by Andrew Rowe
“Sheridan? Yeah, they were great. And between their two attunements, they’re an expert on bones, so… I’ll introduce you to them when we get back.”
“Thanks.”
After checking out of the hotel near the spire, we headed back to our original hotel with Cecily to get showers and change our clothes. Then, in spite of my own objections, all of us went to Farren Labs. It was the last day of our guest visit, but we weren’t going for more instructions.
We made our way straight to Farren’s office for some answers.
***
Sera pushed her way into Farren’s room in a cold fury. “You nearly got our friend killed.”
Farren looked back at her with a perplexed expression. “Did I?”
“You told her to go to the spire!”
Farren blinked, then looked to Cecily. “Oh. You’re back. Is it that time, now? Good, good. You’re useful now.”
“Useful?” Sera balled her hands. “She didn’t get a new attunement, and she’s down half a hand!”
Cecily winced away from the argument, saying nothing.
Farren stared at Sera without any obvious emotional response. “I never said she’d get a new attunement.”
“You said she’d be fine! Your exact words, Farren.”
Farren shrugged. “She will be.”
“Are you kidding?” Sera fumed. “Does that look fine to you?”
Cecily winced. “Sera, it’s…it’s okay…”
Sera turned to Cecily. “It’s not okay. She told you to go into the spire. She told us you’d be fine. And, with her behavior, she implied she knew the results in advance. Without that, you might not have taken the risk.”
“That’s correct.” Farren interjected. “It took a variety of factors to encourage Miss Lambert to visit the spire.”
“And you’re just…admitting you manipulated her?” I gave Farren an appraising look. I wasn’t Sera’s equal at judging tone and body language, but Farren still seemed…off. Distracted. Maybe a little confused by Sera’s heightened emotional state. I didn’t know how much of that as an image she was deliberately cultivating, but I was convinced there was more going on than a simple lack of empathy.
“Manipulated. Perhaps that’s true.” She sounded wistful. “Not the term I would prefer, but accurate enough. I guided her toward a specific result that would be desirable to both parties.”
“Both?” Sera snapped. “How is this good for anyone?”
“Oh. You haven’t noticed the change.” Farren blinked. “She didn’t earn an attunement, but her attunement did get better.”
Sera narrowed her eyes. “Better how? It’s not like it ascended. We checked, on the off-chance that she’d managed it somehow. She’s still a Carnelian-level Enchanter.”
“Ah, yes.” Farren’s head bobbed. “But she’s almost something else. Corin can confirm.”
“I haven’t seen her mark.”
“Not yet. You will. Go ahead.” Farren waved a hand.
“This is—” Sera started, still fuming.
Cecily shook her head at Sera. “It’s fine. Let’s…see this through.” She pulled up the leg of her pants, displaying an Enchanter mark near her right ankle. “See anything different, Corin?”
“Not at a glance, but…I think I know what Farren means.” I shot Farren a look, but she just gazed absently toward us without any hint of what she was thinking. I looked back to Cecily. “May I touch your attunement mark?”
“I…okay.” Cecily looked nervous, but she waved toward the mark. “I’ve been meaning to learn that new diagnostics spell you mentioned, anyway.”
“I’ll be glad to teach it to you. Let’s see.” I reached out and put a hand on the mark. “Analyze Attunement Composition.”
I had, of course, already tested this spell on my own Enchanter attunement several times, so I knew what a Carnelian-level Enchanter attunement generally looked like.
Cecily’s sub-glyphs were virtually identical at a first glance. I wished I’d learned a spell for directly comparing the sub-glyphs in two attunements, and I made a mental note to do that later.
Instead, I cast Accelerated Computation and began to search manually. I couldn’t maintain Accelerated Computation for long, but it radically improved my speed at parsing the sub-glyphs while I had it on. I tried to narrate out loud what I was seeing. “Let’s see…no entire new functions. Nothing like a new mana type. No attunement functions activated out of sequence…”
Sera whipped her head to Farren. “You could just tell us what he should be looking for.”
“I could.” Farren simply confirmed, without adding anything else.
“Ugh.” Sera folded her arms and waited.
That’s all the obvious stuff…what else could be significant enough to be worth looking for? There aren’t a lot of other…
Oh.
I shifted my mind to search another section of sub-glyphs. An obscure section, one that I hadn’t had a chance to look at in a lot of detail yet, but one with the potential for considerable significance. And that’s where I found it.
I pulled my hand away from Cecily’s leg, straightening up. “You have a pending specialization in mental mana. It hasn’t visually changed your mark yet because it’s still processing, which takes about a day.”
“A specialization?” Sera folded her arms. “That’s it? That doesn’t require a Judgment! Anyone can get that, it just requires using a strong preference for one mana type!”
“Yes, yes.” Farren confirmed. “But she wasn’t useful to me without one, and she wouldn’t have specialized quickly without the trip. Congratulations, Cecily! You’re useful now.”
