Setting the Compass

Senka walked into the room Aeolia had led her to as the winged woman closed the door behind herself.

“I suppose this isn’t going to be just a sparring session,” the spirit stated as she took in Aeolia’s serious expression.

“Obviously,” Aeolia flatly retorted. “But it was the best idea I could come up with to get us alone.”

Senka smirked, which caused Aeolia to snap at her, “This is serious! Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

Aeolia’s admonishment only caused Senka’s smile to increase.

“Sounds like you don’t have as much of a problem as you did yesterday,” the spirit sultrily said.

Running a hand through her hair, Aeolia let out a sigh. “Look, I don’t have that much of a problem with this whole thing. Hell, I almost blew it by coming on too strong to Vivian. And that’s why if we’re going to bring this up, we have to do it carefully. I don’t want to see her freak out again.”

Senka’s smile faded and she solemnly said, “I understand. This is a lot to ask.”

“That’s the understatement of the year,” Aeolia muttered. “You’ve put me in a really difficult spot, but I’m not just going to avoid the issue. Just, it might not go the way you want."

"All I asked for was the chance," Senka remarked in a solemn tone. "If Vivian finds it uncomfortable, then I will drop it."

"Is it going to be that simple?" Aeolia asked. “Are you really going to just step back if Vivian says no?”

Senka looked at Aeolia with a sad smile.

“I suppose it does sound a bit suspicious when I say I will,” the spirit replied. “And I can’t say I wouldn’t hurt from missing out, but trying to change things by **** will just lead to more problems. I don’t have the right to ruin your relationship for my own selfish desires.”

“Man, you keep being noble and I keep feeling worse about this,” Aeolia groaned, drawing a brief giggle from Senka.

“It’s not being noble, just pragmatic,” Senka stated, her expression growing serious. “We don’t know what lies in the future and I’m not going to weaken our ability to deal with it over my sexual needs. I believe there is a quote John heard from a movie about this sort of thing: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.”
“Well, at least you’re ready for the worst,” Aeolia said. “I can respect that. Now, Vivian said it would probably take an hour to finish those arrays of hers, so we might as well make our excuse real.”

“So a real spar?” Senka asked, tilting her head to one side before casting her eye around the room. “Not really the optimal place for it. Not to mention that going knife to glaive is a bit of a mismatch in your favor.”

“Firstly, it’s not like we’re blessed with space right now, so we can’t be picky,” Aeolia remarked. “And secondly, we’re not going to use our actual weapons. We’re using these.”

Aeolia moved to a small closet and withdrew a pair of small sticks, each roughly the same dimensions as Senka’s vessel.

“Grabbed a bunch of these the other day,” Aeolia explained, handing one to the spirit. “Figured it might be good to spar against John. You know, see if training the normal way would work for him. But since I got it for him to use in place of the knife, works out nicely for you.”

Senka regarded the stick and gave it an experimental swing.

“Feels alright,” she said. “Although it feels a bit strange to wield something that’s not my vessel. How should we start?”

Aeolia took a position opposite Senka and raised her own faux weapon.

“We’ll take it slow to start,” Aeolia instructed, drawing her wings close to her back. “I’m not well practiced in knife fighting, but I know the basics. Keep the blade up and try to narrow your profile. And be ready to quickly move back from an attack. Dodge and strike is the name of the game. Try to attack me.”

Senka nodded and rushed at Aeolia, thrusting her wooden blade at the shorter woman. Aeolia dipped to Senka’s left, easily dodging her strike and lightly stabbed under Senka’s breast.

“That’s what you want to avoid,” Aeolia remarked in a serious tone. “Leave yourself open and you die. Even if you’ve got magic to spare, a quick strike and boom, you’re done.”

“Understood,” Senka said, shifting back into a readied stance. “So, how should I engage in physical combat?”

Aeolia smirked and began to impart what knowledge she had on close quarter combat.

Vivian’s desk was clean, save for a single large sheet of paper covered in arcane symbols. The rest of her small office was another story, with pages of notes taped to the walls and opened books lying on the floor. The redhead herself sat at the desk, hunched over the page, pencil in hand as she worked on the tracking array.

She bit her lip and tapped her writing implement as she stared at a particular line, some part of the script not to her liking. With an errant gesture, she twisted the light in the room, causing a projection of one of the pages around her to appear.

“Oh, I need to inverse that input,” she muttered after a moment of review, making the edit she needed. “Now it makes sense. And that means these should link up and boost the signal, and…”

She trailed off as her pencil danced across the paper, symbols and lines sketched down in quick succession, only slowing when Vivian had to check some of her references. Still, as she neared the completion of the project, her resolve to finish it burned with increased fervor.

“OK, the receiver's pretty much set, just need to get it set into something more permanent than a sheet of paper,” she said. “We probably could craft some of those pieces of metal into a sheet to put this on. That should be fine. Now, to finish the sending mechanism.”

Vivian carefully set her completed work aside and withdrew a smaller sheet of rune covered paper from a drawer. The work on this part of the project was further along, only needing a few minor tweaks in her opinion.

“If I shift this a bit I can increase the range, but it’ll strain the power conduit sequence,” she muttered as she toyed with a revision. “It’ll drain a touch faster though. Is it too much of a risk?”

She ran through the calculations, trying to find the optimal ratio between range and power usage. Too much mana running through the system could lead to premature burnout or the signal being detected and countered, but too weak left the range too short to be useful.

