After a long night of making use of Myriad in his realm to work on his mind skills, he woke up and prepared breakfast for everyone. Over the last few weeks he’d picked up a few recipes from Fontesh, and so he was putting his efforts into making the frattles Delair enjoyed that he’d grown quite a taste for himself.
With food served and everyone satisfied, he was going to go off to work on the statue again to try and get most, if not all, of it finished that day when Sachel stopped him, pulling him to the side to make a request.
“Let me hire you,” She asked, much to Ben’s surprise.
“Maybe. Why, what do you need?”
“We’re still stuck on how to deal with the frost bats. Thera suggested that you might be able to make something to help us find them.”
“I’m touched that she has so much faith in me, but I’ve never made anything for tracking before, I wouldn’t know where to start,” Actually, how would I go about something like that? Do any affinitied magics have spells that might work? Wait, maybe I could do something with bind? No, either way I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s a bigger issue here. “Besides, I can’t help you, this is your quest. If I do too much you might not pass it.”
“That’s why I said I want to hire you. I spoke it over with Myriad, I would just be paying you for your work. It’s no different than hiring someone to make a weapon for me, so long as I’m the one to use it.”
“Hmm, well in that case I guess there’s no issue with it so I’ll at least try to see what I can come up with, but I’m not making any promises. We’ll discuss price if I manage anything, alright?”
“Sounds good, thanks.”
He waved her off and went back to work on the statue, his thoughts filled with how he would manage to make an enchantment that could help with tracking.
Let’s see, I feel like I'm onto something with bind. Since me and Thera can always know where the other is it’s obviously a tracking skill, just highly specialized to a specific person. Maybe there’s a way I could alter it to track a specific item? One tracker and one receiver, and just put the receiver on one of the bats?
He felt like the idea had potential and stopped his work after a few hours to test it out. The simplest thing he could think of was to make a simple compass of sorts, but instead of using magnetism, he’d be letting bind point the way.
To test it he got a bucket of water and a leftover piece of wood, carving it into a shallow semi-sphere to float on the water with an arrow carved into the flat side showing the direction of the enchantment before he applied it, trying to work out the structure he thought would work best.
Since it came from his copy of bind he believed it should point towards Thera, showing him whether or not the idea was viable, and he placed it in the water, hoping it would slowly drift to match the direction he felt her in, only for nothing to happen.
A failure, huh?
He’d patiently waited a few minutes, but had no success. It wasn’t too surprising. Some skills took a lot of time and effort to learn how to properly enchant with, not being anywhere as easy to draw out the effects like using magic or enchanting the effects of the sword wielder skill on a sword. If he was ever back in Anailia he would have to see if any research had been done there since it was a skill that came from their god, but for the time being he could just experiment.
And experiment he did, spending a few hours alternating between working on the statue and trying to make something with bind work, getting Thera near the end to try enchanting with her copy of the skill as well to see if using both made a difference before he had to admit he couldn’t do it, he’d have to explore a different option.
That put him back to magic. He had his rings, and while the physical magics were likely to be useless to the task, he thought there might be potential in the more spiritually oriented ones, specifically dark magic.
Hey Myriad, you around? He asked, waiting a few minutes to get a reply.
<Just finished up with another god, did I miss anything important?>
No, nothing crazy don’t worry. I was just hoping you might have an idea on how to make an enchantment I could use for mind control.
<...That’s odd. I know I was desperate when I got you to be my believer, but I was at least confident that I’d properly confirmed you weren’t evil, so why is it that more and more you seem to be trying to prove me wrong?>
Hey, I’m a sweetheart. Not an evil bone in my body.
<Says the boy who sleeps with a cursed ring to make himself stronger, wants to trap souls in items when his skill improves, and now wants to learn about mind control.>
Everything sounds bad when taken out of context, Mr. God that blew up his planet. I know using mind effects is forbidden on people, what I want to do is create something I could tie a mind effect to that could be placed on a frost bat to motivate them to return to their group.
