Luck be Damned

15

^^ Besan's Barrier Magic ^^

— Alice —

Classes, I learned, ranged from basic, (geology, geometry, geography, Court Manners, etc.,) to Apprentice, (physics, psychology, Fencing,...,) to Advanced, (Psionic Resistance, Emotion Magic Resistance, Dragon Slaying,) and even the Elusive 'Expert' Classes, which I was not given a list of, -these apparently were only available with a Mentor, but I was informed that Spatial Magic was one of them.

Each of these had some affect on being a Knight, but there were also the Magical Classes, which, -though you had to have taken the basics courses to be caught up,- were unquestionably superior in terms of learning opportunities.

I ended up taking several written exams of varying difficulties, and using those scores to qualify for higher-level classes, mostly the Magic and Science Classes, which I honestly thought belonged together in the first place.

Fencing was a required course, as was Basic War Magic, along with Basic Healing, which was a non-magical trauma medicine and herbology class which would've been useful if I didn't already know everything in it.

I had an idea, however, after remembering that Zara knew everything I knew, as I knew it. On a whim or spark of genius, I don't know which, I memorized where each and every class I was interested in was located, first. Then, I spent all night creating a Scrying Eye, a small glass Golem in the shape of a clear sphere, -enchanted with my flying technique,- that was capable of recording and then displaying lengths of video for me.

The logistics of the display and recording were tricky, but I'd managed it before midnight, with my previous knowledge of video cameras and how to record images; the crystal inside the ball was liquid, and would record each scrap of light that touched it, in frames of about 22,000 a second, -22 times that of a human eye, which would allow me to see the intricacies of the movements of the mages and advanced fencers, whom I could not see very well at all, when they moved at speed,- then recap them from its memory bank, which was a small core made of solid crystal that was carefully created to hold the spirit who possessed it, and feed the images to it with perfect clarity, and recall them with that same perfect result.

They could see into every spectrum, and hear everything from 1 decibel up to 200 decibels of noise, the testing of which made at least two dogs howl, and Zara covered her ears and complained at me, which was good to know. My ears had been plugged, but I hadn't considered hers, so I apologized properly and pet her until she felt better. I also included in them a tremorsense, echolocation, and thermal-vision, which would measure movements in the air, the return of sound, and latent body heat, all in concert, to pinpoint the location of anyone, even invisible someone's.

To facilitate this, there was a thin layer of very sensitive gelatinous crystal on the outside of the shell, which was so sensitive that all of these things could have been recorded even without the added steps, but I wanted the security of back-up methods. The last main feature for them was that the gelatinous shell would occlude it's own light, so it would be effectively invisible. Magic would reveal it, I was sure, but not the naked eye.

Once I'd gotten them developed, I created enough crystal for 601 of them in bulk, and then added one truly final feature; it was one spirit inhabiting the Golem, and then the Golem separated into all 601 copies, all controlled by a single consciousness. This would allow them all to coordinate perfectly, and share information with me at all times, as one of them, the main body, would become a replacement for my sunglasses, which I had on me at all times.

That set, and all of them formed and working properly, I sent them off into the school. There were about 100 classrooms, some with the same class by different teachers because of the sizes of the classes, so I placed one of them into the four top corners of those square rooms, so that they could compile a 3D rendering of the class for me to semi-participate in and learn from, at my own pace. The remaining 200 were placed throughout and around the castle, keeping an 'eye' out for anything untoward.