"Are you sure you're not doing it just to avoid facing Elina? Besides, as Friya said, this is not my kind of vacation either. I don't feel very coddled having to work my a.s.s in a lab for over twenty hours a day." Solus sighed.
"I know from experience how hard it is to live with a big burden on your mind. If I thought that letting you roam through the Kingdom or even past its borders would help, I'd do it without a moment of hesitation." Lith replied.
"Yet I think that after walking on your legs, no matter the landscape you look at while stuck inside the tower, your mind would be replaying those few hours when we taught you how to stand, run, and dance.
"By working, you can keep your mind and hands busy instead of torturing yourself with the memory of what you have lost. We have the next eight hours completely free so you have all the time to prove me wrong. What do you want to do?"
Solus thought for a few seconds about her options. She couldn't get far from the tower without fading away which forced her to walk in circles like a hamster. To make matters worse, it was broad daylight outside.
A tower popping out of nowhere and a spirit of light would hardly go unnoticed, forcing her to choose as a destination one of the geysers nearby barren lands. Solus could go back to Jiera where it was already night, but the thought was enough to make her want to cry.
"I want to sleep, but I don't want to be alone." She said, turning into her wisp form.
Lith kept her company, c.a.r.e.s.sing the wisp until she fell asleep.
'This was the easy part. The hard one will be when she wakes up and she is forced to face the limits of her condition again.' Lith thought.
Unfortunately, he was right. A few hours later, after the tower had restored her strength, Solus opened her eyes and almost burst into tears when she tried to stretch the limbs that she lacked.
Even turning into her humanoid form didn't help. She had no toes to wriggle and no bones that would pop. No matter how accurate her energy body became, it was still just an imitation of life.
"Let's get back to work." Solus covered her face with her hands for a few seconds before getting on her feet.
Lith said nothing but checked her mana core with Invigoration, hoping that all that time spent together would bring her closer to freedom. Solus's core had indeed become of a shade brighter, yet it was far from enough.
Friya joined them a while later, in a much better mood than at the moment of their separation. Lith and Solus had already arranged the different pieces of the flying car each inside a different magic circle for the final step of the Forgemastering process.
"Let's do this. I can't wait to see if all our efforts will finally pay off. No Forgemaster of my age has ever crafted a power core." She said.
Lith cleared his throat in reply while pointing at himself.
"You're right, sorry. No Forgemaster of my age has ever crafted a power core after only six months of practice like I'm about to do. As for you, I'm sorry but Manohar already beat you to it." She chuckled.
"Thanks for belittling my work. He did it only after becoming a Royal Forgemaster and receiving plenty of training from his masters. Unlike you two, I'm almost self-taught." Lith said with a grunt.
"And also a sore loser."
He decided to ignore her and raised his arms. It was the convened signal for everyone to start their respective spell. Assembling a power core required an enormous amount of mana and focus, but splitting the task would also lessen the strain.
Having a bright blue core and a mage tower, Lith was one of the few people on Mogar that might have pulled it off just with Solus's help, but in case of failure, he would have wasted their hard work again.
Lith was a workaholic so starting from scratch wouldn't bother him much, but Solus and Friya were likely to kill him for it. On top of that, working as a team had several perks.
Friya's presence in the final step relieved enough of Lith's and Solus's burden to allow them to greatly increase their precision and make every attempt last much longer than when they worked on their own.
That way, Lith and Solus had enough time to study how the mana circulatory system affected the different pseudo cores and to practice handling the different parts of the power core.
Lith looked at the different pieces that comprised the skeleton of the vehicle that resembled a minivan and sighed deeply. He had been forced to abandon the idea of reproducing the iconic time-traveling means of transportation in the early stages of the project.
The original DoLorean looked much cooler, but it was also much less practical. There wasn't enough space for the kids and both the trunk and the hood had no purpose. Baggage would be stored inside dimensional items and the power source took less space than an orange.
'If only I knew how to permanently distort space, I could have kept the initial design.' He thought.
'Yeah, right. Way to waste an absurdly powerful spell in the name of nerdiness. At that point, why not a blue police box?' Solus was flabbergasted when she realized that Lith was actually considering the idea.
Her sarcasm was wasted on someone that crafted his wands to make them resemble a buzzing screwdriver.
They started to weave the Bonding spell in unison, to make sure that their respective violet crystal would make contact with the silver at the same time. Under any other circ.u.mstance, such a spell would be part of the preparatory phase along with Runesmithing.
Yet crafting a power core required a different approach. As the three gemstones started to fuse with the metal structure, they also generated a complex network of channels that allowed the world energy to flow throughout the silver as if it was a living being.
In normal enchanted items, the mana circulatory system was necessary to imbue a powerful pseudo core into the chosen vessel without making it crumble due to the strain that high volumes of mana exerted on inanimated objects.
Now, however, its purpose was different.
The Forgemasters had to harness the violent flow world energy and use it to move the single pseudo cores from their starting position towards the heart of enchantment, right in the middle of the three crystals placed respectively on the hood, the roof, and below the driver's seat.
Lith decided to use Friya's Warp Drive, the most complex incantation, as the base of the power core, placing it first on the dashboard. The red core was comprised of dimensional runes whose complexity was on another level compared even with the golden Light Mastery core that Solus had crafted.
Normally, Lith would have shaped all the pseudo cores before imbuing them and made them overlap so that they would be able to occupy the heart of the enchantment at the same time.
This time, however, he was crafting something intended for non-mages and as such, it required a high level of automation that could only be achieved by embedding all of the required protocols into a single string of runes.
