Return of the Runebound Professor

As it turned out, Moxie hadn’t really considered where they were going to eat either. The pair of them spent about twenty minutes trying to figure out somewhere to go get food before they both promptly gave up and decided it could be handled the following day.

There would be class tomorrow, so the most important thing to handle for the time was letting all the students know that it would be slightly delayed. There was a brief instant where Noah wondered if he was meant to feel marginally guilty for delaying class purely so he could go on a date with his girlfriend.

He dismissed that notion. There was no point to have power if you didn’t abuse it. That was where all the fun came in. And it wasn’t like the students would be alone. Lee was going to be bored while he and Moxie were out, which meant there were likely some stretching sessions with the students’ names written in blood on them.

Noah and Moxie didn’t have any trouble letting everyone know about the delay. They didn’t mention the reason, but chances were that the kids had figured it out considering that both of their teachers were both suddenly planning a delay at the exact same time.

After their brief stint around campus, they returned to their room. It was still relatively early in the evening. There were several hours left before night fell, which left them with two options. Either they could sit around and try to brainstorm where they were going to get food tomorrow, or they could do quite literally anything else.

“If we’ve got a few hours with nothing happening, it feels like now might be a pretty good time for me to try and get some help with my pattern,” Moxie said. “It’s kind of hard to encapsulate it with just motions. Do you think we’d be able to use a Mind Meld potion so I can show you what I’m doing in an area where I can’t accidentally risk blowing anything up?”

“That’s a good idea,” Noah said. He reached into his bag and frowned. “I’ve only got one left right now, though. Do you–”

Moxie pulled a blue vial out of her own bag. “Have one.”

“Nice. Good thinking.”

He set his bag down and sat down on her bed, moving over to the back to make room for Moxie. She followed suit, but followed after him and wasted all the space he’d left. Moxie scooted up until her back was pressed to his chest and her hair was tickling his nose.

“Ready?” Moxie asked, popping the seal off the potion.

Noah’s reply was lost in a cough as her hair got into his mouth. She snickered and drank her half of the potion before handing it over her shoulder to him. He craned his neck back to free himself from the prison of red hair for just long enough to remove the second seal and pour the potion down his throat.

He set the vial down and wrapped his arms around Moxie, holding her as a familiar buzzing enveloped his mind. A blanket of darkness rushed up and swallowed him whole, and then he was flying.

A few moments later, Noah found himself standing in the forest of Moxie’s soul. He shook off the last effects of the potion as the vines beneath him twisted up into a chair and pushed themselves into his legs, forcing him to sit.

Moxie stepped out from behind him, a twisting knot of vines in her hands. She held it up, then paused as a thought struck her.

“Wait. We can shape our souls pretty much how we want to as long as we don’t go against anything core to us, but there’s no way the pattern could somehow damage me from within, is there?” Moxie asked.

“I… don’t think so,” Noah said slowly. He wasn’t quite so certain that he’d bet on it. Magic had some odd effects, but he couldn’t recall ever getting soul damage from anything other than death or splitting runes. “You should be fine. If worse comes to worst, I’ll just use the Fragment of Renewal to patch you up. Realistically, any soul damage you take is actually safer than normal damage. I can only heal the former.”

“Good point. In that case, I’m going to start. My pattern is growth, right?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Noah asked, trying to keep the teacher from entering his voice and failing miserably. Moxie’s eyes narrowed and a vine coiled at Noah’s elbow, poking at his side threateningly.

“Don’t make me waste the potion tickling you. Vines are really good at it,” Moxie warned. “And I have enough money to blow on another potion.”

“Okay, okay,” Noah said with a laugh. “Go on, then. Show me.”

Moxie held the ball of twisting plant matter in her palms up. He wasn’t actually sure if the ball was something she could form in the normal world – it was just spinning above her palm like a little planet.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“This is basically what I want to do,” Moxie said, answering Noah’s question before he could even ask it.

She held the ball up and vines erupted from it. They rushed out like a wave, falling over each other in their haste to erupt into the sky and blanket out the sun. Midway through the explosion, they froze.

Noah squinted up at the vines. It only took him a few moments to see what Moxie was trying to do. There were patterns in the literal growth. Every vine in the deluge had its own purpose and was acting like a line within a rune.

It was… painfully complex. When it was still, there was no problem. The issue was that Moxie’s vines were all moving at once. If she wanted to completely bring this pattern under her control, she’d need to be able to control every single one of them at once.

“This is… a lot,” Noah said slowly.

“Yeah,” Moxie said. “You see my problem?”

