Fantasia Concordat Ch. 02

"I still think this is a bad idea, Master." Dahlia droned over the sounds of Jack's hasty preparation and scribbling. She didn't really expect her warnings to affect Jack's plans in the slightest.

"Magical Limb Augmentation," Jack enunciated as he wrote, not looking up from his notebook and ignoring Dahlia's complaints. "Test number three."

Jack put down his pen and pulled his brace into view. It now had a shiny luster to its surface from the chrome spray-paint Jack had coated it with in order to increase its magical effectiveness. Such an idea had come from Jack himself. Dahlia grinned to herself. Say what you would about Jack, he certainly had a lot of ideas.

Upon closer inspection, one might find that inlaid in the silvery surface of the brace were countless designs of remarkable intricacy. Magical runes Jack had carved under Dahlia's close instruction in order to transform the metal instrument into a magical catalyst. Jack held his impromptu wand to his chest now, muttering softly to himself. Dahlia watched with marked pride as she saw her current master and pupil clear his mind and begin preparations for spellcasting.

As she watched Jack's mouth slowly utter words of arcane power, Dahlia's mind drifted to ponder the few weeks she had spent in her new master's care. At first, she had been pleasantly surprised at her new pupil's diligence and willingness to learn. He wrote almost everything she told him down, and any moment he wasn't spending draining knowledge from Dahlia was spent reviewing that which he had already gleaned. Dahlia was ashamed to admit that his persistence in the pursuit of magical knowledge wore even her patience thin. He seemed to have an endless stream of questions. Any answer she did give him then promoted two or three branches of questioning that Jack was hell-bent on pursuing. But the worst thing about Jack's interrogations was that he almost never answered any of her questions.

"What spell does this rune signify?" Jack had asked her as he flipped through her pages one evening. He soon discovered that the pages almost never contained the same content twice. Dahlia had explained earlier on that the knowledge contained within a Grimoire far exceeded the amount of pages deemed "reasonable" to belong to a single book, or even a series of books.

"That is a powerful spell," She had told him. "It allows the user to see the future."

"See the future?" Jack had looked up from his notebook for once, in surprise. "That sounds incredibly useful."

Jack's eyes had then narrowed, "What's the catch?"

"The amount of time one can see into the future depends on how much energy they are able to expend in the usage of the spell. As you can probably imagine, it is incredibly difficult to cast."

At that, Jack didn't seem to falter. Dahlia had thought such a statement would turn Jack's expression sour, make him cross out his notes angrily. She had secretly wanted to see a look of anger or disappointment on his face, if only to find some replacement to the cold mask he normally wore when studying.

"And how far into the future could I see, with my current capacity for magical energy?"

"About half a second." Dahlia delivered the line as coldly and bluntly as she could, but her only reward was Jack lowering his head once more and writing something in his notebook she couldn't quite read.

"So," Dahlia had continued, letting her annoyance get the best of her. "At your level, it's near useless."

"Yes," Jack had said, never slowly the steady crawl of his wrist across the page. "Near useless."

After that, Dahlia had stopped trying to surprise or disappoint Jack.

Dahlia was brought back into the present by a sudden motion from Jack. He'd stopped chanting and was apparently ready to begin his experiment. He got up from his chair and limped to the center of the basement. The room itself was poorly lit and featured unfinished cement flooring, but Dahlia supposed that was why he'd chosen in as the place to conduct his magical experiments. The cement made a convenient surface to place magical runes in chalk, which wiped away easy enough when the fun was all said and done.

Jack stopped and looked over his shoulder at the permanently nude form of Dahlia. She sat on the edge of a dusty workbench, much in the same manner as she had when she first appeared in his bedroom the first night. Jack had discovered that she could talk with him while in her human manifestation as well as when she was just an old book, though Jack had wondered why the book itself remained present even when Dahlia was in her "human form." Jack had tried opening the book while she was human before him, but this only caused Dahlia to slap his hands away and blush profusely. Even since then, she had made sure to keep the book out of his reach while she took on her humanoid manifestation. Jack smiled as he looked at her now, the book clutched protectively to her chest as she watched him, the designs swirling on her skin in an unreadable pattern.

