It was with an angry snarl that I threw my latest project away from me, my patience and self-control finally overwritten by a long, continued string of failures. Trying to make a magical item that allowed its user to fly was complicated. Incredibly so, if one of the things said item needed to do was work regardless of elemental affinities. It was supposed to allow even a person whose Astral Power was completely biased towards Earth to soar, but no matter how hard I tried, I had yet to succeed. By now, I had discarded at least a dozen prototypes and the number of ideas I had considered was easily in the hundreds, even if the majority of those ideas were variations on the same or on similar concepts. Which, at the end of the day, was inevitable; there were only so many ways to soar through the sky and, consequently, only so many ways to emulate them magically. And, consequently, only so many different starting points to create an enchantment around, only for said enchantment to come apart, as they all had. It was utterly annoying and yet, I didn’t want to disappoint my daughter by admitting that it might be impossible.
“You okay, mom?” Lia asked, looking a little concerned as the boots I had been working on were bouncing around the shelter we were using for the day, while I was trying to disintegrate the shoes I had just thrown away with nothing but my eyes. Not even using magic, by now, I felt as if my frustration alone should be able to turn them to dust. Alas, it was not to be.
“No,” I admitted after a moment of hesitation, “I’m incredibly annoyed that I make no progress. I’ve been trying to get this enchantment to work for a while, and the only thing I’ve got from it are failed prototypes.”
“So you know what doesn’t work, right. That’s what you and Luna are always on about, that there are no failed experiments, just experiments telling you what doesn’t work,” she tried to cheer me up, sitting down next to me.
“Usually, yes,” I agreed, even if things were a little more complicated, “But that only works if you can get an idea why something failed, if you learn something from your failure. The only thing I’ve learned so far with this is that nothing I’ve tried works anything like I would expect it to. And, what makes things worse, is that I know what I’m trying is at least plausible because I made my flying cloak a while back,” I explained, getting Lia to nod in understanding.
“So, what did you do different with the cloak?” she asked the obvious question I had asked myself at least a dozen times, though the real number was likely around a hundred times, and that was just in the last two weeks.
“Other than the use of an incredibly potent magical substance with properties I don’t understand in the slightest? And the continued infusion of another inherently magical substance with that substance and my own magic?” I asked, knowing that there was no practical way to figure out what made my cloak as special as it was. Multiple unique circumstances had played a role in its creation, so repeating that process was nigh impossible, and it certainly was impractical. And even if it were to somehow, miraculously, work, the product wouldn’t be what I had in mind, as my cloak partially relied on the elemental affinity of its wearer to work.
“Other than that, yes,” Lia nodded, getting a slight glare for her efforts, “Do you even know if what you wish to accomplish is possible? On Mundus, were there examples of such items and, if there were, how common were they?” she asked, making me consider things from a different direction. Because, on a world like Mundus, where magic had been a fact of life since a time of legends, people would want to soar through the sky. Sure, there were monsters up there, too, but those monsters were somewhat limited in number and in the danger they posed. So, people would want to have the option to fly. And yet, the only thing in that regard I had seen had been defenses against fliers in an area where we had seen a large number of flying monsters.
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“I see what you mean,” I admitted, wondering if what I had in mind was even possible. “Maybe I should scale back a little, to the point that I have something functional as a base and expand on that base by trying to add functions,” I mused, thinking back to the various experiments I had done, and how I might go about taking the first step to get off the ground.
Or at least the first step in the air. Thinking back, I was fairly certain that nature had given animals, before magic was a thing, two different evolutionary paths to flight. One from the ground up, the other from trees down, with both paths eventually leading to an ability to fly. Maybe I could follow a similar path, starting my experiments with purely physical means and going from there. Maybe the solution was not even to try incorporating magic from the start, but only to add it once I reached the limits of what pure physics could do for me?
“You know that might even work,” I mused, images of potential solutions flickering through my mind, alongside a fair amount of amusement at some of the images my mind was conjuring, one of which was an image of Lia with a suit reminiscent of a flying squirrel, or a base jumper from before the change. I doubted I’d be able to make the actual suit fluffy, fluff was sadly not terribly aerodynamic, but the image was gloriously amusing.
“What do you have in mind?” Lia asked, likely noticing the gleam in my eyes.
“Well, you know I’m trying to make equipment that allows all of you to fly? Even Sasha, which will be even more complicated than the stuff for the rest of you,” I admitted, knowing that there was no way to teach the current Sasha how to operate any complex enchantments, not without a way to boost her intelligence and sapience to a level where she understood them.
“Yeah, you said that before,” she nodded, “What do you have in mind, after all that cursing earlier?”
“I think I’ll throw you off a few cliffs,” I responded, keeping my voice perfectly level and calm, as if I was telling her the most ordinary of things. That, alongside my words, made her head snap around as she stared at me in disbelief, her eyes blinking and a brief shake of her head making me think that she was trying to get rid of an insanity induced vision.
“Okay, what?” she asked, sounding utterly confused.
“Throwing you off cliffs, just like a bird throws its chicks out of a nest to see if they can fly?” I asked, managing to keep my voice level and any amusement out of it, increasing Lia’s confusion even further.
“I might dress you in a fluffy costume first,” I added, but, sadly, that was the moment when my composure cracked and I started to giggle, making Lia stare even harder, her disbelief almost manifesting as a physical force.
“What are you talking about, mom?” she kept staring at me, her eyes confused as she was trying to make sense of my words, only to end up worse than she had been before.
“Dressing you up as a flying squirrel and throwing you off a cliff is the next step of my experiments,” I explained, barely keeping myself from breaking down in laughter at the combination of images in my head and the look of sheer and utter incredulity on Lia’s face.
“Mom, explain, please,” she asked, “You are getting a little strange right now.”
While the look on my daughter’s face was absolutely hilarious, I didn’t keep her hanging for too long. Instead, I explained my thought process regarding the two different starting points of natural flight and the idea that she would start up high and go from there. Her natural agility allowed her to easily leap from tree to tree, so adding a simple cloak to allow her to glide would be trivial. From there, I would only have to add some way for her to gain thrust, or she could use it in a similar way to the wings I had used back on Mundus, simply stepping through the shadows to regain height and keep gliding down, trading the height gained by teleporting for speed.
Sure, that wouldn’t be what I had in mind, as it wasn’t a real flight nor would it work regardless of the user’s elemental affinities, but it would be a good first step. Plus, the step wasn’t an overly difficult one either, while having quite a few practical uses for Lia, making my daughter just a little safer in this dangerous world. All in all, there were multiple reasons to make this particular item and few, if any, against it. So, turning Lia into a flying squirrel was obviously the right solution to this problem.
