One might think that the existence of a prophesy, much of which had already come true in such spectacular fashion as to drive away all doubt, a prophesy that spent fifty-one reasonably-sized pages describing her brilliant success at something seemingly quite straightforward, would imply that it was... oh, I don't know, maybe pretty easy? Or at least less than entirely befuddling. But no. Day 104 of research into shielding sensitive electronics from magic had come and gone, and Jade was frustrated.

She lay on her back on the moss just outside of her tent, looking up at the stars. Things had started out so clear and promising. The first experiment was simply to bring a battery and an ammeter into the mountains. She had tried hiking, but was unable to get far enough away from the measurable effect of the magical aura emanating from the lab. Then Mr. Norton had taken her on her first flight in their turboprop airplane to the other side of the mountain, (awesome, by the way) and left her there for the night. Then at least she had been able to confirm that her own body did not usually interfere with electricity, except when it was healing. Her healing was magical - no surprises there.

Jade had then designed a series of experiments to resolve some relevant questions: Who could be nearby (and thus help with the rest of it)? What was the relationship to distance? What else mediated the effect, if at all? And then the one Iggy had stumbled upon before any of them had met Jade: Why did Iggy's shield plant dampen the effect, and could that be used to shield sensitive electronics?

After confirming that she didn't move the needle, Jade had brought most members of the lab out one at a time to her spot on the Eastern side of the mountain. (Tina of course wasn't going to travel that far.) It had been a week of outdoor fun. Allen looked adorably cramped lying on the floor of the plane. Xander had refused to fly, but was able to get to the test site on his own four hooves and back comfortably in less than a day.

Allen had the same thing going on as Jade: quick magical healing, but otherwise nothing. Xander was likewise a perfectly normal man-stallion hybrid, except when he looked up into the night sky, presumably something to do with centaur precognition.

Iggy and Mr. Norton both had intensely magical bodies. Iggy wore his on his sleeve, so to speak. He was the most helpful for the experiments with distance and intervening materials, since his effect on the sensor was constant and steady. On his first trip to the site he brought buckets of shield seeds and sprouts, and they worked together to plant them at intervals for later work.

Mr. Norton's placid expression and quiet posture said "I am boring" so compellingly that Jade was surprised when he turned out to disturb the sensor as much or more than Iggy. Norton enjoyed her shock for a bit, and then explained that despite the genuinely material nature of the body he currently wore, it would be entirely too much mental effort for him to mold a completely functional human suit down to the level of blood and lymph, so beneath the skin he was consciously manipulating a much simpler structure, presumably with magic. He had some organs he couldn't change around so easily, and thought of this as his "real" body. Jade, who was used to him by now, thought he would like to know this was the creepiest thing she had ever heard. Mr. Norton smiled and wiggled his eyebrows at her.

Pel's body did nothing to the sensor, even in flight, but at her suggestion she demonstrated a little of her ancestral gift, speaking a few strange words and tickling the air with her fingers, which conjured a tiny orb of light. This, of course, registered as magic, for as long as the orb continued to exist. They spent a long time after that fruitlessly trying to teach Jade the same trick. It seemed it was partly innate, but not so innate as to be detectable until the spell was triggered. Jade couldn't even hold it afterwards; it vanished the moment it left Pel's fingers.

Dorian body likewise did nothing to the sensor, but he did turn out to know some magic that Jade was eventually able to learn. Unlike Pel's, it was a long, complicated, and repetitive process to enchant an object, and the result of her first ever spell might have been disappointing to a less creative person than Jade: It just biased an object's propensity to spin in one direction. This was how the gyroscope in Mary's chair had been made. Apparently all of the learnable magical effects were like that: simple, local biases in the normally inviolable laws of physics. Awesome - and gears were already turning in Jade's head.

Mary registered as unmagical. She said her race had some ancestral magic like Pel's, but it wouldn't work out of the water, and demonstrated. The needle remained motionless. Jade suggested a glass of water, but that hadn't been enough.


It was pretty remarkable that no one had already figured out magical shielding, or so Jade had thought. She couldn't be the first scientist interested, and it wasn't even her field. The whole world was affected by the division between electrical and magical societies. Making integration possible could change everything.

The human brain was electro-chemical, so something about an animal head usually prevented magical interference. Even assuming that Tina's telepathy was an exception, its effect on a mind was orderly, unlike the usual effect nearby magic had on electricity. Jade had requisitioned an oscilloscope, and she had yet to discover any particular pattern in the interference.

The problem was that that particular exception seemed to be an actual exception. It wasn't bone, it wasn't blood, it wasn't ... It was just that when the brain was doing its thing, magic didn't mess it up. "Seemed to be." Jade didn't believe in exceptions. That ran against fundamental scientific dogma. She put a pin in it for later.

In any case, they did know one thing that blocked the magical aura, a particular plant species. Iggy had grown one into a small spherical cage, and electrical work done inside succeeded unharmed. They had immediately tried to build a larger one, but as soon as it involved more than one plant, the shielding effect leaked. The plants were small, a computer was big, they'd need some way for Jade to work in there herself, and they'd need to connect them together. In the end, it may turn out to be Iggy's problem to grow a large enough version of a single plant to shield the entire beautiful data center they had constructed for her.

