, and James had read enough science fiction and fantasy to recognize a portal when he saw one, even if he had never seen one in real life. There was certainly no other explanation for his being here now, in what looked like a pleasant sort of countryside, standing on a grassy lane that led up to a picturesque little cottage that had the sort of extra boards on the facings and edges, crossed here and there, that he expected on a postcard from some old European town, a bit of kitchen garden to either side of him making him think this must be the back of the house. There was a white fence around the garden that met up at the edge of the house, and a gate by one side of the house and another behind him down the grassy path. That confused him a fair bit, as if anything, he would have expected a path that was actually used, such as the one through a kitchen garden, to be well packed dirt. Even if it was sown with grass, surely a path would have been quickly worn into it?

He was certain he had not been unconscious for any of what he had just experienced, so it could not have been an abduction. But a portal? How could such a thing be? Was it merely a distance portal, a way for some alien or eccentric genius to teleport around the world? Or did it go through time, or space, or dimensions?

He leaned down and lifted his pack back onto his back, sighing at the weight of the books inside, and wishing they had been something more useful. Why couldn't this have happened when he was camping, and had a pack full of survival gear or something? He fished out his handkerchief and blew his nose, as he had been about to do, not wanting his first impression on whoever might be in that house to be that he was sick.

Unfortunately for his desires, that was the moment the back door of the house opened, and an old woman stepped out, carrying a basket of clothing, and saw him. He started violently, not having noticed her, when a voice suddenly spoke sharply in an unfamiliar language, and he looked up. His heart sank as he realized that at the very least he was far enough from home that he not only did not know the language, he could not even identify it.

He did not know French, or Italian, or German, or Spanish for that matter, in spite of living in Houston, a city with a high-proportion of Spanish-speakers... though Spaniards might not acknowledge them as such, but he felt sure that he would have recognized any of them. So further afield then, one of the former Eastern bloc countries perhaps?

The lady had said something more and then, frustrated at his helpless shrug, had stomped back in the house.

"So much for a good first impression," James muttered, wondering if she was calling the cops, and if he was about to spend the next few years in a foreign prison. She had looked a rather wizened old lady, but that wouldn't do him much good if she had gone to get a phone or a gun.

That thought made him realize something was missing, and he looked around again, more closely. In all his view of wooded and grassy hills, a flock of sheep in the distance on one of the slopes, a stream winding between hills on the lower ground in one direction, and a denser, darker wood rising up to the slopes of a mountain range in the other, nowhere did he see a sign of tarmac or blacktop. There was not a single power-line in sight, nor any vehicles. There was no sign of a plane in the sky, though he did see some birds circling here and there in the clear blue.

A grumbling voice drew his eyes back to the cottage, as an equally old and decrepit looking man came out, shutting the door behind him, and strode towards James, a lumpy and crinkled stick in his hand, that could only be called a cane by way of hyperbole, though he pushed off the ground with it like one.

Here again, looking closer at the old man's clothing, James felt goosebumps rise on his arms. No sign of metal buttons, zippers, not even a belt-clasp! The man's trousers were held up by a bit of knotted rope. James could almost feel the possibility that the portal he had passed through was merely a means of teleporting to different places on the Earth slipping away, vanishing beyond his grasp.

The man said something sternly, and prodded James with the stick. James sighed and shrugged, assuming he was being told to hit the road, in spite of the lack of roads hereabouts, and shrugged and turned to go, hoping that he would find someone who would be a bit more open to a stranger, when he was spun about again. The seemingly decrepit old man had hooked his knobbly stick into James' backpack strap and spun him about with no sign of effort. James eyed the stick warily, hoping he was not going to have to defend himself from a beating.

The old man merely eyed him fiercely, glaring at him from under great bushy white eyebrows. He had a thin, wispy white beard, closely trimmed, with a stray few white hairs sprouting from a mole on his cheek that James had to struggle to keep his eyes off. The man's eyes were ... well, one of his eyes was a steely gray. The other was clouded with white splotches. The old man mumbled something, then tapped his staff on the ground. James' eyes burned, and his mouth watered furiously, forcing him to swallow, and but for the lack of any pain, James would have thought the old man must have cracked him in the head.

The light faded, and James' eyes adjusted just quick enough to catch the last glimmer fading from the very tip of the old man's stick. "What is your business here, outsider?" the man questioned irritably, but in perfectly comprehensible English. He must have seen the logo on my shirt, James thought quickly, searching for an explanation for old man's fortuitous guess of language that did not involve flashing lights from wooden sticks. Maybe he's got an LED in there for walking at night.

"I..." James paused, realizing that if he simply described what happened, then he would likely not be believed, unless the old man was involved with the slender man, which was a bit much to hope for. On the other hand, what could he say? "I'm lost," he said finally. "Can you point me to the nearest town?"

The old man shook his head, his still full mop off white hair flopping about. "Do you know who I am?"

James shook his head, wondering why on Earth the old man might expect him to know such a thing.

"Alright then, inside with you," the old man stated and turned and stalked off.

James briefly considering arguing the point, but quickly hurried after him. There was something peculiar going on here, and while he would have been satisfied to get to a town where he could learn something merely by observing the level of technology, and hopefully find out that these creepy old folks were just Luddites who despised progress, and the town would have cars and phones, he did have a feeling that these two would know rather more about what happened to him and who that thin man was. He was simply afraid that if he irritated them too much, he might find out the hard way that it was a magic portal, by having the old man turn him into a frog, or a tech portal by having one of them vaporize them with a beam weapon. After all, the thin man had apparently been leaving their house.

He followed the man inside, and found the house to be open and roomy on the inside. The old woman was puttering about with a heavy black saucepan on a hanging rack over a fire in a large stone fireplace, and he felt a sudden irrational surge of relief that it was not a large cast-iron pot

"The potatoes are nearly done," the old lady said, glancing at the two of them, and James shuddered. She had spoken English before she had so much as looked at them. If she knew it, why hadn't she tried it when she first saw him? That the man could have recognized something about him and tried English was one thing, but how had she then known to use it?

"Good, good," the old man said, and pulled a wooden chair over, and as he did, James realized with a start that the house had a packed dirt floor, not stone or wood. The chair itself was made of rough sticks, debarked but not split, and bound together with twine or something like it, and James pulled off and set his backpack down beside it before gingerly settling into it, afraid it would fall to pieces if he even put his full weight on it, much less sat down with any force.

He was surprised at how comfortable the chair was, and how little trouble it had accepting his weight. It had certainly looked like the sort of chair prone to creaking and squeaking, but it made no sound as he settled in to it.

The odd fellow bustled about, tugging a table away from a wall to the center of the room, something James would have gladly helped him with, but for the glare he received when he moved to stand, then arranging said table with three dinner settings. James was not particularly hungry at the moment, but seeing the two preparing what he assumed was a lunch, he realized that if the closest town was any great distance away he might not have reached it by nightfall. Maybe they could take him in the morning? James wondered if there might have been a driveway around the other side of the house, and whether a proper road could have been somehow concealed from his sight by the hillsides, his mind balking at the obvious even as the clues piled up.

Pulling the saucepan from the fire, the old lady easily ladled out three portions onto the plates, drawing James' attention to them. They looked like fairly ordinary plates, white with a blue pattern, like porcelain, and James thought them a hopeful sign. From the dirt floor he had half expected a wooden bowl. The cutlery was equally normal to his eyes, a simple metal knife and fork. Surely that put a limit on how far back he might be, if he had somehow traveled in time?

He was not sure when porcelain had been introduced into Europe, but he was certain it came from China. Likewise he was uncertain of the antiquity of using a knife and fork at meals, but he vaguely remembered discussions of their introduction to English nobility from France or something like that. That would put it sometime after 1066, he thought, that being the one significant date he could recall regarding the Normans and England, and his heart sank again, realizing that while it might have cut off a substantial portion of early history, it still left him potentially hundreds of years out of date.

When the other two took their own seats at the table, James turned his attention to the food itself, realizing that apparently whatever it was, it composed the entire meal, and found it to be a stew, with lumps of meat, potatoes, onions, and something he thought might be carrots, though they were rather more red than he expected of a carrot.

The old man took a black loaf of bread and tore it into pieces, handing a piece to each of them. Breaking bread . . . realizing with a start that he was sat at a dinner table and had not even introduced himself, James blurted out, "Uhm, I'm James, James Strathmore."

The other two just looked at him curiously for a few tense moment, while he flushed with embarrassment, then the old guy shook his head and said dourly, "We'll see, we'll see. Eat up."

James flushed even brighter, and lifted his fork, but hesitated, waiting. He wanted to say Grace, but he wanted even more for one of them to do so. More than that, he wanted one of them to take the first bite, but they were waiting patiently, and it hardly seemed credible that they would have any reason to poison him when he would have willingly just walked away. Still, strains of horror music were floating through his head as he bowed to the pressure of their gazes and took a bite. The flavor was good, and the meat was tender, the potatoes fully cooked. None of it made much sense to him, when his mother used to make stew it was in a large pot on the stove and cooked slowly for a long time, not a saucepan over a fire, but somehow the textures of everything seemed to be just right.

The knowing gazes of the elderly couple were a bit much to take, but he held his tongue, having been raised to respect his elders, to be polite when a guest in someone's home, and still hoping that these two would have some explanation for what had happened, or at least who the thin man was. He noted to himself how that man had become the thin man in his thoughts, and wondered how long before he would be capitalizing it in his head, like Cancer Man from the X-Files.

He was about halfway through with the stew, stewing in his own troubled thoughts the whole while, when he finally noticed that it was becoming a strain to reach the bowl, and looked down at the chair and then himself. "What the hell is going on?" he cried out, staring at his tiny hands, swimming in his now overlarge shirt. "What is this, Alice in freaking Wonderland? I didn't even get any cake!"

His complaints came out in a high, child's tone, and the old folks grinned at him, and he realized that they too were younger, his hair and beard now grey instead of white, hers black and long, their wrinkles fading before his eyes. "Come now, finish your meal," the now middle-aged lady urged.

The man nodded. "You'll need all the years you can get just to make it home, you know."

James jumped up from his chair, frightened and panicked, but now fully aware that they obviously knew how he had gotten here, and probably who the thin man was. "Who was that man?" he demanded, reddening with anger and frustration, barely noticing that his shoes had fallen off at some point and his right foot had landed rather painfully on the laces of one of them. His hand darted to his jeans to hold them up.

"Never you mind that, now," the woman said, frowning sharply at him. "You just sit down there and finish up. Your mother didn't teach you to leave food on the plate."

He gaped at her, unable or unwilling to believe that she could know anything about his mother.

"He won't be back to take you home, if that is what you are thinking," the man said curtly. "You'll have to make your own way home, and you'll need the time."

James stared at them for a long minute before tugging his jeans up, pulling his chair back in place, and sitting in it. What could he do now? Run away? There was no doubt in his mind now that this was magic, no, Magic, with a capital-M, and they could probably turn him into a frog as easy as help him. And if they were magic, but thought he could somehow make it home, what of the next people he might meet? What if he went running, only to discover the dark wood was full of werewolves, or vampires, or he found a real witch's hut and she decided he looked nice and tender now?

They knew something, that much was obvious, and he was already in for it. Even if the thin man came back this instant, how could he explain being what, twelve now? He sighed and tucked back in and set to finishing his stew, paying more attention now to the sensations as he shrunk, dwindling back into childhood.

He also watched as the other two youthened as well, though not to the same degree. When the old man mopped up the last of his stew with a hunk of crusty black bread, his hair had darkened further from a gray to a deep, glossy black like that of his wife. At least, James felt sure they were husband and wife, though neither had said anything as yet that would confirm it. Both were now largely free of wrinkles, though he had little crows feet around his eyes, and a wrinkle on his brow, while she had slender laugh lines.

The rest of the meal had passed in silence, James not knowing what to say, it being far too late to protest what was happening, the other two apparently content with the quiet. Without a word they stood and began putting away the dishes in a cupboard, without even bothering to wash them so far as he could tell, and then moving the table back out of the way.

"Now, James," the man said finally, acknowledging his name for the first time, drawing up a chair to sit facing the now quite small boy, "You've got a lot to learn, before you can get home."

"Why can't you just take me home," the boy said, pouting and crossing his arms. "If you could shrink me, you could take me home."

The man shook his head. "It isn't that simple, much as you might wish it to be. I am not a Walker, nor is Battie. We cannot take you; and even if we were, we'd not know where to take you. No, this is something you'll have to do on your own, and to do that, you must learn to learn."

"I know how to learn," James grumbled rebelliously, holding his temper with difficulty by trying to remember that he did not want to be turned into a frog, "I went to school. I was in college even, before you did this to me!" He huffed, gesturing to himself and the clothes he was now struggling to keep on, as though he were a child playing dress up in his father's wardrobe.

The man shrugged and waved his hand, and James goggled as his clothes shrank down to fit neatly. Even his shoes leapt back onto his feet and shrank to fit. "You know how to learn what a school would teach you, perhaps, but you do not know how to learn for yourself, nor how to learn what you must."

James nodded, a bit stunned at what had happened to his clothes. His own de-aging was a shock to the system, but it could have simply been the result of something they had, or had been given. Water from that Spanish guy's Fountain of Youth or something, though that was supposed to be in Florida somewhere, he thought. Waving his hand and making his clothes shrink, precisely enough to fit him?

Somehow the sheer intentionality of that impressed him. Making them younger was just sort of a weird traveling back in time thing, something you could attribute to something as banal as a fountain of water. His clothing, on the other hand, and especially his shoes, which were modern comfortable walking shoes made of many different bits of cloth and padding all sewn together, had never been smaller. He wondered if they still had the same number of atoms in them?

"You going to teach me how to do that?" he asked curiously, his face finally losing that red tint it had held through much of the meal.

The man shrugged. "You will learn how to learn," he said again, "what you learn then will be in your hands, not mine. But we will come to that in good time."

James huffed and leaned forward, "Fine, what's first, then?"

Learning To Learn

When James settled in to the bed they had given him to use, that night, his head was spinning with all that he had learned that day, much of which was not anything he had been taught by the old, now younger man. He had, by dint of close listening, finally heard the woman, whom he assumed to be Battie, as it was the only name the man had mentioned aside from James, refer to the man as Barry. It seemed an odd set of names to him, and told him nothing of where he was nor when he was.

In all that he had learned, he still knew nothing of where the closest town was, nor even what country or nation he was in, nor what time period. Yet he had learned much that was useful to him, not the least of which was that magic was real here, and that he could do it! No, not quite, he corrected himself. He had learned that magic was real by personal experience, but had only been told that he could do it, that he could learn it. He had not yet experienced that himself. He had learned other things, though, such as that while he had been apparently de-aged, he had not lost any of his knowledge, and while his emotions were perhaps a bit closer to the surface, he did not really feel like a child in spite of his form. His experience and memories were still his, he still knew about computers and chemistry, physics and history.

