Runelords 42.1 - Appeal to Logic

“...Hey Luna,” Virgil ventured, walking up to her. They were in the sealed Valparisian library, studying for the ritual that would take them, and their foes, to the Runeforge. It was a few days after Khyr and Virgil had returned from the Undead Nation, curing Khyr’s curse and returning it to the mummy’s box still in Luna’s possession, much to Khyr’s ill-restrained fury. Luna had been keeping pointedly to herself the whole while, and the mood concerning her was tense. “May I speak with you for a minute?”
“Not like my opinion ever stopped you from talking before,” she said snidely, not looking up.
Virgil flinched under her jab, but she didn’t notice. “...That’s...fair…” he replied slowly before taking a breath. He played with the sleeve of his shirt for a second before admitting slowly, “I...am not good at being deceptive, and I don’t want things to get...acrimonious, so, I’m going to try and appeal to your logic, and hope for the best.”
“I don’t think logic is much your strong suit either,” she jabbed at him again.
He gave a single, sad snort of laughter, “Yeah, probably not.” He sighed, “Luna...how much do you know about intelligent objects?”
Luna’s focus slipped slightly away; her fingers drummed lightly on the desk and her gaze was sightless, though her eyes were still trained on the book before her. “...Some,” she said.
“Do you know what their biggest defining property is?”
“Their intelligence?” she said, as though Virgil was a complete idiot.
“Heh,” he smiled humorlessly. “Not necessarily, actually. The actual intelligence imbued into an inanimate object can very greatly. You can get everything from swords that act almost human, to rocks that just feel sort of happy when you pat them. Their ‘personality’ if they have one, their actual level of knowledge, reasoning capability: those are just a reflection of how much power and skill was put into making them. No. The actual, most defining trait, is that they have a purpose. All intelligent items have a purpose, and a drive to fulfil that purpose.”
Luna tapped her finger before sighing laboriously, “Just make your stupid point.”
He looked at her a touch sadly for a moment before frowning and stating with all seriousness, “...Zara is a definitively evil-aligned intelligent object, whose purpose at this point, I can only assume, is to train people to become master-class necromancers. As an intelligent item, particularly as a powerful one, it does have the ability to subtly influence its user’s behaviour, and it will use that power if it furthers its agenda. It can and will alter you to match what it wants.”
“...You think that Zara is controlling me,” she said dryly.
That’s ridiculous, Zara intoned in her mind.
“Not controlling. Influencing,” Virgil maintained, “But don’t for a moment think that it couldn’t try to take over your mind directly, if it felt like it.”
“Last I checked, I’m still immune to mind games,” Luna said off-handedly.
“Yeah, great thing about magic, you’d be surprised how many loopholes it has,” Virgil said with a touch of lightness. “You’re immune to most spells, sure, but you’re not immune to all magic, and if it’s making some sort of long-term bonding effect or other passive ability, who’s to say what would and wouldn’t affect you? Put enough power and direction behind something, and you can eventually break any ‘rule’. And whoever made that book obviously didn’t spare expense with it.”
He’s being rather disrespectful, Zara said primly.
“Don’t refer to Zara as ‘it’,” Luna said coldly.
“...As much as Zara sounds and acts like a being, ‘she’s’ still just a book, not a person,” he said.
“Funny,” she said, her voice light but edged with ice, “People often say the same thing about undead.”
Virgil frowned at the comparison, and he had to take a moment’s pause before he continued, “I’m sorry. You’re right. But that doesn’t change the fact that Zara does have an agenda, and that she's using you to fulfil it.”
“That’s stupid,” she replied.
Zara agreed, It is.
“Really? Is it?” Virgil coaxed. “Let’s look at the facts. Zara has offered herself to act as a conduit for this ritual, right? Demonstrably, she is an item touched by the Magelord of Necromancy. Is she the Magelord’s book? If she was meant to hold the Magelord’s information secret, like a diary, why would she be sharing it with you? She’s written in code; you aren’t just reading it. So she’s obviously teaching you, because you’ve been casting these rituals, right? She has to be intending to teach people.”
“...Yeah. She’s a book. Duh. What’s the point of a book that doesn’t inform the reader?”
