//------------------------------// // With the Greatest of Ease // Story: Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me // by DataPacRat //------------------------------// I couldn't help humming... I'll fly away, oh lordy, I'll fly away; in the morning. way up high, halleluah, by and by, I'll fly away. On the other hoof, with the spell I was now playing with, actually 'flying away' wasn't all that much of a possibility. Naturally, this demanded some immediate experimentation. The Latin word 'volare' just meant 'fly' - and in the context of the local magical system, seemed to trigger something like a unicorn's telekinetic effect. I could point to any random object, call upon a gem's power with the word, and it would rise into the air and move around as I willed it to. (Ever play the game where you tried to push something just beyond your reach? It felt a lot like that - only I actually managed to succeed.) If I focused on myself, then I could push myself into the air - or, perhaps, it was push against everything around me. With me and an object just starting out standing still next to each other, I could get it to move about a meter per second - relative to me, and to everything in the cargo bay, which were all moving through the air at a good clip. I drafted Micro to help, and had her pull a small cargo-wagon to and fro through the cargo bay, sometimes with me aboard, sometimes an object for me to grab, sometimes both; and a few times, I drafted Stoke, as well, so I could be pulled one way, and the target object another. The results were pretty consistent - 'volare' let me push an object up to one meter per second in any direction, relative to myself. If it was moving faster than that, relative to me, to start with, then I could slow it down until it was moving at that rate. The acceleration was fast - it took a smaller fraction of a second than I had a decent timepiece for an object to go from one meter per second in one direction to one meter per second the other way, but I wasn't really able to shake things very hard. A second discovery - the heavier the object, the faster it drained power from my gems. Though it wasn't quite a linear relation. Using the standard I'd developed previously, where it took 1.0 'thaums' to use a gem to create a light as bright as a candle for one minute, then using 'volare' on a half-kilo object also used up one thaum a minute... while lifting Stoke, who was close to my own weight, somewhere around five hundred kilos, used up the power to create a light for two hours, in three and a third minutes; about 35 times as much. That rate did turn out to be similar to how much power I drained when I volare'd myself into the air, so at least that much was consistent. Trying to cast 'volare' twice on the same object didn't let me move things twice as fast. Trying to volare myself from a moving cart didn't seem to affect my speed - if I started out moving faster than a meter per second relative to the cargo bay, I immediately slowed down to that rate. So, for self-flying, the effect seemed to be relative to my overall local environment, not just what I started out. Which led to my next experiment. I asked Captain Red to slow the ship down for a few minutes, so the wind on the top deck wasn't too distracting. I climbed up the steps to the top of the sterncastle, looked down at the main deck in front of the bridge just below... took a breath... and jumped off, blurting out 'volare' as I started to fall. I slowed down to a nice, safe speed before I landed. Looked like as long as I had a gem with me, with enough power, I didn't need to worry about falls. (Though, given how much power moving myself with this spell took, and how slowly I moved with it, if I tried stopping myself from too high up, I could easily run out of power before I made it to safety.) I tried some telekinesis-battles with Micro, with her trying to push our target one way while I pushed it another - and it was a real tug of war. She could put extra effort into it, and make headway; but when she relaxed, or tired, the spell's push was extremely even and consistent, and she'd lose ground. The effect lasted as long as I concentrated on it - if I was distracted, the effect stopped, letting the target drop. I could 'volare' more than one object at once - but only as long as I could concentrate on all of them at once; I could manage two doing just about anything, three was a juggling act, and up to half a dozen if they were all moving similarly. I could pick up a bunch of marbles in a clump as if they were a single thing, likewise a small heap of ballast sand. I couldn't pick up the water from inside a cup, or the smoke from a candle, or the flame from the same candle. When the sand was spread out thinly over an area, I could only grab it from a few centimeters in area; when it was at least a centimeter thick, I could grab larger amounts, up to a circle about two meters in diameter. I had extremely limited control over bending and folding objects I was moving; the spell seemed to 'want' to move all of an object at once. It was a struggle just to open up a book at all, nevermind opening it to a particular page; likewise, I wasn't going to be tying or untying ropes anytime soon. I couldn't just grab Micro's hoof to pull her with it - either I grabbed hold of all of her, or the spell just fizzled out without effect. After a bit of playing around with some loose pieces of cloth, I made the tentative conclusion that I could move and rotate objects as a whole, easily; but when I was trying to move parts of them relative to each other, all I was doing was releasing