The man's teaching had not been quite so interesting, mostly being about the philosophy of magic, the pitfalls and side alleys that could lead one astray, and how to meditate and focus to build his mental stamina and willpower to eventually be able to harness magic. He rather felt as he had after his first philosophy class in college, taken to fulfill a humanities requirement, in which he had thought that many things were claimed without sufficient evidence.

Still, the bit about focusing on the difference between things he was taught, and things he had learned was useful, and the time spent coming up with ways to test things in answer to Barry's unending stream of questions had seemed like good and useful practice.

"When someone tells you that you should never touch a certain object, because it will burn you," Barry had explained, "as a child you may not listen, and touch it anyway. And if the person was telling the truth, you might learn a valuable lesson, and listen the next time. What if they lied? Or what if what they said was true sometimes, and not others? You might have learned quite a different lesson."

"Knowledge that someone else gives you, whether by words, or example, or writing, or song, or in any other way, can be useful, or it can be dangerous. An army that has a lazy scout who wanders off and then returns with tales of clear riding ahead may find itself in an ambush. The important lesson for you to learn, and one you will have to teach yourself, like that child, is that the only knowledge you can ever really trust is that which you gain yourself, and even that may sometimes be in doubt."

"The wise man knows this, but knows too that sometimes the thing warned off may not suffer a test gladly. When a man tells you not to wake a sleeping giant, taking the child's course may be the last thing you do. Such is the act of a fool. The wise man considers the words, and determines for himself how to test such a thing, so that he gains the knowledge for himself, and knows the truth of it, without risking his life."

James was not at all sure that he agreed with what Barry was teaching him. After all, was not the power and height of science due in large part to scientists building on each others work? Sure, they tested and replicated, and in the aggregate, this weeded out error, but no individual scientist could possibly test everything for himself, and if he insisted on doing so, then he would progress no further than one man could in a lifetime. Standing on the shoulders of giants was a metaphor, to be sure, but it was a very strong one, in his opinion, and he was not much inclined to give up all the lessons of science. Particularly since one of the more pointed lessons therein was of the various biases that plagued the human mind, and how any person, scientist or otherwise, could be led astray by them, and convince themselves that the outcome of their experiments was telling them what they wanted to hear.

Of course, though the words ran smoothly in his memory, they had not been free from interruptions. His mind was still his own, but his patience and attention span were those of a child now, something he had struggled with. For a man who frowned and glared as much as Barry, he had exhibited a remarkable patience, though James had often wished Barry would give up and stomp off to leave him be.

He had not, whatever James might have preferred, and had instead pestered James with scenarios, not in a constant stream, like a test, but peppering them here and there suddenly amongst his explanations of magic, and of meditation, and of logic.

He would be speaking of mental focus, and then suddenly demand, "A cook has told you never to place a brick on a pot lid when the pot is on a fire, how do you determine if this is good advice?"

That James had learned of Alexander Watt and the steam engine in school impressed the man not one whit, and he insisted that James concoct a scenario of his own for testing the cook's assertion.

The same had gone for many childhood lessons, teachings that James had accepted or tested with a child's naivete before, but was now required to find a wiser method of verifying. Looking back now, as the darkness filled the home, tempered only by the light of the fire, for he was on a bed, more of a cot really, though with his frame that was no problem, in the same large room he had first entered, while the other two had gone into another room and shut the door, he found that the questioning had served two purposes. Not only was he being taught something Barry seemed to think was critical to his ever making it home, the random nature of the questions' timing now seemed to him to have been a way of focusing his child-like attention span, keeping him thinking instead of dozing off or tuning Barry out.

It had been surprisingly effective, and even now he found himself devising little experiments in his head. How would one test whether it was safe to wake a sleeping giant? One easy way would be to pay a fool to do the job, while observing from a safe distance, but how would one know a safe distance? Perhaps one could pay a fool, and pay another to watch and report the results.

He mused over experiments he remembered from history, and from the chemistry lectures. It was odd, he thought as he finally settled down and drifted off, that it was a magician that was teaching him about what was surely just another way of wording the scientific method?

---

James awoke early the next morning, though he was not happy about it. Having gone from evening shadows to the noon-day sun, yesterday had been nearly thirty hours of continuous activity, and he had been desperately glad to get to bed the night before. Unfortunately for his deep desire to sleep in, being situated in the main room of the house meant that he awoke when the house did, rising bleary eyed to the smells of eggs and fat in a pan, though there was no sizzle of bacon to go with them, and to the sounds of movement and speech.

"Come, young fellow, time to rise," Barry called to him, "you've no time for lying abed. Up, up, and sit and think and puzzle for a moment, to get your mind awake while the food is readied."

James pushed himself up reluctantly, and slid his feet out of the bed, looking down at the odd pajamas he wore, which he vaguely remembered being chivvied into the night before. They had not buttons, exactly, but rather loops of cord sewn to either side, that a second cord was passed through and tied off, to hold them together. Likewise the bottoms were held on by a bit of cord, and as he sat up, Battie swept by, dropping a shirt and trousers on the bed for him made of similar design, and he blushed furiously as he hurried through changing, wondering where his own clothes had wandered, and when he would see them again.

This time he helped Barry pull the table out and they soon sat to breakfast, which again was consumed in utter silence, with no Grace before meals, nor any sort of blessing asked nor thanks given. He thought Barry was about to speak when all had been eaten, when the man suddenly paused and looked towards the wall James had guessed to be the front of the house. A clattering was heard outside, and then repeated twice more, and Barry rose and walked to the door, opening it just as a large man stepped inside.

This new figure impressed James instantly with sheer size of his arms, which were thickly muscled. His chest was broad though his shirt was loose upon it, unlike the bodybuilders from James' world that he otherwise rather resembled. His legs were large but did not look so massive, though again the trousers were baggy, making James suddenly realize and feel glad that whenever and wherever he was, he was in a time in which men wore pants and not tights.

The tall, broad shouldered man had a thick shock of black hair flecked with what looked like wood chips to James, thick leather boots, and a deep voice when he spoke to Barry. His words taught James something new, something he had not realized. There was no possible way the man could have known or been told to speak English, and no reason why he should have been, so when James understood him perfectly, he finally realized that Barry and Battie were not speaking English either, that Barry had somehow magically produced some sort of translation effect. The moment he realized that, James suddenly found that he could hear faintly beneath their speech the same unfamiliar tones Battie had first spoken to him.

"Well met, Master Barry, how are you and the Missus?" the man had said, and James had missed a bit of back and forth in his startled understanding, before he finally managed to pay attention in time to see Barry hand over a few coins to the man, while Battie handed him something wrapped in a patterned cloth.

He rolled his head about on his shoulders, cracking his neck, before clasping Barry's arm and then striding out again, Barry closing the door behind him. Barry returned to the table and the two quickly cleared it off and James aided him in moving it aside again.

Now finally came the test that James had thought about the day before, as Barry asked each of the questions he had previously asked, demanding a new and different way to test each one. James found some of the challenges easy enough, as he had been thinking of them the night before prior to falling asleep. Others were not so easy.

Doing the brick experiment over an open fire in a field where he could get quickly behind a hedge had been his easy answer to the boiling pot issue the first time, the second time he found a bit tougher. It was a pretty simple situation, after all, and the test was obvious enough. How else could one do it? He considered offering the idea to pay a fool to do it, as with the sleeping Giant thought experiment from the night before, but realized in time that it was substantially no different from doing it himself if he observed the test, and if he went with his second thought, of using a fool to observe, he would have completely failed the task. The whole point was to test the veracity of something one had been informed about by a theoretically knowledgeable person; relying instead on the word of a fool was certainly a step down from that.

It took a bit of cogitating, but he finally hit upon the idea of taking a step back from it, and demonstrating it from a different angle, that would satisfy himself by validating his hypothesis of the reason for the prohibition, without actually testing it directly. So he suggested that using a pot with a single hole and allowing the escaping steam to inflate a bag until it burst would safely demonstrate the effect without endangering him, or destroying the pot, which would have been the result of his first test.

Barry never seemed inclined to tell him whether his ideas were right or wrong, or whether they would actually work. He simply did not move on to a new topic until he had heard something that satisfied him, and James did not as yet know what about his answers was or was not satisfactory, aside from that Barry seemed to somehow know the difference between his offering an experiment that differed only slightly from something he remembered reading about, and when he had come up with something entirely his own, for those were the only ones that gained a brief smile before his usual dour look returned.

Lunch was again a silent affair, and after lunch they resumed lessons, which seemed a bit odd to James. While he had never personally lived in a country house, or on a farm, he had read Little House on the Prairie and similar books, and was fairly certain that there was pretty much always something to be done, yet here was Barry taking an entire day out just to teach him? Perhaps the large man was only one of many servants that took care of the place? It certainly did not seem large enough to be a manor house of any sort, and he had not seen any other homes nearby. Though of course that merely brought up the question of where then the large man had come from?

He did not have long to ponder this, of course, since Barry had moved pretty directly into lecturing after the table had been put away from lunch, and he was quick to notice James' mind wandering, and spring another of his surprise tests on James. Things went on in this fashion for the remainder of the afternoon, leaving James a bit weary of all the talking and thinking, and wishing he could sit alone and listen to music for a bit and not have to think at all.

Sitting idly was not on Barry's program, however, and he was instead given a book to read. It was in surprisingly good condition for being stored in a house where the modern convenience of air conditioning was absent - or at least, James had at no time noticed the sudden cool breeze and distant thrum of an air conditioner kicking in, though the temperature in the house was not at all unpleasant.

The book was bound between wooden plates, carved and inlaid with gold leaf, and when he opened it, James once again had the uneasy realization that he was reading a totally foreign language and comprehending it as though it was English. He could only hope that whatever was translating for him was not as apt to confusing results as the online translators with which he was more familiar. The words on the page were hand-written, as best as he could tell, and it was what he thought was a luminous manuscript, which he was vaguely aware was not quite the right term, but he could not think of the right word for it, but it was the sort of work that if found in a major library, would certainly be an historic curiosity, and one which would require the utmost care in handling lest its fragile leaves be further damaged.

The story it told drew him in quickly, and he soon forgot his thoughts about the book's provenance in his eagerness to read more. It was, he vaguely realized, a learning text, teaching him about the magic system here, but it was doing so in the form of a story about an apprentice to a great mage, a situation that rather well matched the one he found himself in.

Here and there bald-faced statements were made, and after merely a full day, between this morning and the previous evening, he found himself noting them for later devising of tests to verify their accuracy. Regardless, the overall theory presented fit fairly well with the philosophy of magic that Barry had explained, one which did away with many of the objections he had previously harbored regarding magic in various fantasy fiction he had encountered.

It was more, he thought, the magic of a Merlin than a fantasy wizard, more in the person than the props, as it were, though as a philosophy it explained some of the underpinnings that might lead to props. Humans have muscle memory, a memory that allowed physical movements to be improved and near-perfected by sufficient practice, as in the ability of a musician to play without needing to consciously consider the fingering of each note, or an accomplished typist to type at high speed without needing to look at the keyboard to find each key. Magic was fundamentally a mental art, but when paired with learned and trained muscle memory, it could gain benefits in terms of speed and precision, and especially repeatability.

In a similar vein, the child in the story learned of mantras and their use, the idea that learning repeated phrases could condition the mind for meditation and focus. This instantly brought to James' mind the image of the nuns that ran the Catholic school he had grown up near, and how often he would see them walking as he passed, Rosary beads clicking in their fingers as they murmured prayers even as they were guiding children, or cleaning up after them.

He almost lost the thread of the story entirely when he ran into a bit where the child pushed too far ahead and animated a broom to perform his own chores. The following sequence was so familiar that it took some time before the child in the story lost the appearance of the mouse famously depicted in another tale of an apprentice.

Pushing past that, he moved on into detailed descriptions of the exercises the child learned, and found himself eager to try them, and curiously wondering when he would learn from his own experience that he could perform magic, and not have to rely on Barry's statement that he could.

He had read the third such exercise when he was brought from his focused reading by Barry's hand, interposed between the book and his eyes. "Time to eat. A mind works better when the body has what it needs, though never faster than when what it needs is beyond grasp."

James carefully laid the book aside and once more entered the simple routine of the meal. None of the meals so far had been very different. All had involved various things cooked together, more or less resembling a stew or sometimes more like a stir fry, depending on the ingredients, and all had been accompanied by a simple loaf of black bread.

After dinner, James was permitted to return to his reading, though that was soon made impossible by the approaching darkness, as he was reminded once more, being more aware this evening, of the absence of any electric lighting in the house. As he once more changed into simple night clothes, he wondered again at the strange contradictions. If these two were in fact so powerful in magic as their de-aging of him and themselves and Barry's retailoring of his clothes indicated, why did they not have equivalents of modern conveniences, like lighting at night? He had not even seen a candle as yet, nothing other than the fire itself. And why did they live so simply?

He had no frame of reference to judge what a wielder of magic ought to be like aside from the fiction from his own world, but the man and his wife did not seem to fit them very well. With the magic they demonstrated already he could not believe that they lived this life out of necessity, and he wondered what their reasons might be as he once more drifted off to sleep.

First Casting

It was six days later that James finally got to try some magic for himself. He had little enough idea what Barry thought of his progress most of the time, though he thought he must surely be better than the man's average student, since much of what Barry seemed to be trying to teach him fell under the rubric of what James would call the scientific method, the basic concept of forming a hypothesis or making a model, using the hypothesis or model to make a prediction, designing an experiment whose outcome could demonstrate the veracity of the prediction, and thus either disproving the hypothesis, or allowing it to stand, and proceeding to either form a new hypothesis, or advancing the model, and formulating a new experiment, and so on.

Surely if this was an earlier era, as it so strongly appeared, or at least a different dimensions analogue of such a prior time on his world, the average student would require rather more convincing before accepting that it was appropriate to question and test what one was told rather than accepting it as truth.

Yet if he was so good a student, Barry never seemed to notice or acknowledge it, merely moving on to the next thing when he was satisfied, or on whatever whim took him, and usually having a gloomy expression the whole time, apart from the occasional very small smile when James managed a particularly solid experimental design.

Still, he was startled when Barry suddenly said, "Alright, time to prove yourself, to yourself. You've read enough by now to have some idea how to proceed."

