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[[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] Every magus passes through three phases of regard for those most prototypical tools: tomes, scrolls, and bundles bound by alligator clip—long preceded by the whalebone rod, the sun-baked tablet, the symbol inked onto pliant skin. When young, they are treasured. Failure to absorb the knowledge within risks scolding in gentler times or injury in the hard days that always follow. When mature, they offer nothing but embarrassment among peers. Spellwork should be memorized, then internalized, not carted along to this conference or that confrontation. When wizened, they symbolize a time before power could be derived from first principles. Although reminisced over with fellow sages, although referenced on occasion, they are most likely to spend their owners' final years gathering dust. Of course, there is a fourth phase after moving beyond meager timescales: the tome as aftmind, as third lobe. Reaching that lofty peak is impossible without recognizing that some ideas are too caustic to be stored intact; some spells, so dense as to burden a mind turned outward. Consider the Minuteman's two-person rule. Consider the demon core's searing reunification. These are the consequences of such an object appearing in hands that otherwise need none. ----- 41 times had [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-5370 Amitha Sanmugasunderam] been summoned to Site-01 for "discreet, high-level" matters. 38 times had those matters been directly pursuant to an overseer's pet project or even more cherished concern. 35 times had that overseer turned out to be Overseer-6, [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-910 Erin Ahmadi], who by any measure had taken a direct hand in Amitha's career. By then, trekking down the blue corridor had become routine, as had passing through scanners and sniffers, riding down five levels on a buttonless elevator, and buzzing for entry at one personal suite of many. With badge clipped to her tailored suit, she was ushered through door after door sealed by combination lock before finding herself in an office fitted with the personal touches she had come to expect. White walls. White furniture. White noise that approximated speech if one listened close enough. "Some of my projects //are// time-sensitive as a matter of fact, and I don't expect I'll be much help without preparation either," said Amitha, gingerly handling the leather-bound spellbook that had been thrust into her hands. She practiced a science suited to the Foundation's pace, after all—position papers and steering committees, long weeks of work for exhilarating moments of action. Little of the manila envelope felt present in this tome's silver buckles or weathered features. "No assistance will be required today," said Ahmadi as she donned a greatcoat over her black dress. "Simply keep my tome at the ready and your mind on my methods. Such learning opportunities are rare these days." "Wouldn't taking an armed escort be safer anyway?" "Nothing but more bodies to shield from spillover. One should not complicate matters when setting foot on another's stage. Our freedom to act will counterbalance their knowledge of the field." She looked toward the aide who had followed Amitha inside as though inviting challenge. He was on the less feral side of Alpha-1's uniformed creatures, although their taxonomy had never been quite so neat. "Whatever you prefer, Overseer," was all he said. "Indeed. This need not require any additional paperwork, Amitha." She pulled a heavy iron key from the interior pocket of her coat, its two teeth resonating with the rings worn on that hand. "Watch closely." More severe than most, the invocation tore spellwork straight from metal and scattered its rust into Site-01's air filtration system. Vessels were more hindrance than anything when it came to exploiting their internal orders. The rings thrummed even louder, then were first to part conventional spacetime along an axis difficult to define under the rigid framework from which Amitha drew power. n+1 dimensions could be extended for some time of course, computational might allowing, but Ahmadi's influence always crept through gaps that logic could not comport itself within. Transit through the gap was compression most thorough, squeezing what formed a person into the smallest units of information available—compressed, encoded, recompressed, concern about what it degraded would be reasonable if minds functioned in such a state. No senses remained to perceive what lay between worlds nor gray matter for external thoughts to gestate within. It was a comforting sort of senselessness, swept along in Ahmadi's wake despite the forces buffeting both, anchored by the spellbook that had been clutched to her chest when they departed. Even when compressed into near nothingness, that totem refused to relinquish itself in full. Lacking reference, it seemed only an instant before they crashed back into conventional reality, where flesh and bone unfurled with slight portions of mass missing. Their destination was a throne room ostentatious in all the ways from which the Foundation refrained. Fluted pillars looked too thin to support a ceiling ornamented with hundreds of fists, each clutching banners thinner than gauze. Stained glass in slit windows failed to pacify that place's perpetual daybreak. Runes more elaborate than necessary were carved into every flagstone too, every step, every shield humming with power intended to protect the sorcerer-king who reigned there. The body: cicada-hollow, shrunken from what had been extracted. Its throne: Studded with crystal jars and glass tubes, run through with piping and pipettes. Organs throbbed across its surface as servants, solicitors, and seers arrayed atop the surrounding tiers gawked at an intrusion that should have been rendered impossible by royal might. Dead yet deified, the corpse alone maintained composure. "Our agreement has become a distraction," said Ahmadi. "Consider it terminated." Amitha presented the Overseer's tome to her without undoing any buckles. She reached out, but not before the shriveled king opened his mouth. > **Reject Essence** > //10th level enchantment// > Casting Time: 1 action > Target: Five