Aether Engineering

Chapter 66

Maston Academy

The Town of Maston in the Candis East District

After eating a quick lunch, Myles and Jane walked straight to Professor Hazel’s class. Technically speaking, they were early, but students always arrived well before the start of the official class time and often left late. Nobody so much as gave them an odd look.

When they reached their station, Myles quickly unrolled their partially completed designs. Jane placed a few spare lumps of basium onto the corners to keep the parchment flush with the table. They forced themselves to study the plans with fresh eyes. It was difficult. Now that it felt they were onto something, Myles could barely contain his enthusiasm. He knew though, it was that very excitement that would make them miss an obvious mistake.

Eventually, Myles was satisfied with the review. They had only really sketched out the handle in any detail. It was, after all, where everything stemmed from. The only part of the surrounding ring they had finalized was how it connected with the handle.

Depressions in the inside of the ring allowed for the handle to latch on at specific points. When the handle wasn’t locked into place, it would be held within a metal track that wound its way along the inside of the construct.

Jane made eight evenly distributed marks along the edge of the track. “If we’re going for four functions like you suggested, we’ll need to put the depressions here.” Jane hesitated for another second before adding another set of eight marks. “I like the idea of adding resting positions between each function too.”

“That should be feasible.” Myles nodded, already thinking about how to implement the various functions. They were starting with just two—they had to limit themselves somewhere if they wanted any hope of having the construct ready by their next exam.

The first was a simple application of pure mana that would mimic commutation. It would keep the construct protected. Even metal wouldn’t last long against the type of onslaught an arcaner, or a decently strong monster for that matter, could unleash. In a pinch, they could even use the construct as a shield of sorts.

Unfortunately, simple was a very relative term in aether engineering. They still needed to consider the physical dimensions of the construct, and ensure every rune was placed in the right spot with the precise subrunes to match. They planned on placing the runes to accomplish that objective on the blades themselves.

Jane’s suggestion from the previous night had already been lightly sketched into the designs. Half of each spike would be made of channium while the other would be made of the far heavier densite to ensure the weapon could achieve proper rotation when thrown.

Commutation functions were well-charted territory. The typical design focused primarily on three runes. The first was a commutation rune. Myles pulled the aether index open, flicking through to the right page.

The commutation rune would be useless by itself. It would evoke mana just fine, but that mana would be lost in an instant. Instead, conventional wisdom was to use an anchor rune to reabsorb unused mana back into the construct where it could be funneled back to the commutation rune for reuse, effectively mimicking an arcaner’s commutation.

Making the two runes work together was easier said than done. By itself, the commutation rune released all its mana at once. That wasn’t good enough here. They needed to maintain a constant flow of mana around the construct to keep it protected at all times.

The solution to the problem presented itself after a thorough perusal of the aether index.

With that in mind, the pair turned to deciding on the dimensions of the outer disk. In theory, the smaller they made the disk, the shorter the time it would take for the mana to return to the commutation rune, and therefore the more mana they could have actively protecting the construct at any given time. They were fairly constrained by the length of the handle which could extend to a length of 39 cm and retract to a length of 24 cm.

It was Myles’ suggestion that was eventually adopted. He had advocated for the depressions the handle would lock into to be 4 cm deep. They opted to coat the sides of that 4 cm section in the same grease as the wooden portion of the handle and the metal track to simplify things. Accounting for the gaps in the metal the depressions represented would have made calculating the movement of the mana through the disk much more difficult and prone to error.

In total, the width of the disk would be 14 cm of which only 10 cm would be left uncoated and capable of holding mana. That gave the central point of the usable portion of the disk a circumference of 141.4 cm.

Jane looked over the budding blueprints with a look of satisfaction that Myles couldn’t help but share. He dragged them towards himself, comparing them to the pages of the aether index he had open. “We’ll need channel runes to move the mana from the handle into the disk itself.”

Jane nodded, picking up a quill and carefully drawing them into place. On the side where they planned to place the commutation rune, Jane sketched a channel rune whose box of influence would run all the way across the disk from where the handle locked into position to the leading edge of the spike. The other side just had a channel rune to pull the mana into the disk. Jane also began work on carefully sketching the series of channel runes that would send mana around counterclockwise.