Thrilled to finally be allowed the chance, James had to decide what to do, as his teacher had not specified. This was undoubtedly another test. Most of the fiction James was familiar with would have had a beginning wizard prove his ability with one of three techniques - either lighting a candle, lifting a feather, or producing a simple light. Of the three, he felt that relighting, as opposed to lighting, would be the easiest of the three, and the most likely to work. After all, a candle or even a match that was lit and then put out could spontaneously re-ignite merely by putting it into an oxygen-dense atmosphere, something his college chemistry professor had demonstrated in a safety lecture.

Yet none of them appealed to him as truly sensible for proving something to himself. Oooh, look, he could do without a flashlight, or a lighter, or the wind. Big deal. He considered flipping a coin and attempting to influence the flip, but that seemed more like demonstrating something paranormal rather than magical, whether it was precognition of the answer, or influencing the air currents, or influencing probability. No, he wanted something more tangible, something that would convince himself over his own skepticism, yet it needed to be within the reach of what the book termed a cantrip, the sort of magic that could be accomplished by the simplest of wizards.

Finally he had an idea. If producing light was within the realms of a cantrip, and moving small items was within the realms of a cantrip, then combining the two on a tiny scale should be within the realms of feasibility, would test both his magic and his concentration, and would hopefully be much more impressive than either alone.

With his purpose clearly set, he leaned forward, focusing his mind on this one thing, remembering what it had looked like, and what it should look like, what it had sounded like and how that sound should be produced, and breathing deeply, held out his hand and still half-doubting, knowing that if he did this it would be irrevocable, pressed his will against the universe. A light shone forth from his hand, seeming to illuminate a tiny blue-white flickering figure of a woman leaning over and touching something, as a tinny voice was heard.

Barry actually laughed aloud at that. "You've seen that before, I am sure, to be so detailed, but you did well. Any wizard worth his salt learns to produce light in the darkness, but few indeed are they who think through what it means for light to be at their command."

Those words sparked a torrent of thoughts racing through James' mind. It had worked, he had done it! And with light - but he was not a wizard, not a peasant boy learning from an all-knowing master. He knew what light was, and what it meant for it to be in his grasp. Photons, packets of electromagnetic energy meant more than just light that could be seen. From gamma rays, X-rays, ultra-violet, the visible spectrum, infrared, microwaves, radio waves, they were all the same, all beams of photons, and he could create them with mere will.

It was a tiny cantrip, the barest tip of a spell, but what could be built upon so slim a foundation? The understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum had revolutionized his chosen field of chemistry, and had more than a little to do with the advances that lead to his other field of computers, had opened the way to identifying elements and combinations of elements, to understanding the nature of stars, to so many things, and it was in his hands.

The sounds too, so simple a spell, such a tiny thing. Just causing a tiny spot of air to wiggle back and forth, and somehow his will had successfully imposed on that bit of air a pattern he remembered, even though he did not understand or know it at the detailed level of the individual vibration.

What did that mean? Could he produce a matching but out of phase wave? If he could then he could effectively silence any sound. Certainly he should able to make a bit of air vibrate in perfect sympathy with some other bit of air, sympathetic magic and the Rule of Like were real according to what he had read, in spite of all of science saying that they were ridiculous. And they were, until you knew exactly how to press the Universe to bend your way, to use that similarity. And that meant he could listen to distant conversations, or interject his own words at a distance.

To be sure, most of this was beyond him as yet, a simple cantrip could not operate at a great distance, nor reach to extremes of volume or brightness. In time, though . . in time, with nothing more than the end result of building on this simple combination of effects, he could create lasers, produce shockwaves, cause mass hallucinations, conceal himself with a bubble of silence and invisibility. It was a veritable superpower, right from superhero comics, right there in his first cantrip, and if the stories he was reading were right, no-one knew.

At least, no one here. Even Barry, with his stories and challenges of logic, had not revealed anything that implied actual knowledge of modern science. If you did not know the spectrum existed beyond the visible, if you did not know what light made coherent by a laser could do, if you had no idea that the shockwave of an explosive was nothing more than a really loud sound, all the possibilities of these simple spells would pass you by, and you would keep seeking new spells. He had to suppress an urge to laugh maniacally.

When he finally resumed paying attention, he found Barry watching him with a somewhat puzzled expression, but the wizard did not say anything about it, but instead instructed James, now that he had demonstrated his ability, to rest and read more of his current book. James was a bit surprised to realize that he was genuinely in need of that rest - whether he had used up what magic was available to him, or whether it had used his own energy reserves; i.e. his store of accessible sugars, or whether his will was somehow a finite tool, or whether perhaps it was merely emotional exhaustion from his success and the realizations that had followed, he did not yet know, but he was tired by his success, and happy to move on to reading. He had finished the first book he had been given the day after he had received it, and had gone through several more similar books since.

Here too he suspected he probably read faster than Barry ought to be used to, but saw no sign or evidence that it impressed Barry, nor otherwise. He was merely given a new book when he finished the first.

The next two were like the first, stories of apprentices learning under new masters, though each learned different things, and in different orders. One of the elements that came through loudly to James from the juxtaposition of the books and Barry's instruction in philosophy and the scientific method, was that much of the instruction he was seeing as given to these other apprentices was deeply flawed.

The first book he had been given was better, and he suspected that it might actually have been the tale of someone trained under Barry, though neither the apprentice nor the master were ever actually named. Of the later books one was trained in the use of verbal spells, and the other in the use of a wand. An odd piece to them was in the settings, since in both it seemed to be implied that not only was this the only way this apprentice was going to learn, but that it was the only way magic could be done, at all!

James wondered if they came from different cultures on this world, or if perhaps Barry was more familiar with dimensional travel than he seemed, and they were from different dimensions. Was it possible that in some worlds, spells could not be cast without speech? And in another the waving of a wand was not merely taking advantage of muscle memory, but was vitally necessary?

Would he step through some final gate back onto his own world, only to have everything he had learned be suddenly useless, because magic was quite simply impossible there? Yet were that so, then the thin man would have sentenced himself to forever remain when he stepped through and allowed the portal to close behind him. That seemed doubtful.

The book he was currently reading was less immediately engaging, as it was not told as a story, yet it was interesting reading still, for it dealt with the concept of magical spells and their interactions with numerology and astrology. Astrology had been so thoroughly debunked where James was from that he had great difficulty when the book reached the first mention of it, but luckily for him, the book was not a deep treatise on esoteric theory, but a lighter work of introduction, and much of it was just explaining the ways in which the working of magic influenced later magic. It was cautionary in tone, pointing out that previous casters may have primed magic by years of incantations, and so random exploration of words could produce disastrous results if the caster stumbled on to a previously widely used incantation. When it reached astrology, it treated it with a light tinge of ridicule, basically pointing out the same inherent banality of the concept, wherein certain known astronomical objects assumed supreme importance, while so many more were unknown, yet could hardly be less influential, and then proceeded to explain that the degree to which it worked at all was generally due to the principles of conformity.

In a world where everyone knew that a person born at this time would behave in such and such a way, that expectation had force, from simple peer pressure and the threat of rejection of non-conformists; but in a world where magic had been shaped by years of similar beliefs, it too imposed itself on reality. This would never have manifested as anything in James' reality - one of the common methods of disproving astrology there was having multiple astrologers produce charts or predictions for the same individual or individuals, and they were invariably drastically different. Only when the principles of astrology were so strong that virtually every astrologer agreed, and everyone knew what a given sign or portent meant could they grow to have real force.

In the same way, the book implied, the collective action of a sufficiently large number of magic-users could condition the sympathetic nature of magic, and cause a certain sequence of words in a certain tongue to have a consistent effect. Even then, it pointed out, a sufficiently strong-willed wizard with a powerful and clear imagination could overwhelm that sympathy and produce any effect he liked with a given incantation, or pattern of wand motions.

He fell asleep that night, elated at having proven himself capable of magic, and with his mind filled with the ideas of the next chapter in the book, which explained the use of material items in spells.

---

It was the afternoon of the following day, when he was again given the opportunity to try a single simple bit of magic, as he was trying to decide what to attempt, when he realized that somehow, having been there for nine days or so, he had not bathed. Even more remarkably, he had not needed to ask for and find the toilet, something he was simultaneously dumbstruck by, and thankful for, since judging by the time period of the rest of the house it would be a one-hole outhouse or something the like. Was that a magic on the food? The clothes? He did not smell bad to himself, and they had not smelled bad to him when he first met them, so it was not just a matter of growing accustomed to his own smell.

He looked at his hands and found them clean. Something was obviously cleaning them, or preventing them from getting dirty. It was a startling realization, but it was also pulling him off course, and he returned to trying to think of what to test. It might have been easier, he supposed, if he had been one to play the role-playing games others in his high-school had played, but he had never joined those groups, and remembered only a little of what he had overheard, Magic Missile and Fireball being most prominent, and he was sure neither qualified as a cantrip.

While he was interested in exploring the further ramifications of his ideas about the light from the previous day, he did not really want to have to explain that idea to Barry, and producing anything other than visible light would, by its very nature, produce no visible effect. Barry might even think he had entirely failed. So he sought for some other thing to attempt. Much of what could be done with magic could also be done with technology, and he did not want to merely be capable of replicating what he could already have done by going to a store and buying a few things. Still, there were certain things, currently only feasible with expensive equipment, that he might be able to do by hand, which might be interesting. But not in the realm of a cantrip. Reproducing three-dimensional printing would have to wait a while.

One of the frustrating aspects in his reading was the massive inconsistency between one book and the next, on what was possible, and what was not, and how a given thing was even being accomplished. One book showed summoning water from air as a cantrip, doable by anyone and worth learning as it gave you water in dry places, the next had the master warning the apprentice that summoning water was difficult and dangerous, as drinking too much of it could kill. Since both only gave, at best, a description of the casting, and neither described what that casting was actually doing, he could not determine why one was hard and the other easy, or one dangerous, and the other safe.

It would be an interesting thing to do as a cantrip though, and he could think of several ways it might be done. With magic, water might possibly be created from nothing, ex nihilo as his philosophy professor had called it, the way God created the universe in the Bible, or the Big Bang created it according to modern science. He suspected that would be a more difficult way, but was not really sure of that. And would that water last?

Magic might be able to create water from energy, E equals mc squared style, but matter requires a vast amount of energy. He was pretty sure that in the atomic bombs, only a small portion of the matter was converted to energy, and yet the energetic release was city-destroying in scale. He certainly did not plan to try that.

Alternately, magic could take hydrogen and oxygen gas and burn them to produce water. Of course, one had to get the gas, and if magic could separate it from the air then could it not also simply separate the already present water vapor from the air, and condense it? That was probably the least energetic method.

Or perhaps it could literally summon water from someplace else. Would it carry the dissolved salts and minerals with it, or leave them behind? Perhaps that depended on the visualization and understanding of those who cast it, or in the case of sympathetically patterned magic, on the conceptions of those who had cast it in the past. Given that there was far more saltwater than accessible fresh water on the planet, he could see that being rather unpleasant, though it ought to be fine for say, putting out a fire.

Which should he try? What would be the easiest, the closest to a cantrip?

Probably the water vapor would the easiest, but as he thought on it, James kept coming back to the hydrogen and oxygen model. Not only did it involve a nice chemical reaction, it was also showy and interesting, if he could manage it right. A flame, burning in mid-air, that wept! That would certainly impress the less knowledgeable or more superstitious folks. Except it would fail, he thought as he frowned. The heat of the burning would vaporise the water, so it wouldn't weep at all. Could he cool it with magic, at the same time it was burning?

That was exactly, now that he thought about it, what he had thought to do with water vapor in the first place. So it would really be the same as casting two cantrips at once, as he had done with his previous attempt, or perhaps three, since he would need to not merely gather the hydrogen and oxygen, but also ignite them. It was as he was considering how to fit the cantrips together that he realized he had been fooling himself. Just because he had seen demonstrations of hydrogen burning in oxygen did not mean he could so easily do it. Oxygen is plentiful in air, somewhere around fifteen to twenty percent depending on altitude, the percent decreasing as one ascended, he thought, but hydrogen is a tiny percent, being mostly present in water vapor. Actual gaseous hydrogen? Could he tack on something in the spell that would summon gaseous hydrogen from some other source?

No, not within the powers of a cantrip, and if he pushed beyond what he could already do, he risked . . . well, he was not really sure what the risks were, aside from Barry's disapproval, but given how tired he had been after his success the day before, pushing too far might leave him so drained he would fall into a coma, or have his heart stop, or who knew what.

So no weeping flame for him. What then? Just condense water vapor? Was that really even worth the bother?

What if . . . he considered the idea, and a moment later, put it into practice. He was almost instantly rewarded.

It worked perfectly, his little cycle. Having one process condensing water out of the air to form a visible bubble, and at the same time, splitting a bit of the water thus produced to form hydrogen and oxygen gas, while supplying the heat to burn them worked perfectly, behaving exactly as he had envisioned it. Since he had carefully envisioned intersecting spherical areas of affect for the two cantrips, with water being formed in one tiny sphere, and the top bit of that water intersecting the sphere that was splitting and burning it, while the water below that succumbed to gravity and dripped down, it certainly was a flame weeping water.

He had momentarily been worried, knowing that hydrogen burns with an almost invisible flame in pure oxygen. Luckily, the rising heat drew in enough impure air to show the flame glowing an almost normal candle-like orange.

None of the dripping water was actually coming from the flame - the water the flame produced was sufficiently heated by the flame that it was vapor from the moment it formed, and rose quickly on the plume of hot air. Nonetheless, it had exactly the visual effect he had first pictured when he thought of a weeping flame, while simultaneously confirming to him his ability to produce both water and fire.

He released it after about thirty seconds, and realized that he was sweating and breathing a bit harder. Barry silently nodded and pointed to his book. "Yeah, sure," James responded, and groaned as he stood to walk to his bed to read, feeling his muscles ache. Aching muscles . . . could lactic acid have built up? Had his body been burning sugar in all his muscles to accomplish that? Or was it from tensing up so much as he made the attempt?

He wanted to just fall back on the bed and go to sleep, but when your instructor can probably turn you into a newt if you disobey, disobeying is probably unwise, so he lifted the book and opened it, flipping through the pages to find his place. As he began reading, he felt suddenly comfortable, almost at home, as if he was back in his dorm room settling in for a study session after a bit of football or a long game of hackey-sack with his friends. His luck in falling through that portal a year and a half into college, instead of when he was in high school, had not been something he had previously considered, but now he contemplated it. He had experienced bouts of anger and frustration at his ill luck in tripping just as the Thin Man had opened that portal--and there it was, a snide voice commented, you've starting capitalizing him--but now he thought about how much worse it would have been if the same thing had happened in high school.

