Surviving Arkadia

When I finished reading Amris handed me a fresh cup of coffee. He reached for something on his belt and then waved a small flask at me. “A tot of spiced whisky?” he said. “You look like you could do with it.”

I nodded, rendered dumb by a combination of relief and my dry as parchment mouth. The combination of coffee and spiced whisky was better than I’d expected and I requested more of both.

“Sky squid are a thing here?” I said, wincing at how dry my throat was.

“They’re called Void Squid,” said Amris. “I read about them in an old bestiary. I thought they were mythical. At least we know something that works on them.”

“What’s a fuel-air bomb,” said Dr Roly Henning. Trudy had gone to get him around the time the SS Idyllic had reached the port of Ostia. I had stopped for a coffee and she decided that it made sense for him to hear it first hand in case there was any medically relevant information that she might miss while she was focused on taking notes.

“I think I can explain this,” I said. “It’s to do with chemical explosives. A chemical explosion is really just a fire that burns very quickly and a fire needs fuel, oxygen and a source of ignition. Normally explosives carry their oxygen with them in chemical form but a fuel-air bomb disperses the fuel in the air and uses the oxygen from the air. It means they can produce a much bigger explosion for the weight of the device. They also create a partial vacuum by using up all the oxygen so you get a double shock-wave, one for the outgoing explosion and one coming in for the vacuum collapsing.”

“That would be a distinctive sound,” said Trudy.

“Sounds like BaBOOM-WHOMP,” said Amris.

“But what’s a power word?” I said.

“That would be a spell constructed from other spells,” said Gertrude. She’d drifted over at some point when she came outside for a tea-break and came to see what we were up to. “You tie a bunch of spells together in sequence, or if you’re really good you can have them running concurrently, and you have the whole thing go off with a single command word or short phrase. They’re hard to make, draining to cast, and you can’t keep many in mind at once. They’re the pinnacle of Arcane Spell Construction. Almost everyone with a Magic based career, and most hobby casters, aim to create at least one.”

I closed my eyes to look at the skill tree, curious about how much work it would take to make a powerword. ARCANE SPELL CONSTRUCTION had a bunch of prerequisites, including having reached tier three on at least two different branches or schools of magic. But once you unlocked it you could level it quickly because it had synergies all over the place. It would actually be harder not to level it.

I opened my eyes and Roly had pulled out a notebook and was making notes about something. “So you’d need to start by creating a volume of something very flamable,” he said, sketching something in the notebook. “I’m sure there’s a spell low down in the Alchemy tree. Most of them use it to create fuel for spirit stoves.”

I looked back at the Skill Tree, concentrating on Alchemy. I was sure I’d seen something like that when I was planning out how to access gunpowder weapons. “Create fuel,” I said, “It summons a volume of flammable matter that the caster knows the formula for. At tier one it would be enough alcohol for a small spirit stove or enough gunpowder for a shotgun shell or a couple of smaller rounds of ammunition. If you up-cast it to tier five you’d have a barrel of gunpowder.”

“Gunpowder would be no good for fuel-air,” said Amris. “It contains the oxygen it uses to burn. You want something that produces explosive vapour. Something like petroleum or kerosene. Kerosene would burn hotter but you’d probably want to preheat it.”

“Right, right,” said Roly, nodding and writing in his notebook. “Once you have your fuel you would want to push it out and expand it rapidly. There’s a spell from the air school that would do. Invisible sphere. It creates a globe of air that can be expanded and contracted. In my misspent youth I used it to pick locks.”

“How do you pick locks with a sphere?” said Getrude.

“You put a small sphere inside a keyhole and then expand it to the size of a fist and the lock just pops open. Of course you can’t lock it again afterwards but if you want to leave no trace you hire an actual thief to do the job.” Roly turned back to his notebook. “Once you’ve got your fuel expanded then you need ignition. There’s plenty of spells in the fire school that would do that but Flashpoint would probably be the one.”

I looked it up. FLASHPOINT - HEATS A QUANTITY OF MATTER UNTIL IT REACHES ITS FLASH-POINT AND SPONTANEOUSLY IGNITES.

“You’d need to up-cast it quite a bit so it would heat all the fuel,” I said.

“Not necessarily,” said Roly. “But it would be more effective if you did.”

“I cannot believe you people,” said Trudy. “We finally have a lead on the violent phase and you’re all obsessing over a showy spell.”

Amris looked more sheepish than I have ever seen a cat of any kind look. “I’ll make some fresh tea and coffee for everyone,” he said, and made himself scarce.

“Sorry,” said Roly “I allowed myself to get caught up in the moment.”

“It’s not entirely without value,” said Gertrude. “We might have to fight these Void Squid and I’ll be a lot happier about that if we can back engineer a spell that we know has worked in the past. So if you don’t mind, I'd like a copy of those notes.”