“Ok! So you agree with that!” He said brightly, “A book’s purpose is to teach people. An intelligent book is going to take that teaching very seriously. A book holding the secrets of the Magelord of Necromancy, would want to teach people necromancy, right? Maybe, to be the very best necromancer? Maybe she was made with the intent of training incumbent magelords...or maybe the first one made her and she was just passed on, peacefully or otherwise,” he hazarded. Luna didn’t reply, but she bit her lip thoughtfully. “Is she encouraging you to be a better necromancer?”
I’m merely guiding your studies on the questions you yourself are asking, Zara said to Luna’s mind. I’m helping you satisfy your own curiosity and facilitating the rituals you yourself want to conduct.
Luna didn’t reply to Virgil’s statement, so he continued gently, “...Before you had Zara, were you even really interested in necromancy? Arcana, even? Don’t get me wrong, you’ve always been super smart and knowledgeable in magic, but...you like science. You’re interested in alchemy and magi-tech and the crazy work in hereditary magic the doctor does. You like explosions, and guns, and machines. You...you like butterflies and bumblebees and rabbits, but you try and tell yourself you don’t because you eat rabbit occasionally so you try to play it off like you don’t think they’re the cutest thing. You like to go to bars and get drunk and dance even though you say you’re bad at it when you really aren’t, and you like to grow herbs and plants with insanely tiny flowers because you think they’re cute, particularly when they’re purple or blue. You like to spend four hours trying on boots and finding matching earrings for literally every shirt you own. You like to read books about civil wars and train engines and linguistics and electrical circuitry, and you read trashy romance novels when you think no one’s looking.” He laughed sadly, “Here you are in an ancient Valparisan library, that’s been lost for generations, filled with forgotten books about all of the things that happened in the wars at the end of the largest empire the world has ever known, and all of the technology that they had that we’ve still never managed to replicate, and is staffed by a robot that is itself a marvel of antique magi-tech…” his voice dropped sadly, “and you’re spending all of your time reading Zara. And...and that’s not bad, in and of itself. I’m not saying that it’s bad. But, don’t you think it’s a little strange? That suddenly necromancy is so important, that this library just...isn’t interesting?”
Luna looked deeply thoughtful, and Zara whispered to her mind, There is plenty of time for recreation later, but, if you want to be sure that the ritual for Mr. Foxglove is prepared correctly, it’s best that we have the particulars worked out in advance of travelling to the Runeforge, to ensure that we acquire all of the necessary materials in their appropriate amounts. 
“...Yeah...yeah…” she muttered to herself. Speaking up, she said to Virgil, “I’m...busy. I need to get this done before we go to the Runeforge, so I can get the undying bones, and anything else I need.”
“What is it?”
“Huh?”
“What is it you’re doing?”
“The spell for Aldern. I promised him I would, and I’m going to. That’s that,” she said with finality, but her voice had lost much of the acerbic tone it had held earlier.
He still looked at her sadly, “That’s...that’s great. I’m sure he’ll really appreciate that. I do.” He looked down, “...But what about after?”
“What about it?” she snapped.
He didn’t reply right away, and when he did, he said slowly, “You never cared much about arcana before. You never cared about getting more powerful before. Spirits, I don’t think you even really cared too much for studying for study’s sake; remember, when I was around a few years back, you were complaining about writing a paper because you thought the topic was boring so you’d left it for six months and counting? You mentioned a couple times about things that you probably should be studying, but you just couldn’t get into it. If you are just reading Zara for the heck of it, it just seems a little weird that your priorities seemed to change so much so quickly. And yeah, maybe it’s just the stress of what we’re doing right now. Everything’s awful and you’re just feeling out of it. It happens. 
“But, what are you going to do after Aldern is happy?” He sighed, “The longer you carry around that book, the more every problem is going to look like it could be, should be solved with necromancy. Because you have a book with all the answers; why wouldn’t the solution be in there? It just makes sense. But, Luna, there’s a reason all the arcane schools are tied to sins, why people call them the Magelords of Gluttony and Greed and Wrath. You can’t get so tied to one thing, that it outweighs everything else. That’s when things go wrong. And necromancy will never, ever, be satisfying. It promises to let you have ultimate power over life and death, but it can never make things perfect. It’s...one of those graphs that never ever reaches zero. It makes you think it does, but the closer you get the more it’s frustrating that you aren’t quite there yet, so you go farther and farther. Necromancy is gluttony: it grants half-lives and partial power that needs to be endlessly fueled, and will never bring actual satisfaction. No arcana will.” He sighed and continued before Luna could speak, “And you can tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and you probably will, and say it’s not my business and not my place and I have no right to make insinuations about you or judgements about your actions, and that’s fine. That’s fair. But I spent, what, three months as a literal manifest of gluttony. My soul was tied and fueled by the same essence of what you’re studying now. So I think I can say with at least some authority, that it will never, ever, bring you satisfaction. It will never give you an accomplishment that feels good enough, or strength that feels adequate, and it will leave you wanting more and more until it’s all you’re doing. Just trying to fill that hole that the necromancy itself made, because before you had all the answers, it wasn’t a problem at all.”