He was already through the intense homesickness that came when he first went to college, he was already used to a life more focused on study and lectures, without the presence of family. His friends though, he found he was missing all the more fiercely, and again he felt a sudden shock of recognition at his luck. How much worse would it have been if his flirtations had found a willing ear and eye, and he had been in a committed relationship, only to suddenly vanish?

As it was, it would be some time before his absence was noted, and even then his friends would probably guess that he had dropped out to go home. His parents would not expect to hear from him for a few months, at least. A shudder ran through him at the thought of what they would think when he failed to contact them, and he stared down at his youthened body before determinedly shaking off those thoughts to return to his reading. Bad as it would be to go back a child, it would be far worse to be a frog, or a rabbit.

So he poured all his focus into his study of material items, comparing the words of the book to his thoughts about conjuring water. The books covered basically four ways of using material items in spell. The first was one that the book claimed many other works neglected, and James could see why, as it was so pointlessly obvious. If you cast a spell on a material object, then you've used that material in the spell. Well, duh. Still, comparing that to his thoughts about the water, he could see where it might get missed. After all, if you were summoning water vapor from the air, or summoning water from a great distance, you were using water in the spell, and in neither case was the water something you had before hand, in hand, as with the other three ways.

The second way put him in mind of stories of Voodoo, or Vodoun as he had heard it ought to be, and that was sympathetic magic. At its most basic it was little more than an aid to visualization, helping the wielder to properly visualize the target of his effects by using something that resembled it. In other spells, though the description was rather more obtuse, it acted, as James perceived it, as an input to the spell in a more literal sense, like a parameter passed to a computer program. For example, using the blood of a person allowed one to use a magic that had the concept 'affect the person whose blood matches this blood,' and so locate or affect someone the caster may never have seen, and be otherwise unable to picture, or to drive past protective magics.

There was much more depth to the sympathetic concepts than the mere use of material as target, and the sympathetic discussion had taken up most of his early morning reading, before breakfast and the beginning of Barry's lectures.

Now he was into the third way, which was almost as much a style of magic on its own as sympathetic magic was, in which material items were used simultaneously as part of the spell, the mantra being the ingredients named as they were cast into the air or into a bowl or onto the ground, and as fuel for the spell, being sometimes burned in the casting, sometimes utterly consumed. From the odd diversions in the apparent uses of the substances, James felt sure that there was more than a thread of sympathetic magic in this as well.

Why though, were plant matter and fleshy things burned, while crystals crumbled into powder, and gold vanished utterly? What was the difference? The burning could supply energy, James thought, but powdering crystals required breaking millions of strong chemical bonds in a non-exothermic reaction, so it should require energy to accomplish, not provide it. The complete vanishing of gold could possibly be understood, if it was being used as a source of either energy via Einstein's equation, or of protons and neutrons for recombination into other elements, but the gemstones left the powder, so they were not being used in that way. What was unique about a gemstone? They could be used to focus light, as in a laser, but that use would vanish as they were powdered. The powder itself could be used as an abrasive, he supposed, but the book did not describe the dust being swirled about or anything, just falling to the ground.

Mentally noting that as something worthy of further study and understanding, he continued on to the fourth way. Somewhere in between the second and third ways, he thought as read about sacrificial magic. Sacrificing someone's life to protect or to destroy those they loved or were related to? Definitely sympathetic - but sacrificing animals or goods to draw the attention of some powerful spirit and bind it to your will was more like using it as fuel, like the third way. It all seemed a bit peculiar to him, implying as it did the existence of demons, or spirits, or gods. Were they independent already existing entities present in the world? Or were they beings from other dimensions being pulled across? Or shapings of magic given purpose and form by the sacrifice itself?

The book failed to clarify this point, and the whole business seemed worth staying away from, except that it was the only thing so far that even implied the possibility of crossing planes.

Of course, he was only beginning his studies, and it might well be that he would come to other ways of doing such in time. It did bring home a point that he had not considered before, that made him wonder if he was thinking about all this the right way. These people doing the summonings, based on what was written, did not themselves need to know where the spirits were coming from. Some magics could be cast without understanding how, or what was actually being done. Just as his deeper understanding might allow him to make much more powerful uses for spells others might discard as unworthy, would he also end up failing to cast spells that he did not understand?

If he could not envision a means for accomplishing something, would he even think to try? Magic was already doing the impossible, as far as he could see, and though the steps and meditations he had learned had allowed him to cast several cantrips up to now, he still did not actually know what this force was that he as manipulating. Did he have some organ that mediated the magic? Was the magic he was using something external to himself, and he was spending his bodily energy in setting it in motion, like paddling through a stream? Or maybe it was coming from himself, and he was somehow actually generating it by his meditations and exercises, like the chi the characters in fighting video games threw. Nothing he had read yet had told him, but surely he could eventually come up with a way to test that.

Outside

God rested on the seventh day, but the tenth day dawned and Barry was still going. James had seen two other new people, one a young man, in his teens James guessed, who brought in a basket full of black bread, the other an older woman who had brought a basket of eggs. He had not gotten to speak to either of them, and he felt like he going to go stir-crazy, but Barry changed nothing, and the day went on just as had the days before.

When the time came to test his magic, James had thought up and discarded several ideas. Or at least, he had discarded the idea of doing them then, though he held onto them for later use. He had thought of trying to change the color of a piece of paper, to impress on it an image without working out ahead of time how the color change should happen, whether it be by adding dye or ink, or changing the nature of the paper, or changing how it interacted with light on a tiny scale.

Then he could investigate and try to figure out what it had used. There were two problems he saw with this that made him abandon it. The first was that he had a very limited supply of paper, basically only the books and a few spare sheets in his pack, and he had not seen any stationery supplies in the house at all.

The second was that as soon as he had come up with the idea of changing the color without thinking of how to do it, he had promptly thought of three different ways of doing it, and there was no way to get them out of his head now.

Another idea had been to shape water into a form and then freeze it. This idea he had set aside for later, since he thought it would take some practice, not only to hold the water in shape, but to get it to freeze evenly, since water turning to ice expands. So far he had managed to do two effects and both had been, at least to him, visually impressive, and he wanted to do something visually cool again. The freezing thing would be great, but only if he could make the freezing happen perfectly from the inside out while maintaining the shape, and he did not think it likely he would get that right on the first try.

A similar idea of controlling the shape of flame, of making it move about like an animated figure of fire was quickly abandoned, not only from the risk of fire going out of control, but from having seen too many of the television cartoons in which fire is anthropomorphised as a little tongue of flame with arms and legs. If he accidentally let that creep through into his magic, he could create a living flame that actively sought to burn any and everything it could. Not a worthy outcome.

So now he had to come up with something else. He briefly considered doing the color thing with his skin, like a tattoo, but the consequences of something going wrong seemed a bit out of proportion. Of the three original concepts he had of cantrips, lighting a candle, lifting a feather, and creating light, he had now done two of the three. Lifting a feather seemed pointless and boring after his other cantrips, though, and so something that used the same basic principle of action at a distance would be good, but more interesting.

In spite of having a dirt floor, the house was too clean for him to gather dust into a shape. Moving all the air in a sphere out of it so that it collapsed back together was tempting, having neat implications in a variety of directions, but it was not showy or impressive, and he liked that he had been doing things that were visually impressive even as they proved deeper facts to himself. So he decided instead on something potentially useful, something that would not ordinarily lie within the grasp of a cantrip, but which ought to work, since he had been able to disassociate hydrogen and oxygen in water.

He would disassociate carbon and oxygen. He was not sure off hand how much carbon he could expect to get, given the small percentage of the atmosphere that was carbon dioxide. He did not know the precise percentage, but could probably find it in one of his chemistry books. He was pretty sure it was marked as one of the trace gases, though, nothing like oxygen's near twenty percent.

It would be an opportunity to stretch the meaning of a cantrip, though. One of the points the book had made about sympathetic and material based magic was that the less magic was left to itself, the less power was needed to accomplish the goal. It took immense power, for example, to simply grant a plainly worded wish, because there were so very many ways for it to be done. According to the book, one of the reasons that commonly taught wanded spells had such oddly precise limitations, such as lifting anything up to five pounds, and nothing even an ounce heavier, was that the reduction of uncertainty made the casting easier. Correspondingly, many wanded or otherwise tool based schools considered bare-handed magic fiendishly difficult, largely because it required so very much more power, because they were not used to carefully specifying their results.

James decided to test that, by specifying things very carefully indeed, but in a way that hopefully would avoid the need for the excessive concentration and will that the books implied this sort of magic took. He constructed his cantrip to affect a one inch sphere, separating the carbon from all the carbon dioxide that passed through it, and producing a cylinder formed of layered linked hexagons, each layer being a circle a sixteenth of an inch across, the sphere to always remain in the same position relative to the forming cylinder.

There was no obvious or visible effect from putting the cantrip into action, but James continued to wait patiently, watching the spot he had cast on, waiting. It took a moment for his eyes to find the tiny speck of black once it had appeared. It slowly grew, hardly seeming to change from one moment to the next, and James realized he had underestimated the amount of available carbon. Leaning closer, he breathed on it, knowing that as human respiration produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct, he would be increasing the available carbon.

His breath was sufficient for a proper size circle of black to now be visible. He breathed on it three more times before judging it finally large enough to carefully grasp it by the sides in the tips of his fingers, and lift it up so that he could breath out with his entire breath passing through that one inch sphere.

This substantially improved the rate of growth, adding almost a 32nd of an inch with each breath. When it got to about two inches long, he rolled the rod in his fingers, noting the blackness it left on his fingertips. It was cold, colder than he expected, and the air around it had been chill when he picked it up, and was even colder now, and it was perilously soft, much softer than a pencil lead, and he thought if he pressed his fingers together he could easily crush it to powder.

Even with his breath it was not as impressive as he had pictured it, having over-estimated the amount of available carbon, but it still satisfied him. Not only was it conjuring a solid object, which should be beyond the ability of a cantrip regardless, it also served a second purpose of demonstrating an unseen benefit that only someone educated in science would be aware of. Stripping carbon from carbon dioxide did more than provide a source of graphite, and potentially of diamonds, it also produced oxygen, a hidden benefit, that when scaled up from a cantrip to a full size spell could produce air to breathe, cause a dead fire to leap to new life, or increase the intensity of an existing fire.

Turning his attention back to himself, he considered the results of his attempt at precision. He certainly did not feel nearly as tired as he had on the previous days, but was that from his precision, or simply because he was getting used to it?

He set the graphite bar down by where his pack lay on the dirt floor, and wiped his blackened fingers on the outside of his pack and then his bedding before returning to his book.

When he woke up the next morning, he finally remembered to cancel the cantrip, and then had to carefully break the yard long stick into smaller pieces.

---

It was nearly two weeks later when James was finally given the opportunity to leave the house. He was beginning to get a little stir-crazy, and was exceedingly happy when Barry told him that he was free to wander for the day, and that he had advanced enough that he could now cast cantrips, though nothing much stronger, at will.

He had been slowly ramping up over the two week period. After his effort on the graphite stick Barry had watched him more closely, and been a bit more communicative, explaining that he was concerned about the drain from leaving the spell going. No ill effects had shown up, however, and he had eventually allowed James to try another cantrip that afternoon. When it had again made him a little tired, James had taken that as confirmation that his efforts regarding precision had been successful, and in subsequent cantrips, he tried when possible to think of ways to increase their precision to push them beyond what cantrips ought to be capable of without exhausting himself.

He had also pressed for and in the end was granted some time each night to read his own books, which he used to read and confirm his memories of certain chemical formulas. Now, though, given a full day to himself, and the right to go outside, and the freedom to try his cantrips at will, he was not inclined to spend that time indoors studying his books.

He accepted the small lunch tied in a napkin that Battie gave him and putting his socks and shoes on for the first time in a long while, realising as he did so that his socks were clean again though he had never seen them being washed, headed out the door to go exploring.

This was his first time going out, or even seeing out beyond the narrow opening when the few visitors came by, the front side of the house. It was an open yard, unfenced. There was a large pile of wood in a sort of holding stand set some ten feet away from the house, running in a line away from the front wall, and he now finally realized that the first visitor, the large, muscular man who had come in after they heard clattering, had probably been a lumberjack, or a woodsman, he supposed they might be called now.

There was indeed a lane running down away from the house down the hill where it was hidden from the view behind the house. The grass was an even height, though he had never heard a lawnmower, and when he leaned over and ran his hand through it, it had clearly been cut off by something. He suspected some type of animal, but had not heard the sounds of cattle or goats from within the house. Of course, being magic users, Barry and Battie might well have sealed their house against sound.

Looking down the lane he could not see very far, and he had still received no answer from anyone about the distance to the nearest town. There were no other houses in sight, and he wondered if the few visitors they had received had come a long way.

Certainly he saw no sign of automobile traffic. The lane itself was dirt, and he would have expected if it was mostly navigated by cars it would be two dirt tracks with a grassy centerline, a pattern that he had seen develop even on unmaintained asphalt roads out in the country. Instead it was fairly even, and he wondered if it was magically maintained.

It did not look like a mere footpath, he had seen plenty of those near the college, where students took the shortest route even if the concrete sidewalks did not. Such a path was worn in the center and faded to the sides, and was usually pretty narrow. This was wide enough for a cart.

Did he want to follow it and see where it led, or would it be better to wander into the forest that stood near at hand? Some of the books he had been given had talked of various magical creatures and animals, and they had collectively convinced him that Barry and Battie knew more of dimensional travel than they had yet admitted, since the books did not agree on what creatures were real, and what were mere stories.

Would a wizard or witch allow the forest near them to have dangerous creatures? That could go either way. If the creatures were dangerous to even an aware wizard they would surely seek to get rid of them, but if the creatures were easily handled with magic but dangerous to non-magic users then they might use them as sort of a cordon or shield against outsiders.

He had never been all that much of one for wandering in the forest, though, and it certainly had been three long weeks in a contained environment. He decided the lane, as long as it stayed in open air, would be a better choice.

He was not too worried about being lost, as one of the items left behind in his pack was his lighter and he was fairly sure it was sufficiently unique that he could do a quite precise spell to point to it. He was still a bit bemused by the idea that divination spells could actually work, but the idea of spells that gathered information from remote places within the current light-cone was not nearly as bothersome as the idea of prophecies and predicting the future.

It was a nice day, the sky was mostly clear with a few puffy white clouds, and nothing dark on the horizon. He was perfectly happy walking for the first five minutes, and then he looked back to the house and then looked down at his feet in chagrin. He had not had too many reminders of his recently diminished stature when simply moving from bed to table and back. Now looking back, he wondered if that the reason young children were constantly running. He sighed and turned back to walking, resigning himself to the idea that it was going to take a lot longer to get anywhere.

