Mother of Magic

WereCat

Stephanie and Le studied their latest "Building Your House By Magic" issue.

The mountain lodge was largely done. It had a main floor porch and walls. Doors, and steps. The ground floor — the level that was meant for guests in the original house — was not started. The first and second floors above the ground level were much more complete. They slept in their new bedroom for a few nights already, working during the day to refine and learn.

When the house was magically constructed, it was easier to imagine the entire walls. No matter what the wall was made from, wood or stone, it was easier to visualize the entire object before magically creating it and attaching it to either the superstructure or another wall. Later, into the flat expanses of the exterior walls they installed doors and windows. Unconstrained by the realities of the construction supply business, they were shaped to a purpose. Magic let them be any size. Any construction. Any frame type. Only the realities of weather guided them, so the safety glass was perfectly clear, thick, and triple-paned. Designed to keep out winter. In a world where global warming was not yet a problem, everything was designed for winter, not summer. Summers could be spent out on the wide porches that ran around the main floor anyway. If it needed to be screened in for mosquitos later? Easy.

Having practiced how to punch holes magically in the walls they had earlier created, the couple was going big. They were removing a portion of the wall that faced out over the mountains. Their original house had a huge triple-pane scenic window overlooking the wide open spaces. Downslope nearby and off into the distance giving them a view of adjacent mountain tops. The view had been their favorite aspect of their original home. The living room was the room that got the most use because of that window. They had been making love in front of it not long before they were abducted.

Now, it was being magically re-created in this world. Bigger and better than the original. Thicker and better insulating as well. The massive and heavy new window lay directly over one of their stainless steel I-beams. The weight was not causing any stress to the house frame. If they worried about weight, they could retroactively add reinforcements. The new house could be designed and redesigned on the fly. Little things they wish they could have done differently in the original? Easy to update. If they did not like the update? Change it back, or to something else. Forget gutters? No issue. Now they looked like they had always been there and integrated into the flow of the roofline. Forgot leaf guards? Now they had those too. Does the porch need a little more slope for water runoff? Now it has it. Design mistakes and rethinks happened inline or days later. It cost nothing to do it other than agreeing on it.

Magic removed some limitations on the possibilities, but there were practical considerations still. Glass had been appearing and disappearing all morning as they wrestled with the best way to design the aluminum frame to hold three panes of inch-thick each glass. The technical problem was getting the air gap between the panes to have nitrogen in it. Once sealed, sealed enough to hold it. The seal was being tricky, and that was because they could not just grab and replicate themselves some synthetic rubber with magic. They had to know how synthetic rubber was made, and neither of them did. They knew what it looked like. What it felt like to the touch. But rubber was not like metal: A single atom or a few alloyed together items. Rubber has a recipe and they did not know it. There was probably a way around this, but they did not know that either, and Ava was not there to advise them. This was a "make their own mistakes and practice" kind of day.

They talked it over. There was natural rubber they could use as a replication model. It was used in Collins for door seals and tires on various kinds of buggies. Replication magic is what one used when something was not visualizable. Synthetic rubber is a long chain of hydrocarbons, assembled in a complex series in chemical plants from Oil. Natural rubber is also complex but made by plants. In neither case did they understand the material the way they did something like Iron or Aluminium. Elements. Anything they created with Magic like the window sills was pure. A single element or an alloy of a few of them. Simple. Also? Their results were the envy of any metallurgist from their world. Getting pure anything took a lot of work there. Pure Iron or Nickel was easy. Mixing them was easy. Replicating their results? Still easy.