I drummed my fingers, wrestling with the idea of what to do with this situation. “The girl is bound to her wheelchair because the Soul of the Acropolis is too powerful for her body. She needs to advance to Archmage to be powerful enough to sustain it, but relying on the Soul of Hera will restrict her future to what the Soul can give her, instead of earning it on her own.”

“That is true. Not a bad thing from our standpoint, but a definite cap on her,” Briggs agreed cautiously.

“Have Sama offer her a Mark and Wizardry training.”

Briggs’ pale violet eyes almost popped at the unexpected offer. “Oh. Oh, ho. That is a very Good move...”

“Furthermore, it comes with the caveat that she must learn the Void Element on breaking through to Sage, not Water. Wizardry will give her personal power the edge, and her choice of Element will be sufficient to wrest control of her destiny from the Soul of the Acropolis. Her goal is to exceed Hera, not to be subject to her.”

“It also means she will be the first member of the Acropolis with the ability to use Raise Dead. The cornerstone power the Soul gives her will be next to useless at that point, the Soul becomes just a cultivation aid and a blessing from the founder.” Briggs thought that over, nodding repeatedly. “Yes, that is a good move. She’s already a Psychic Mage, so she can easily cover for what the Mark does. Just the Caster Level benefit of Wizardry will give her an unassailable lead in power over her counterparts in the core powers of the Acropolis...”

“And she will have the Healing Domain. Even if we don’t tell her, she’ll have a connection to Heaven.”

Briggs wagged a big finger at me in solemn appreciation. “You are a manipulative stinker!” he chided me formally.

“She’s a White. Good things should happen to Good people,” I replied to that, and he just grinned again. I didn’t feel right playing manipulative games on a White person.

“I like it. It is a very Good move, indeed. Learning Wizardry will slow her down, as she’s not engaged much in direct combat, but if she can make Ten, well... she’ll have a half-Sage’s power the instant she makes Archmage, and any uses of Resurrection will basically have little to no effect on her, she’ll just need the goldweight...”

“Which a certain organization can also supply her...” I noted ironically, and he didn’t miss that, either.

“Being able to Energize to Light and Healing doesn’t mean she’ll have the gemstones,” he agreed slowly. “It’s going to be pretty amazing when Typeless Mages get up there and can do the same, but if she’s tossing Sage spells...”

“She could potentially Resurrect small armies,” I said, and even Briggs sucked in a breath. It was not something to be done lightly... but if people could be slaughtered en masse by Dark Magic, they could also be restored by its opposite...

“Divine Mother of the Acropolis will be right...” he had to say, and I had to nod as well. Sharing a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing, and Wizardry was not a ‘little’ knowledge. It was a completely new way to look at their own world of magic and relationships with Mana, Beasts, and powers from other Realms.

--------------

“Energetic Infusion, often shortened to Energize. It is one of the most critical powers of Arcane Casters, able to slowly infuse the characteristics of Mana into natural substances, attuning them to the primal forces of Mana.”

I surveyed my audience calmly, both in Markspace and in reality. I had their strict attention, as most of them knew what Energize could do by now, it being one of the primary ways they were getting their hands on extremely rare Isotopes and the like, without paying through the nose to dealers in rare minerals, plants, and other substances.

Today’s class was being held outside. I had several heaping mounds of colored rocks around me, occasionally sparking, crackling, smoking, or misting with puffs of the raw Mana they contained.

“The more adept among you are by now familiar with the Shape Stone spell, and its uses in molding things. If you’ve done your research, you also know that higher Valences of the spell are capable of working on metals and crystals, not just stone. You also know that there are variants of the spell that work on all the Elements, from Fire to Lightning.

“What you probably wondered about are the real-life uses for such spells. We’re going to be demonstrating some cross-disciplinary stuff, on how Magery and Wizardry can indeed work together on things.

“Captain Mick, come on up to the mound of fulgurton here.” I pointed to the mound of faintly yellow and purple rocks, the occasional purple spark of Lightning Mana popping irritably over it. “For all of you who don’t recognize it, fulgurton is the raw ore from which Fulgur’s Copper comes from, which we know alchemically as Lightning-aspect Copper, or volturium, its proper name.

“This mound of stuff is just tailings left from the big mine up in the Pikelands at Copper Harbor. This is very low-quality ore, not worth the transporting cost to refine, and there are literal hills of it left around the mines up there, just there for the taking... if you can make something of it.”

The Mick walked up, his custom tonfa-style Wand in his hand, which began to spark with a constant faint electrical field from its Shocking Enchantment.

“For all your information, this little trick took the captain here over three hundred tries to work out correctly. Extend out your Earth Magic senses and watch closely what he is doing.” I did Detect Magic V for the Markspace watchers and fed them my impression... and not a few of the other students here, too, who wanted the double perspective.

The Mick twirled his Wand, and then focused the Energize to Lightning Infusion through it. Instead of actually trying to spread into the basically worthless stone there, he instead touched the faint remnants of Lightning Copper inside the rocks, and sparked it up.

In an instant, a huge chunk of the pile in front of him lit up with new energy, startling a lot of the students with the sudden increase in Lightning Mana.

The Mick promptly Cast his Stone Shape at IV, sparking with an edge of Lightning from his Wand, into the mass of it, and extended the happy mass even further with the additional energy.