As the path wound down the hill, he had a sudden pang of apprehension for what it was going to be like trying to go back up that hill when he returned, but he shook it off. In the distance he heard birdsong, and that reminded him of one of the things he had planned on trying.

Constant meditation and magical exercises had improved his memory substantially, and so now he intended to make use of that. Cycling through the steps to set up the cantrip, which were nearly routine by now, he set a small patch of air near either ear vibrating softly in tune to the tune of the Beatles' Scarborough Fair, a suitable song for walking. It was not quite as good as a music player, since he had to locate the song in his memory and push it to the cantrip, but it worked pretty well. It also lacked stereophonic sound, since he had never paid sufficient memory to what side a particular bit of song came from, but he expected he could make it better in time.

Perhaps eventually, he could even have automatic mood music when he entered a room. He grinned at the thought of marching into a room preceded by the strains of Mars, Bringer of War. Unfortunately, it would be awhile before he had grown sufficiently to do justice to it, so for now he just enjoyed the Beatles.

When the hill continued to steepen, he looked down the long slope and another idea struck him. He was a bit leery of magicking up his shoes, lest something go wrong, but this was a fairly minor spell. It was a bit trickier to set up, and he moved to the side of the path and sat on the grass to think it through.

It needed to be adjustable, since he was not sure exactly how strong it would need to be, but if he was careful, and left only the one element variable it should be manageable. None of the books had quite covered the idea of runtime variables, of values that he could adjust on the fly during the spell, but the levitation and mental manipulation spells had the concept sort of baked in. They were a bit loose for his purpose, needing quite a bit of magic since they effectively had somewhere between six and eight or more degrees of freedom, between moving along any axis and controlling pitch, roll, and yaw, and depending on whether you considered velocity independent or not. Not that any of the spells used those terms, or even recognized the significance of the degrees of freedom.

He would build this cantrip with only two degrees of freedom - an angle around his own vertical axis, on one end of which would be an intake, and on the other an exhaust, and a velocity. The concept was otherwise pretty simple. The shape would be constrained by reference to his shoes, and a vertical dimension of, well, an inch ought to do. The cantrip would prevent any movement of air through the boundary layer, except in a two inch wide aperture on either end, with the velocity of airflow and location of the aperture set on the fly as his variables.

Decisions made, he carefully cast the cantrip. It took a fair bit of focus, since he needed to affect both shoes simultaneously. Two separate castings would have left him with four independent controls, two per side, and likely led him to an uncomfortable experience of doing the splits.

Standing up felt no different than normal, but then, both settings had begun at zero, that being the easiest point to use. In the case of the rotation, since it was using his understanding as a basis, zero degrees was with the intake straight ahead, and the exhaust directly behind. He pushed the velocity up slowly, lifting each foot and setting it down again occasionally, to give the spell some air to operate on. When he felt one foot slipping as if he was trying to stand on ice, he decided that was about right, and started moving as if he was trying to skate.

Sure enough, while the spell was constraining the air fairly well when he was standing vertically, feet flat, and the air was prevented from escaping the sides by the curtain of magic, he was not touching the ground. When he angled his foot and pushed as though kicking off on skates, the air was able to escape enough for the front of his foot to contact the ground and give him a boost. Soon he was moving swiftly down the hill.

His momentum did not carry him much of the way up the next hill, however, and so, not yet feeling winded or exhausted, James went for a third simultaneous cantrip, this one simply applied a uniform force to the entire area of his back, with the magnitude of the force the only variable, and again, it was tied to his will, instead of being left up to magic.

In no time he was back in motion, speed skating up the hill as though he was on a flat lake, and no longer worried about the effort of getting back up the slope on the return journey. He grew a bit nervous when the path entered into a wooded area, considering turning back and trying out his air-skates on the grass, figuring they ought to work pretty much like a hovercraft, since that was what he had modeled them after, and be good for rough land as well as smooth roads or pavement.

His speed was sufficient that he was back out in the open, the woody bit having been a mere finger of the larger forest, before he had quite made up his mind, and he put it out of his thoughts, distracted by a sudden panoply of interesting things.

As he crested the hill just beyond the copse he saw cows in fields, rather dull looking brown cows, but still a sign of people to his mind. There were white cowbirds amongst them, some on the ground near the cows, others on their backs, and seeing them reminded James that with no fences visible for them to perch on as he had so often seen them, he had better avoid skating across these fields, and indeed had better slow down and watch the road ahead for cow patties, which he promptly did.

His personal audio had moved on from the Beatles to Mars, the Bringer of War, since he had been thinking of it, and thence to the theme to Star Wars, since the Gustav Holst tune had reminded him of the Imperial March, but even as he was thinking how nice it was, he had a momentary thought of how bad it could be, based on his thoughts as it was, and instantly, as if to spite him, It's a Small World started playing and he was forced to cancel the cantrip lest he be stuck with it playing forever in his head.

Skating past the herd of cows, he found the path now winding along a hill instead of leaping over it, and as he passed the curve he finally saw his goal, a small town or village nestled at the base of a hill beyond which stretched a flatter, more softly rolling region that had the squarish patchwork quilt appearance of farmland, with dry stone fencing thickly clothed in ivy separating the fields.

The town itself was rustic, or even quaint. The buildings were mostly light colors, white or creamy yellow, with brown or red eaves, shutters, and the sharply contrasting accent or outlining boards whose name and purpose he did not know, but associated with stories of Switzerland or Bavaria.

He canceled his other two cantrips, not wanting to do anything overt. Barry had not warned him against doing magic openly, and the books had disagreed about the dangers and consequences of doing such, but he was not sure if Barry had anticipated him making it this far.

He had none of whatever the local currency might be, of course, though he had a number of neatly trimmed carbon sticks rolled in a bit of cloth that he might pawn if he found anyone interested in art. He was not really planning on looking though, he had simply brought them on the off chance. He had the food Battie had given him, and could produce water from the moisture in the air, so he was not too worried about his lack of funds.

For the most part he looked much as any of the villagers he could see below, as he was wearing the clothing that Barry and Battie had given him, with one notable exception. He was quite sure that if this was as rustic and old-time a village as the looks implied, then his shoes, constructed of so many separate pieces of cloth sewn in such intricate patterns would probably look quite out of place.

A simple spell concealed them with the appearance of more simply sewn brown leather shoes, and then he continued down the hill, walking now instead of skating.

He looked about curiously as he reached the first buildings, noting first off that there was no pavement anywhere. There were proper streets, but they were of flat cobblestones and mortar, not cement or asphalt. There were no vehicles more advanced than a horse drawn cart, though he supposed that in such a small place perhaps it was as efficient to walk where you were going. There still might possibly be something more advanced in a city.

What was more concerning, and made him feel his guess about being either back in time, or effectively so by being in a less advanced dimension, was almost certainly correct, was the complete and total absence of any power poles or power lines. The only lines he saw anywhere the those that held clothing hung out to dry. No-one had a cell-phone, he saw no headphones, nor even an old fashioned boombox.

He watched to see what the children were playing with, and saw various games being played, but all low-tech. He did not even see a single rubber ball. One kid was running along rolling a hoop by running a stick across the top of it. Another group was playing a game that looked like marbles, though they were playing with something brown instead of shiny like marbles. He saw kids running, racing, pulling lines of brightly colored somethings tied to string behind them. Not kites, exactly, but rather similar to the tails he had seen on some kites.

The people seemed cheerful and happy, smiling at each other and at him, no obvious looks of suspicion or fear of outsiders. A few of the kids threw an odd truncated wave in his direction, just throwing a hand up in the air and dropping it when they saw him, and he mimicked them back.

Apparently they spoke the same language here as Barry and Battie, for he caught snippets of conversations here and there and had no difficulty understanding them. They tended to address one another respectfully, prefixing the name with a courtesy that he heard as Master and Mistress, though of course the actual word was something else he could not quite make out through the magic that performed the translation.

The names themselves seemed much less like nicknames than Barry and Battie, which made him wonder again what their names actually were. He was not sure what Barry was normally a nickname for, even in English, much less a foreign language.

As he wandered down what appeared to be the town's main street, he eyed the shop windows, trying to identify the shops. There were a few that had actual signs, but for the most part they seemed to use their wares to identify themselves.

There was an obvious bakery, judging by the long brown loaves, cracked across the top, some sprinkled with seeds, the smaller round black loaves like those Barry tore in thirds every evening, and the dotted and pinstriped cake resting along on a raised platform. The one with a massive half of a pig hanging in the window was surely a butcher, and apparently also a sausage maker, given the long chains of links that draped the windows as if in place of curtains.

The next street on that side surprised him a little, given the small size of the town, for it appeared to be a candy shop. He saw no sign of chocolates, which seemed odd since he was sure that Europe made rather a big deal of the quality and purity of their chocolate, looking down their noses at American chocolate. Instead, it seemed to have a variety of very colorful hard candies, lollipops, candy whistles . . . all in all, it rather reminded him of the candy factory from the Dick Van Dyke version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang he had seen as a child.

Indeed, the whole side of the street seemed dedicated to food, for the candy shop was followed by either a tea shop or cafe, he was not sure what distinguished them, and beyond that by a wide open square lined with small carts where folk were selling vegetables, fruit and similar farm goods, including small wheels of cheese, made he supposed, from their own flocks of goats, or their own milk cow. The only shop that did not seem devoted to food was one that had every sort of candle imaginable in the windows. Yet even it advertised honey by means of a picture of a stylized beehive dripping the tasty substance.

The opposite side of the main street seemed devoted to more general needs, having a shoe shop, the proper term for which escaped him, a clothing store that he thought was called a millinery (in which he was quite wrong, for a millinery is in fact a hat-makers), and next to it a hat shop, and lastly something that looked more like an old-time general store, though perhaps not quite as thoroughly general as in the Old West, the movies of which had most strongly influenced his mental image of such a shop.

At any rate, it appeared to have large tubs of seeds of various varieties, along with a wall covered in tools, doubtless the produce of a blacksmith somewhere in town, as they certainly had the look of hammered metal as opposed to the smooth curves of cast metal he found more familiar.

He could almost convince himself that it was some European variant of the Colonial Williamsburg recreation in America, where people lived in the traditional fashion as a sort of living museum. Unfortunately, for that to be true, there would have to be tourists about, and he saw no-one that fit in any less than he did himself.

There was no proper restaurant that he could see, though perhaps it was on a different street. No hotel either, on the main street in town, yet another confirmation that this was an out of the way place.

For the most part the streets, and especially the farmer's market sort of area at the end were quieter than he would have expected. No-one was calling out their wares to every passer by, and if he had to guess, that was probably because this was a small enough town that everyone knew everyone else, and could probably guess to the week, if not the day, what each person would have for sale on any given day.

The loudest sounds, by far, came from the children playing, and from the dogs, of which there were fewer than he would have expected, and not a one of which looked like a sheep dog. Indeed, they looked to him like a Bluetick, except all brown. Definitely a hound of some sort, a hunting dog.

James continued to wander around the town, but his hopes of finding that the portal had merely been a means of traversing great distances was finally laid aside. He could not deny or explain what he had seen in that way anymore. No matter how poor or isolated a place, there was simply no way for them to keep the evidence of modern life completely away.

Even the poorest African villages had children running around in machine stitched shirts. He did not even see a single shirt with a slogan, nor a single logo tee in the whole place. Unfortunately, while he paid the best attention he could to what was and what was not present, he had not had a history book in the pack when he tripped through the portal, and so he had no good way of comparing the dates of certain discoveries, such as chocolate and rubber, to try to place his time better.

The only one he was sure of was the chocolate. Chocolate came from cocoa beans or was that cacao? He was not sure, but regardless, the important point was that they came from South America, which meant that this was sometime before the importation of cocoa beans. He knew that tied things to fourteen ninety-two, but not how closely. It could not be much more than a decade or two past it, he thought. He was not sure how fast the development had gone, or how soon chocolate had spread across Europe, but he was sure that he could not be in the sixteen hundreds or later.

Rubber came from Africa, he thought, or possibly India, but he was much less sure about the timing on when it came into use. Of course, sugar cane also came from America, he thought, wrongly, so that meant that the sugar for all those candies was from . . . what was it again? Beets? Had hard candy ever been made from sugar beets? He was not sure, but he thought that it was a more recent thing, particularly the brightly colored and worked hard candy he saw in that shop.

Was it possible that magic had made the difference there? That since it was a local product within reach without traveling across oceans that magic had taken the place of the factory style industrialization?

He drifted back by the candy store, but his experience with the methods the books gave for detecting magic was insufficient. All of his practice had so far been in the house, which frankly was surprisingly saturated with magic. In that environment he was struggling to narrow his focus to try to locate a single spell so that he could try to identify it or understand it. Here he needed the opposite, to broaden his focus and yet find a single spell amongst a background of silence, and he was not managing the concentration necessary with the distractions of the numerous voices around.

Still, he was more than pleased to be outside, and to have voices all around, after being cooped up in relative silence for so long. He was used to the noise and bustle of the college dorms, and the general noise and activity of Houston.

He spent most of two hours just wandering the town, taking in the sights and sounds, and a little more unfortunately, the smells. Apparently one of the other modern innovations absent in this time was plumbing and general sanitation. Walking about the streets required regular attention to the ground to avoid the leavings of horses or dogs or other animals that freely wandered the streets.

There did seem to be a few people making an active effort to keep goats from wandering into the square where the vegetables and such were on sale. Aside from that the animals aside from the horses seemed to be allowed to wander where they would. The horses that were present all seemed to be attached to various forms of wagons, and every now and then the wheels of those wagons would encounter a pile and drag muck across the road for a ways, making it somewhat harder to identify the dangerous spots to step.

James had an advantage that, as far as he knew, no-one else present had, and after getting fed up with the constant smell, he created a simple cantrip that filtered the air entering his nose and mouth, removing all particles containing more than fifteen atoms, a simple and precise measure that he expected would get rid of the majority of aromatics. Sure enough, it seemed to work fairly well, and removed almost all the smell.

Suppressing that sense finally made it possible for him to venture carefully down a side street, where the smell had repelled him previously. Apparently, judging by the concentrated muck along the sides of the alley, he suspected that people were emptying their waste out through the windows, and he quickened his pace to get through without getting rained on by a bucket of filth.

The back roads were mostly homes, though he did see one that had a sign advertising rooms for rent. Not a hotel, exactly, more what in the U.S. would have been called a Bed and Breakfast, a B&B. He noted the location, but kept going. He was looking, not really hopefully, but just out of curiosity, to see whether there were more shops or interesting activities beyond the main street.

As he had half expected, once he got away from the main street, he noticed a distant ringing sound, and heading in its direction, observing the buildings he passed with interest, and particularly noticing one that had a painting visible through a window, he found his way to a large stable next to what appeared to be a smithy.