Jade sighed and relaxed. There'd be more tomorrow, and every day after until they cracked it, but for now she would stop bending her mind towards to problem. The air was warm, the moss was soft, and this was all so much better than "Aaaaa werewolf!" every day. Thinking with colleagues about an important question was the best. She stretched out her arms and legs and splayed her fingers in the moss.


Dorian lay on top of a bookshelf in a recessed nook of the library, his left leg dangling off one side. The ceiling of the little alcove was only a foot above his head, and his working papers about the shield plants were tacked up. He had just returned from the kitchen with a late night snack, and some tea with lemon peel which he balanced on his chest under his chin, and sipped as it cooled.

"Magical aura" was some kind of wavy particle, like electromagnetic radiation, and this was the source of the interference somehow. The shield plant blocked it, but the aura found its way around the edges, and it wasn't large enough that just one of them would cover, say, a whole building. It was about the size and shape of a Pothos - a desk plant. What interested Dorian was the way that the aura leaked around the edges. So far, the pattern of the leakage defied prediction, and he was trying to work out a mathematical model they could use to stitch multiple shield plants together securely.

He finished his tea, and played with the lemon peel between his fingers as he thought. By Maxwell's equations (whoever that was), the aura strengths Jade had collected at various positions from behind a leafy shield weren't electromagnetism. They didn't seem random either. There was some elusive pattern to the residuals. He lifted the lemon peel to his mouth, and bit it. Ugh, bitter. Mistake. He looked at it. Hmm, spiralOHMYGOSH.


"HEY JADE, GUESS WHAT?!"

Jade slammed awake, shrieked, and rolled frantically to avoid the whatever terrible disaster monkey freight train avalanche, then came to her senses. She suddenly had moss in her hair and on her face, and mud on her arms.

"Dorian? What the hell?"

Dorian was down on his hands and knees with her on the ground, shaking with excitement, looking like some crazy wood sprite. "Hi! I'm sorry I woke you rather suddenly haha but it's kind of important and exciting though not at all urgent but anyway do you think you could model edge diffraction of a beam of something like light but with spiral rather than linear trajectory against an arbitrary shape using this?"

He waved towards Xander, who was looking as impassive as ever, but panting hard and holding a large beige tower computer borrowed from Jade's unfinished data center.

Jade stared at Xander silently for a moment. He raised one hand off the box in greeting, and then readjusted his grip. She waved back weakly. Then she looked back at Dorian, who was still grinning like a maniac. The two of them had run here with that computer. Edge diffraction was when light bent around the edge of an object. Something like light, but with a... spiral trajectory... She smiled.

"You figured it out?"

Dorian laughed, lunged forward and hugged her. "Nice recovery! Not quite! I have no idea how it works physically, but I've roughed out hypothetical geometry and a distribution which fits the measurements you took as long as the trajectory itself is a spiral. How cool is that??"

Jade was now wide awake, and tracking. "Very cool." Better than coffee. She picked a bit of moss from her teeth and rose, easily lifting Dorian off the ground and setting him back on his feet. Then she brushed herself off. "You think we can work out an arrangement of the vines."

"You're the best," said Dorian.

"Second best, at best." She walked over to Xander. "Is this the craziest thing he's had you do?"

"Not by far," he replied in his dignified baritone. "Where would you like this?"

"On the workbench. Thanks Xander," said Jade.

Dorian danced over and started pulling fistfuls of loose papers out of Xander's saddlebags and pockets as he stood very still, all of Dorian's notes from the past two months. He shoved two pens in his mouth and a fat orange highlighter behind his ear. Lastly, he stood up on the tips of his toes and pulled a single folded sheet from Xander's vest pocket, and then ran off to the workbench to spread everything out. Xander trotted along behind, still expressionless except for his laughing eyes.

Physical simulation had been Jade's area of research, and would have been the field of her doctorate. She hadn't intended to do any heavy computation in the wilderness, but the machine Dorian had brought would do, and she had her portable, along with a gas generator to power it. Three hours ago, with lemon peel dangling from his mouth, Dorian had hacked together a purely geometrical theory of magical self-propagation which, for all that it was far from clarity, at least correctly predicted some experimental results. Xander served as their experimentalist, and used Jade's tools and little garden of shield plants to apply the precise technique of "arranging plants and waving at them really slowly" to probe the edges of the model and help Dorian refine.

The three of them worked intensely together, and they hardly noticed when the sun rose. They made rapid progress, and had a great time doing it. By the time the sky was once again dark and everyone exhausted, the computers had taken over the search. They all slept like the dead on the soft moss as the machines worked out the design of their own arcane shield.

The next morning, Jade awoke exhilarated, and immediately checked her portable computer monitor. Then she crept over to where Dorian slept peacefully, knelt down, and shouted at the top of her lungs:

"HEY DORIAN, GUESS WHAT?!"