creatures within range > Components: V M (10 mL of cerebrospinal fluid) > Duration: Permanent > > Provoke disparity between flesh and the essential flame within, dealing 100d6 necrotic damage that cannot be prevented by any means. Creatures slain this way cannot be reincarnated for a number of years equal to the amount of damage taken. Disparate organs throbbed in turn as a single aetheric ripple resonated throughout the chamber. Cataclysmic, that was the only word for how much magic could be channeled through a body when heartbeats, breaths, and all manner of lesser concerns became unnecessary. Not that it seemed to startle Ahmadi in the slightest. Even as Amitha felt her own internal calculus unraveling, decimals drifting across sequential rounding errors, her senior magus spoke a passage reassembled from the tome and what already lay nestled inside. > Whale Fall - 2██ > Instant > > Counter target instant or sorcery spell with mana value 6 or greater. Destroy target creature with mana value 6 or greater. Destroy target land. > > //Drowning in power is a bad way to go.// Seawater swirled up from stones underfoot in an all-consuming wave. Salt stung her eyes as eels parted curtains of seaweed rooted in mortar. Slit windows became distant suns distorted through miles of ocean, biology's creep overtop soon rendering the depth abyssal. Courtiers of every stripe clutched their throats as whalesong eulogized the many sparks extinguished there, and a massive rib thundered down squarely between opposing wizards, followed by dozens more vertebrae, teeth, and assorted skulls. Sea snow blew through as though a blizzard itself. One massive eye opened above the dead-yet-drowning king, and its awareness guaranteed death. > **Peril Shunt** > //10th level abjuration// > Casting Time: 1 reaction > Target: Self > Components: None > Duration: Instantaneous > > Pluck the strings of fate to prevent all damage and harmful effects that a spell would deal to the caster. For each 20 damage and each non-damaging effect prevented this way, reduce the viable lifespan of the nearest planet by one solar year. Amitha had only just realized that she didn't need to breathe when the whalesong was swept away on another brutish tide that cleared the room of all but drowned attendants. This, at least, was a branch of magic she recognized: ordering the still-malleable present by leveraging far-future stability. Stable futures trending toward heat death barely mattered when his alternative was falling beneath Ahmadi's might—the throneworld's slowing core, its drifting orbit, these were proof enough of what ruin it entailed. And yet, a subtle frustration ran through the Overseer as she shifted her entire palm onto the locked tome. > Unthread - █████ > Sorcery > > Split second. This spell cannot be countered. This spell can target permanents as though they did not have hexproof. Exile target permanent, then exile all copies of it from all players' decks and all copies owned outside the game. Seething magic burst from Ahmadi's free hand. Its twist toward the throne shed decaying energy into second- and third-order discharges unable to affect any layer of reality. Perhaps it lacked structure by design though, a churn that could not be grasped, contorted, or strangled into impotence; the stream of countermagic and counterlogic spewing from the corpse king certainly came too late to matter. Organs held in his throne's many recesses exited stasis as that curse struck true. First formaldehyde boiled over, then refrigeration failed. Braided intestines bound by brass rings slipped free. Bulging stomachs and hearts pushed out the needles stuck through, medical and mystical both, some shattering jars outright before splitting themselves apart. Waterfalls of serum poured from every gap, and still its sitter reached through his parted robes to break something free. What emerged was a rib held tight, surface carved in that longest tradition. > **Grand Bifurcation** > //11th level evocation// > Casting Time: 1 action > Target: A chosen vector > Components: S > Duration: Instantaneous > > Divide left from right, half from half, sword from shield, lobe from lobe, acceptable from unacceptable. Cleave everything and spare nothing. Its casting came too quick to comprehend even when prepared for a reversal of the spell prior. Everything shifted—Amitha and the Overseer's tome in one direction; Ahmadi herself in the other. The dividing line split her forearm, the palace, and the planet beyond it by nearly a meter, movement that might have been imperceptible under other circumstances. Would that all its effects were as gentle. A binding came undone where Ahmadi's severed hand was still pressed to the tome, rings now dull. Braided strands whipped apart as contiguous planes diverged. Weights and counterweights tumbled free. That she had never sensed the sheer potential stored by the Overseer's internal loop was a testament to its craftsmanship, but the star forming equidistant between clean-cut stumps was no less terrible as a result. What radiated there required new fields of mathematics to describe and new schools of thaumaturgy to withstand. Its pulse shaved hours off Amitha's life every second, a roil malignant, but dropping the tome was suddenly beyond her. Indeed, feeling justified over past concerns was all she could manage. Leadership never listened. Despite that deafness, there was still a familiar calm about Ahmadi as she glanced across the fissure now separating them. Too often did that expression precede orders to accomplish the impossible at any cost. Although she surely felt the effects of her own sundering worse than others present, one snap of bare fingers followed. > Waiting Games - 4████████ > Sorcery > > Target opponent takes 9,999 extra turns after this one. While taking turns this way: > * Players cannot lose or win the game. > * All available game actions must be taken and all phases must be declared. > * If a player is unable to draw a card, shuffle their graveyard into their library. > > //Concession is the gentler death.