“If we had unlimited resources, we could set a mana infused gem to power it without worry, but we can save that for a later version,” the redhead said in a minorly irritated voice. “For now, we just have to deal with manually charging them up.”

She surveyed her work again, looking for any piece of the array that could be a weak point.

“Power systems are as good as I can make them,” she muttered, brushing back a bit of her hair. “Broadcasting sequences look up to par. Stabilizers are good. Don’t think there’s anything else I can add and now I just need to give it a test run.”

Vivian reached over to the receiver array and ran some of her mana into the power sequence. There was no flashing light or sound to indicate it was functioning but Vivian could feel the current of magic flowing through the system. She let her perception follow the circuit as it made its way through the array, powering each of its functions.

“Distribution is good, receiver is good, alerts are powered,” Vivian rattled off as the array’s systems fired up. “Everything seems to be working nicely. Let’s see if the beacon works just as well.”

Pulling back from the bigger array, Vivian paused, letting it run for a few seconds to see if things would run smoothly without her or anyone’s input. Nodding once she deemed things acceptable on that front, she picked up the smaller piece of paper and began to charge it.

“Hmm, seems like it’ll take about ten minutes to fully charge,” Vivian estimated from the rate the mana buffer was filling. “Wish I could increase the charge rate, but I don’t want to risk things getting messed up in compression, so this’ll have to work. Ten minutes for close to ten hours of charge isn’t a bad ratio.”

She only charged it for a minute, only needing to have enough to let it start operating. Indeed, the array’s functions kicked in at the sixty-first second, triggering a reaction from the paper on her desk, a small golden sphere of light appeared in the center of the circle for a second before fading.

“OK, mana dependent light projection works,” Vivian said, letting out a small sigh as that was the most ambitious part of her design, a way to tell whose device was connected or disconnected. “And now to see if the cut off alert works.”

With a careful hand, Vivian took her pencil and erased a portion of the array. In terms of functionally, the removed portion was little more than one of many sequences that helped to regulate the mana flow. But, as designed, even a minor loss of power caused the entire system to shut down. And as it did, the receiver produced an arrow of gold light, this one remaining visible and pointing right to where she was.

Vivian smiled as she looked at the projection more closely. A single patch of darker gold stood out near the base of the shaft, the indicator of how far the last signal was, in this case, one kilometer or less.

Vivian hummed thoughtfully as a pulse emanated from the receiver, another part of the alert system. It was toned down at the moment, only needing a small modification to reach its intended range, but it would release periodic waves of mana to signal someone had been cut off.

Looking down at the page in her hand, she let out a sigh.

“Wish I didn’t have to build up a charge before the beacon began broadcasting,” Vivian lamented as she fixed the beacon’s array, returning the receiver to its inactive state. “Now I have to wait for it to wear down to see if the subroutine regarding a beacon running out of power instead of getting cut off will trigger.”

Deciding to spend her time wisely, Vivian pulled out the notes she had made on the array on Beth’s wrist. It wasn’t much, mostly the outer security, but once that was cracked, she’d had access to the whole system, and from there, an easy path to disabling it.

She didn’t get much headway when a knock on her door drew her back from her work.

“Hey, Vi, are you in the middle of anything?” Aeolia asked through the door.

“Not really, come in,” Vivian answered. “Just doing some brainstorming for later projects.”

“Done with the GPS thing?” Aeolia inquired as she and Senka entered the room.

“More or less,” Vivian replied, turning around to face them. “First tests ran well, just waiting to see if the receiver’s going to work correctly when it comes to a transmitter that just ran out of power instead of getting cut off.”

“What if the signal was cut off as the power died?” Senka asked, her eye sweeping over the array as one would a painting.

“That’s a one in a million risk,” Vivian said, “and it’s one that doesn’t really have a solution besides making sure we keep the transmitters charged. Someone trapping one of us right as the transmitter dies isn’t any different from them doing it when the transmitter’s been dead for a while.”

“A fair point,” the spirit acknowledged.

Aeolia let out a small cough then said, “We didn’t drop by just to see if you were done. There’s, um, something Senka wants to ask of us.”

Vivian’s brow raised and she focused her attention on Senka. For a moment, she thought she saw a flash of nervousness break the busty spirit’s normally cool expression.

“Well, I’m all ears,” Vivian remarked. “What’s up?”

“I’ll be blunt,” Senka said. “I wish to join your relationship with John.”

Vivian blinked owlishly as she processed Senka’s words.

“You want to,” she managed out, her face heating up. “Join us. Like…”

“As your girlfriend and lover, yes,” Senka calmly finished. “I am attracted to all of you in both the physical sense and in terms of your personalities. I understand that’s a large idea to wrap your head around.”

“Just a bit,” the redhead breathed out, running a hand through her hair. Her eyes flicked over to Aeolia and she continued, “Um, do you mind if Aeolia and I talk about this?”

Senka smiled softly and nodded once. “Of course not. I don’t think we would be having this conversion if you accepted my request right away. I’ll go back to the training room.”

The spirit turned on her heel and exited Vivian’s office, leaving her two prospective lovers to discuss her proposition.

Thanks again for reading this little story. If you liked the chapter, please hit that thumbs up, and if you want to support my writing, check out my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/ScrapCrow. Get access to my chapters before they’re published here and join my private Discord.