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.