Aether Engineering

Chapter 63

Maston Academy

The Town of Maston in the Candis East District

Myles scratched out yet another half-complete design with his quill. The page was covered with similar drawings, each abandoned. A full week of having his best plans torn in half had made Myles very critical. The problem today, Myles knew, was the ideas were just rehashes of what had come before.

Jane peered over his shoulder, fingers playing across her chin. “Versatility.” Jane scanned the room, looking for some inspiration. “Versatility.”

The word sent a nasty shudder down Myles’ spine. It was Professor Hazel’s favorite criticism, and it was frustratingly vague. They had made designs focused on being more accessible, constructs that could be used by anybody in any situation. Those had been torn to shreds faster than anything else.

Myles absent-mindedly stroked the end of his feathered quill, dropping his commuted mana just around his fingertips. It was good practice for improving control, but it was really more of a bad habit, something he couldn’t resist whenever he had a quill in hand.

It didn’t make sense to Myles. Why did they need versatility. The only ones who needed to use the construct were them. Shouldn’t they design something to suit their needs, not something that anyone could use?

“You’re going to damage it again.” Jane warned with a concentrated frown, nodding towards two quills on the desk that had suffered damage to their feathers. They still worked, the feather was just decoration, useless for writing. Still though, the ones without the feather felt slightly off somehow, their balance changed.

Myles paused. That was it! The feathers of a quill were pruned just right for balance. They weren’t useless. They weren’t actively helping with writing, but they were still doing something. Myles had thought the professor had meant their construct needed to be usable by anyone, but that wasn’t what he meant by versatile. He was telling them they could make something that was more, something with feathers of its own. A construct that could do more than evoke composite mana. “Jane!”

Myles explained his line of thinking, and a smile pierced through, the concentrated frown vanishing before his eyes. She took the chair beside Myles, grabbing the paper he had been using earlier. She started to draw.

Myles looked over the sketch. She was scratching what looked like a disc into the paper. Next came a line that cut across the inside, a handle Myles realized.

Jane started talking, her back still bent over the design. “If we find a way to rotate the handle, we can adjust the flow of mana meaning…”

“…we can switch functions on the fly.” Myles finished the thought, his mind already moving rapidly. With a concept like this, they could put multiple functions into one weapon, each making the others more dangerous. “We’ll need to design the containment runes for the handle first. What metal should we even use for this?”

“Basium. If we were just storing mana, we could use densite, but I want it to move quickly too. Basium is a good balance.”

Myles nodded, accepting the choice. “If that’s the case, I want the handle to be bigger.” Myles leaned over, adjusting the size in Jane’s diagram. “Basium doesn’t have the highest mana capacity. We need to leave room for more mana.”

After about an hour of back and forth, they settled on a design for the handle. The real challenge was devising a way for it to move around inside the disk. It needed to be able to latch onto certain points, spots where mana could flow from the handle and into the disk. Depending on where it latched onto the disk, a different function would activate.

They were forced to scrap the idea of single metal handle. Instead, they split the handle into two rods, leaving a bit of space in the middle. A thin outer wood covering would surround, providing form, a brace to keep the handle from falling apart. When the handle was locked into place, the space in the middle, between the rods, could be used to hold a battery construct, providing a means to imbue mana into the rods. With a strong enough squeeze, springs would retract the rods inward, unlocking the handle from the disk, and ejecting the battery.

Building such a device would be a serious challenge. Myles could already see the hours it would take to bend each of the springs into the right shape. Jane seemed confident she could carve the wood covering, though Myles knew they would need for it to fit perfectly with the other pieces.

Even after they got all the pieces to work together, the wood and springs would need to be coated in a specially made grease to ensure mana wouldn’t leak into them from the rest of the construct. The grease was the same substance that was used in hope lamps. Myles had brewed it before back in his early days at the job shop. He was glad it was premade here. The ingredients weren’t…pleasant.

Jane leaned over, smiling at the page with satisfaction. “That should do it.” She pointed towards the sketch of one of the rods, accidentally bumping Myles in the process. When they first met, she would never have done that. She really had grown more comfortable recently. “We’re using a channel rune to send the mana from the battery construct into the two rods, right?”

It was a rhetorical question. Myles took the hint, pulling their copy of the aether index open to a diagram of the channel rune.

Professor Hazel required all their designs to be very specific. That meant they had to include written versions of each rune tailored to their construct along with the rest of the design.

The channel rune was made up of three major components. The base rune itself specified the behavior of mana. In this case, movement. A set of nine modifier sub-runes defined a box where the rune would have influence. Finally, a type-specification sub-rune indicated the mana type the rune would affect.

Since their channel rune was designed to move pure mana from a battery towards the outer end of their handle, the type-specification sub-rune would logically correspond to pure mana. The other modifiers were a little trickier. They each had to be calculated based on where the central-most point of the rune was inscribed into the metal. Channel runes also had a directional element to the area they affected. If you inscribed the rune facing the wrong direction, mana would flow the wrong way. Fortunately, Myles and Jane had already calculated the numbers.

Each rod was 12 centimeters long, 3.5 centimeters wide, and 3.5 centimeters tall. The channel rune was carved into the top of each rod 2 centimeters from the innermost point, pointed outwards. The channel rune on either rod needed its box of influence to overshoot the rod it sat on by 7.5 centimeters, or half the size of the space between the rods. This was what allowed the handle to pull mana from a battery. A rune’s box of influence could manipulate mana of any material that was directly touching what the rune was inscribed on, so, even though the battery was a separate piece from the rod, its mana could be moved by the rune. After the mana made its way out of the battery, it would need to travel an additional 4.5 cm through the rod. All of that resulted in a channel rune that Jane wrote carefully into the design.