The blacksmith was actively hammering something on an anvil, but it was small enough that he could not see for sure what it was. He guessed it might be either a horseshoe, or something even smaller, perhaps a nail, since he was sure that it was blacksmiths that made nails, before the advent of industrial manufacturing.

There was a long woodpile along the outer edge of the building in a small alleyway between the stable and the smithy. The positioning seemed a bit odd to James, with the fire risk of a smithy right next to a fire-prone stable full of hay, but he supposed that the blacksmith acted as a, what was it, a farrier? Or whatever the proper term was for the fellow who re-shod horses.

He wandered past, examining the equipment on the walls, and passed on down the lane, coming back to the rising hill. There were a few houses that climbed the hill, but the town seemed to quickly give up as the ascent grew steeper, and the hill was reclaimed by grass.

He was startled by a sudden outcry from above, and looking up, saw several children at the top end of the hill, lying on the grass and then rolling down the hill. The were not in line with him, where they could have hit the houses, or ended up on the hard cobblestones, but further down, and appeared to be aiming for a row of three haystacks, very stereotypical piles straight from a cartoon, to his mind. In spite of the prevalence of that appearance in stories, he had never in his life seen a real one. In his life in Texas, hay was either in small rectangular bales, or massive round bales, and occasionally piled in a round metal holder made of welded round pipes.

Watching the kids roll down the hill, it looked like a lot of fun, but he did not want to try it here in town, there was simply too much muck all around. After a bit longer just wondering about, James trudged his way back up the hill, then after looking about to make sure there was no-one around, he reapplied the cantrip on his shoes and took off down the hill heading away from town, back towards Barry's.

Munchkin Land

When he reached the cover of the small bit of forest that reached out to envelop the road, he stopped just inside the edge of the wood where he could sit and still watch the road in the direction of the town. Untying the knot of the cloth containing the lunch Battie had sent with him, he settled down and made quick work of the meat, cheese, and black bread.

Then he took the package of carbon sticks and unrolled it, picking one of them up. He had taken the time to look in his chemistry book and examine the bond pattern of diamond, which was, after all, merely an allotrope of carbon. It had taken some considerable thought to work out how to describe the pattern for adding atoms to the structure. It was not nearly as simple to mentally picture and impress on the magic as the simple beehive slice pattern of graphite, and for that reason he was glad he had not tried it when first drawing carbon from the air.

Now though, he thought he had the pattern down, and had a ready supply of carbon atoms. Taking up one of the sticks and setting it down directly in front of them, sliding the rest aside, he worked out the pattern in his head. It was not enough merely to have the actual pattern of the connections between individual carbon molecules. For the resulting diamond to be usable without requiring polishing by a professional, the entire crystal had to end up with certain dimensions.

Thus this cantrip was multi-layered, sort of three cantrips in one. The first cantrip was responsible for disassociating the carbon atoms from the carbon stick and transporting them to the target region. The second was responsible for the large scale structure of the crystal, ensuring that it grew in a pattern that would produce a particular apparent cut.

It would be ideal to produce a brilliant cut, the cut that according to the little side-blurb in his chemistry book was designed to return the maximum amount of light from the top face of the diamond. Unfortunately, his book did not give the details of the diamond cut, and only included a single example line drawing which was frankly too complicated for him to manage without a clear guide, as there were innumerable facets, many with different shapes, so he had gone with a simpler cut that was well-diagrammed in the book. It had a similar basic shape, as if a cube was turned on its point, then had the top half cut off halfway down, then each edge was cut to form a flat facet about an eighth of the way in.

As far as he could tell, the cantrip worked, and it worked quickly, but the results were disappointing. A stone was certainly formed, and it had nice clean smooth faces, but it was dark, and had none of the inner fire that he was used to seeing from diamonds on his world.

Perhaps if he found an actual diamond cutter they might take it from him to be re-cut, but certainly he could not expect to use it as currency with anyone else. It looked like a dull transparent rock, more like a bit of glass than a diamond.

Sighing, he took the stone and re-wrapping the sticks separately, bundled the rock and carbon sticks in his lunch cloth and retied it. He was disappointed, it was true, but not terribly so. It had actually worked, after all, and once he had a better set of details on what the brilliant cut's pattern was, he should be able to produce valuable stones from the very air.

Turning to a different idea he wanted to test, he went back to his light producing cantrip. The basic concept of a laser is embedded in the name, but the actual 'light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation' was only important for its result, which is light that has spatial and temporal coherence. Indeed, lasers existed on his world, that he knew about from his reading, that actually emitted light that lacked the characteristics that people thought of when calling something a laser. The tightly focused beam of light that could put all of its energy onto a tiny spot was only an attribute of those lasers that produce a very coherent beam.

He could possibly build a laser, since he knew the basic principles, but why should he need it, if he, through a simple spell, could directly produce light that was already coherent. Functionally speaking, if you assumed a perfect coherence, there would only be a few variables - the direction would be one, which had several degrees of freedom. The position of the source had another set of degrees of freedom. The frequency, or the wavelength, would be a variable that needed setting, which would affect the color of the light, if visible, or produce infrared, ultraviolet, or some other spectrum position of radiation. And the final variable would be the power, the amplitude of the light beam, the number of photons per unit of time.

Potentially you could have two, maybe three more variables that allowed it to drop from perfect coherence to something less than perfection. A reduced spatial coherence would broaden the beam. A reduced temporal coherence would allow interference effects to reduce the intensity of the transmitted energy. The last possibility he considered would be allowing rotational coherence to drop, which would de-polarize the laser, allowing it to get past a polarizing filter that happened to have the right alignment.

Actually, now that he thought about it, even if the rotational coherence was absolute, the actual angle of the polarization was something that would be a variable, and if he left it unset it would increase the difficulty of the spell.

He sat and pondered for a few more minutes, trying to think of anything he had left out. If he left too much to the magic, it would up the magic requirement of the spell, and possibly result in his pushing too far and running into whatever the consequences were for drawing too much magic. The books had said various things, but some of them were contradictory. One book claimed that overdrawing his magic would simply knock him out, another threatened burn-out, the possibility that he would completely destroy his ability to cast. Whatever the result, he would prefer to avoid it, so he wanted as few variables left as at all possible.

The first set of degrees of freedom seemed easy enough. The most dangerous possibility with lasers is going blind by having them impact the retina. Holding the polarization of the light fixed . . . the problem with that was how to express the polarization. After all, while polarization could be nominally defined and specified by the division of the electric field strength into two perpendicular components, the choice of which two angles was wholly arbitrary, and had no effect whatsoever.

The effect of circularly polarized light was to hold the field strength constant, so perhaps he could back into it by setting the magic to hold the field strength constant, yet there was a right- versus left-handedness that needed to be defined lest it constitute another variable, and he was not sure how to describe it without again doing the arbitrary division into two perpendicular measures of field strength and comparing their values. Of course, linearly polarized light, while it would regularly drop to zero field strength, would reach a peak strength exactly twice that of the circularly polarized light. Theoretically, though, if he could get past the arbitrary angle thing, the polarization would be definable as a simple measure of the degree of alignment of the fields, from negative pi to positive pi, he thought, though he was not sure. It might be only half that. Still, defining it too large would only mean that there were two points in the range that matched a given polarization.

The source point and the directionality, though comprising something like six degrees of freedom, he was not too worried about. The easiest way to handle that and keep the field controllable would be to have the beams emit from directly in front of his eyes, targeted at the focal point of his vision. Then his vision would only be at risk if he looked directly into a mirror with the beams engaged.

It occurred to him then that if he was going to ensure that they came out of his eyes, he could use the direction of gravity from that point - down, basically - to define his arbitrary angle, and adjust solely the field strength phase of that component, holding the perpendicular component constant.

Fixing the spatial coherence to a beam the diameter of his pupils, while variable, would at least be able to be defined by reference to a readily available value. Having all the light produced with a specific defined pattern of field strength took care of temporal coherence. That left him with frequency or wavelength, which he could specify most easily by specifying the wavelength, since that was how it was recorded in his books. That visible light was from 400 to 700 nanometers, or pretty close, with the longer being red, and the shorter blue, was easy enough to remember, and most of the other important values could be remembered as simple powers of ten. That is, for example, while there were a range of values that could be called gamma rays, it was easy enough to remember that a wavelength of 1 picometer was in that range, that X-rays were between 10 and 100 picometers, that ultraviolet was in the 1 to 100 nanometer range, and so on.

The last measure, the strength of the beam, should be specified in watts, he thought. He was not sure how workable that was, though, since he did not know exactly how that translated to photons per second, or a measure of that sort that would be precise. The problem with just basing it on photons per second was that the energy of a photon was so small, any usable laser would probably need an absurdly huge number of photons. So, lacking any better idea, he decided to go with the watt measure. He was pretty sure that regular laser pointers were measured in milliwatts, and burning lasers were measured in hundreds or thousands of milliwatts.

So starting with a five milliwatt, 700 nanometer beam should be about the same as red laser pointer, just producing a visible red dot where-ever he was looking, like a targeting laser on a rifle.

Satisfied that he had covered the critical points, and unable to think of anything else that was being left to magic's whim, he set up the cantrip. This one only required a single cantrip, so it was technically simpler than his attempt to make a diamond.

One of the advantages of his meditation and magic practice was learning to enhance his recall. Once a spell had been designed, he should be able to recall and cast it without having to redesign it every time, unless he needed to actually change the behavior of something he had left fixed rather than tying to runtime values. So hopefully once he had this spell working to his satisfaction, he would be able to bring it up with very little concentration.

Casting and activating the spell produced no visible effect, since it was designed to start with the variables at zero, except for the wavelength, which was defaulted to 700 nm, since a wavelength of 0 had no physical meaning and he was worried it might break the spell. Adjusting the power up to 5 mW, while looking at the ground, in case his judgement of strength was off, he was instantly rewarded with a small red dot. It was larger than he naively expected, having pictured the tiny red dot of a laser pointer, even though he had chosen to define the physical coherence based on a region matching the size of his pupil.

Satisfied, he closed his eyes, checking to be sure that he could not see any glow at all. He had set the spell to start the beam a half-inch from the surface of his eye, but it would not do to up the power until he was absolutely certain it would not burn off his eyelids when he blinked.

A moment later he realized that while blinking needed to be prevented from harming him, deliberately closing his eyes was an excellent reflex to use to shield against blinding himself. He promptly dispelled the cantrip and designed an extra cut-off into it such that the power would be clamped to zero the instant his eyes closed, and restored when he re-opened them. He recast the cantrip, raised the power back up to 5 mW, and then slid the wavelength from 700 nm down through the range towards 400 nm, and grinned as the color shifted through the rainbow exactly as expected.

"Superman, eat your heart out!" he crowed, then focused back on the ground and pushed the color back to red, and then pumped the power up to a watt, but did not observe any melting. He pushed it up another order of magnitude, to 1 kilowatt, and instantly found his eyes tracing a line of glowing molten sand and dirt across the path. He quickly pushed the beam strength back down to 5 mW, and then on to 0.

He wondered what it would do to his magic if he left a cantrip like this running indefinitely. Would it stretch his reserves, like exercising a muscle? Or just empty them out? Unfortunately, that was a point none of the books he had read had been clear about.

He had other things to try, though, so he shut it down. Putting these spells together was an interesting exercise, but it also reminded him of how very different his apprenticeship was from those he was being tasked to read about. Where they were learning spell after spell, he had not yet been taught a single spell. In fact, even though he had read the stories of several apprentices' training, not a one of the spells they learned was actually detailed in terms of how to cast it.

Instead, he was being forced to learn how to craft spells, which from his reading was quite worthwhile. Where a student was normally trained first in casting memorized spells, and only after many years of study and learning spells did they even begin, if they ever did, to start examining the similarities of spells, to start teasing them apart and learning to put them together in different ways, he was starting there.

Even then, most of the schools of magic he had read about did not go into the crafting of new spells at all. That was left for devoted students to learn of their own. That pattern seemed to mostly apply to stories of actual schools - the apprenticeships did actually teach about crafting magic eventually.

He hoped that Barry's style of throwing him in the deep end of learning to construct spells up front would work out well, but he was afraid that there was a deeper reason. He was rather concerned that the primary reason he was being trained in this way was merely the idea he had gotten from the books that many of the spells students actually got trained in only worked the way they did because the variables they contained had been conditioned to have a certain value by generations of magic users casting with similar expectations.

The same spell cast in a different world would not have those conditioned values, and without the inherent understanding one got of what the variables were from deep study or actually being the one that created the spell, the variables would take on uncertain values, resulting in uncontrollable wild effects that could potentially be dangerous, not only due to their direct effects but also due to potentially pulling many times as much magic from the caster as the caster was expecting.

So he was left with needing to build up a useful library of spells where all of the variables were either fixed in the spell, or tied to something that he would actively control. Unfortunately, duplicating the described effects of some of the more interesting spells, the ones that were designed to counter the effects of other spells, or shield against them, or ward places, was something he found it hard to even picture, much less see how to accomplish.

When a spell needed to manipulate a physical object the methods to accomplish it were pretty clear to him. Manipulating other magical energies, especially from other casters, was rather a different question, especially because he had not yet managed to identify a single other spell from Barry or Battie. He could detect their magic's presence in the house, but not the magic itself.

He would have liked to work on some kind of shielding of that sort himself, or something to break through such shielding, but without that experience, he was not even sure how to begin. Instead, he had two more ideas that he wanted to work on, one that could be either defensive, offensive, or merely useful, while the other would be pretty much offense only.

The first one was probably somewhat more complicated than the second, but being more generally useful he was going to try it first. The idea was simply to use magic to manipulate objects at a distance as a form of telekinesis, but he wanted a single spell that would have the flexibility so many of the spells described in the books lacked.

Oh, he could certainly see where certain specific tasks would do better with a specialized spell. For example, a spell that needed to move unconscious people would work better if it could lift them uniformly, rather than from a point.

Still, a spell that could move things at a distance ought to be more flexible than just lifting and moving something. For example, on any ordinary lock, why should a separate unlocking spell be needed, when telekinesis should suffice to push the tumblers into place? Why need one spell to administer a punch at a distance, and a different one to pick up and crack an egg?

His goal was simple, to create a pair of movable magic hands. Their dimensions would be set by reference to his own hands, and their movements would be layered, with both a sync to his hands, and an additional set of X, Y, and Z axes controllable by direct application of will. The pitch, roll, and yaw would be held fixed, set by relation to his position. Hopefully, his magical sense, weak and still developing though they were, would suffice to enable him to see them, and since he doubted he had the strength to operate them outside of his line of sight, the inability to rotate them to match the curvature of the earth would not get even close to being an issue.

