Toying around with my merinita character, with a theme on books and living knowledge, I have to come to design the following spells for his every day laboratory uses. Tell me what you think
Have your characters ever created spells specifically designed for lab uses ? Would love to see them ! Please, share !
Emergence of the Sleeping Knowledge
R: Voice, D: Mom, T:Ind
InHe(Re) 10
The magus targets a book while asking a question. If the book contains a relevant answer, it moves to the magus while its pages begin animating by themselves as if an invisible person were rapidly flipping through them to find the relevant passage. The magus has a split second to grab the book before it falls to the ground.
The book can only answer a question if the response is explictly stated on its writings.
Using this spell regularly during a laboratory activity adds +1 to Texts specializations, but reduces safety by 1.
(Base 3, +2 voice, +1 additional rego effect)
Question to the Invisible Librarian
R: Voice, D: Mom, T:Room
InHe(Re) 30
This spell is similar to Emergence of the Sleeping Knowledge, but is designed to be cast in a room full of books or notes, such as a library or a laboratory. While casting the spell, the magus speaks a question. If any book or note contains a relevant answer, it moves to the magus while flipping its pages to the relevant answer. It stays for a split second in levitation in front of the magus, who has just enough time to pick it before it falls to the ground.
If more than one book contain a relevant answer they all fly to the magus. In this case, they will all fall to the ground except for the one that he will be able to pick, unless he has a mean to hold them still.
Using this spell repeatedly during a laboratory activity adds +1 to general quality and +1 to text specializations, but reduces safety by 1. Indeed, the magus may unvoluntarily attracts many tomes at once. He may also put too much confidence in easy responses to complex questions.
(Base 3, +2 voice, +3 room, +1 additional rego effect)
Awaken the Living Knowledge
MuHe 25
R: Touch, D: Season, T:Ind, Ritual
This ritual requires an initiation to Animae Magic and the Illusion mystery of Perpetuity, which are both taught by the Shadow-Masters mystery cult (HoH:MC 83).
This spell transforms a book into an animae of might 5. If the book is a summa, the resulting animae has an score in the relevant art or ability and a teaching score such that his teaching source quality is equal to the quality of the summa.
The animae may also have a power related to the topic of the book. As a rule of thumb, the power should be designed as an hermetic spell of magnitude less than or equal to the summa score, with a cost of one might point per magnitude. For instance, a summa on Terram with a source quality of 6 may have a power equivalent to unseen arm, costing him 1 point of might.
Orpheus of Merinita designed this spell to make his book studying both more entertaining and more appealing to his personality. As an Apt Student, he would rather be able to converse, ask questions, make reformulations, and occasionaly share some stories with a teacher, than spending hours reading an inanimate piece of paper.
Theoretically, this spell could be invented with a lower duration and thus with no need for a ritual casting. However, each time the book is animated again, it looses all memory from previous interactions, thus preventing the necessary continuity in the teacher/student relationship for the season of teaching to be fruitful. It could however, have other uses such as quickly finding useful informations by asking the question directly to the animae. This kind of application may be interesting because, as an intelligent being, an animae may make deductions and conjectures, and thus be able to respond to much more sophisticated questions than one could ask with Emergence of the Sleeping Knowledge.
(Base 4, +1 touch, +3 season, +1 might 5)