Ryn of Avonside

I popped back out of the Nameless Garden thirty whole minutes later, and to my surprise, Dr. Wilcott was still there. She looked cold and worried, but otherwise unharmed.

“I'm so sorry that took me so long,” I said, putting my hands together beseechingly. “Turns out there's a cooldown on these things. Plus, we have a storm coming, over in the Nameless Garden, so it's sort of all hands on deck, over there.”

“Ah, that's an issue,” said the Professor, running a hand through her silver hair. “What do we do?”

I had to think for a second, because the logistics of transferring between the Ring and the Garden meant that the buns would probably arrive back in the university grounds.

“Okay. So I asked one of the other mages to make a fruit for us instead. They and their friend will be arriving back in Avonside, because… well, there's a lot of arcane rules about conservation of position,” I explained. “Sorry for jerking you around, but we'll need to go back in to meet them, because I'm not sure that it's safe to let them run around on their own out in the town. I know Ryn has banned them from adventuring around on the Ring without supervision.”

“You mean the little bunnies?” She asked as we began to walk back into Avonside.

I giggled and shrugged. “Depends, were the bunnies bipedal or quadrupedal?”

“Uh,” she stalled, having to think. “Well, when they carry things, they're on two legs, but when they're not, they're on all fours.”

“Then no, you haven't seen them. Come on, let's hurry. We really don't want to leave them unsupervised.”

We got to the classroom where most of us mages transferred in and out of the Ring, right as Cee and Smoke popped into existence inside. Neither had changed out of their adorable little outfits, and Smoke carried a mage-fruit seed.

“Perfect,” I said, smiling at both of them. “Oh, um, introductions. Right. The pink one is called Cee, the dark one is Smoke. Cee uses she/her, Smoke uses they/them. Cee and Smoke, this is Dr. Wilcott, she's a councillor in Avonside and one of our biggest allies here.”

Each party stood staring at the other in silence. The bunny faces were hard to read, but Dr. Wilcott’s expression was one of confused amazement.

I coughed awkwardly. “Uh. This is what happens when one of Ryn's buns eats a mage-fruit.”

“My word, okay,” said Dr. Wilcott, finally. Then she quickly smiled at the two buns. “Nice to meet you both. I'm told you're going to be delivering the fruit that will turn me into a magic wielder?”

“Me,” Smoke said in their characteristic brusque tone. “My grove was not tired.”

Dr. Wilcott twitched and stared with an expression that was somehow even more bug-eyed than an elderly pug. “They talk!”@@novelbin@@

Smoke thumped a foot. “Of course talk. We think. We smart.”

“Our heads aren’t very good with language, but the magic helps,” Cee explained, giving Wilcott a bunny smile — which was mostly done with the eyes. “I'm learning fast, though. Smoke just likes to be… um, contrarian.”

“Hey, using rare words! Rude,” Smoke protested, thumping again.

Cee rolled her eyes. “If you learned more instead of hitting metal with hammers, you might know the words better.”

Oh boy. A tiny fluffy bunny mage argument. Dr. Wilcott looked very confused by everything that was happening.

“Come on, you two,” I sighed, gesturing for the door. “Let's go find some dirt to put this seed in.”

With the buns still quietly bickering behind us, we left and made tracks towards the quad, a large open square of grass in front of the old admin building. The very first building on the university, known as Avonside House, had been closed for extended maintenance when the schwooping happened. Now, it was used for storage.

“Will this do?” I asked, looking to Dr. Wilcott.

Looking uncertain, she shrugged. “I don't know the first thing about magic, so you tell me?”

“Well, we're going to grow a fruit here, and then you're going to be really interested in it, and when you go to eat it, it'll suck you inside and put you to sleep for a couple of weeks, maybe more,” I said. “If you want to get yoinked in front of everyone, this will do, otherwise we'll have to find somewhere in the forest for privacy.”

“Here will do,” she said. Her body language was speaking volumes right now. She was extremely nervous.

Looking to Smoke, I gestured to the grass and nodded. Without a word, they hopped up the small curb and into the grass, then used their long feet and heavy claws to dig a small hole.

Into that hole went the seed, chased by a healthy dollop of growth magic from the bun. I noticed in passing that Smoke was very adept with moulding the magic. Rather than simply hucking a glob at the seed, they actually applied it to exactly the right places as needed to speed up and nurture the current growth phase. Even Esra didn't have that kind of control.

I guess what the buns lacked in raw power, they made up for with other innate abilities.

Soon, we had a long green stalk that drooped down due to the weight of a heavy, glowing fruit. It sagged and bounced as a breeze caught it — the fruit must've weighed more than the rest of the plant combined.

Dr. Wilcott was immediately entranced, and began to take steps towards it. I remembered the way the fruit drew me in when I became a mage, and how mesmerising it was. The crazy part was that it didn't feel invasive or malicious, it felt like someone was giving you amazing head scratches or something.

So, I was completely floored when Dr. Wilcott looked away from the fruit and at me. Her voice was dreamy and calm, but there was an element of soft, iron control to it — like velvet wrapped manacles. “May I?”

“Absolutely,” I agreed, almost hurriedly gesturing to the fruit. God bloody damn, woman. How strong was her will that she could resist it enough to ask freakin’ permission? Wild!

Smiling, Dr. Wilcott turned and reached out to caress the fruit. In an instant, her form warped like the most crazy lens of glass was focusing on her, and she was sucked inside the mage-fruit. A moment later, there was a cute little pop and the fruit, too, vanished.

“Too old to be daughter,” Smoke commented.

I laughed. “I think we're doing away with that little cultural tradition, Smoke, don't worry.”

When Smoke and Cee had been safely escorted back into the Garden, I left to do my final errand of this incredibly busy day. The xenology department had asked for Ryn, but she was miles away now, so it would have to be me who went over.