The general idea was that by emulating the entire surface of a pair of hands magically, he would be able to do anything with this spell that he could do when physically present. He should be able to pick something up, to throw something, to leaf through a book, to unlock and open a door, lift and carry things, even build a brick wall if supplied with bricks and mortar, all while not physically present. Of limited usefulness at the moment, really, but once he managed to get the hang of viewing things at greater distances they should be more useful.

In the meantime, he would get practice, and they might possibly be locally useful merely for their strength. The magic would be going in to making their movement match his, while he would feel none of the weight. So rather than being as strong as he was, they should be as strong as his magic could make them, though they would probably end up draining him faster as the force they needed to apply increased.

His first casting of the spell, this one he could not convince himself to call a cantrip, it simply did not make sense as one--cantrips did not act at more than a few paces distant, that was one of the defining features of a cantrip, their limited range and power--was a mixed bag. It appeared to work, but he had forgotten to set the starting position of the hands, leaving three degrees of freedom undefined. He was somewhat lucky, instead of badly draining him, the spell simply drew those facts from his hands as they pulled the other templated settings. Unfortunately, the moment he tried to push the hands forward to see if he could see them, he had to immediately pull back. Pushing them forward had jerked his own hands forward at an odd angle, and it had been most uncomfortable.

With the magical hands starting exactly where his hands were, moving them forced his own hands to move, which was something to remember, since it might be useful for increasing his own personal strength at some point, but it was not at all the purpose.

So he dispelled the casting and adjusted the spell, redesigning it to hard code the starting position of the hands so that they started a foot in front of his own hands. Not quite as flexible as allowing it to be set dynamically, but he could adjust a spell before casting it, which was beyond most rote wizards, and it would only be a problem in certain limited conditions, whereas the benefit to setting it this way was the lack of any need for additional concentration or remembering to set things before casting it.

Firing off the spell once more, he focused his magical senses, trying to verify the position of the hands. A moment later he sighed and dispelled it once more. He could sense them, vaguely, but it was far from sufficient to be useful in trying to actually manipulate things, to tell if he was touching something.

He went and sat down with his back against a tree, after glancing at the sky to judge the time, and thought about how to fix things. He needed to be able to see his hands, but merely making them glow would make them visible to everyone and anyone watching, and the usefulness of a pair of invisible hands would be much higher in most circumstances than a pair of spooky glowing hands floating in the air.

Yet the idea of messing about with his vision scared him considerably. He had no idea if Barry and Battie knew any form of healing magic, and he was certainly not versed in any, knowing no more magic than he had managed to teach himself, aside from the exercises designed to bring it out and make it accessible in the first place.

So what then could he do? Nothing immediately came to mind, so he decided to set it aside for further development, and go with the glowing hands for now. That was fairly simple, just tying in a second cantrip that took the position and boundaries of his hand from the first spell, and produced omnidirectional pale green light from the entire perimeter of them. Unfortunately, this spell also had unnecessary degrees of freedom, so he had to make sure to specify the frequency at 510 nm, and the strength as ten watts. He thought that was about right, though of course it might be off by a bit. But he was pretty sure that ordinary incandescent light bulbs, which gave off omnidirectional un-collimated incoherent light were normally between fifty and one hundred watts, and since he was producing light over a greater surface area, turning it down seemed reasonable. He knew that ten watts would be blinding from a laser, but he was not making any effort to produce . . . he stopped and shuddered. He went back in and made sure that the spell specified that the direction and phase of the light should be wholly random, not a randomly chosen fixed value, to make sure he was not leaving it open for magic to choose to produce a laser, since he had himself basically explained to the local magic how to create one.

Then he finally cast the hands for a third time, and this time he could see two ghostly glowing hands. It was an almost perfect effect - the increased light being sent towards his eyes from those portions of the hands and fingers where more surface was lined up between his eyes and the opposite side of the hands, as compared to the thinner light coming from the backs of the hands, where only two single points were in line, made it look very like a cartoon outline of a pair of hands.

He proceeded to push them down to only a few inches above the ground but forward a bit further from him with his will, then dipped his hands down and lifted them as if cupping water. He had meant to try scooping up some of the fallen leaves, but discovered that without any ability to feel them when he reached them, he had misjudged, and his ghost hands had sliced cleanly into the soil and torn up a divot from the ground, leaves spilling over the sides of the clod of dirt and roots.

He had felt no effort doing it, and that confirmed to him that his theories on their being able to thusly boost his strength were valid. Unfortunately, subsequent attempts to pick up sticks, to touch the trees, and to throw various things demonstrated that the lack of any feeling or sensation when he contacted something entirely destroyed his ability to use a delicate touch. His hands gouged through thick tree trunks with little effort aside from a sudden sensation of tiredness as it drew on his magic, and he could easily picture them slicing just as readily through a human body, or an animal.

It might indeed be useful for defense, but the primary reason for wanting actual hands instead of a mere lifting spell was exactly such fine manipulations, easy with hands, but challenging with anything else. He would have to work that out, but for now, he dispelled the hands, and feeling a bit tired, he decided it was time to make his way back to the house. Locating and picking up his lunch packet, he recast the hovershoe cantrip, as he was now thinking of it, and set off, moving quickly down the hill, before he had to active the pushing cantrip to make it back up the next one.

He made it back to the house before the sun was quite down below the horizon, grinning widely, and feeling charged up and ready to go. He had not gotten to the last of the cantrips he had wanted to try that day, one that would simply take a small object and accelerate it towards a target, basically nothing more than duplicating a gun with magic, but he had little doubt that he could do that one, even on the fly if necessary, as it was really quite simple in concept, so he was more than satisfied with the way the day had gone.

He felt that he had confirmed for himself that he was either in another dimension or in another time, and so Barry and Battie were correct about his needing to learn magic in order to make his way home. In addition, he had managed to work on several interesting cantrips that he had wanted to test in private, along with coming up with some new problems to work on in his own time.

Read Read Read

Now that James had gained some experience putting spells together, Barry finally gave him a book that was actually about spell construction. James dove into it with eager glee. Spell-crafting was feeding his hobby of programming, and at the same time constantly exercising his knowledge of physics and chemistry, to the point that he had returned to making a little time every day to study in the books from his original world. They also fed the puzzle-building and solving urge that had grown in him as a direct consequence, he felt, of all of Barry's little tests. He was still in awe of the way Barry kept coming up with new tests and challenges.

His enthusiasm waned rapidly, however. The book was focused on a sub-division of spell research that was built around numerology, a pseudo-science that had been so thoroughly debunked in James' world that he really could not give it any credit. It was like a third grader's idea of math, assigning importance to individual numbers in their own right. Sure some numbers might have more use than others, such as prime numbers and the like, but by the same token, it had only addition and subtraction as concepts, negatives were not present, decimals were unmentioned, fractions were nowhere to be found. Irrational and imaginary numbers were far beyond the pale.

It was almost as if they thought any spell could be composed merely by adding and subtracting whole numbers. Now, in point of fact, James did know enough of modern math to know there was something to this, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem depended on turning symbology into numbers to allow proofs to be referenced by other proofs, and eventually to be self-referential, which was, assuming he was remembering this all correctly, the key component to proving the incompleteness - basically using Gödel numbers to build the equivalent of a statement that claimed its own falsehood, and therefore could not be proven either true or false.

But really, you only did that to prove a point, no-one wanted to actually work with numbers in that way, and even if they did, how did you know what the transformation from algorithm to Gödel number went? As far as he could tell, the methods taught in this book came from people who quite clearly did not know what the transformation was. Instead, they had some technique that, and this was not clearly specified so he was unsure of his interpretation, either parsed a spell into these strung together numbers, or at least guided a search process into converging on the correct set of numbers for a spell.

In the absence of a real underlying theory, they made assumptions about the types of numbers to add based on attributes of the individual integers, by analogy to smaller bits of working spells, and by trial and experiment. Part of the problem, of course, was that numerology, lacking any formal means of proof or disproof, admitted many more varied meanings for numbers than modern mathematics. Math could tell you a number was prime, or a perfect square, or a perfect number (oddly a different meaning than perfect square), or a variety of other more or less silly attributes, such as friendly, amicable, and so on - but all based on some mathematical definition, such as how many factors a number had, or whether they added up to something interesting, or had other interesting patterns.

Numerology, on the other hand, mixed in theology, which varied from group to group, and other oddities, such as ideas derived from plane geometry and whether a number could be defined in a certain number of graphing motions, and odd ideas of the power of repetition, wherein one number could be broken or improved by being repeated a number of times tied to a different number.

By all rights, none of it should work at all. There should be no way to string together an arbitrary series of numbers and have that mean something in magic. Even Gödel numbers meant nothing without a mapping, a translation between the symbols of a specific formal system and the natural numbers, and how could magic have such a mapping independent of someone first devising it?

Yet apparently it did work, and he puzzled over this, and reread the book, much to his disgust, over the next two days, trying to work out a sensible way in which this numerology could be allowed to operate without requiring him to believe in something so patently ridiculous. Eventually, he had to concede that there was no logical constructive way to manage it, so he instead chose to believe that it worked solely because they themselves, in researching the numbers, built up a belief in their minds about what the spell would do, and as they worked towards an implementation, were actually honing their understanding until it allowed them to convey that understanding to magic, whereupon the whole process of repeated casting made the connection steadily stronger and stronger.

That thought lead to another interesting sideline. Perhaps it was true in worlds that operated in that basic fashion, especially those with any form of centralized schooling, that common spells were easy, and rare spells hard, precisely because they were common, or rare. A common or widespread spell would become, by this way of thinking, steadily easier to cast, as it became more patterned and people slowly came to expect more similar results, as each generation's training went through a sort of bottleneck due to the smaller number of teachers versus students. By the same token, commonly used spells would be more restrictive in actual use, since the variables left open in them would become patterned, and more and more would take on the same values.

This then might also explain the ridiculous number of highly specific spells common to such worlds, based on his reading. As a spell became more common, and thus more specific, its uses grew slowly more restricted, and those spell-casters sufficiently skilled to create or tweak spells would make more general variants to accomplish more varied goals, only for these new spells to go through a similar narrowing process. The only truly broadly potent and malleable spells would be wholly new spells, or spells so ancient that their patterning had been degraded or lost with time and lack of use, so that they were effectively new.

That same pattern would make dimensional travel extremely dangerous for such wizards traveling anywhere beyond their own close neighborhood unless the wizard was so powerful that supplying the extra magic to overcome the sudden increase in the degrees of freedom of a spell would not bother them.

His own custom designed spells should hopefully fare better in such a situation, since they had no extra degrees of freedom to suddenly go wild, though if he ever ended up in a world with a sufficiently different physical environment that might fail to hold. For example, if he ended up in space, then spells formerly constrained to some degree by gravity, by his mere assumption that they would behave similarly to physical projectiles, might have a sudden large degree of freedom - perhaps choosing between nearby stellar bodies for the strength of gravity, or just treating the apparent strength of gravity as an open ended variable for magic to choose.

Even after deciding how to treat numerology he still found himself unwilling to attempt any form of analytic breakdowns on his own spells. What good would it do him to have so simplistic a conversion, down to meaningless numbers?

He did begin to test going in the other direction, however. If, in fact, communication of intent to the magic was as important as he had decided it was, then he might actually have some success with writing spells as programs, sort of pseudo-code, as it would guide his own mental understanding of the spell. If nothing else, if he could find a better description of a diamond's brilliant cut, it would probably be a lot easier to express the innumerable facets as some sort of program than trying to build a spell from them directly.

It had one other prominent potential use, as well. He had already been composing spells out of multiple cantrips. If he could make subroutine-like cantrips, cantrips that had multiple open variables, and either outputs or direct effects, and cast them enough that they were nearly instinctual to him, that his understanding of them was sufficiently deep, he might be able to build layered spells, constructs of magical energy that could use multiple spells, not merely for separate but linked effects as he had done up to now, but actually as fully interconnected components, then he could potentially build spells that were entire orders of magnitude more complex than would otherwise be possible.

He wondered if the really great mages did something similar, ingraining certain lesser effects so much into their muscle memory or the magic of their realm so that they could chain innumerable small spells, not only one after the other, but actually one into another.

His first attempt was intensely simple, and constituted two remarkably simple cantrips. They each had a single input and a single output. One of the two was actually his cantrip attempt from the day before, slightly modified.

What he had done yesterday for his cantrip was a step towards allowing him to see his hands without making them visible, and that was to cause magic to form a display on a flat plane of air, with the light constrained so that it was produced and traveled almost entirely within a thin cone of divergence, so that the plane was only visible when looking either directly, or almost directly at it, but totally invisible, aside from the reflected glow from objects placed in the light's path, from the back or sides. Currently, the display could show any single image that he could provide it mentally.

What he did now was to adjust it to use his understanding of language to render visible text from an input. His second cantrip was a very simple one designed so that the input was a variable dropped in, that basically tied it by reference to some physical, measurable attribute of some real object, while the output was the result of the measurement in words.

Unlike his previous spells, it was not enough to link these spells so that they both used the same measure, or operated on the same substrates, or in the same location. Here, he actually needed to tie the two spells together, to feed results from one spell directly into the input for the second, preventing the input from being treated by magic as an open variable.

He tied the input of the first cantrip to one of his carbon sticks, tying it to the height of the stick in whole inches above the ground. He spent the next twenty minutes casting and recasting the second cantrip, then casting and recasting the first with the second already going, while Barry watched with mild interest. It was a frustrating and draining process, as each failed casting left an open variable. After the first casting, James found that the casting of the display often had magic picking up the curses he was vocalising in his mind, causing the screen to curse at him.

He persevered until he could cast no longer, and ended up going to bed that night without reading, exhausted. Throughout breakfast the next morning, and even as he tried to read, he was distracted with thoughts of how to get the spells to link up. His answers to Barry's challenges were lacking, but somehow he made it through the day until the time came to try his spells again.

His first three tries were equally useless, and he was beginning to despair of his goal. Surely it could not be actually impossible to link two spells together? Yet so far everything he had tried had failed, from picturing a portion of the spell as a physical plug and socket, to threads that could be tied together, to just willing it to f-ing work already, to picturing physical overlap of the spells.

The one method he knew could work as was also something he was saving as a last resort - and that was to actually modify a physical variable, such as vibrating a spot of air, and tying the second spell to that physical variable. He did not like it, it exposed things to environmental noise, and gave a target for disrupting his spells, not to mention it would simply be mentally tiresome having to define each time the item and behavior to draw from with sufficient clarity and minimal degrees of freedom.

