121 Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One – The Tyranny of Rep Counts (1/2)

Time had passed.

With Mama's help, Hazé had passed the truly dangerous time, carefully hidden away, doing the uncontrolled pooping and peeing stuff like any other child, resting and taking care to get stronger and healthier.

It meant she had to be very careful and slow with her Casting, until Mama found her a Focus Wand, discarded by a passing Caster picking up some herbs from her.

It was a simple thing, only good for an apprentice at QL 23, so if she tried to send her full strength through it, it would literally blow apart, unable to take a higher Caster Level than Three.

But Mama WAS an apprentice, thirsting for knowledge that she'd been denied all her life due to her handicap. It was fine for her to use, and for Hazé to borrow to show the use of Cantrips and Valence I spells.

After all, she basically just sat (or flew) around all day, there was no reason whatsoever she couldn't work on rep counts. She had craploads of Valences, and she really, really needed to Weird a lot of Metamagic down.

Virtually all Metamagic effects that could be applied to spells came with a cost, an infusion of outside energy required to actually do what you wanted to. Increasing damage, duration, range, area, splitting, chaining, bursting... there were many, many Metamagic effects, and the vast majority of them cost a little (or lot) something extra.

Wizards handled Metas different from Sorcs. Wizards had to memorize their spells ahead of time, imbue their energy at that time, and so cast their Meta'd spells just as fast as they did normal ones.

Sorcerers had to add in the additional power as they went along, effectively requiring them to draw from a higher Valence, and drastically slowing down the speed of the Casting as they reworked the spell on the fly to include the extra effect. It made them more flexible if they weren't threatened, but most Metas couldn't be used in combat without some care, as standing in one place tracing glowing patterns in the air for six seconds or more wasn't very smart in a fight.

What Hazé had to do was get her Rep Counts in, get her Reserves up, Siegecraft started, and her spells and Metas Weirded.

These things all started with a minimum of five hundred Castings of a Spell or Meta being Cast, if you wanted to open the most basic levels of these things. More Rep Counts were needed if you wanted to raise the potential limit, and more uses of them to get to that limit.

For example, just to Cast now, she had to add the Still and Silent Spell Metas to everything, because she couldn't do much more then put a tiny hand on the Wand. Naturally, what she wanted to do was Cast without having to spend a Valence III on everything.

Weirding a Meta meant reducing the additional energy required down by exactly one Valence. Basically, you condensed and refined your understanding of the Meta, drawing more energy out of a lower Valence instead of the higher one, folding it down to a smaller size and so conserving Valences.

Still and Silent Spell were +1 Metas, so Weirding them would reduce them to +0, and so their Meta'd spells could be cast with no extra cost... but only after Casting the Metas five hundred times attached to a Valence I spell... and then only for Valence I spells.

To Weird them to Valence II spells, she had to Cast a Meta'd Valence II spell a thousand more times.

Valence III spells, two thousand Castings. Valence IV... four thousand. Valence V, a colossal eight thousand times... not that such a thing was currently possible with a Valence V hard limit...

Weirding spells worked exactly the same way, but from the opposite side. You learned to Cast the spell with less energy, fitting the structure of the Metas attached to it more easily, and infused them with more power. It reduced the total Valence cost of Metas attached to that spell by 1, to a minimum of +0.

It differed from Weirding Metas because you had to focus on the spell as you cast, not the Meta, and tinker with it. So, the Rep Counts didn't stack at all. More time, and higher Valence spells naturally took more Castings to learn how to make them more efficient, just like higher modifier Metas...

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To open a Reserve, the same thing had to be done. Reserves operated off a Spell Center, a spell serving as the nexus and key of the Reserve. It allowed her to Cast basically half-power, limited range spell effects without limit, scaling by the Valence that empowered them. Easy peezy. Five hundred Castings, open it off a Valence I, right?

No, no. Most Reserves wouldn't operate without being Centered off at least a Valence II spell. Happily, they ran off Valences Cast, rather then per-spell Castings like Weirdings, but it meant 1,500 Valences worth of appropriate Castings for ANY Reserve, and some only operated out of Valence IV or V... 7,500 and 15,500 Valences, respectively. You also had to have an appropriate spell of that particular Valence available and in active memory.

Once the Reserve was active, you then had to actually use the Reserve to push its Spell Center to a higher Valence, i.e. learning to focus the energy through the Spell Center. Because Reserves were endlessly usable, this was merely pure drudgery. More Rep Counts.

Going from a I effect to a II took two thousand Reps. To III, four thousand more. Then another eight for IV, and another sixteen thousand to get it working at V.

At six hundred an hour, that was still fifty hours of work, for just ONE Reserve.

There were dozens of Reserves, and they were all desirable, because the secondary effect of every Reserve was +1 to Caster Level of the spells resonating with that Reserve. Fire spells, force spells, lightning spells, Good spells, water, earth, charm, conjuration... there were all sorts of Reserves, and the Caster Level bonuses stacked.

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