When I arrived at the Vurst building, I ducked inside and took the stairs up to their floor. We might have good power generation now, with the dam and the wind turbines, but those first weeks had instilled a healthy distrust of elevators into the entire population. Ugh, that reminded me that I needed to go over to the Fabrication Department and talk to them about magical methods of electricity generation.

In Ryn's tree, we had some rudimentary steam turbines powered by heat-generating plants, but the next step was to bring that concept to the real engineers. Hopefully they could come up with better ideas.

I opened the xenology department door and found a storm of nerds, my people. Most were in front of a multi-whiteboard wall, scribbling things, applying magnets to paper, or running strings between different notes. It was the mother of all conspiracy boards, and it looked like the whole department was deeply excited by it.

“Uh, hello?” I called, bracing for the Archimedes mirror of focused attention.

Several stopped to look, followed by more as their conversation — or debate — partners got distracted. I fought like a drowning woman to keep from cringing away from it all. Finally, an older man in a tweed suit bustled up to me with a wide, manic grin.

“Hello, hello! Are you Catherine? You look like the description, can I assume? I'll assume I'm correct. Yes. You've come in Ryn's place, I imagine? We heard she was off on a mission, but we figured we'd ask anyway — no idea what your magic could do, so who knows? She might've shown up anyway. Not that your presence isn't just as good, of course, but she was the one who delivered the artifacts to us, so…”

The verbal wall of words caused me to squeak and take a step back, but he only seemed to realise what he was doing after his babbling was almost complete.

“I'm… Catherine, yeah,” I said, nodding like I'd just been concussed. It really felt like it, holy moly!

“Excellent, excellent,” he said, visibly restraining himself. “Okay. Well, we managed to build an interface that allows us to connect their computers to our systems. Our efforts are very much only at a firmware level, currently — our understanding of their actual language is making it difficult to progress beyond that. However, we have still made many exciting discoveries.”

Nodding along, I began to ramp my brain up enough to follow along with his rapid speech. “Okay. That's expected, honestly. What are the highlights? Oh, and can I have a copy of the data?”

He nodded happily and gestured for me to follow him to a table. “Yes, yes. We've already taken the liberty of creating printed and digital versions of the data to give to you. The digital copy is on a dvd, unfortunately, so I hope you have a computer with a disk drive.”

My eyebrows rose, but I didn't comment on the medium, and took it from his hand. The physical copy came as a box full of letter-sized paper. I lifted that up with my magic, which caused the tweed-suit man to gasp and stare.

“Just my magic, don't worry. My arms aren't strong enough to hold that box for any length of time,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed, but also kinda like… like I was cool? Magic was definitely cool, so… yeah.

“Goodness, what amazing new rules our reality is operating by,” he said, then with a deep breath, he smiled once more. “As for the highlights, we can tell you a few things based on inferences we've made. First, this was not the only laboratory. It is, in fact, one of at least a thousand. Second, the Umare did not start working on magic until the last few years of their existence on this Ring. Which means, as a side note, that they created this world using purely mundane means.”

That was honestly jaw-dropping. They didn't use magic to make the Ring? The Umare must have been so, so much more technologically advanced than us.

As if he hadn't just dropped a bomb on me, he continued, “On a social level, we understand that while their family units were about the same as ours are, their extended communities were on-average, much more tightly knit. We think that due to artificial longevity created by their medical technology, children were rare and often cared for by many members of the community.”

“So their longevity treatments made them less fertile?” I asked. This was actually so interesting.

“We're unsure. It could've been a societal response to a long-lived population, or something more biological. Either way, they seemed to value life a considerable amount,” he said, gesturing to one whiteboard in particular.

There was a photo pinned to it by magnets, depicting a piece of art that showed an Umare kneeling to feed some deer-like prey animal, while beside them, with their back turned, another Umare ate a steak that had been cut from some sort of meat-slab connected to tubes and other equipment.

“An advertisement, if our best guess is correct,” the tweed-man said. “We didn't find any images implying the opposite — that their people ate animals, despite their physiology being that of a pure carnivore. Along with other evidence, we think they developed some sort of sapience-less lab-grown meat. The apparatus around the slab in the advertisement looks like it might pump blood through the slab, while some others look like they are meant to stimulate the muscle and mimic physical activity. We had theoretical ideas for something similar back on Earth.”

So, a bunch of carnivores still cared about life enough to make meat that couldn’t suffer on its way to the pot. Damn…

Wincing with chagrin, I looked down at my feet. “Now I feel like a bit of a savage for liking meat.”

“Oh, don’t let it bother you,” he said, waving my concerns away. “We haven’t reached their level of tech, so this alternative isn’t available to us. I won’t even attempt to engage in the philosophy and morality of the issue, either, but I will say that currently as a community, Avonside doesn’t have the nutritional or calorie  legroom to go without meat. That is even with the help of yourself and the other mages. Who knows, though. Perhaps we can find surviving examples of their technology and follow in their footsteps.”

“Right… okay,” I said, feeling a little better. “I’d like that, to be honest. Anything else, though? I mean, with regards to how the Umare did things — lived, all that stuff?”

“Nothing too major. Without an understanding of their language, we don’t have a hope of deciphering anything other than the image frames and how they approached mathematics,” he shrugged… but the look he gave me was sly. “That is, unless the rumours about magic wielders such as yourself are true?”

As I caught on to what he was implying, I giggled, feeling very important all of a sudden. “Yeah. It’s true… so I guess I’ll get to reading what you’ve sent me and get back to you?”

“That would be amazing,” he said, holding out his hand like we’d just made some sort of clandestine bargain. Guess I had one more job to add to the pile.