// Stillness embraced them in full. The working at first felt akin to the phylacteries she renewed at the Hartier blacksite on a biannual basis—using altered perceptions of time to delay certain bodily functions that resisted detention, if not those lodged deeper in spirit. Perception was only the start of this new problem though. Chunks of fresco halted mid-fall above dust from the Overseer's sundered arm. Rivers of vital fluid froze in their rush down the royal body. Yet her internal clock, reference-bound to forces that would continue unabated for quite a bit longer than conventional understandings of time, insisted all remained apace. This was sure to have repercussions. Of course, the Overseer would be the one to suffer backlash whenever, if ever, the spell ended. Some debts couldn't be avoided through clever accounting of responsibility and reciprocity, nor by redistributing karmic debt throughout the Foundation as a whole. The choice to grant Amitha reprieve made a certain sense under such circumstances. Something had to be prepared in this racked moment without regard for its cost, had to be carried through afterwards if they were to stave off a second deathbed incantation. The presumption that she could surmount either challenge was just that though. Although chances to conduct her craft without loose variables had become few and far between, this one was strangest yet. Breathing exercises failed to still a racing heart as she looked past the cloven ceiling, through cloven atmosphere, to where even the tumorous sun evinced a new scar between growths. Thoughts normally suppressed by her well-ordered brain rose unbidden as Amitha paced down the length of that divide too—rebels storming her mind palace, files flying as cabinets were thrown from its balconies, orderlies and adjutants hurled after them. Where possibilities, prognostications, and resultant anxieties were usually considered and discarded in due course, they instead emerged again and again as she strode to the foot of that dying throne and considered what else had been entombed within. Broken chains of thought reformed without concern for future accountability let alone order in the present. Breaths came thin. Sweat overcame antiperspirant. Amitha hadn't suffered a panic attack in decades, but this one found new vectors to strike through. Any sense of time's passage slipped away despite her capacity to measure it. What were seconds with nothing to match them against? What were minutes when so many decaying spirals of thought reached their nadir in one span? Worse than the nauseating instant of gap transit, this was a nauseating eternity, set to forced march alongside her own wretched thoughts: fixation on errors leading to this point, chastisement for gawking at that showdown even if the Overseer instructed as much. Others yet suggested the quickest, surest ways to rid herself of herself rather than continue this misery. That was ridiculous though. At her level of practice, sacrifices were suffered by others. ----- Only after failing to wrangle her mind did the malice inherent in Ahmadi's spellwork became clear: each attempt to forcefully retain a useful idea amidst the squall traced grooves into her brain that would normally be overwritten soon after. Here, each repetition deepened them, locking her thoughts into sequence by rendering those elements a path of least resistance. So did memory become a chain, retention a vice, placing action beyond reach when even simple observation ossified. At least, that was surely the intent. It functioned as such for her first several hundred attempts to comprehend the singularity formed by the Overseer's severing—how its flux was expressed, how that intensity was liable to multiply the moment time resumed. A wall of information begging to be rammed against until lower functions ruled alone. But it was instead Amitha's first concussion that seeded the AND, NAND, and XNOR gates which could situate gray matter for thoughts she truly needed. The next day (week?) was spent laying groundwork while fending off her own logic traps. The next month (year?) was consumed by diagramming formal operations on a wall with bone instead of chalk. Populated matrices, charted eigenspaces, these were not methods of inspiration but tools that would enable its shackling in this hostile environment. "New" thoughts were only necessary to the extent that they unlocked her next leap forward. Even brilliance surpassing her usual output was left at the wayside, abandoned in place of what could be further built upon. Reaching the stage where she observed in one moment and understood in the next without taking every step between was Amitha's sole chance at survival. And so did repetition become logic become ritual—a circuit board traced across raw neurons, a far greater edifice constructed around her mind palace that bristled with instruments and flew banners of its own. Moon eclipsed. Cauldron subsumed. Perhaps this was how Ahmadi felt when regarding the Foundation as a whole. Defined, refined, such thoughts neither needed a tome nor could possibly be contained in one, being creations of this place and its time. Eventually, not even the Overseer's stare bothered her as she worked, which only faltered when that brutalized second finally rolled over into Amitha's turn. The pinprick star provided all she needed in its first pulse. > **NEW RULE - Parameter Slide** > Replaces //Universal Consistency// > > If you just played this card, adjust the Klein-Pinard Constant by ±0.00000016. Unbraiding energy snapped back into a loop as the laws governing its collapse righted themselves from that minor edit. What fission first generated, Ahmadi released as naturally as if she had expected this outcome, lensing it into a lance that followed her outstretched finger. The king vanished in a roar of displaced air. His throne dissolved into particles subatomic. Several light-years away, its touch finally faded, stroking a comet that would never again know contact in the loneliness of space. "Perhaps it would be better if this adventure went forgotten," was all Ahmadi said after being reunited with her crumbling hand and the tome it refused to relinquish. ----- 41 times had Amitha Sanmugasunderam been summoned to Site-01 for "discreet, high-level" matters. 38 times had those matters been directly pursuant to an overseer's pet project or even more cherished concern. 35 times had– [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box |author=Pedantique]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]