So Far

Trainering Part 3

Max walks onto the glowing blue energy seething ley-line.  All is silent and nothing grows on the line.  Sitting in the centre of it are his trusted left hand Walker and his dragon hatchling.  "Hey guys, hope I'm not interrupting."

Chris opens his eyes and sighs contentedly, "No, I was just relaxing and G'lishi is working on not being an obstacle for the line."

"Right, okay, it's actually him I came to talk too."

"Sure boss.  I get the point.  G'lishi, we'll continue this another time." says Chris before getting to his feet and float away a foot above the ground.

Max starts in right away, "Okay, G'lishi, what I came out here to talk to you about is I have a job to fill up more of your time.  Something to do between fights.  I want you to do the same job that Rad is doing between fights.  You will go out ahead of us and see what is where and look for the enemy and then report in on the radio when you find any Coalition troops, robots, or such.  Some of this time I want you to change into something smaller or maybe just shrink down your size and be a smaller dragon.  I'll teach you to know when to be smaller, and when we'll want you to look for things flying.  How does that sound?"

The translator finishes repeating what Max said turning it into Dragonese.

Once the translator stops, G'lishi nods.  "Okay. Do I just look, or do I attack sometimes like a normal dragon would?  And if I change into something else, you'll have to tell me how they normally behave.  Most animals just run away from me, but I don't know if they do the same for humans and robots."

"Your job will be to look most of the time and I will tell you when to attack.  Now, I can tell you all sort of things about different animals." Max says before launching into a brief but useful tutorial on local animals.

Max called Archer to come to his tent and bring the G.B.  Archer gets there and Max and Chris are out front with a new shield for the G.B.  It has the same shape as the others but embedded in the front of it are a triangle of gems.  The edges of it are covered with a tracery of wires and etched lines like one of R.C.'s circuit boards.

Max tells him, "Archer, this is your new shield.  Actually to be correct this is one of them.  The centre section with the gems is detachable.  That is the part that we have to keep and protect.  It has a built in protection all its own that you are not to use unless absolutely necessary.  How it works is that you active it with a switch on the back and it will provide you with a forcefield that is comparable to the shield itself.  It will protect the entire G.B.  Now, to put it in simple terms there are three switches.  The three switches are like three batteries, which means you can turn on the same intensity forcefield three times before the shield recharges.  You can't turn on more than one at a time so you, or maybe we, are going to have to determine what each charge can handle for damage.  That way when it's about to fail, or has already, you will know to switch that one off and turn on the next."

Chris continues, "As Max said when the three charges are used up you have to eject the core.  Then if you have to you can use the rest of the shield as you have before.  The core is not terribly expensive but we can't carry a spare and it will take us a while to get another made up if the Technowizard is even available to do so.  Now, there are two slight hitches to using it.  First, each charge is good for only seven minutes and shutting it off won't save the extra time.  Second for me to recharge all three charges at once will take almost all of my energy.  That means I'll be taken out play.  Alternatively if we are at a ley line then I can use the line to replace two of the charges within a 24 hour period.  So this really is a thing for emergencies."

"Tell him the other thing Chris."

"Okay, if, and only if there is a dire emergency and the core has been destroyed I can make a talisman that does the same thing as the core except there won't be any switches and you'll have to _set it off_, use your will to make it work.  For that you'll have to concentrate and tell it you want it to turn on.  The cost in energy for the talisman is really hefty.  I can do it but only at a nexus point, or at a ley line with the help of G'lishi, and Bronson or some other mage.  At the nexus it will cost me most of my energy.  At a ley line it will cost me all of my energy, most of G'lishi's and a chunk of Bronson's.  This is costly in the extreme."

"As such it will only be in the direst of emergencies." Max concludes.

Chris tells G'lishi, "I found out about how to make talismans.  It's pretty advanced stuff and not very much beginner material.  Still if it's important I can help you make one.  It requires a lot of mystical energy.  First you make the physical part of it.  It's best to carve it out of something hard rather than to mould it out of clay.  They're still fragile so you can't use them as fighting tools.

"After you've made it then you have to cast the talisman spell on it which is partly its own spell, and partly the spell you want the talisman to have.  So say for example that I want to make one.  If I go to a ley line nexus at noon, or at midnight, and I use most of my own magical energy then I can make a talisman that can cast any easy to moderate difficulty spell three times before it needs to be recharged.  That's a lot of magic.  It gets worse though.

"If I want to make one at just a single ley line, at noon or midnight, then I would have to use all of my own magical energy and most of yours, and then I'd still need some from another mage willing to help us.

"So you can see now why you had so much trouble with it."