Dog portal

“Offer a portal to summon your dog that got lost in the city.” August read from the pamphlet. Yes, the music library had informational spell pamphlets. “Intermediate level, invocation Arcana. Details are as follows…”

Hrm.

He would need to tweak this. Was it intermediate because it was one target, or because it was a dog? Was the description a simple example, to give the idea… or did it need a dog as a spell component? He did not have a dog. Did He need a dog?! Was he supposed to have a dog, as an invocation master? Was it a pet class?! He needed a pet, right?! Or was this a question of intimacy, closeness. F r I e n d s h i p . Would any friend do? Human friend? Acquaintance? Man off street? Man on street? Hobo?! Did he needed to buy s as hobo to practice this spell?!

August jotted down the data, and left the library.

The next day, He bought a dog.

The dog was his guinea pig. Literally and figuratively. He needed to know, to understand. The dog, was it important, or was the play the thing? Was the spell what mattered most. Or could they do substitutions?

He had once read a book series about magicians, where they practiced 1000 different spells for pounding in a nail. They practiced for at high elevations and practiced for low, for casting when Venus was in retrograde, or casting on the moon. Variations upon variations. Then they learned to pull nails out, because the teacher wanted their fucking nails back. The whole point had been when you can do that shit 1000 different ways, with any variable, the magic is in you, ingrained. You can adapt it on the fly. Or just cast the spell. So with that in mind, did mystic magic need 1000 spells to hammer a nail… or could one spell get tweaked on the fly to achieve a slightly different result?

What? He had only been a mystic for several years now. He was not a master wizard yet. He was pretty sure most everyone else already had more powerful spells than him, anyways. He had loads of questions, and experimentation was really the best option, other than begging another mystic to help him understand magicks (specially when each school varied, and was personal for each mystic).

Yeah.

So, long story short, he bought a guinea pig. Wait, hadn’t it been a dog earlier? What gives?! Well. Dogs are a lot bigger, and a lot more work to take care of. You have to walk them, pet them, love them, play with them, feed them, clean up after them, clean them, and… a hamster was way easier.

It changed again.

Yes. Yes it did. Guinea pigs are big and stinky and aggressive. Hamsters are smaller, and much cuter. August thought the anime Hamtaro, for instance, was freaking kawaii desu. He opted for the smaller animal, the smaller cage, and the thing that could fit in a ball and push itself around. Much cooler than a big chonking Guinea pig. For his spell, he used a hamster as a guinea pig stand-in for the dog. Please try and keep up.

Before he began preparations for the spell practice, August went over what he knew.

Invocation
Magic that summons or calls something to a location. This also allows for the creation of objects, and potentially even animation, but both require magical focus to maintain.

That was his best school of arcana. That was what he did. His element of it was the “call,” the “compel,” the siren song compulsion effect. It built to all the best magicks, but didn’t lead directly to Jedi mind tricks to influence and trick. Not immediately, at least. But if he was clever…

The main purview for August in this school was mind control, siren songs, and compulsions… those were invocation.

Jefi mind tricks, whispers in the ear, making someone susceptible to suggestion… that was metation. Illusion could also mess with minds too, if he made a person think they heard a different command and act accordingly, but that was less effective.

Those were the main things. He had considered learning metation, but the pamphlet had been… really weird. Lotta focus on dancing pants. He liked his pants not to dance. Whereas Invocation, that had high level animated rock dog. Hell yeah, rock dog! Also, portals, what he was focused on here and now. Teleportation of a dog, from a nearby room. Low level stuff. Should be able to be tweaked for his own personal usage if he were clever. And compelling a dog to arrive from another room. Those were listings on the pamplet he was studying. All useful. All about dogs. But he had a hamster, and— he was distracted.

It was a very cute hamster, your perfect hamster. Browns and golds and whites and blacks and spots. Yes. He had named it Hamtaro. Yes. He was a loser. Try and keep up.

Compulsion into suggestion… yeah, he had figured that out without delving into metation. It was meta, tweaking the spell like that. Hell. He had snapped with that spell. He had not even tweaked it, honestly. He had thought it was metation for the longest time until he started making new spells, and realized they were more invocation, more

c o m p u l s i o n

Than they were a mind hex. You live and you learn. His compulsion to Carrick to fly faster, that had been inspired. And he had learned to compel people with single-word tasks, since suggestions required concentration unless he wanted to use them briefly, then discard the spell for a new version once the result was achieved. Doable, but costly, Spell mechanics and energy-wise. Ate glyph card spell focuses like nobody’s business, and—

Gods dammit, distracted again.

Dog portal. For Hamster. Go!

His eyes trailed through his notes to another detail. The words he read were as follows:

“the effects can truly be random (the Invocation hedge witch sprouting demon horns and oozing yellow slime after trying to make everyone in her neighborhood suffer a mass hallucination). A single unmastered spell is all it takes to become corrupted.”

Oh. He could make people suffer mass hallucinations?!

The lines before that also mentioned compelling trees to grow?! What couldn’t invocation do? It kicked ass!!

Further reading, backwards in the paragraphs…

“Magical Corruption
The longer a person is exposed to too much energy, whether it’s solar, thermal, nuclear, etc, or the more intense the exposure, the greater the chance of them being changed by it.”

Wow, he had been in danger during the mansion battle. Everyone had, around all that magic. And the cataclysm, hey, was that why he had changed forms?! After he, August, had suggested he burn through all his magic. Had HE done that to the man?! He had not meant to, but… well wow, what even would compulsion magic do to visually or physically change a person? Make them sexier and more charming? Make them look like a siren? Had that perhaps been where those creatures of myth had been conceived? Nooooo, couldn’t be. Corrupted people. Silly. Next, you’d be saying the Minotaur was just someone who really liked flesh shaping spells. And— he mentally winced at the thought.

Note to self: practice makes perfect, don’t deviate from the plan. Keep it simple, stupid. But he was still going to personalize the hell out of this spell. That being said, August spent the next several hours, the next several days, working with his hamster guinea pig to learn how to make a dog portal…

Yep.

He practiced variations in size. It took less energy for a doggie door-sized portal, and a reasonable amount for a person-sized portal. He could not make a gate. He could not make it last a profound amount of time. The hamster had to be baited to go through the tiny hole in reality, and it had to go fast. It was not even a hedgehog.

He learned stuff about the dog portal. Yes, it in fact did require somewhat intimate knowledge. Very much like “this is my pet” knowledge. He could not make it work for a friend, even if he hung out with them often enough. Ever. The distance and size deferential made the costs far and away higher than an intermediary spell ought to be. To get the pet summon from across the city to be reliable, you would want a ritual spell. A sort of Gate. It might take great time, or it could take great investiture of power. More than his current levels. Maybe with some more mystics helping him. But to
s u m m o n a d o g…

A different spell might be required for a long distance portal with strangers, or a short distance one for anyone. A distance portal for anyone would definitely not be intermediate. It would be

A d v a n c e d

He could do it. He had the technology. He could downgrade the distance, up the cost to compensate for the potential kickback and reverse the jelly baby neutron flow, but—

He could use it to make a door that worked to take him, and maybe one other person, across a distance of about 500 feet. He could do it, in theory…

August got to work practicing something that didn’t involve a hamster in a ball at all. Although that might be an idea for a future spell….