Myles noted with satisfaction that the only rune Jane added a type-specification to was the one that would lead to the commutation rune. It was a clever little detail that ensured any pure mana that reached that point in the disk would be pulled out and moved into the siphoned containment rune. As a general rule, the more specific a rune, the more priority it would have.

While Jane took on the labor-intensive channel runes, Myles grabbed a new piece of parchment and started to work on the plans for the siphoned containment rune. Of the whole set, it would be the easiest to make a mistake on. The rate at which it released mana had to be set to allow just enough time for the mana to return before the rune was left empty.

Set the rate too high, and there would be gaps in the flow of mana, leaving the construct defenseless for the duration. Set the rate too low, and less mana would be moving around the construct at a given time, weakening the defense.

It was here that the choice to use channium to build the disk showed fruit. Pure mana could speed around half the construct in about 0.7 seconds. Even taking into account that they planned to place the anchor rune at the furthest spike, by guiding the mana through the channium half, it would only take somewhere around 0.76 seconds in all.

Myles chose to be cautious and round that number up to 0.8 seconds. As far as he was concerned, he would rather the construct have slightly less protection than risk it being hit when it had none at all. In terms of the rune, that meant that they could allow it to siphon off 1.25 times its contents every second and still expect the mana to return in time for reuse.

The rune itself would be engraved on top of the spike which they planned to forge 8 cm wide with an 8 cm length. The center of the rune’s origin would be centered and about 1.5 cm away from the disk. Myles carefully drew the rune, frequently referencing the examples in the aether index—then he stopped, and a silly grin broke out on his face.

“Jane, we don’t need to pass the commuted mana back through the disk at all.”

She looked up with interest, leaving her work for the moment. “What do you mean?”

“We can just commute it right back.”

Jane frowned. “Would that even work? Wouldn’t the two streams of commuted mana run into each other or something?”

Myles thought about it for another second and realized he had no idea what would happen if two separately evoked sources of pure mana collided. “Would they cancel each other out, or combine, or…”

Jane gave a wry grin. “Want to test it?”

Myles was already grabbing one of the spare chunks of basium and heading for the aether forge. Half an hour of work later, and a newly forged construct sat on their desk with matching sets of commutation runes and anchor runes on either end of a thin metal bar.

Jane raised her eyebrow at Myles from across the table, and with a small nod, they both pushed mana into their side of the construct. The result was…interesting. The mana didn’t cancel itself out, but it didn’t combine in some huge blob in the middle either. Instead, the two streams of mana crossed through each other, creating what looked to the eye like little rapids all along the rod.

Myles and Jane stared at each other in curiosity before Myles slowly reached out to grab the construct, making sure to commute an extra dose of mana around his hand. The moment he grasped the rod, it slipped through his fingers. He tried to pick it up again and got the same result. The reaction didn’t seem to be doing anything harmful to his commuted armor, so Myles dropped the armor around his hand for a moment. This time, the rod flipped out of his hand. Jane tried to catch it, but it found its way out of her grasp as well. When it landed on the floor, it didn’t stay still, instead, it slid and slid and slid. It only stopped when the friction wore through all its mana. By then, it was already halfway down the hall.

Looking at the rod—which had landed under another group’s station to some surprised murmurings—Jane looked back to their blueprint. “Ok. So, let’s not do that then…I’ll finish the blueprints if you want to..uh.. ” Jane trailed off, turning abruptly away with a mouselike look as a student held the rod construct up high, turning his head to try to find a culprit.

Myles stepped forward, a guilty look on his face. Inwardly though, he was very glad they had run that test. He had a horrible image of being ambushed by monsters, and activating a finished shuriken construct only to have it slip from his hands and cut off a toe or something. Still though, Myles grinned to himself, this might be just what he needed to get his friends out of the mood that had fallen over them.

…

A good ten minutes later, Myles returned from one of the worst scoldings of his life. Jane was hard at work on the blueprints. Looking over her shoulder, Myles saw the siphoned containment rune had already been penciled in.

The commutation rune was also nearly finished. Jane scratched a line from the base of the spike to the center of the rune, specifying the distance as 4 cm. Myles began to look over the work as well, making sure the rune’s box of influence overlapped that of the siphoned containment rune. The commutation rune needed to evoke the mana as soon as it was released. The rune’s anchor point would be set at the very point of the furthest spike to ensure that the entire construct would be covered in pure mana upon activation.

