"I still think this is a bad idea, Master." Dahlia droned over the sounds of Jack's hasty preparation and scribbling. She didn't really expect her warnings to affect Jack's plans in the slightest.
"Magical Limb Augmentation," Jack enunciated as he wrote, not looking up from his notebook and ignoring Dahlia's complaints. "Test number three."
Jack put down his pen and pulled his brace into view. It now had a shiny luster to its surface from the chrome spray-paint Jack had coated it with in order to increase its magical effectiveness. Such an idea had come from Jack himself. Dahlia grinned to herself. Say what you would about Jack, he certainly had a lot of ideas.
Upon closer inspection, one might find that inlaid in the silvery surface of the brace were countless designs of remarkable intricacy. Magical runes Jack had carved under Dahlia's close instruction in order to transform the metal instrument into a magical catalyst. Jack held his impromptu wand to his chest now, muttering softly to himself. Dahlia watched with marked pride as she saw her current master and pupil clear his mind and begin preparations for spellcasting.
As she watched Jack's mouth slowly utter words of arcane power, Dahlia's mind drifted to ponder the few weeks she had spent in her new master's care. At first, she had been pleasantly surprised at her new pupil's diligence and willingness to learn. He wrote almost everything she told him down, and any moment he wasn't spending draining knowledge from Dahlia was spent reviewing that which he had already gleaned. Dahlia was ashamed to admit that his persistence in the pursuit of magical knowledge wore even her patience thin. He seemed to have an endless stream of questions. Any answer she did give him then promoted two or three branches of questioning that Jack was hell-bent on pursuing. But the worst thing about Jack's interrogations was that he almost never answered any of
her
questions.
"What spell does this rune signify?" Jack had asked her as he flipped through her pages one evening. He soon discovered that the pages almost never contained the same content twice. Dahlia had explained earlier on that the knowledge contained within a Grimoire far exceeded the amount of pages deemed "reasonable" to belong to a single book, or even a series of books.
"That is a powerful spell," She had told him. "It allows the user to see the future."
"See the future?" Jack had looked up from his notebook for once, in surprise. "That sounds incredibly useful."
Jack's eyes had then narrowed, "What's the catch?"
"The amount of time one can see into the future depends on how much energy they are able to expend in the usage of the spell. As you can probably imagine, it is incredibly difficult to cast."
At that, Jack didn't seem to falter. Dahlia had thought such a statement would turn Jack's expression sour, make him cross out his notes angrily. She had secretly wanted to see a look of anger or disappointment on his face, if only to find some replacement to the cold mask he normally wore when studying.
"And how far into the future could I see, with my current capacity for magical energy?"
"About half a second." Dahlia delivered the line as coldly and bluntly as she could, but her only reward was Jack lowering his head once more and writing something in his notebook she couldn't quite read.
"So," Dahlia had continued, letting her annoyance get the best of her. "At your level, it's near useless."
"Yes," Jack had said, never slowly the steady crawl of his wrist across the page. "Near useless."
After that, Dahlia had stopped trying to surprise or disappoint Jack.
Dahlia was brought back into the present by a sudden motion from Jack. He'd stopped chanting and was apparently ready to begin his experiment. He got up from his chair and limped to the center of the basement. The room itself was poorly lit and featured unfinished cement flooring, but Dahlia supposed that was why he'd chosen in as the place to conduct his magical experiments. The cement made a convenient surface to place magical runes in chalk, which wiped away easy enough when the fun was all said and done.
Jack stopped and looked over his shoulder at the permanently nude form of Dahlia. She sat on the edge of a dusty workbench, much in the same manner as she had when she first appeared in his bedroom the first night. Jack had discovered that she could talk with him while in her human manifestation as well as when she was just an old book, though Jack had wondered why the book itself remained present even when Dahlia was in her "human form." Jack had tried opening the book while she was human before him, but this only caused Dahlia to slap his hands away and blush profusely. Even since then, she had made sure to keep the book out of his reach while she took on her humanoid manifestation. Jack smiled as he looked at her now, the book clutched protectively to her chest as she watched him, the designs swirling on her skin in an unreadable pattern.
It wasn't that she couldn't wear clothes, or didn't want to, but it was more of a matter of her not understanding the need for clothes. She didn't understand the sexual nature the image of a nude woman conveyed, and the more Jack had tried to explain it, the more embarrassed and unwilling to listen Dahlia became. Jack had initially thought her an inherently sexual creature, based on their first encounter, but soon discovered this was not the case. She apparently only accepted the notion of coitus as a ritualistic gesture, and any other interpretation was shockingly vulgar.