“I see why you aren’t trying this in the real world,” Noah said with a nod. He chewed his lower lip. “What have you been doing to practice the pattern without magic?”

“I’ve mostly been doing this,” Moxie admitted. “The problem is that growth in the real world is ridiculously slow. I spent some time accelerating the growth of random plants to see how they grew, but the problem is that I don’t just want growth. I want to make the growth into a Formation itself.”

Noah walked in a circle around the frozen canopy of vines. Moxie was clearly serious about this. Even if it was just in her head, he wasn’t finding any issue in the actual shapes and lines that she’d formed with the vines.

There was definitely a pattern in them. There was no denying that. Noah was somewhat sure that even if Moxie brought this out and tried to do something similar, as long as she did it like this, it would work.

He just didn’t know what would happen if she put magic into it. There was a subtle but significant difference between what she was aiming for and what the others were doing. They were putting magic into a nonmagical pattern.

She was using magic to make the pattern and would then be putting magic into it again. It was functionally skipping an entire step. Noah would have preferred to tell Moxie that she needed to find an intermediatory, but the issue arose in choosing what that would be.

She’s right. Growth is really slow. She can accelerate it with her magic, but everything about her plants is inherently magical. It’s not like Moxie can just carry around a flower on her shoulder and ask her opponent to wait a month for it to bloom when she’s fighting.

“You haven’t made this easy on yourself,” Noah observed.

“I’ve never been one for easy things, but I’d rather not waste time if you think it’s completely impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” Noah said. “Just difficult. I suppose I should start by asking where exactly it is you are in terms of the pattern and what you’re most worried about. Then I can give my thoughts after that.”

Moxie waved her hand and the vines vanished. The ground beneath her feet rose up into a chair and she sat down. Noah headed over to his own chair, then changed course and headed over to Moxie to pull her to her feet. She sent him a confused look for a second as he took her spot.

“What are you–”

Noah pulled her back down to sit in his lap. “Okay. Now you can talk.”

“You’re so cheesy,” Moxie said as she leaned back into him. She made absolutely no moves to get up. “There are a few problems. The first is that I don’t know what’ll happen if I try to make a pattern with magic plants. Will it have a chance to blow up?”

“It should actually be pretty safe,” Noah said. “Your runes can only do a single thing at once, and you can only use one rune at a time. For once, that’s actually useful. If you’re using your magic to make plants, the pattern will literally only be a pattern.”

“Well, shit.” Moxie said with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m an idiot. I didn’t think about that. Maybe I’m spending too much time around you.”

“If that was true, you would have tried it and ended up blowing yourself up somehow anyway.”

“Oh, yeah. That probably would have been more likely. So I can try to make a pattern with the plants and it should be fine.”

“Yeah. You might want to be careful with your Master Rune, though. If you end up letting magic slip out of that and into the pattern – you’ve got the same issue. Granted, you don’t have it Imbued into your soul so I don’t think that should be possible, but be aware of it.”

“Okay. That leads me to the second question. Let’s say I manage to get the pattern out of the plants – growth logically means I have to keep getting bigger. Does that mean I’d have to keep an enormous number of vines all in the exact same shape and continue to constantly add more of them if I want to keep the pattern going?”

“Depends on your view of growth, probably,” Noah said after a few seconds of thought. “But that seems possible. Maybe you could try to add a second half to the pattern?”

“A second half?”

“Yeah. Something to temper the growth, like a cycle. Cycles are patterns. A while ago you told me that you like flowers. Could you try to go for the whole life cycle of the flower as your pattern rather than just the part where it gets bigger?”

“Like from where it sprouts as a seed to where it dies?”

“Exactly. I don’t really know if that fits what you were thinking, but it’s got growth in it. It would let you have a pattern that has some elements of what you wanted without having to worry about it getting out of hand.”

“You think that would work? Just a flower?”

“I mean, simple isn’t bad. Flowers are nice – and I can already think of some pretty nasty combinations you could do with a full life cycle if you can really find a way to boil that down into a pattern and eventually a Formation.”

“Me too,” Moxie said. Her voice drifted away as she lost herself in her thoughts for a second. She twisted so that she was sitting sideways in Noah’s lap. “Well, damn it. I’m going to need to completely change the way I think about this. I think it’ll go a lot faster this time around though.”

“Well, you’ve got like… twenty-five minutes left in the potion.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got other plans for those now. You should have stayed in your chair.” Moxie flashed Noah a grin.

It didn’t take him long to decide that he most certainly did not regret stealing her chair.

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