Solo [Gug Andjak] Oodles of Doodles

[Elsa Marin]

Winter 7th, 513 AV

Sahova was boring. Boring empty cold windy empty boring. There was nothing to do, nobody to talk to, her room was cramped and cold and she had to sleep on the floor like some kind of animal. Elsa was cold, and sore, and very bored. She hadn't seen her sister in all day, and if it wasn't for her tea she probably wouldn't have slept at all. She was already wondering why she was even here. What was she suffering for?

Elsa sat in the Gug Andjak hoping to answer that exact question. There was magic happening all around her. She was surrounded by dead people doing unthinkable things Elsa couldn't even begin to understand. In hindsight, coming there was probably not the best idea. She never thought she'd be grateful for being ignored. This way she didn't have to speak to any of them or - gods forbid - touch them.

They had the right idea, though. She came here for magic, so she should do some magic. Take her mind off things. Brush up on her glyphing. It was the socially acceptable kind of magic. Subtle, quiet, meticulous, polite. It was Anna's magic.

Elsa would make a scroll.

First, the focus. Focuses were simple, in theory. Magic went in, magic came out. Unless there was the slightest flaw, in which case you'd just wasted your time. Focuses. Foci. She had to focus on the focus. A circle could work, right? Put the magic in the circle, take the circle out again. Yes, that sounded logical. Elsa would draw a circle.

Elsa drew an ellipse. She pursed her lips. An ellipse was not a circle. This is not what I wanted, hand. Try that again.

Elsa drew an ellipse.

Elsa drew an ellipse.

Elsa gave up, and drew the damn circle point by point. From the middle, determined the radius. Marked four points on the circle, then the points between those points on a curve, then connected the points. Now she had a perfect-ish circle. Close enough, at least.

Now hopefully there was enough room on the paper left for the rest of the glyph. Elsa checked. There was not. Damn.

[Elsa Marin]

Getting a fresh sheet of paper, Elsa painstakingly repeated the process of drawing the focus, then moved on to the next part of the sigil. If she would take anything from this exercise it would be to plan her sigils in advance.

Next, the barrier. Magic went through the focus, stayed in the barrier, then came back out through the focus. Like a tap on a keg. There were a lot of things Elsa would have done for a drink on Sahova.

Where was she? Ah, yes, the barrier.

Thinking back to the snatches of glyphing lessons Elsa hadn't slept through, she remembered a word pair. Datlas-Randjaq. To shape for a future purpose by limiting freedom or setting boundaries. Damned if she could remember what the actual datlas-randjaq glyph looked like, though. She'd have to do something else. Maybe a square? A box to keep the magic in. Sounded logical enough.

Having learned her lesson from the earlier circle debacle, Elsa carefully measured out the points of the square, making sure the corners were equidistant from the center of the circle and keeping things from going generally rhombus-shaped. The end result was a square with a circle in it.

Feeling a bit plain, Elsa rotated the paper and drew another square on top of the first, forming a kind of star shape. Not quite satisfied, Elsa repeated this twice more until she had a roughly circular square. Square circle. Squircle. Already she saw one big silver lining to being on Sahova: None of her professors were around to see how horrible she was at this.

[Elsa Marin]

A barrier with sixteen corners. Sixteen was a magic number. Right?

Well, she was using it for magic, therefore it was now a magic number.

One last bit, then she could put the magic in. Even if this whole mess worked like it was supposed to, without a trigger it was just a box from which Elsa would never get her magic back. The trigger made the magic come out when some condition was met.

Counting from the top corner of the barrier, Elsa drew a line from the focus through the sixth corner of the barrier. Six for luck, Sixer knew she'd need it. The line terminated in a six-sided square outside the barrier, where Elsa would place her trigger conditions. Now there was the question of how to make trigger conditions. Maybe she could just... write them down? In common?

Well, it wasn't like this was her ink or paper she was wasting.

IF (HEAR "Swordfish")
THEN trigger

If the scroll heard the word 'Swordfish', then it would trigger and, hopefully, release the magic.

Focus, barrier, trigger. The theory was sound, even if it was all circles and squares and lines and wow she was really bad at this. If the scroll wouldn't take a Void portal then it would at least be Voided, and Elsa could forget she ever tried this.

[Elsa Marin]

Setting down her writing implements and centering the paper on the table, Elsa opened a portal to the Void. Part of the world fell away, and there was darkness. It was a small portal, around the size of Elsa's closed fist. It took very little power to form and maintain, and she moved it down into the table.

The portal sank into the scroll as if it wasn't even there. One moment Elsa was maintaining the portal, and then she was not. The portal was gone. The sudden relief of not having to maintain even such a small portal against the press of the world trying to right itself was like a splash of cold water to the face. The scroll worked! It retained magic! Buoyed by her success, Elsa said the trigger word. "Swordfish."

First there was nothing. Then, black lines bled through the edges of the barrier. The focus seemed to sink until the entire paper was consumed by a bottomless pit. The paper stretched until it was a perfect, black circle, and started shrinking. First it covered a good portion of her workspace. Then it was the size of her hand. Then it was the size of a pea. Then it was a small, black dot. Then it was gone. There was nothing left of the scroll. Elsa could only assume it had Voided itself.

Well. That was interesting. She really didn't know what she'd expected. Was this normal behavior for Voiding scrolls? Had the portal reformed and then unwound without her will to maintain it? The tabletop was seemingly unmarred. Weird.

Still, Elsa could count this one as a success. It was a miracle that the scroll had even contained the portal for any amount of time, and released when the trigger told it to, considering Elsa was an awkward, fumbling virgin when it came to the whole discipline. She decided against trying again. If that had been the scroll malfunctioning, Elsa could only imagine what might have happened if she'd botched it even more. Maybe she could convince Anna to show her how it was done. If she could find her, anyway.

Proud of the afternoon's work, Elsa left the Gug Andjak.