Kit kept himself from throwing Nita the look he wanted to. Give him the benefit of the doubt . . . “That’s a great state to be in,” he said. “Especially so early on in the process. Why not spread out the basic diagram for us and we’ll have a look.”
Penn’s expression went profoundly suspicious. “Yeah, sure. How do I know you’re not interested in swiping some of the sensitive elements?”
Kit glanced at Nita in astonishment. Nita gave him an “I saw this coming” look, with a smile, and said nothing.
Kit turned back to Penn. “To use for what, exactly?” he said.
“Yeah,” Nita said, and chuckled. “It’s not like I run out the door in the morning thinking Ooh, wow, I really feel the need to divert the solar wind today!”
Penn smiled at her skeptically. “Good one,” he said. “But, realistically, this is going to be kind of technical for you, wouldn’t you think? I thought you were more into the birds-and-bees kind of wizardry. The nature end of things.”
Nita’s mouth quirked up on one side. “There’s quite a lot of nature,” she said softly. “And quite a lot of it is . . . technical.”
Kit kept still, as he didn’t think he’d ever before heard Nita put a twist on the word “technical” that practically turned it into a drawn knife. “But go ahead,” she said, and there was more humor in her voice now. “Let’s see how much technicality you’ve got packed away in this thing.” She stuffed her hands in her jeans pockets and looked unconcerned.
Kit swallowed as inconspicuously as he could. He had a very strong feeling that something quite untoward had just barely missed happening. What worries me, though, he thought, is that Penn didn’t even see it . . .
For the moment, though, it didn’t matter. “Right,” Penn said, “here it is!”
He waved his arms in a grandiose gesture. The burning blue lines and circles and angles of a spell diagram flooded out from his manual on the side table. The diagram covered the floor and then reared upward into the upper half of a sphere that closed over all their heads like a diminutive dome.
The first thing Kit noticed was that large parts of the spell diagram were missing. The wizardly construct arching over and around them was sketchy, more of a schematic than a full diagram. There was a large, empty core-sphere at the heart of the thing, the spot where the routines meant to handle interaction with the Sun’s distant surface would go. The core had big spell-powering receptor sites faired into it all over its surface, and some time had been spent on the multiple energy-scoop wizardries associated with them.
“Okay,” Nita said, before Kit could even get his mouth open, “I see where this is going.” She walked into the heart of the spell, reached out for the core-sphere—about the size of a big beach ball—and picked it up in her hands. “Now this has some possibilities. You take this construct, shove it from wherever you are into a small temporospatial tube, and drop it out the other side of that into the Sun’s chromosphere. So you can implement it from anywhere, which is good.” She turned the “beach ball” over in her hands. “All these receptors pull raw energy straight out of the solar atmosphere, so the spell, except for the verbal Speech parts and the intentional components, is powered by what you’re using it to control. That’s elegant. And all you have to do is bootstrap it with the basic spoken wizardry and your own intention, then turn it loose.”
She paused, then, and turned slowly once in a complete circle, looking over the rest of the visible spell diagram that was drawn on the dome over and around them. “So far, so good. But after that the spell’s got a whole lot of work to do, and you haven’t yet indicated how you intend to power that. What you’re planning to do is to warp the prestorm coronal structure into a kind of funnel shape over the area where you’re working, and then shoot the high-speed energy particles of the wind off in another direction, like water out the neck of the funnel. Which is fine. Now, I see the control sectors over here—”
She walked over to one side of the dome, pointing at and tracing with one finger a number of fairly complex angular structures, densely interwritten with the Speech. “And these are a nice idea, too. But you’re not going to be able to power them directly off the Sun, as you’ve already got one set of directives doing that in the spell; you can’t run them both at once in such tight quarters. At the very least, you’ve got to spin off another entire core for the control structures. It’s going to cost you more energy: maybe fifty percent more than what you thought you were originally going to spend. A solo-working wizard who has to do this spell on short notice and without prep is going to be useless for anything for a day or so afterward. So you’ve got to either repurpose this spell for group work or scale it back. If you scale it, it won’t be able to handle as much of the corona as you’re indicating you’d like to do here, but it’ll still be useful as sort of a fire extinguisher that a wizard can deploy while waiting for the heavy assistance, the fire trucks, to arrive.”
She turned around where she stood, looking at the other diagrams and annotations in the Speech that were written over the surface of the dome. “It’s a start,” Nita said. She wandered back toward Kit and Penn, and casually tossed Penn the beach ball of his spell-core. He caught it and staggered, not expecting the extra ten pounds’ worth of gravitational force that Nita had quietly imparted to it on the fly while he wasn’t paying attention. “Now all you have to do is fill in the rest of this stuff,” she said, waving her hands at the dome, which was about two-thirds empty space. “It’s interesting, though, even though generally this is more in my sister’s line of work.”
“Your sister’s a wizard?” Penn looked surprised. “Older than you? Younger?”
Oh, God, Kit thought, he doesn’t even know.
“Younger, yeah.” Nita produced a cockeyed smile full of meaning that Kit suspected Penn was completely unequipped to parse. “You two should meet.” The smile got a touch more feral. “It’d be fun.”
“So that’s the structural side,” Kit said. “Looking at it simply as a concept, I can’t see any problems. It’s a great idea, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t work. In fact, you have to wonder why no one’s done it before! Which I guess is a good sign.”
Penn preened himself a little. “I thought so,” he said, “you know? It had that feeling of . . . inevitability about it.” He grinned.
Oh, Powers That Be, Kit thought, lend me your bucket that I might stick my head in it and not have to listen to this guy’s ego parading itself around the room! He was surprised by how much this was getting to him. Have I simply not noticed how lucky I am not to have a life full of people who all think they’re the best thing since sliced bread? Even Carmela seems low-key next to this guy.
Aloud, though, Kit merely said, “Well, what’s not inevitable yet is that this is going to be ready for you to perform it in front of thousands of people in a couple of weeks. You’re short on structure right now. I know you’re, well, concerned about the sensitive aspects. Fine. You don’t know us, we don’t know you—or at least we didn’t before a day ago. But at the same time, the Powers That Be sent us to you. I’d hope that would suggest to you that your content’s safe with us. We are not just some random wizards you met in the street.”