It wasn't that she couldn't wear clothes, or didn't want to, but it was more of a matter of her not understanding the need for clothes. She didn't understand the sexual nature the image of a nude woman conveyed, and the more Jack had tried to explain it, the more embarrassed and unwilling to listen Dahlia became. Jack had initially thought her an inherently sexual creature, based on their first encounter, but soon discovered this was not the case. She apparently only accepted the notion of coitus as a ritualistic gesture, and any other interpretation was shockingly vulgar.

"As I have told you before, Master," She had said, "That was merely meant to bind the contract between you and I."

"Although," She had added with a discreet blush, "That was the first time I'd been 'activated' in a long time."

"You've known other masters then?" Jack had meant to tease the fair-haired beauty, but part of him had risen with a wave of jealousy and curiosity

"O-Of course!" She had spluttered incoherently. "W-Well...a f-few, at least..."

Jack had bit back another sharp question. He realized the rage and disappointment in him and found annoyance at these feelings. So what if she'd masters before him? So what if she fucked them all? She was just a book, a tool to be used for knowledge. Jack had decided to stifle his base desires in his thirst for knowledge. It was what he had always done.

"How long ago was that?" Jack had asked instead.

"If your modern Gregorian Calendars are still to be trusted, then it has been at least one thousand years," Her expression had softened, "So very much has changed."

Jack grinned and brought himself out of his reminiscing with a snort. He had work to do right now.

Turning his back on his watchful Grimoire and teacher, Jack continued hobbling into the center of his musky basement. Inside the center of a large ring of magical symbols he'd drawn on the basement floor, Jack had set up a curiously low table. The hollow click click filled the empty room as he approached his testing area. Once he reached the stout table, Jack leaned more of his weight onto his brace, now doubling as a wand, and threw his right leg over the table, allowing it to rest over the edge, but not touching the ground. Jack rolled up his pant leg and revealed the shining metal of his artificial limb, covered in the same silvery paint as his brace and decorated in delicate magical symbols. Everything was now in place.

Jack grunted with exertion as he balanced on a spare crutch and he awkwardly held his leg in the elevated position. He was glad that Dahlia had not offered to help with this any of the other times he'd attempted it. As he closed his eyes and prepared to release the energy he'd stored from his chanting earlier, he briefly wondered how he appeared to Dahlia. Did she think him a bitter cripple motivated only by wounded pride? Jack smiled. Even he wasn't so sure about himself anymore.

Jack felt the brace grow hot against his hands as he fed it magical power. The inscriptions along its surface glowed blue with energy and pulsed as he fed it, taking from him as much as he would give, but always willing to take more.

"Careful," Jack heard Dahlia behind him. "Take it slow."

Jack said nothing and kept his eyes closed. He was not using the wand to cast a spell, but merely using it as a conduit for transferring energy. He'd discovered, rather painfully, that his own body was poorly suited to such a task. He could gather magical energy and store it well enough, but releasing it without using his brace proved to be rather explosive.

Jack placed the tip of his brace against the edge of the chalk drawing. He'd removed the rubber tip from his brace normally present when he used it in his daily routine. He had gotten a few looks based on the new paintjob he'd given his brace. As he poured energy steadily through his brace, he allowed it to flow naturally into the chalk design below. Another conduit to transfer energy, the chalk drawing was also not a spell, though it bore close resemblance to a spell rune. In theory, it was basically a "jar" to hold the magical energy Jack would give it, a jar that enclosed the center of the circle. The lines of the drawing began to glow with faint blue light in a gradual sequence that might follow if one would fill a grooved symbol with water. Once the entire chalk drawing was glowing Jack let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. All the energy he'd stored up earlier had successfully been transferred to the chalk drawing. Now the hard part began.

The air around him felt heavy and thick. The hairs on his arms and legs stood up. Jack was awkwardly standing in a pocket of air now heavily saturated with magical energy. Jack took a deep breath and tried to calm his heart beat. He had to be careful here, he didn't want another explosion.