As Jane put the finishing touches on the channel rune, Myles was already flipping through the aether index. He knew what came next, the containment rune. When the mana was pulled from the battery and into the rod, they would need a way to catch the mana, hold it at ready near the disk.

The containment rune would be inscribed into the top of the rod 2 centimeters away from the outer end. Essentially, the rune’s box of influence would start where the channel rune’s ended. It would then go on to cover the remainder of the rod. Even as Myles found the right page, Jane was already referencing it. Before long, another carefully drawn rune was added to their design.

With one final flick of her wrist, Jane finished the containment rune. “Now for the fun part.”

Myles grinned eagerly. “We already know we’ll be evoking a composite of sound and ice mana as a stunner of sorts. That gives us three more functions to decide.”

“Three more? How do you figure that?”

Myles snatched the quill from Jane’s grasp with a flourish that was…completely necessary. With a few quick lines, Myles drew eight symmetric prongs around the outside of the disk. Nothing said aether engineering like a classic gear. Gears were present in all of the greatest designs. All of those days spent looking through the small handful of articles about new aether constructs, Myles had been marveling, imagining designing his own constructs.; gears were truly…

“Oh, I get it. A shuriken! That works perfectly.”

Against his will, something had snapped in Myles’ mind. He could no longer see the construct as a gear. Myles turned a pair of dead eyes towards Jane. Never mind that shuriken’s classically had four blades not eight, never mind that this construct would be far bigger than any shuriken, never mind other reasonable logic. The construct was a weapon. It wasn’t a gear. It was a shuriken.

“Uh…” Jane stared at Myles, her grey eyes failing to comprehend the vision she had just shattered, “…are you alright?”

Myles shook his head, firmly reminding himself that what they called the construct wasn’t important right now. He needed to focus on what it could do. “We can consolidate each function to the spikes.”

Jane tapped Myles’ hand, signaling him to pass the quill back. She carefully traced a line along the disk from the bottommost spike to the topmost. “The mana will come out both ends of the handle. We could just replicate the function on both sides to move mana around the disk, but…”

“What is it?” Myles asked. He had been planning on doing exactly that. It was the easiest solution.

“I’m concerned that the construct wouldn’t be properly balance if we did things that way.” The corners of Jane’s mouth gave a brief twitch. “We used to have an axe-throwing competition in my village.”

Myles kept silent. Jane rarely talked about her life before the academy. He had no idea where she was going with this, but he trusted she had a point.

Jane smiled fondly. “I was never allowed to participate—my family wasn’t trusted…”

“The yellow bands?” Myles interrupted.

Jane nodded. “My parents both had red bands. It scared everyone off. Nobody liked to come near my father’s shop, and we were kept at arms distance.” Jane shook her head. “That’s not the point. One year, a passing shikari saw me watching. He told me all about the technique needed.” Jane paused for a moment, shaking her head again. “Anyways, when you throw an axe, it rotates because of the way its head is weighted.”

Myles nodded, starting to get the picture. If they attempted to replicate the same function on opposite spikes, it would work, but the resulting construct wouldn’t be very easy to wield. “What if we make the disk one giant channel? We could make half of each spike out of densite and the other half out of channium. Densite’s heavier than channium, so, that should give us an effect like the head of an axe, right?”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Jane made a note on the diagram. “We’ll need to use a series of interlocking channel runes to make that happen though.”

Myles gave a brief nod, his attention already elsewhere. A moment later, Myles had found what he was looking for. He laid the aether index out once again, patting its page with his hand.

Jane gave the page some consideration. “Yeah. Using channium for the disk would make sense. It will move mana around quickly, but will it hold up from a physical standpoint? I’ve never worked with anything besides basium before, but I’ve heard channium is a bit weaker.”

Myles waved away the concern. “It might not be able to stand up to someone attacking it, but, it shouldn’t have any problem otherwise.”

Jane shook her head. “That’s still a concern though, right? I could see a monster swatting it out of the air.”

Myles winced. There was no way channium, or even basium for that matter would be able to take an attack from something as powerful as a stormbird. Not to mention whatever else might be out there. “Why don’t we use one of the functions as a sort of commuted armor for the construct?”

Jane nodded. “Think we can make it work similar to the shields we made for the cinderwolves?”

They kept talking for some time about what the other functions should be, but they came to the conclusion that they simply lacked the time and resources to do anything more than the first two functions before the end of the month.

Right as they were about to start on the design for the stunner function, Myles heard a pointed cough come from behind him. Myles turned to find Professor Hazel already peering intently over his shoulder. “I always love to see dedication from my pupils, but I think working any longer will only harm your productivity tomorrow.”

Myles looked around the hall, suddenly realizing that Jane and he were the only ones left. He hadn’t even noticed how late it had gotten.

Myles started to get up to leave, but Professor Hazel stopped him with a slight nudge. Although it felt like little more than a nudge, Myles realized he had been commuting armor. Professor Hazel must have used considerable force, otherwise Myles wouldn’t have felt a thing. It just felt slight because the professor had enough control to know exactly how much force to use.

“Your design today is much more interesting, though I do have one question for you.” Professor Hazel held up a hand. “Projectiles have a flaw in that they’re difficult to retrieve in combat. How are you planning on overcoming that?”

They hadn’t discussed that, but an answer came unbidden to Myles’ lips as if on instinct. “A rope.”

Even as he said it, Jane had shouted out a different answer. “We’ll guide it with a loop of pure mana.”

Professor Hazel gave himself a slight grin. “Your platoon is in the process of each choosing a new mana type to delve, correct?”

Myles nodded, feeling a little confused.

“Come; walk with me.” Professor Hazel gestured towards the door. “I would like to discuss your choices. I may have some insight.”