Search for traps and treasure

[aestrix]

There is a library.

It is actually an excellent example of one: it has books on history and philosophy and astronomy and science and languages and even a little modest section for storybooks, tucked in a corner against the wall. These books are all easy to pick up off the shelves and read, like ordinary libraries.

The books on magic, on the other hand, are behind locked and spelled glass, with their position signatures scrambled and constantly shifting so they can't be teleported away, each one built to set off a silent alarm that'll alert the owner if touched, and to turn completely blank if opened without permission. And then burst into flames if someone tries to force it to show what it's hiding or tampered with in the wrong sort of way.

Just another day in Kystle. Stealing peeks from books in a mage's library is not recommended for the casual reader.

Comments

[pythbox]

Three identical small boys appear in the library.

They examine the magic bookcase with three slightly different expressions: interest and excitement, interest and focus, interest and anticipation.

Then the one in the middle makes a reaching gesture and pulls an apparently-solid copy of one of the books out of thin air.

"How'd you do that?" whispers the first one, impressed.

"Illusions and shields," the second one whispers back.

The third boy takes the book and sits at a table and starts reading it while the first two hold an intense whispered conference on mana efficiency and spell design.

[aestrix]

A girl about their age hears something from the library. She pokes her head in, wondering if one of the cats has gotten trapped in there.

...

That's not one of the cats. That's - three identical small boys, in the library.

Um.

She un-pokes her head, and tries to decide what to do.

[pythbox]

The first two boys break off their conversation and glance toward the door. The third boy ignores everything and reads his illusory book.

[aestrix]

That is a bad sign.

The girl stays very very quiet, and tries to remember the exact steps to follow to silently alert her mother with magic. She is pretty sure she's not equipped to deal with this.

[pythbox]

One of the former whisperers pokes his head out of the library.

"Um, hi?" he says tentatively.

[aestrix]

"Hi," says the girl, awkwardly. "Why are you in my library."

(Well, her family's.)

[pythbox]

He grins sheepishly. "We... were bored?"

[aestrix]

"You. Were bored. So you broke into a mage's library?" She sounds somewhere between bemused, annoyed, and sort of awed. "You know some of them explode, right? Some of them explode."

[pythbox]

"We have done way dumber things than this when we were bored," he assures her, then pauses to reflect on how that was maybe not the most reassuring thing he could possibly have said. "...Anyway, we're not touching the exploding books."

[aestrix]

"Is. That supposed to make me feel better?"

[pythbox]

"Well, if we're not touching the exploding books then they won't explode, and I imagine you don't want your library to explode," he says hopefully. "So that part's good, right?"

[aestrix]

"This library doesn't explode," snorts the girl. "That would be stupid. You'd just get some burns, the library would be fine."

[pythbox]

"...I can actually think of at least three different ways someone could screw up dismantling your security spells and blow up your library by accident," he says, "but that's not the point, because we're not doing anything to your security spells."

[aestrix]

"But you are reading the books," she observes, accusingly.

[pythbox]

"Yeah, but look, all the important ones are right where they should be," he says, pointing triumphantly into the library at the spelled glass which is indeed totally undisturbed.

[aestrix]

All of the important ones are not there, the girl doesn't say.

She notes the books are all safely under the spelled glass. She notes that one of the books is being read anyway - even though its exact copy is still sitting safely on the shelf, undisturbed.

"... How'd you manage that?" she wonders.

[pythbox]

The talkative triplet grins at her. "You tell me," he invites.

[aestrix]

She looks at him and smiles a bit, then looks at the copy of the book.

The book on the shelf is undisturbed. The copy being read -

Is an illusion. But it's being touched? Oh. It's an illusion and some kind of ultra-complicated construct-thing made out of a shield?

"... I think I'm missing something," she says, sounding disappointed. "Making a shield construct that holds an illusion exactly mirroring the internal structure of a book is outrageously expensive, are you doing something to make a blank book look like a shield construct...?"

[pythbox]

"It's not that expensive," says the boy who is neither talkative nor reading.

"I told you how to make it more efficient," says the talkative one. "You could be using half that much mana if you didn't insist on making every single page behave right even when they're flat together and nobody would notice."

"It would hardly qualify as a proper functioning copy of a book in that case," sniffs the quieter one.

"Snob," says the talkative one.

"Sloppy ingrate," says the quieter one, but there's a smile in his eyes.

The talkative one sticks his tongue out at his brother. "Nyeh."

Meanwhile, the third triplet peacefully reads his book and ignores them both. (Although the small smile suggests he's paying at least some attention.)

[aestrix]

"Not that expensive in comparison to what?" wonders the girl. "Even with the more efficient design where the pages don't behave right when they're flat together, if you keep the book around for ten minutes it's more expensive than bringing a blank book and copying everything over. And then you just have the book forever and can take it home."

[pythbox]

"Ten minutes? Try an hour," says the quieter one, smugly. "Which is plenty of time to read it in."

The talkative one snorts. "She's right that it would make more sense to copy it in a way we could actually take home, though."

[aestrix]

"An hour? How'd you -" Scrying occurs. "... Wait. You. You spelled the air? But how are you keeping it from - oh. Oh and then it's just keeping the air together, which the shield helps with, that's clever."

[pythbox]

The quieter one grins.

"Isn't it though?" the talkative one says happily.

[aestrix]

"Very!" agrees the girl who has completely forgotten that she should not be geeking out over magic with strange people that have broken into her home. "I bet you could use this for other things that don't need to be permanent but do need to stick around for long enough that you couldn't do it with a shield, a book really doesn't seem like the best thing for this, there's lots of little inconvenient places that you might want something in," she walks past the talkative one and to the spelled glass shelf. "There's a book in here about small shield usage in the body for use in surgery, I wonder if... Aha, there you are."

She goes to open the glass case, and stops before she actually touches the glass. "... You should probably still not be reading books in this library."

[pythbox]

"Why not?" says the talkative one. "And which book is it?" He peers at the shelf to try to figure out which one she was talking about.