Jack opened his eyes and focused his glare on the silver of his metal leg. The limb was attached with a series of straps and belts that connected to his stump, just below the knee. The limb ended in a solid rubber imitation of a human foot. As Jack focused his attention on it, the runes carved into the surface of the metal shaft of the leg began to glow. Jack hardened his stare as he began his work.

Jack used the magical energy permeating the pocket of air in the center of the circle and began to weave it around his leg and through his skin. Sweat rolled down his face and he battled with the intricacies of the magical currents unsteadily existing around him. He couldn't see the energy, but he could feel it, if he strained his attention hard enough. He used that power to push and pull the magical currents around him so that they found his artificial limb, and the spell rune inscribed there.

It wasn't enough to activate the spell, Jack had realized. Certainly it would be difficult enough to gather enough energy to do so, but Jack couldn't just fill the limb with magical energy as he had done on his first try. Magical energy was a fickle force, and resisted any violent urge to move in any direction that it found unnecessary. The first attempt had ruined one of Jack's artificial limbs and nearly taken more of his leg. Jack needed to knit the magical energy around the limb evenly, to apply in such a way that would prompt no explosive rebuke from the magic itself.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Jack had successfully repositioned all the magical energy in the pocket into his artificial leg. The most delicate portion of the task came next. Jack squeezed his eyes shut, and activated the spell runes littering the length of his metallic limb.

"Activate," he breathed, barely a whisper. The strange language came thick and slow from a tongue poorly suited to the sounds.

Jack opened his eyes and witnessed the surface of his limb growing white-hot with energy. He set his jaw and mentally prepared himself for the task ahead. Soon a wall of translucent material seemed to seep from the surface of his leg. It expanded in the shape of a cylinder, using the metal shaft of his artificial limb as a radius. Jack gritted his teeth and willed the expanding wall to stop once it had reached a size he deemed necessary. The magical wall resisted Jack's touch, nearly bursting with the pressure of magical force. Jack began to shape the magical wall, molding it into a form that would match a humanoid limb. He made the ends of the wall engulf the other portions of the limb, foot and brace, to create a single greenish mass of incorporeal energy. He strained his eyes as he exerted mental fortitude in order to twist the shape of the wall in delicate place in order to recreate his lost leg.

Once Jack was satisfied he had created a shape that passably mimicked a counterpart for his remaining leg, he began strengthening. As he focused more attention to the shape, the color of it shifted to a more solid appearance, losing its opacity. Jack gritted his teeth and sucked in air as he desperately tried to use up the remaining energy in the core of his artificial leg to increase the density of his magical replacement.

Finally, he was done. Jack's magical creation lay propped onto the small table, attached delicately to his body just below the knee. It bore close resemblance to a normal human being's right leg, except for its color, which shone a dark green. The surface of this magical augment had a strange quality to it, as if it were unable to reflect any light, or perhaps it didn't allow light to escape. Jack couldn't see the metal limb inside any longer.

Jack let out a long series of sighs and prepared to awkwardly lift his leg off the table. He didn't expect to be able to walk with his new creation just yet, but he had wanted to make sure he would be able to create a magical limb before he even thought about magically attaching it to his body and giving it life. As he wiggled and strained he was briefly glad he had decided to put the table here, as he doubted he could have stood with something this heavy weighing him down.

Jack eventually gave up and resolved to just kick the table away with his free leg and allow his body weight to rest on the new leg once it was on the ground. Jack kicked. He then shifted his weight to prepare for the collision with the cement floor. However, the collision didn't come.

Jack didn't collide with the floor.

Instead, Jack noticed with stark disbelief as the base of his new magical limb approach the basement floor, and the floor began to chip away from underneath him. It was as if the floor wanted nothing less in the world than to touch his strange new limb, and shrank away into oblivion from its presence. Jack had no time to react or stop as his magical leg plunged unobstructed into the concrete. Jack eventually fell to one knee and released the spell. Jack just looked agape at his right leg. He was knee deep in concrete, stuck inside a hole exactly big enough for his right leg.

Dahlia started laughing around the third time Jack tried to pull his leg from its concrete prison.

