A Hidden Witch - By Debora Geary Page 0,86
out, so in theory, this should work.”
“Okay, but I need something to push.”
Marcus grinned—not a pretty sight. “That would be the spellcoding part of the lesson, my dear. Why don’t you give that protection spell another try?”
Sigh. For a moment, it had actually sounded like they were going to have fun. Elorie put fingers to keys and started to painstakingly craft the lines of code that would create the beginnings of a spell.
Jamie watched in disbelief. “You’ve been making her code from scratch? Marcus, that’s evil.”
Elorie froze. “There’s another way to do this?”
Marcus glared in disapproval. “There are shortcuts, but I believe there’s good value in learning to properly code a spell from the ground up.”
Jamie winked at Elorie. “Well, since your method has her ready to dump half the ocean on your head, let’s give my method a try, shall we?”
A couple of icons on Elorie’s screen started to flash. “See those? They’ll get you to some menus that let you pick up some precoded spell chunks. Stick enough of those together in the right order, and you can build a pretty decent spell.”
“Or a train wreck,” Marcus growled.
Jamie laughed. “It’s not that hard to handcode a train wreck either. This way, you get to learn the logic of a spell first. When you want to get fancy, then you can work on handcoding.”
She and Uncle Marcus were going to have quite the chat later. Following Jamie’s clear instructions, Elorie had a protection spell assembled in just a few minutes. Then two warriors appeared onscreen. “Mine’s the one with the blue helmet,” Jamie said. “When I look like I’m losing the fight, I want you to activate the protection spell and push it to my guy there.”
Elorie jumped as an all-out swordfight broke out on her screen. How the heck was she supposed to decide when someone was losing? One good swipe of the sword and it could all be over. Even virtual beheadings weren’t something she really wanted to witness.
“Lose faster,” Marcus said dryly, “or I’ll send over a couple of my men to help.”
Suddenly Jamie’s avatar fell to the ground, sword tossed uselessly to the side. Elorie grabbed her mouse and threw in the spell. The red-helmeted warrior’s sword swung down like the wrath of God—and turned into a flower as it crashed into the protection spell.
Jamie looked stunned, and Marcus laughed like Elorie had rarely heard. “Didn’t proofread her code well enough, did you? She used one of Ginia’s spellchunks. You’re lucky not to be flittering like a fairy. That girl leaves all manner of silly magic lying around, and she insists on adding most of it to the spell libraries.”
Maybe she should be getting Realm lessons from Ginia—they sounded like a lot more fun. And Uncle Marcus didn’t sound nearly respectful enough of her skills. Elorie looked pointedly at the flower. “The sword’s hardly a threat now, is it?”
Jamie laughed. “Only to the male ego. Can you reverse the spell?”
Elorie reached for her mouse and quickly pictured the reversing spellshape in her mind. She pushed it at the warrior with the red helmet, and then squealed and covered her eyes as blood spurted out of Jamie’s now headless avatar. “Ugh, gross! Do you have to make it quite that realistic?”
She uncovered her eyes to see two faces watching her in utter shock. “Oh, no. Did I do something wrong? It worked, didn’t it?”
Jamie looked at his dead avatar and nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah. Worked like a charm. I just expected you to spellcode the reversing spell. How’d you do that?”
She blinked. “Well, it’s mostly the same shape as the first spellcode. I just twisted it around a little.”
Jamie frowned. “What shape? You see shapes in spellcode?”
Didn’t everyone? “Sure. Just like any other spell.”
Jamie looked at Marcus, and Marcus shook his head.
“Holy shit. Hang on a moment.” Jamie started typing furiously on his keyboard. A couple of minutes later, he looked back up, victory in his eyes. “I just messaged Ginia, Marcus. She sees shapes when she spellcodes, too. That’s why she can use Net power like Elorie, and we can’t. They see the spellshapes.”
Marcus groaned. “Warrior Girl can do this too? God help us all.”
Why was she always the last one in the room to understand her own powers? “Why is that important?”
Jamie grinned. “Well, it seems that for you and Ginia, at least, it doesn’t matter whether the magic is in virtual space or real space—you can see the power streams and manipulate them