"As I have told you before, Master," She had said, "That was merely meant to bind the contract between you and I."
"Although," She had added with a discreet blush, "That was the first time I'd been 'activated' in a long time."
"You've known other masters then?" Jack had meant to tease the fair-haired beauty, but part of him had risen with a wave of jealousy and curiosity
"O-Of course!" She had spluttered incoherently. "W-Well...a f-few, at least..."
Jack had bit back another sharp question. He realized the rage and disappointment in him and found annoyance at these feelings. So what if she'd masters before him? So what if she fucked them all? She was just a book, a tool to be used for knowledge. Jack had decided to stifle his base desires in his thirst for knowledge. It was what he had always done.
"How long ago was that?" Jack had asked instead.
"If your modern Gregorian Calendars are still to be trusted, then it has been at least one thousand years," Her expression had softened, "So very much has changed."
Jack grinned and brought himself out of his reminiscing with a snort. He had work to do right now.
Turning his back on his watchful Grimoire and teacher, Jack continued hobbling into the center of his musky basement. Inside the center of a large ring of magical symbols he'd drawn on the basement floor, Jack had set up a curiously low table. The hollow
click click
filled the empty room as he approached his testing area. Once he reached the stout table, Jack leaned more of his weight onto his brace, now doubling as a wand, and threw his right leg over the table, allowing it to rest over the edge, but not touching the ground. Jack rolled up his pant leg and revealed the shining metal of his artificial limb, covered in the same silvery paint as his brace and decorated in delicate magical symbols. Everything was now in place.
Jack grunted with exertion as he balanced on a spare crutch and he awkwardly held his leg in the elevated position. He was glad that Dahlia had not offered to help with this any of the other times he'd attempted it. As he closed his eyes and prepared to release the energy he'd stored from his chanting earlier, he briefly wondered how he appeared to Dahlia. Did she think him a bitter cripple motivated only by wounded pride? Jack smiled. Even he wasn't so sure about himself anymore.
Jack felt the brace grow hot against his hands as he fed it magical power. The inscriptions along its surface glowed blue with energy and pulsed as he fed it, taking from him as much as he would give, but always willing to take more.
"Careful," Jack heard Dahlia behind him. "Take it slow."
Jack said nothing and kept his eyes closed. He was not using the wand to cast a spell, but merely using it as a conduit for transferring energy. He'd discovered, rather painfully, that his own body was poorly suited to such a task. He could gather magical energy and store it well enough, but releasing it without using his brace proved to be rather explosive.
Jack placed the tip of his brace against the edge of the chalk drawing. He'd removed the rubber tip from his brace normally present when he used it in his daily routine. He had gotten a few looks based on the new paintjob he'd given his brace. As he poured energy steadily through his brace, he allowed it to flow naturally into the chalk design below. Another conduit to transfer energy, the chalk drawing was also not a spell, though it bore close resemblance to a spell rune. In theory, it was basically a "jar" to hold the magical energy Jack would give it, a jar that enclosed the center of the circle. The lines of the drawing began to glow with faint blue light in a gradual sequence that might follow if one would fill a grooved symbol with water. Once the entire chalk drawing was glowing Jack let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. All the energy he'd stored up earlier had successfully been transferred to the chalk drawing. Now the hard part began.
The air around him felt heavy and thick. The hairs on his arms and legs stood up. Jack was awkwardly standing in a pocket of air now heavily saturated with magical energy. Jack took a deep breath and tried to calm his heart beat. He had to be careful here, he didn't want another explosion.
Jack opened his eyes and focused his glare on the silver of his metal leg. The limb was attached with a series of straps and belts that connected to his stump, just below the knee. The limb ended in a solid rubber imitation of a human foot. As Jack focused his attention on it, the runes carved into the surface of the metal shaft of the leg began to glow. Jack hardened his stare as he began his work.
Jack used the magical energy permeating the pocket of air in the center of the circle and began to weave it around his leg and through his skin. Sweat rolled down his face and he battled with the intricacies of the magical currents unsteadily existing around him. He couldn't see the energy, but he could feel it, if he strained his attention hard enough. He used that power to push and pull the magical currents around him so that they found his artificial limb, and the spell rune inscribed there.
It wasn't enough to activate the spell, Jack had realized. Certainly it would be difficult enough to gather enough energy to do so, but Jack couldn't just fill the limb with magical energy as he had done on his first try. Magical energy was a fickle force, and resisted any violent urge to move in any direction that it found unnecessary. The first attempt had ruined one of Jack's artificial limbs and nearly taken more of his leg. Jack needed to knit the magical energy around the limb evenly, to apply in such a way that would prompt no explosive rebuke from the magic itself.