Jack turned the hot water knob a more severe angle and went back to washing his body and idly musing in the shower. He wasn't so disappointed in his failure; he was in fact very interested in the results. The way the concrete seemed to disappear instantly was astounding. He didn't know what his artificial leg to vaporize solid concrete, but he knew that his approach for magically restoring his lost limb was incorrect.

Jack sighed. He knew from its advent that the idea was a long shot. Even if he created the solid mass from magical energy successfully, actually attaching it to his nervous system to that he could move it like a real limb was certainly beyond him. He hadn't really thought that far ahead. His line of thinking had been that if he ever got that far into his little experiment, the experience and knowledge he would have gained from it would at least be very useful. Jack liked to think that at least that part had come true.

Jack turned off the water and grasped the handrails on the walls in order to pull himself free of the shower. His bathtub was a handicap model, with a non-slip stool installed inside so that Jack wouldn't have to try to stand on one leg while washing. Jack hopped over to the wall and grabbed a towel and began drying off.

His eyes caught a sight of himself in the bathroom mirror and he scowled. Mottled and twisted flesh covered his chest and back. He ran his fingers over the patches of warped skin and felt a wave of disgust rising in him. He left the bathroom in a hurry.

When Jack arrived back in his bedroom, he was stark naked. If this bothered Dahlia, she didn't show it. Dahlia was bent over, examining his bookcase. She'd made a habit to help herself to his personal book collection. Jack had never objected to this. He figured it was fair, since he was taking all kinds of knowledge from her himself, he could spare a few volumes worth of his own. He briefly admired the naked form of well-rounded backside before moving past her to his dresser.

Dahlia stood up, evidently finding a book that interested her, and flung herself across Jack's bed to read on her stomach. Dahlia's eyes briefly scanned Jack's presence before silently returning to the book. Jack figured that her own oblivion to her own nakedness should make her unaware of his own. He rummaged through his dresser and pulled out some boxers. Dahlia's eyes looked up as she heard the noise of the dresser drawer, and she blushed once she realized why Jack was putting on clothes.

"Master," Dahlia said in acknowledgement of his presence, not looking up from the book she was reading on his bed.

Jack sat down and grabbed his notebook, writing down some of the thoughts that had come to him while in the shower. He would probably bring his notebook in the shower with him if he didn't have to worry about ruining the pages.

"So, another failure, huh?" Dahlia said, looking up from her captive book.

"I don't think it was, no."

"You didn't recreate your lost leg. This event is only further evidence of your misunderstandings on the mechanics of magic."

Jack felt the remark bite him a little too sharply, and swiveled his chair around to retort, "A great scientist once said that there's no such thing as a failed experiment; the results will always reveal some truth about our universe."

Dahlia closed the book and looked up at Jack, "I do not understand your 'science.''

"I know you don't."

Her face screwed itself into a scowl, "I cannot stand this about you, why must everything be a mystery?"

Jack said nothing. Dahlia continued, "You expect answers but provide none yourself. But I think the strangest thing about you is you seem to want to learn the laws of magic so you know which lines to cross. I find you highly unpalatable, Master."

Jack felt a pang of emotion at Dahlia's outburst. Her face was flushed with anger and her breath came in hot little gasps. Jack was alone with his thoughts for a few seconds.

"I am I really that disappointing to you, as a pupil?"

When Dahlia said nothing in response, Jack decided to continue, softening his voice, "I'm sorry, okay? I don't get people very well. I'm not used to explaining myself to people. I guess I've been a little self-absorbed in my own little world for too long."

Dahlia averted her eyes in the wake of her deflated anger. "I must apologize as well, Master. I will admit that recent discoveries have made me... emotionally unreliable."

Jack perked up at this, "What recent discoveries?"

Dahlia closed her eyes and swallowed, "I can't feel them."

Jack waited a moment to give her time to continue. When she did not, he provoked her once more, "Who?"

"The other human Grimoires. I cannot feel their presence any longer."

"Wait," Jack suddenly burst out, "The other human Grimoires? Why the distinction? Do you mean there are other races of Grimoire?"