my hold on part of the object, and it simply fell as gravity and the air-currents pushed it. I tried using two 'volare' spells at once, to push one piece of a rope one way and another, another; but whenever I stopped fully concentrating on holding the one volare spell from pushing part of an object, so that I could concentrate on using the other to push that part, the other spell just grabbed the whole thing again. That limit seemed like it might be more a limit of me than of the spell itself - and might be something I could improve with some practice. Similarly, it took some effort to just push a single button or throw a lever without the spell trying to grab hold of a whole object - or of the whole ship and fizzling right out. I was only able to pull Chekov's trigger when the back of the gun was braced against something - and though I wasn't using my quite limited supply of ammunition, while that might be good for a trick, aiming it at anything in particular was going to be just about impossible. Contrariwise, I was able to pick up a lodestone, and use it to pick up a piece of metal; but the rate of power used turned out to be for the total weight being moved, and not just for the lodestone itself. With a bit of focus, I was able to grab Micro's new uniform shirt, without grabbing her, and hold it still and stiff enough to impede her movements. I was also able to grab a string, and keep it taut enough to slice through some butter; but trying that with a delicate strand of spiderweb just broke the web, nor was I able to use the string as a needle to poke holes in anything solid. It wasn't that hard to volare a nut, and unscrew it from a fixed bolt; or unscrew a screw. I couldn't pull out nails that were solidly hammered in, though. If an object was falling, or in the middle of a throw, I had a bit of trouble 'catching' it; so I wasn't going to be able to snatch arrows out of mid-air. I was, however, able to volare a table and move it around as a shield. I was able to cast the spell on a pair of heavy saddlebags, pushing them 'up' to effectively negate their weight - but when I walked forward, they simply slid back over my back, hovering in place. A bit of concentration let me fly them forward with me, as long as I didn't move faster than the spell's maximum local speed. Adding a strap over my chest kept them on my back even then - only I had to pull hard against the speed the spell was trying to move the object, which seemed about as hard as just trying to carry the bags naturally. I was able to grab an object Micro was holding in her hoof... sometimes, and sometimes even when I did, she was able to grab it back. The biggest weight I could pick up was about a ton - and doing that required draining the most capacious crystal I had, quite quickly. There didn't seem to be a limit on how small an object I could move - as long as I could see it to identify it. Sewing needles were a snap, a dust mote in a sunbeam danced to my will, and when I broke out the microscope, I was able to push a single microbe around. Oddly, though, no matter how small the object, pushing it used up the same amount of magical power as pushing a one-pound object. When I had a small heap of salt and pepper mixed together, I could grab either the whole heap, or individual grains, but not 'just the salt'. I was able to use 'volare' to hold one object against another, and then 'adherere' to get it to stick there (at least for as long as 'adhere' lasted, which was around ten minutes by default). All of that was, of course, valuable to discover. And once I'd established such basic facts, I could start building more interesting techniques and tactics on them - such as sneaking my smallish bottle of pepper spray along the ceiling, to surprise somepony from behind. But even as I worked out the various details, limitations, and permutations, I still had the feeling that I was just playing with a computer's command-line interface... and doing poorly, at that, missing most of the commands, and without even a man page... ... Hm. I then spent a good bit of time trying various versions of 'help', 'manual', 'guide', in whatever fancy Frenchified synonyms I could think of. Unfortunately, no handy tome of the underlying computational architecture appeared - not even a help-sheet of basic commands and standard switches. Still, if it had worked, that could have turned me from mildly clever cow to Sorceror Supreme in one go, so it'd been worth a shot. Now that I was using French as my stepping stone to Latin, I had a few more ideas to try, many of which didn't work, but some of which added some decent entries for my spellbook. 'Fiat lux cerulus' created a nice blue light instead of 'Fiat lux''s standard white. 'Lumen' made for a nice overall glow, instead of a single point-source; and 'radius luminis' created a directional beam shining from whatever I cast it on - including my own horns. 'Lubricere' made for a good banana-peel effect. Armina was tossing and turning, and happy to let me try 'dormire' on her, and it knocked her out for a good eight hours. Nopony was willing to let me try any version of 'vomitere' on them, no matter how many bonus points, or even bonus pay, I offered. Given my recent illnesses, I wasn't particularly willing to put my body under extra stress at the moment, either. And that ended up being the pattern of things. Captain Red ran the ship, the crew settled into their jobs, I spent my time on various research projects, we all slept, ate, and played poker, and the ocean passed beneath us. Then, one day, Blanche, on lookout duty, called out a sighting of a sail on the horizon...