An Unexpected Guest

by PropsValroa

Chapter V

Blu was thoughtful, "That is certainly a useful ability, it would make opening locks quite easy I think. Though it does open the possibility, since you had to take the physical form of the key to open the lock, a key could exist. It is likely of course that this key has been lost or destroyed since the door was made, but if a key existed, a duplicate could be made." He shrugged, "Of course, I have no doubt the lock was no simple task to open, the key must have been something quite complicated, maybe even unique."

Cali shrugs. "There probably is one out there somewhere, we will never know for sure if there is. I really do wonder who created this and why, and how long ago. But I found no clues of that so I guess we'll never know, not that it really matters all that much as this door now belongs to me." Cali said with some sort of gesture, it was hers now, and that was never going to change no matter what. "And you are right, the design of such a key is very weird to say the least. Not something you'd normally make."

Blu nodded, "I suppose you would be the best to lay claim to it, in the absence of the original owners. Given what you told me about it I'd guess at least a few centuries old, but seeing the contents I could likely pin down at least which century it was built."

He looked around again, "Speaking of, night will soon be upon us. Will we be reaching the door tonight? or will we arrive tomorrow?"

Cali simply smiled to him as if knowingly. "Neither. The door is very close. Any minute now. It's been a bit since I have been so, allow me to get my bearings....' she said, looking about. They had walked further into the trees up the hill. The trees were pine trees, it smelled of pine leaves and pinecones which were scattered against the ground. It was completely silent besides the wind. The sun was almost setting.

Blu was confused, "Neither? You say we won't reach it tonight, nor tomorrow?" He sighed, "By tonight I meant today, as if we reach it at any point between now and tomorrow we will have been there by tonight."

He made sure to give Cali the distance she needed while still following, using one of his gloves he pulled a small gemstone out of one of his coat's inner pockets. "If we're looking for magic, I've got a few tools that are good at it."

Cali didn't respond to his answers. She walked over and up the hill, a group of trees was clustered around a seemingly certain spot. "Not tonight, not tomorrow, but right now." she said. The hill had gotten quite steep although they could still walk, but with a good deal of effort. There was a ledge of stone covered in leaves and pine needles. The hill seemed to be above it. "Now you shall see...the Golden door." she stepped onto the ledge, the leaves crunching under her boots. Her hand glowed with a red electrical light and she threw an orb at the hill...in a few seconds a sort of a 'hologram' faded away, revealing the massive construction of the golden door. It was at least 3 times their height. The large empty keyslot lay in the middle. It looked quite old.

Blu gave a low whistle as the door appeared, clearly impressed. He had done his best to scan the spell Cali used to reveal the door, but unless it was a relatively simple spell he wouldn't get more than the basic idea of the spell. "Most impressive. Shall we go in?"

The spell scan reveals that it required a certain energy to reveal what was behind the hologram, most likely Cali's magic. She looked to him, although she didn't reply. Her form melted away in a cloud of red mist and it took the shape of a very odd key. It looked like 2 semi-circles within a heart-ish shape with a 3 pointed shape on the bottom of it, it had weird jagged edges in certain areas. The form solidified into a certain type of dull gold material, much like the door itself. The 'key' floated into the large lock and its form seemed to shape into the lock as if correcting itself. There is a resounding click or unlocking sound. Then the key floated back out, she resumed her normal form.

The door slowly opened up from the top, retracting into the ceiling. Candles with dim yellow-orange flames illuminated a sort of arched hallway. Cali began to walk into the hallway.

Blu was quick to follow Cali through the doorway, eager to see what sort of secrets lay within. He idly rolled the small gemstone in the fingers of his glove, waiting for an opportunity to use it.

Once they were inside Cali looked to the back with an idle sly smirk. Another red orb forming in her left hand that she casually flicked across the floor and it hit the bottom of the door, curving upwards. It then started to slowly retract back down. She didn't want anyone seeing this, or any possible intruders getting in. That went for animals too.

She walked further down the hallway, it went on for quite a distance. Far enough that you could barely see the door itself. The walls and archways made it seem to be brighter than the torches should have been. They crackled with a bit of a soothing ambience that resonated within the arches of the hall.

They then approached a wooden double door with a circular black handle that stuck out. Cali looked at him and finally spoke. "Welcome to the main part of this area. The library." she said, and then opened up the double door in either direction with her hands....

Blu was a bit unsettled by her closing the door behind them, but he figured there was enough magic and knowledge in this room that he could escape if he had to.