Then he grabbed hold of it, and pulled all that active metal out.

With a quiet rumble, a whole chunk of the mound in front of us collapsed as sparkling orange-purple metal was extracted from the rock, flowing up into the Mick’s hand and forming into sort of a ball with a handle attached to it, seething and humming with constrained Lightning Mana.

The Mick slowly lowered down the weighty ball of Fulgur’s Copper to the ground, eyes focused on the mound of ore there. With another gesture and another Stone Shape, all the waste rock flowed and reshaped itself into standard-sized bricks, ready for use.

“Let’s get rid of the whole mound, Mick,” I told him. He just nodded, and everyone watched silently as he repeated the process again and again.

It took him about ten minutes to reduce the entire mound to a carefully stacked pile of bricks, and Driver Sam even set some pallets waiting at the side down so everything could be carted off easily by forklifts later. We were left with a couple dozen round spheres of Fulgur’s Copper of variable sizes on the ground.

“Looks like about two hundred kilos of copper out of that mound, 99.9% pure,” I judged, looking at the little balls. “Fulgur’s Copper goes for about forty-three dollars a pound, so Captain Mick here just made almost nine grand for about ten minutes of work, and can either sell off the bricks for change or charity, as he likes. The irregular veining work actually makes them popular in certain sectors.”

Shaping Stone with such precision was not easy for lesser mages at all, and certainly not so easy and quickly as the devoted spell made it. Extracting the copper so quickly was also far cheaper than smelting it!

“There are literally hundreds of thousands of tons of this stuff sitting all over the Pikelands, metals of various types in ores, which can be pulled out, and the tailings made safe and non-intrusive for the animals who live there. The key here is using the Energizing Infusion both to reinforce the existing Mana and establish the connection throughout as much of the ore as possible, then piggy-backing on top of that ore with the Shape Stone to grab the stuff with resonance and pull it out. The little bit of extra juice from the Shocking on his Wand only helps.”

“For those of you who don’t understand what she’s really saying, lemme sum it up: while we can do it to mounds of tailings nobody wants, we can also take the pure stuff out of the ground in the field, without having to smelt it at all,” Swampy Bjorn spoke up quickly. “Any miner around with the technique, right Element, and Shape Stone can do the same!”

I could feel the thoughts racing at the idea of miners actually being able to mine and pull out their own metals, instead of having to just carve their way down to the ore and pull out masses of stone and minerals and ship them off to be smelted or refined. It would really change the ways things needed to be mined, and reduce the need for mine owners and lots of capital to get such things working like they did.

It was another way to shake things up and push the power down to the miners, as they wouldn’t need the capital/money-intensive services of those in power... and even to the hugely powerful, there was a limit on how much they could do at one time, and they all had demands on their time. What Archmage wanted to mine all day?

They didn’t do it now, they’d only do it for something important and easy in the future.

“Red, Big John, Lord Quake, you’re up!” I pointed to the smoking stash of very low-grade gildiron ore. The two men and the Drake, who’d been drawing a lot of curious looks, got up and headed over to the tumbled hill of coal-black ore. “Gildiron tailings, people. Not only low composition, but low quality. Show ‘em, Lord Quake!”

The powerful Drake ambled up, gave the mound a sniff, and turned up his nostrils so disdainfully everyone just hooted and cheered his opinion of the stuff.

“Watch this three-way teamwork here. Red, Energize Fire Infusion.” He obligingly reached out into the poor metal and ore, and there was a lambent glow across a spread of it, lighting up bit by bit. “John, Shape some Fire. Lord Quake, some flame, if you would.”

The Earthdoom Drake rumbled, fire seeping between the edges of his dark grey scales as his power built inside him. The short and stout Big John looked very intense as he wove his spell...

It wasn’t anything like a gentle breath. Lord Quake just let it rip, and a howling inferno blazed out of his maw.

John had one hand held to the incoming stream of incandescent fury, the other towards the mound of crappy ore. Those watching held their breath in shock as he hooked it into Red’s spell, and all that incoming breath flowed around him, into the spell, and thence directly into the mound of gildiron ore.

The whole mound of it lit up slowly, and then with greater and greater speed as the power of the Drake’s breath Infused them, brightening and seething with Fire Mana. Reluctant smoke and weakly protesting sizzling became cracks and pops and hissing surges of light and fire as suddenly the whole damn mound looked like it had been heated red hot, pulsing with delicate strands of Fire Mana.

“Pull it out, John. Nice flame, Lord Quake!” He’d done just enough for what was needed, not a pound more.

John reached in with Shaping Stone at IV, and pulled out the ore, the burning metal flowing out like lava into the sphere he assembled in front of him. It looked like a ball of near-molten metal, burning heart shining between cracks in the blackness as the whole amount of metal in the mound became one bright burning ball that reached knee-high in front of him.

“And look at that Assay.” The magic swept over it, and everyone whistled.

High-grade gildiron! It was worth twenty times what the low-grade it had once been was worth...

“You need a good source of magical flame to do that, Lord Quake’s is excellent, but, say, getting a direct feed of Heaven Fire Mana off a Refractory Tower could do the same.” Heads turned towards the Towers in the distance. “More to the point, look at the fluctuations inside it...”