What it he could do the same thing though, with magic? Stop trying to tie the two spells together as if they were physical objects, and think of it more like a program, like a computer - have the output be put into a register as it were, assigned a magical code, and have the other spell look up that code.

There obviously was some form of memory available in magic, for the whole conditioning thing to work. Could he access some local form of that, have magic record some named values for him, and then look them up later?

He settled down and began to rework his spells for his fourth try that day. This time, the first cantrip was set up to pull from the physical measure and push the data into a conceptual variable slot that he titled 'Register 1'. Then he set up the second cantrip to pull the contents of 'Register 1' and display it as text on his flat display.

He ran through the sequence several times in his head while he went through the meditative practice, then he finally cast the cantrips in order. The text '30 inches' appeared floating in glowing green letters in front of him. He leaned over and, holding his breath, picked up the stick. The number jumped from 30 to 31, 32, 33, then back down as he dropped his hand towards his lap, ending up at 26 inches.

Though he felt like leaping for joy, he first canceled and recast the second cantrip. '26 inches' vanished and reappeared. He dispelled the first cantrip, but '26 inches' remained visible. He lifted and moved the stick around, and the words remained unchanged. He set the stick back on the table, and recast the first cantrip, and the text changed abruptly to '30 inches,' and this time he cried out in glee, leaping up and dancing about.

Barry and Battie did nothing to stop his capering, but once he had settled, and set aside the current book as completed, Barry handed him the next one. For a moment, James was struck by the thought that there was no-where in the house to store all these books that Barry continually supplied. He had managed to get a glimpse through the only door the house had, and it merely lead into an obvious bedroom, with no bookshelves that he had seen, yet he had been reading a book every two to three days now for several weeks and Barry continued to supply them with no rummaging about or digging up of packed away boxes.

He made a mental note to look into the feasibility of magical storage, whether by expanding the space in his pack to hold more than it should, or by creating a portable hole or something similar, as he had overheard some of the role-players chatting about back in high school. If he could not, he would certainly not be able to carry much in the way of supplies if and when he managed to find a way to step across dimensions like the Thin Man.

He sat on his bed and opened the new book, diving straight into it, and discovering to his chagrin that had he merely moved on past the previous book, many of his questions might have been answered.

This book was all about using magic on magic, about spells that linked with or modified other spells. As with all the books he had been given so far, there was no explicit instruction given, no 'cast such and such in this way, and it will have this effect.'

Instead it was a more general discussion of the types of what it termed meta-spells, their uses and limitations, their applicability and prevalence in different magical systems. It was after about the third paragraph talking about a different system of magic that James realized that somewhere along the line, Barry had shifted from giving him individual books about a specific magical system, such as one might have if one collected books from a number of worlds, to overview books that in a single text covered the systems of multiple worlds, or even generalized concepts, such as worlds where all magic was voiced, or worlds where all wizards used wands, or another where magic was done with hand motions and focal elements.

When he picked up the reading the next morning, after a long and pleasant night's sleep, James found himself getting intrigued not merely by the magic-on-magic described, but by the subtext the book was giving about the various magical systems. It was detailing things with finer gradations, pointing out that even amongst, for example, wizards that used wands, there were those whose wands were wooden, like a stage magicians, in which case the grain and species of the wood could leave a sort of signature on the magic, such that potentially spells could be tied back to the wand that cast them, to those where wands were made of precious materials, gold, platinum, mithril, and gemstones of high quality, where each wand was individually made and designed to actually hold the full pattern of a spell, along with charges of magic to cast it, and the wizard had only to trigger it.

Storing spells, trapped and ready to execute was an interesting concept all of its own, and James found himself wondering whether his graphite rods could be used to channel spells, and whether the diamond he had made could use used to store magical energy, even if it did look worthless. If it could be so used, then its worthless appearance was actually a benefit, as compared to a brilliant cut stone. When held in the hand, so that only the upper face was visible, it had looked almost black, and no-one would have likely been tempted to see it as valuable, or steal it. More to the point, it would have blended in nicely with the graphite, and potentially been almost unnoticeable.

The book described a variety of meta-magic in addition to the subtext about the systems. A spell could apparently be crafted to have no other effect than to increase the range, duration or power of a spell. Or a much more intricate spell could be devised allowing one to cast multiple effects into it, almost as if tossing grains of sand into a spiders web, where they would be caught up, fully cast yet held in abeyance, until the triggering conditions of the meta-spell were met, at which point all the spells would go off at once.

Apparently such meta-spells were a common component of some world's warding schemes, wherein webs of magic were spun about a place to ward against intruders. It was not quite the same thing as having spells stored in a gemstone or a previous metal wand, for while wards were often tied to carved stones, the ward itself was an active magic, actively testing to see if its conditions had been met, and releasing one or more spells when they were.

It was also possible, and this also found use in warding, to cast spells that consumed other spells or magic used in their vicinity as fuel, sometimes actively absorbing other spells to create a sort of null-magic region, and sometimes only capturing ambient energy, so as to maintain the power-level of their responsive abilities.

Barry's lecture and testing that morning met with better attentiveness as James was no longer quite so distracted, though he was still pondering how the meta-magic compared with what he had done by storing information in magic for another spell to retrieve. So far, he had not come across a direct equivalent for that in his reading, and so it might actually have been a good thing that his stubbornness had kept him reading and rereading the previous book looking for insight.

His cantrip that day was probably a disappointment to his teacher, he supposed, but it had immense significance for him. Having memory storage was all well and good, but communicating between more than a single spell demanded coordination, and all of James' programming experience was on modern computers. One attribute that they all shared, and that all of his computer science theory was predicated on, was something called a clock. It was not a clock in the usual sense of something that told you what time it was, but rather the underlying basis that allowed almost all such clocks to exist - a regular, repeating action.

There had been clocks in history that did not work that way - water clocks, the sun-dial, and candle-clocks, for instance, but all digital computers needed a signal pulse, so that everything happened in lock-step, and while he knew that analog computers had existed that did not operate in this way, he unfortunately knew far too little about them to use them in designing his spells. So, he needed a clock.

His cantrip also served a second purpose, for he first cast his display cantrip from the day before. It lit up with '30 inches' still visible, and he noted that apparently the magical memory slots retained their datum for at least a day. Then he cast his second cantrip, designing this one with a single degree of freedom, a single variable tied to his will that would simply be the cycles per second, or Hertz, Hz, as it was known in computing. All the spell would do is push 'On' or 'Off,' alternately, into 'Register 1', flipping every cycle, with the speed of cycling set as the one variable.

He cast it, and the display changed to 'On.' He willed the cycle to 2 Hz, or two cycles per second, and grinned widely when it worked, and the displayed word began flipping back and forth. He pushed the Hz up and up, watching it flip faster and faster until it blurred to the point that it looked like Off and On were both written in the air on top of each other, overlapping, and then canceled the cantrips.

As he dove back into the book, he found his mind rolling over some interesting possibilities. He was sure that it would be inappropriate to try to create any sort of magic spell that fed on magical energy here in the house, as surely Barry already had wards or something that drew on that excess energy. Probably it was some such permanent spell that had removed any need for the bathroom while he was here. It might even be sophisticated enough that it was actually causing his body to somehow internally recycle the water he would otherwise be losing, by removing the excess materials from the blood before it even went through the kidneys and liver?

Still, he kept going back to the idea of a spell that gathered energy and stored it in something akin to the metal wands described. Could something like that explain wishing items, such as the Djinni ring from Aladdin? If a wizard created such artifacts in his lifetime, designed to slowly harvest and store large quantities of magical energy, was it possible that long after he died, the amount of energy might be so vast that it would substitute fully for every degree of freedom in a wish, allowing even someone with no magical training to basically cast the most powerful of spells? And how much more powerful would such a device be in the hands of someone who knew how to craft a spell that did not leave all the variables open, that was actually efficient?

He could not attempt such a thing now, but it was worth remembering, and putting on the back-burner for later use. He almost considered trying to write that into a register, to use the already observed magical memory as a notepad, before it occurred to him to wonder how easy it might be for another wizard to see or draw that memory from the magic. If another wizard drew on his 'Register 1,' would they be able to see what he had placed there?

On a different note, he realized, he needed to test multiple registers, and make sure that his naming of it had actually done something. If it was really a single item communications channel, with magic only able to remember one item, it would be impossible to build a sophisticated multi-level spell system on that foundation.

The book had moved on to spells that twisted the intent of other spells now. The most important one of these, to James' mind, the most immediately useful, and the one that he promptly put on his mental list of spells to find a way to replicate, was what the book termed a target aberration spell. This covered the basic idea of manipulating the targeting of another spell, from a reflect spell that simply switched the target and caster, rebounding the spell back upon the caster, to spells that could take a spell normally cast on an individual, and stretch that to affect a group, to spells that warped a spell designed to affect something that was touched into one that could be cast for effect at a distance.

While the reflection aspect was particularly enticing, James could also see uses for this in changing connection between spells on the fly, to link his spells into an existing ward set, or to attach a monitoring spell to a running spell-group, like he might attach alligator clips to a circuit to check for shorts. It might also be usable for extending a protective spell to cover someone else on the fly.

He would certainly have to make the attempt to create spells that would alter the inputs of another spell, as well, just to see if he could, though he could not think of too many uses for that off the top of his head.

The book also covered a concept called spell breaking, in which the magic-user used similar techniques to the target aberration to twist a spell back on itself. The descriptions in this part were vague, but James knew enough about feedback cycles from chemistry to understand the idea of a positive feedback loop and the way it could lead to an explosion. If you have two chemicals that would combine with a small input of energy, and if combined, would release more than twice the amount of energy they took to combine, then mixing a large quantity together and supplying that small initial bit of energy would cause the first tiny bit to combine. That would release enough energy to combine two bits, which would release enough to combine four bits, and so on. Boom! The same idea worked equally well with something being split as combined, that part was not important. Only the exponential nature of the self-fueling positive feedback loop mattered.

Of course, a positive feedback loop did not have to be explosive, you could equally have a loop that was more akin to an elevator, lifting the temperature or some other attribute of a chemical process ever higher, until some other feedback loop dampened it.

Most magic seemed to avoid loops, being more akin to straight-through procedural code. Wards and other permanent spells, however, generally had what the book called a 'loop of quiescence,' a steady state that was actually a circular process, where the wards sort of pulsed, very similar to the clock he had himself designed, but in a more analog fashion, where rather than the clock mediating each step of the loop, each loop was itself an entire clock cycle.

Any permanent spell, then, had at least the potential for a negative or positive feedback loop to be created, wherein the output of the spell became one of its own inputs. This was not the case with the normal ward scheme, where the loop was simply a cyclical process of checking the inputs, determining the action, taking the action, and so back to checking the inputs. The action taken was not normally one of the inputs to the spell. If you could make it an input, however, then you could set up a feedback reaction that could potentially tear a ward to pieces.

As a practical example, the book described what it called a gossamer ward, a ward that had multiple trip-lines, whose only purpose was to warn the caster of something approaching, normally by sending the caster a mental signal, such as feeling a tingle or buzz. If the ward was adjusted just a tiny bit, such that it also detected sending a signal as something worth sending a signal about, then one had a simple feedback loop that would continually warn the wizard once the warning went off the first time, and would not be able to be shut off without either taking down the spell, or finding and dismantling the feedback look. If the spell had graduated messages - sending a stronger signal if more than one signal was detected, for example, then it could become a positive feedback loop, with each pass through the loop increasing the number of signals detected, increasing the number or strength sent, and could potentially fry a wizard's brain, kill them outright, or just draw too much power and collapse the ward entirely.

Of course, there was also the possibility that it would do exactly what a runaway positive feedback loop would do in chemistry, and blow up in the ward breaker's face. That did not sound like nearly so much fun, especially since an explosion of concentrated magic could probably have much more interesting effects than merely heat and a shockwave.

The next day James spent designing logic gates, little cantrips with multiple inputs and a single output. Each had an input for a clock, and one or more inputs for the logic values. This bit felt very uncomfortable to him using his registers, and made him really want wires or plugs, as he had tried and failed to manage, and he certainly did not actually intend to build anything up from the level of logic gates.

No-one sensible would seriously take a high-level language where clear English statements could be almost directly executed, and attempt to build simple logic gates on it so as to build back up to the level of being able to run a high-level program - but many programmers do that sort of thing for fun, or to learn.

It was especially unpleasant when each implementation of a logic gate would require its own independent non-overlapping set of register names. Only the clock output, which he titled 'Register Clock,' would be the same for all. When the Register Clock's value was one, each cantrip would compute its bit of logic on its inputs and store its output value in a private register. When the Register Clock's value was zero, each cantrip would ignore its inputs, and simply copy the private register value to its output.

James was not quite sure if that was how clocks worked in normal computer chips, but it seemed to him to be what would give him the best result. The real meat of the session, once he got a small set of them running, and at least presumably actively changing their outputs, was casting the display, still attached to 'Register 1,' and then trying to cast a separate spell to change the output that the display was monitoring.

Without any clear descriptions from the books on exactly how any of this was to be done, it took some time before James managed to get any result at all from casting a spell on his display spell, and he was completely exhausted by the time he finally got anything to actually happen. Barry watched all this with bemusement, clearly not understanding the purpose of all the tiny spells, none of which seemed to be actually doing much of anything at all.

He did not interrupt nor complain, however, when James cleared the spells away and went back to collapse on the bed. James did not manage to read any more that night.In the morning he tried to pick back up where he had left off in the book, but found that concentrating enough to read was difficult. His head was pounding, and his muscles ached as though he were coming down with a fever. Indeed as the morning wore on, he continued to deteriorate, the pain building to a bone deep ache in seemingly every muscle he had, though as far as he could tell, he was not running a fever.

Barry seemed unsurprised. "You pushed too far last night," he said curtly. "Now you've got to recover. Go back to bed."

Recovering

Not yet posted.

Synergy At Last

Not yet posted.

Grimoire

Not yet posted.

Loneliness

Not yet posted.

Almost Ex Nihilo

Not yet posted.

Wizard's Guild

Not yet posted.

The Band of Seven Blades

Not yet posted.

Geizbart

Not yet posted.

Playing House

Not yet posted.

Learning or Pranking

Not yet posted.

Fending Off Boredom

Not yet posted.

Hideout

Not yet posted.

Magic Thief

Not yet posted.

Mapping

Not yet posted.

Correcting Faults

Not yet posted.

Metamagic

Not yet posted.

Light Bending

Not yet posted.

Acts of Kindness and Violence

Not yet posted.

Escape

Not yet posted.

Cosmic Power

Not yet posted.

Stellar Attraction

Not yet posted.

Alien Archeology

Not yet posted.

Leavetaking

Not yet posted.