Cecily raised her eyes to Farren’s. “You put me through that just to get me to use more mental mana?”
“Oh, no. The extra mental mana itself is largely useless. What makes you useful is that each specialization enables certain new attunement functions — and I need more people with the diagnostic abilities of a mental-specialized Enchanter. You can start your tour today!”
“I…” Cecily trembled. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“Why not?” Farren blinked. “I just gave you permission.”
Sera glared at Farren. “She’s recovering from a hospital visit. And, you know, presumably near-death. Because you wanted her to have a new attunement function, which she probably could have gotten in a few months without the risk of death if she had wanted to.”
Farren blinked at Sera. “But then she wouldn’t be here, would she? So it’s irrelevant.”
“I…” An icy mist began to flow off Sera’s hands.
“I’ll take the tour.” Cecily said firmly, startling both Sera and me.
The mists around Sera’s hand vanished, and her expression shifted from anger to worry. “Cecily, you’re not in any condition to—”
“No.” Cecily gently shook her head. “I’ll see this through. I’ve already done the losing part of this process, I may as well get the gains.” After a moment, she added, “Thank you for being angry on my behalf, Sera.”
“Oh, I’m more than angry.” Sera shot a glance at Farren. “I’m furious. You can’t just toy with people like this.”
“I’m…not toying.” Farren’s expression sank. She looked perplexed, maybe a little sad. “I just wanted to make her useful. You wanted to be useful, Cecily.”
Cecily gave Farren a sharp look. “Yes. I still do. But in the future, try to give people more information about what you’re looking for.”
“I try. But it’s hard.” Farren closed her eyes. “I never know what you’ll find relevant.”
I gave Farren a hard look. “For starters, you can tell people directly if you’re giving them information based on divining the future.”
“But…isn’t that obvious?” Farren blinked at me.
I sighed, rubbing at my forehead. “Be specific. And if someone is going to get injured based on your plans, you owe it to them to tell them that.”
“No, no. That’s ba
d. That sometimes stops people.” She shook her head vehemently, looking momentarily…afraid, maybe? “Can’t do that. Can’t. Bad. Bad.”
I stared at her, evaluating. “You’re trying to keep the future on a set course?”
“Well, not one set course, no, no, but there are threads, paths…” She shook her head. “I need you to go now.”
“This isn’t over.” Sera hissed.
“No, no.” Farren laughed. “Nothing ever is.”
***
I had to half-drag Sera out of that office. We found Nakht standing outside. He let us leave without a word.
From there, we took Cecily to the front desk, and found an attendant already waiting for us. “Here’s your paperwork to sign.” The attendant shifted a stack of papers over. “And your guest badge.”
Cecily silently lifted a hand covered in bandages.
“Ah.” The attendant said. “The paperwork can, uh, wait. In light of your issue. Unless you can sign with your other hand?”
“I can, but it won’t look authentic.” Cecily replied. “And signatures usually need to match for this sort of thing, don’t they?”
“You’ve been authorized to tour the facility for the next week, until your time in Caelford is at an end. You’ll be temporarily assigned a guide. If your time as our guest goes well, you may be offered a position, either immediately or following the completion of your education process. I will need just one mandatory signature right now. The rest can wait until after your hand is, uh, recovered.”
Cecily nodded. We waited for her to sign her single necessary page, then the attendant went to get her guide.
“Are you two going to be staying for the day?” Cecily asked. “You still have one more day to train here, right?”
“No.” Sera hissed. “If I stayed here, I’d end up punching things like Keras. Sorry, Cecily.”
“It’s fine. Thanks for being worried about me and angry on my behalf.”
“How are you not angrier?”
“Oh.” Cecily reached up and tried to adjust her glasses with her bad hand, winced, recoiled, and then fixed her glasses with her other hand. “I’m furious. I’m just, well, also resolved? There’s nothing to be done. All I can do is make the best of the opportunity that is available. And,” she gave a soft smile, “maybe plot my revenge?”
Sera snickered softly. “Better. That’s my girl.” She ruffled Cecily’s hair. “Okay. I’m out of here. Corin, you coming?”
I shook my head. “I’ll stick it out here with Cecily for the day. I still have more…investigating to do. And maybe I can help Cecily a bit, since we’ll probably be in the same department.”
“I’d like that.” Cecily gave me a smile. “Thanks, Corin.”
“I’ll leave you to it. See you back at the hotel.” Sera gave us a wave, then headed out the door.
Cecily’s tour guide arrived a bit later. I split off from her for a while to try to find any more documents or items related to Warren Constantine, but without any significant results. I tested my tracking spell on more tools, but didn’t find anything useful.
I met up with Cecily for lunch, answered some questions for her, and got back to studying. I did a bit of research on attunement specializations, trying to figure out what Farren might have been looking for in specific, but I didn’t find anything particularly enlightening. One book, Attunement Analytics, had some basics.
