IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.6, Party 5.3, 5.8

I drew again. A straight line. Near the middle, a zigzagging line recognizable as stairs. A ball floating opposite of the stairs, and wavy lines coming from the ground and into the ball. A question mark.

“…The sun?” Tyr asked.

“Sun rays don’t bend,” Kamella commented, spending several moments inspecting my message. “You’re suggesting–no… you’re asking if we can somehow drain the mana you produce?”

I nodded, then tilted my ant’s head. Could that be done?

“…It… can be done,” Tyr said, staring at the ground with a frown. “I mean, absorbing ambient mana is one of the basics of thaumaturgy. But to control the output of a dungeon, even a small one…” He turned to Kamella. “Do we have anyone who knows how to do that on this scale?”

Kamella shook her head. “We haven’t had a thaumaturge since Sagulla and her son left us for the capital, and I am fairly certain a work of this scale would have been beyond her talents, in any case. That being said, it’s possible that someone who can be trusted has the knowledge we require. Could you inquire about this through your contacts? Quietly, of course.”

—IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.6



I continued drawing my revision of the plan. I made Jaya the thaumaturge come to the fort next, and made her hit a block of stone with a wrench, which then popped into a sphere in which the pure mana flowed.

“Ah, we’ve discussed this before,” Kamella noted. “You mean using a thaumaturgic device to absorb your mana and prevent it from being released in the wilds, correct?”

Thumbs up.

“Can thaumaturgy even do that?” Karjn asked at Amnassah and Eira. The two mages shared looks, then the man shrugged.

“I believe so? Thaumaturgy is the art of creating special enchantments that are empowered by pure mana instead of personal mana; the goal is normally to do a lot with as little mana as possible, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to do very little with a lot of mana. I am, however, not well versed on the subject, as you already know.”

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.3



“And that should do the trick,” Jaya said as she slid the final piece into place. She’d been up all night completing the device on top of the previous day’s adventures, but while her exhaustion was showing on her face, it wasn’t showing in her eyes or her behavior.

The mana sink, as Jaya had taken to calling it, didn’t look like much. It was an iron cylinder about a foot tall and half that wide propped on a tripod of iron legs. The innards, fully concealed at the moment, were fairly elaborate, with circuit-like threads of gold lining the plates, wrapping around gold and iron hatch-sealed boxes filled with crystal dust. Central to the whole thing was, of course, the large, gelatin-like, vitrous-white concoction Amnassah had crafted from the eyes of my spiders; it filled up most of the available volume and was the only internal piece really sticking out of the device; one of the tips hung about an inch from the bottom of the cylinder.

“All we need to do now is twist this bit sunwise,” Jaya said, pointing at a ring of iron sticking out near the sink’s top. “Twist it, then step back and cover your eyes because that shit’s gonna be bright as fuck.”

She took the device in her hands, then handed it to Karjn.

“Here you go, boss. That’s one freshly made mana sink, good for… eh… give it ten, fifteen days?” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Long enough for me to start making a better one before it craps out, anyway.”

“Good work,” Karjn said, immediately handing the device over to Olivia. “Get to the fort, set this up in a room somewhere and turn it on.”

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.8