Luna was very quiet for a long moment, before she said hollowly, “...I don’t think you know what you’re talking about…”
He sighed heavily, defeated, “...No one does.” He shuffled slightly on the spot, at a loss as to how to continue.
“...How’d you guess that?” she asked quietly. “...About the flowers ‘n stuff. I never told you.”
Virgil looked up wryly, “Paying attention, I guess. You had all sorts of tiny flowers at your house, and they weren’t growing wild. Most of them are blue and purple. And you have told me that you like miniature things; whenever we were walking around, you’d get excited by jewellery with little birds, and people’s tiny dogs, all sorts of stuff. You think it’s adorable.” He grinned, “Like that dollhouse museum, in Howrah. With the minuscule teacups.”
She looked slightly frustrated now, tinged with sadness. “...It’s creepy, that you know that.”
This confused him, “Huh? Why?”
“Because it makes it sound like you care.”
Virgil sunk in on himself once again. He sighed deeply, and said quietly, “I do care. I always did. And I care now. I know I’m a shitty person. I know I always have been. And I know that being a sin-fueled devil did not make that any better and I can’t make up for that or the things I did.” He swallowed hard, “But that’s why I’m worried, because obsessing over one school, being a devout necromancer or evoker or illusionist, can get so close to that. Obsessing over evocation breeds short-tempered reaction, abjuration makes you distrustful, and necromancy makes you insatiably discontented...like pride makes you ignorant of others.” He sighed shamefully before continuing, “And I don’t want you to just...throw yourself away, and become whatever one-dimensional, malcontent arcanist that book is trying to tell you to be. You’re better than that. You’re a better person than that. You’re a more interesting person than that, a happier person than that, a kinder person than that...So I’m asking you, please, to think about the logistics of this. The factual information about intelligent objects, and how you’ve demonstrably changed your priorities so much since you started using that book. And, if you can see the logic, and I know you can...pass the book on to someone else. I’m not saying throw her away, I’m not saying destroy her...I’m just saying, maybe let someone else be the Magelord of Gluttony. So you can enjoy making guns and trying on hairpins again.”
How patronizing, Zara said disdainfully. Not only is he prying into matters that are none of his business, something he is all too prone to do, but he’s insulting about it as well. Denigrating your diligence and studiousness, qualities any student of magic should strive for. She sniffed, Laymen so often get pathetically wrong ideas about hard work and self-improvement. Just because they don’t have the potential and capability to train themselves to be something greater, they look down their noses at those who do, trying to pull them back down to their insipid level so that they don’t need to feel inadequate. He is no real arcanist, we both know it, so how should he be expected to know what study and improvement entail? You’ve been pushing your limits admirably, gaining skill and achieving your goals marvellously. Don’t let his small-minded jealousy and ignorance deter you from becoming great.
Luna sat silently for another long moment, looking rather miserable. Eventually, she just said quietly, “...Just, go away. I want to be alone.”
Virgil sighed sadly, his expression morose, “...That was never something you wanted either…” He chuckled bitterly and gave a twisted grin, “Wait, no, I can finish this one for you! You’ve been wanting me to go away for years, and you’d gladly rather be alone than have me bugging you, right? Heh.” His face fell, and he looked pained, “I’m sorry. Please, just...think about what I said. That’s all. We’re all worried, and I...I’m worried. I just want you to be ok. That’s all.”
You’re perfectly fine, Zara said. Why wouldn’t you be? Nothing has changed, other than your own abilities strengthening. Luna said nothing to either of them; Virgil walked away, and she turned her gaze back to the ritual she was studying. They still needed to access the Runeforge.
Category:Rise of the Runelords