<Oh fine, I might be able to help you out a bit, but it won’t be easy, especially on something like a non-sentient animal. Part of the reason Thera can’t use her charm to enslave animals and instead has to deal with the risk of drawing them in is because they aren’t capable of understanding her, which means to do what you want to do you’d either need to make them understand you or craft your enchantment to place a mental image in the creature’s brain that it could understand independent of the language barrier.>
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Hmm, Light magic deals in illusions and dark in hallucinations, but I’d need a better understanding of either to put them to use in an enchantment like that. Maybe I could do something with the first option then. Do you think I might be able to link world speak+ to a frost bat so that it could have enough knowledge of the language that it might obey orders when charmed?
<That just creates a whole different issue. It isn’t easy to link a mind effect to an item in a way that could make the skill interact with the target's brain. You might be able to use dark magic as the backbone of your enchantment, but it might end up more mana heavy than you could manage. Of course, you could always try to build in the understanding to power it as well, since the bats have magic they should be able to, but it’s an extra layer of complexity that would raise your tool’s mana cost even more. There is one option though, one other skill you have that happens to be ideal for linking to different minds if you get what I’m saying.>
Connect, got it. Considering you seemed so against me learning to do this should you really be so proud of making a skill that makes it easier?
<I’m against mind control. Using it to make items with mind skills attached to them is an excellent and versatile use of the skill, especially since you’re going to be focusing on leveling up your mind skills for a while anyway. I can only imagine any mage that doesn’t want to take the effort to learn something like parallel thought or complex mind would be happy to get an item that makes it easier for them to think multiple things at once.>
Okay, I see what you’re saying, it might do well in the shop if I learn how so I might as well. I guess I should be testing it with a different mind skill first anyway to know if I succeed, rather than start from trying to get world speak on a bat. Thanks Myriad.
With that done he went to find himself a test subject and found Skoe working on the same task he’d left him with when he stopped needing oil and tar, preparing firewood for the village. While everyone had a magic stove, that didn’t mean they could heat their entire homes with it when the temperature dropped, the mana cost would be far too high for something like that, meaning it came down to good old-fashioned fireplaces.
“Hey, you look like you may need a break from that!” He called out cheerfully as he approached the man, he looked at him with something almost akin to fear.
“Oh infinite hells, what do you need me to do now?”
What’s with that? I’m not treating him too badly.
<You’ve been making sure he’s worked every waking minute since Sachel got him to help you.>
Yeah, and he’s getting to sleep before me and waking up after me, he’s fine.
“Don’t be like that, I need to make an enchantment Sachel requested, I just need you to use it when I do to see if it works.”
He still seemed suspicious, but gave in since it was for his teammate. “Alright, do you have it on you?”
“Nope, I need to make a helmet first to apply it to so I want to fit it to your head properly. Take a seat and I’ll get started.”
As with the rest of his time in the village, the materials he could use were limited to basic wood or stone, and with plenty of logs around the choice of which to use was obvious.
He took a thinner log and got to work cutting it to the size he wanted, taking careful work to match it to the dimensions of Skoe’s head in a way that would be reasonably comfortable as well as secure.
Once that was done he started building an enchantment, not aimed at mind control since he wasn’t looking to break any laws, but instead to allow him to use the full effects of complex mind that Ben had access to.
By the time he had something he felt happy with, Skoe seemed antsy despite getting his desired rest. “Alright, all that’s left is for you to run some of your mana through it to see if it works.”
“And it will do what?”
“Make you think better, don’t worry.”
Completely unassured, the four-armed man did as he was asked, channeling a bit of his mana through the enchantment, only to double over and barf immediately.
“What the hell was that!” He demanded as soon as he could talk, a question Ben ignored in favour of examining what went wrong.
“Hmm, I don’t think I did anything that would cause vomiting. Maybe growing two new minds all at once was a bit too disorienting? Let’s take it from the top but this time I’ll connect to you as you activate the enchantment to see what’s going on.”
“Wait, hold on, give me a minute!” The man pleaded, but there were still plenty of things to do over the day and he couldn’t just wait around, so he placed a hand on the helmet to power it himself while connecting with the man. He wanted to have the tool ready by the night, no matter how much thorough testing that meant.