Book 2 - Text Updates 038

Book 2 - Text Updates 038

Little lanterns in Maggie's mind kept blowing out, in ones, twos and threes. The dwagon units, being harvested. And some of the riders, impacting the ground and ceasing to exist (at least, as Gobwin Knob units she had to manage).

There in the Portal Room stood Lord Hamster, eyebook folded, hand upon his sword hilt. Since moments after he had stated his plan to enter the Magic Kingdom, Maggie had been constructing a tiny message. Now she was about to release it.

Everyone else imagined Thinkamancy as a set of discrete capabilities: "relay a command" or "plant a suggestion" or "send a two-way visual/audible Thinkagram."

They were meant to think of it that way. So long as that was the perception of the discipline, then its fundamental powers could stay largely unknown, untapped, and uncalled-upon.

Thinkamancers were aware of certain magical truths for which, quite intentionally, there were no words in Language.

For example, a Thinkagram was not one type of spell. There was a spectrum, from which a Thinkamancer would choose one or more bands to communicate within.

To someone without a sensitivity to this spectrum, it would be impossible to describe the advantages and capabilities of each, but many of those capabilities went entirely unused, except by Thinkamancers themselves. A warlord would only call for one of a short list of communiques: speech, orders, pictures and sounds.

But he would not, for example, ask to communicate and compare his own intuition with that of an allied commander in the field. Thinkamancers understood intuition to be a form of natural Predictamancy, in which a unit can dimly perceive its Fate on a subconscious level. To a Thinkamancer, intuition was as communicable as speech or emotion or the underlying intentions of orders. It could be sent and received, combined and multiplied, and manipulated.

There were many other such hidden mechanics. There were mental senses which could not even be described to a non-Thinkamancer. The most important of these was the ability to sense Grandiocosmic Strings, the conduits of all magic power in Erfworld.

Only Thinkamancers even knew they existed. A Thinkamancer could feel out the G-Strings of the world, and vibrate upon them by plucking. That was how a Thinkagram was sent, and so much else. Each unit had its own individual G-String, which had many uses.

This was what Maggie had been doing for several minutes. Putting little notches in her G-String.

It was a coded message, passive, and costing no juice. Any Thinkamancer who plucked her would find this note in her G-String. But hopefully, only one of the Great Minds that Think Alike in the Temple of the Thinkamancers could decode it. If they did, it would read:

PGLH TO ENTER MK, PASS GK TO SR PORTAL, PROTECT

She was sure that if the message were received, then the Thinkamancers would protect Parson's passage, for the same reason that her message must be coded in the first place.

That reason was not part of the close-knit fraternity of Thinkamancers, but it knew their secrets and more. That reason had the whole world by its G-Strings.

That reason called itself, "Charlie."

Comic - Book 2 – Text Updates 038