If it was even half of his expectations, he'd hardly want to leave in the first place. He marvelled at the archways and torches, they had to be magical in nature, it didn't seem likely the builders would have stored enough combustible material to keep them lit so well for so long. It must have been built over a leyline, directly tapping into the source to power it directly.

He followed closely behind as Cali opened the door to the library, soon he would have access to all the knowledge he could ever want.

The double door opens and it reveals that they are on what appears to be the upper level of the library. It is fairly large, roughly three to four times the size of your average living room. The 'balcony' is adorned in simple yet unique ways. The floor transitions to being made of wood. There were other torches that flare up gently, illuminating the entire library for him to see. There are three different 'stories' to this, must have taken a large amount of time and effort to make this.

It more or less resembles this here, although being more of a darker-ish tone and the lack of modern amenities. The ceiling is made of carved stone and wood that intertwine perfectly. A design of the Sun and Moon merged together in a spiral pattern adorns the roof itself. He notices other doorways leading to various areas. The books them self seem to be well organized.

"Something tells me we are going to be here for a while." said Cali.

Blu was transfixed, both by the architecture as well as the apparent wealth of knowledge. He wanted to rush off, to pull the first book he could grasp off the shelf and open it, but he decided it would be best to show some restraint. He had plenty of time after all.

"That depends, is there food here? Otherwise we may need to leave on occasion to acquire some. Beyond that... It could take months, maybe years to understand the wealth of knowledge here! A bit longer if it isn't in common Equestrian, but that will only be a minor hurdle."

Cali could only smirk to that. "There isn't, unfortunately. We will have to go in and get some later on, however in my time here I was only able to learn a fraction of what is truly here. I focused in honing in my electrical and shape shifting magic even more so then I had anticipated. I can now assume more complicated forms for a much longer period of time, and charge up and discharge electrical energy with ease. Seems to play very well into what I have as my ability set. However, I would be very interested in learning other magics. Eventually I intend on gaining mastery of the concept in it's entirety." she stood on the 'balcony', her hands rested on the 'fence of it as she looked to him with a bit of a gleeful look.

"Tell me what sort of magic you want to learn, I will lead you to those spell books to the best of my memory. It is time I learn something different than shape shifting, lasers, and electricity. You decide what we will learn first. I am sure you are...quite eager." she said with a little bit of a cackle in her wording. She was quite eager as well.

Blu nodded as he made his way over to the railing to look down on the lower levers, "My specialty, as represented by my mark, deals mostly in runic magic. When I first came here and first learned spells I discovered that spells were made up of components, and for the most part unicorns don't even know what those components on their own do. I found it was much like a computer program, once the individual components could be understood they could be rearranged into new spells, and further... built into constructs."

He charged up the gemstone he had been carrying and tossed it over the railing. At the zenith of its arc it sprouted wings of light, shaped similarly to that of a butterfly, and it started to hover in place. After a moment it would slowly head to the nearest source of active magic.

"That is something I was able to make, it uses a few simple runes, detector, storage, release, the wings are mostly decoration, but it keeps it from storing up too much energy."

He looked over at Cali, "That is the sort of magic I'm interested in. The root magic all other magic is based on."

She listened and observed what he had done and said. The gemstone with the wings would slowly head towards the walls. Probably some form of ambient magic hidden within the walls. Probably some sort of barrier or anti-aging spell on the construction of it, since it looked so good. She walked down the spiral staircase to the second floor. She paced about for a minute before finding the runic magic section.

"The books on the lower sides are for simple stuff, but the higher they are on the shelf, the more complicated the spells are. From my time here they seem to go left to right. I suppose we'll study Runic Magic then." with her magic she levitated over a chair and a table and pulled out the book on the far let and brought it infront of her and then showed him.

"Some of these books were written by Starswirl the Bearded himself, or at least copied from some of his works very well. Could be original, could be copies. Hard to tell, but the contents stay the same. I assume this place was created to hold either the originals or the copies themselves from dangerous events out in the world where nobody would know." she said, handing him the book. She took another one, and began to read.

Blu pulled up a seat opposite to Cali and accepted the book, he glanced over it briefly before pulling out his briefcase. He set the briefcase carefully on the table before unlocking the few different combination locks on it. Inside the briefcase were what Cali might recognize as a pair of computer monitors, one taking up most of each half. He set the briefcase up like one would a laptop.

He turned the computer on and opened up a database of runes and components he had been compiling, he then turned back to the book he had been given, each rune he learned about he drew into the database with a description of its meaning and function.

Cali looked at the briefcase and then back to the book. She didn't disturb him. She read through the book's contents in its entirety. She was learning a few Runic spells and seemed to practice them out as she read. She seemed quite a novice at first. As time went on, she put the book back and got another. She handed the ones that she had been done reading to him, so he could learn those spells for himself, and instructed him to put the books back in order.