That effectively finished off the first function. They hadn’t drawn all the channel runes into the blueprints, but that was the easy part anyway.

“So, now we get to create the function to evoke a composite of sound and ice mana.” Myles tapped his fingers against the desk, leaning in closer, his energy climbing back up again.

Jane tapped their desk thoughtfully, pulling the aether index open to its entry on the composition rune.

It was going to make things challenging to be sure. The rune itself was just that: a rune. They wouldn’t have much more trouble etching it into the metal than any other rune. The complications came with the need to evoke the unstable mixture right away and in getting the ratio just right.

The solution for the first problem was thankfully straightforward. The composition rune had a higher degree of influence than the evocation rune, so if they overlapped the two runes’ boxes of influence, the evocation rune would only take into effect after the mana was converted. That would also ensure there was no gap between composition and evocation that could cause mana rust or other problems. The second problem was where the nightmare lay.

Myles put a hand through his hair, twisting to try to shake loose something in his head that would give him an easy answer. He found nothing. “In theory we can match how fast the sound and ice mana get to the composition rune by creating channel runes through different types of metals…”

Jane nodded, looking wide-eyed at the several pieces of parchment in front of them that were attempts at doing just that. “Its just not that simple though. We could do it if we just needed to match how fast the first bits of mana arrive, but that’s not good enough.”

Myles pointed to the containment rune on the end of the handle. “This is the problem. The mana stores itself evenly throughout the containment rune. The further from the disk it is, the longer it takes to move into the disk.”

Jane agreed silently, and the pair stared at their designs. They had already penciled in conversion runes to change the pure mana that sat in the handle into sound and ice with the 2 cm section closest to the densite side of the spike being converted into ice and the remaining 1.5 cm being converted to sound mana.

The ice mana was moved directly across the disk and into the densite of the spike via channel runes. The sound mana on the other hand was moved into the disk itself and allowed to flow through the universal channel there to the other side of the shuriken where it would be moved into the spike’s channium and then finally arrive on the other side of the construct just as the ice mana was flowing into the densite. The problem was the numbers just didn’t match.

Looking at the ice mana first, it was a subtype of earth mana and had mana flow values to match. The mana stored right next to the disk would only have to move through 10 cm of channium which took about 0.15 seconds. However, the ice mana stored at the furthest place from the disk had to move through 7.5 cm of basium. With basium’s poor earth mana flow ratio of 0.3, that would take a whole additional second. Creating a massive gap between when the first mana arrived and when the last mana did.

The sound mana was even more complex with it needing to travel through a series of connecting channel runes. Their best attempt to make everything work had resulted in the fastest sound mana arriving at 0.81 seconds and the slowest at 1.13 seconds.

In order for the composite rune to not cause severe mana rust—a substance that would reduce construct performance and in extreme cases cause unintended behavior such as explosions—it needed the correct balance of ice and sound mana at all times. That simply was not possible…

Myles grabbed Jane’s arm in excitement as he caught sight of something from the corner of his eye. The same siphoned containment rune that they had used for the commutation function had an optional subrune that could cause a delay from when mana arrived to when it started to be released.

Jane grinned and gave a breath of relief when she reread the description. “If we make siphoned containment runes for both mana types and set the same release rate for both, the ratio will match at all times. We just have to set the delays correctly.”

With some light math which after having worked for most of the day on the construct felt slightly torturous, Myles and Jane were able to figure out that the delays were 1 second for ice mana and .34 seconds for sound mana. In addition, because the siphoned containment rune was actually higher in influence priority than even the composition rune, they were able to wrap the composition rune and evocation rune’s boxes of influence around the siphoned containment runes.

That just left drawing the two siphoned containment runes, the composition rune, and the evocation rune into the blueprints. They quickly decided to place them all together on the spike in a pyramid arrangement. The sound containment rune’s origin would be 1 cm from the base of the spike and 1 cm counterclockwise from the middle of the spike. The ice containment rune would be 2 cm counterclockwise from that. The composition and evocation runes were sketched in equidistant between the two containment runes being 2.5 cm and 4 cm from the base of the spike respectively.