Attunement specializations involve the strict use of one specific mana type that an attunement offers in preference to all others for a sustained period of time, typically about a year. This does not strictly prohibit the use of any type of magic of the other types; it simply requires maintaining a mana usage ratio that is abnormally extreme, generally estimated to be about ninety-percent. The specific mana percentage required to cause a specialization shift to occur varies from attunement to attunement.
There are ways to specialize more rapidly; these typically involve flooding your body with mana of a specific type that your attunement supports. This still is not an instantaneous process, however, and the dangers involve make this method of achieving specialization unpopular with most attunement types. This is sometimes called “forced” specialization, whereas the long-term process is called “organic” specialization.
The most common specializations tend to come from attunements that are already heavily skewed toward a specific common mana type. For example, Menders frequently find themselves with a Life specialization mark, and Guardians can frequently end up with an Enhancement specialization. Specializations for a secondary mana type for a particular attunement — such as a Guardian specialized in Life — are extremely rare, as they tend to involve deliberately neglecting the standard use of the attunement.
Specializations have two known effects.
The first is that the attunement begins to slant the mana it generates toward the preferred type, making it easier to use that sort of mana. In spite of the advantages this offers in terms of mana conversion efficiency, it is generally considered disadvantageous for attunements that value flexibility, such as Elementalists.
Second, some specific attunements have additional powers that are gained when the attunement is specialized in a specific way. The most common powers of this type are shroud variations. For example, a Lightning-specialized Elementalist generates a lightning-elemental shroud automatically, rather than requiring spells to shift the element of their shroud. Said Elementalist could still manually shift their shroud’s element if desired.
Other powers are attunement-specific, but generally passive in nature, such as additional detection abilities. In rare cases, these may lead to gaining access to new compound mana types.
Summoners, Soulblades, and other contract-based attunements can theoretically gain specializations that are not based on the mana types given directly by their attunement, but rather by mana types generated by their contracts. These cases are generally considered to be strictly disadvantageous due to the extreme risks involved. For example, the loss of a particular contract can be devastating in cases where a Summoner only has one source of that mana type.
I was already familiar with most of that, but it was all I could find on short notice. Most of the documents on specialization were apparently housed at a different facility that focused on improving existing attunements, rather than making new ones.
At the end of the day, Farren called me in to formally offer me a job.
“I know you’re going to refuse right now, of course,” Farren told me. “But do keep us in mind for next year.”
“I’ll…consider it.”
Farren frowned. “You have reservations beyond what happened to your friend. Why? This place would be perfect for you. You would be happy here. You would be happy even if you accepted it now, which you won’t, even if you should.”
I couldn’t exactly argue with that. I was enjoying learning about attunements, far more than I’d even expected. After a moment of hesitation, I just spat it out. “You experiment on children.”
Farren frowned at me. “…Yes?”
“You are making children into weapons.”
“Oh!” Farren nodded. “You mean the God Beast Attunement Project. You knew about that already. That simplifies things, if we’re ever going to assign you to it. Which…could happen?”
I let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me rephrase in a way that’s clearer. I have serious moral concerns with turning children into weapons.”
Farren frowned at me. “But they’d die otherwise.”
“What?” I was legitimately startled. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard about that part? Hm. I’m bad at explaining this part, but I’ll try.” Farren took a breath. “Centuries ago, there was a relatively common birth defect that occurred in a certain subset of the population. The original attunements given by Selys were, in part, to correct that defect.”
I stared blankly at her. I’d never heard anything like that.
Farren co
ntinued. “These early attunements stabilized the people in question, and other attunements were given to people who didn’t have that birth defect, but still required specific types of mana that weren’t available in the necessary quantities on this continent for, uh, reasons. Basically, attunements solved a lot of mana-related issues for people who needed it…but only for those people. And when those people survived and interbred with others, certain traits were passed on. And over the course of centuries, the mana composition of their descendants changed.”
I processed that. “Did that make the problem worse for future generations?”
“Not worse, exactly. Just different. Different enough that simply giving ordinary attunements to children wouldn’t fix it. We’ve tried. The so-called God Beast Attunements weren’t developed as a means of making new weapons. They were made as one branch of research into solving a fatal illness.”
“But…surely the actual power of a god beast isn’t necessary for that.”
Farren shook her head. “The name of the project isn’t an indication that those children will grow up to be as powerful as god beasts, although admittedly, they are more powerful on average than conventional attuned. Rather, it refers to the structure of their attunement being designed based on elements of god beast physiology. In specific, god beast attunements store mana in the entire body, rather than a single mark location, and process and circulate that mana differently. This is necessary to maintain proper health for one of these affected children, but the same style of attunement would be dangerous — and likely fatal — to an ordinary human. The types and concentrations of mana these children need to survive are poisonous to others.”
“That must make testing a nightmare.”
Farren nodded. “Which is why we need more experts at diagnostics and statistical analysis.”
I gave her a hard look. “You mean you’re assigning Cecily to that project?”
“That will be up to her.” Farren smiled. “But we would very much like to have her.”