She also said at some point later on, "Since you have been doing Runic magic yourself, you can also teach me it too, and I can do my best to teach you my shape shifting abilities and such after you read through the books on those. Must gain a solid understanding of the concept and spells before you can really learn or teach. We'll focus on Runic magic until we have mastered it. Then next, is whatever you want it to be. I am fine with whatever." Cali said, her mind a bit strained from the magic that she had newly learned from the books. But, she kept going.

Blu spared a glance away from his studies when Cali spoke to him, "Sounds reasonable, most of the applications I know for this magic is best expressed through gem carving like the seeker I showed you. If you can get some gems of exceptional clarity I could show you a thing or two about rune carving."

He'd take notice at her practicing, "Careful! A poorly drawn rune can be even more dangerous than an incomplete spell, you have no idea what a misdrawn rune might do."

Outside of that, he would be fully enthralled with learning and cataloging the runes he was learning. Most runes, by definition, were rather simplistic. Hardly useful compared to spells when used in casting, but that's because they weren't designed to be cast, they were designed to be activated. Carved or written out and then charged with open magic. The activator had little to no control over the effect, that was for the scribe to decide.

Cali simply smirked at his instruction and simply followed along with it. “I pawned my gemstones off in exchange for gold. Some time we will be snatching some from a nearby town. Although the ones that I took last night were more of diamond and Opal.”

She continues to read and practice, this time more carefully. She gets onto a the next book, giving her previous one to him. “Although we should swap roles as you know more than I...” she said and then did exactly so.

Blu snorted, "You're going through these books far faster than I am, as you aren't compiling them all as I am." He briefly considered telling her why he was taking the time to draw each rune into his computer, but decided he would wait until she asked to say why.

"If you want me to teach you, you're going to have to find a runemancer's tablet. Given they have so many books on runes here I've no doubt they've got tablets. They're usually clay or stone about the size of a sheet of paper, with a series of protection runes going all the way around the edge."

Cali rose an eyebrow at that. "I never knew about that. Let me go look for such things, if they are here that is." Cali had stated and got up from the chair. It took her a few minutes of looking around the shelves, but she did indeed find a dozen or so of those tablets in here. There was probably more but she stacked them up on the floor by the desk. She looked to him with interest, "I suppose it's not as simple as just reading a book. I mean, I understand some of it now but there is a lot more to it. So teach me...." she says, gesturing to the tablets. "Or should we read through the rest of these books here?"

Blu looked over at the stack of tablets she had acquired, as well as what remained of the shelves of books. "If these books continue getting more complicated at the rate I've been seeing, we'll be here for weeks or months before we get through all the books on runes. Especially if some of them are written by Minotaurs. We may as well get started on practice."

He grabbed one of the tablets and detached the stylus that came with it. "As long as you're careful to not cross the protective runes, you should only need one. The stylus is very important first because it engraves the tablet temporarily as well as not activating the rune as it is drawn. Many unicorns fail to use runes for that reason: their magic activates the rune as soon as it is drawn, or earlier. So be careful as you draw the rune to not let any magic touch it until you're ready to activate it."

Blu used his glove to manipulate the stylus, gently drawing a fire rune. He then drew a much more complicated rune lower down, and connected the two with an odd line. "The fire rune you should recognize, this other one is what I call an activator rune, it collects and stores magic before passing it on to connected runes by this line, which is made of triangles to ensure the magic goes one way without changing the structure of the rune. This is very important for rune sequencing, but we can get to that later." He set the tablet down on the table, away from the very precious books, and pressed on the activator rune with the thumb of his glove. After a short bit the line started to glow with the same blue light as his magic, then the fire rune lit up and a small flame appeared over the rune.

Once he stopped touching the activator the fire remained above the rune for a bit, the same amount of time that it took to activate, before disappearing.

Cali observed the runes he had drawn and listened to his instruction. She drew the air rune on another tablet and then activated it, forming a little bit of an airblast over it that they felt a little bit. Wasn't too strong but they definitely felt it. She smiled slightly, but it wasn't a sly smile at that. "Could see so many potential uses for these sorts of things. Combinations of various things but, I am curious how one would use these in a battle. Maybe overcharge them and use them as bombs or something of that sort or set off certain spells at enemies." she suggested, watching the air rune disappear from that of the tablet.

Blu nodded, "That is one of the issues with runes, they are not typically mobile. That is of course excepting the whole school of golemancy, which is the application of runes to power and control golems. Outside of that, runes are most useful in defence and traps, not in attacking."