The camp is barely up. Gustav, Rask, and Ca’armine are out after food. Alexis works the jet-black ring off his finger and sits down across from Ethelred with it in his palm.
“Red. I want to test this one properly.” Alexis clearly wants to do more than they’ve done before.
“You remember the story on it? The crone at the trading post in the Westlands.”
Alexis waits for the answer before he goes on.
“Here’s what I’ve been sitting on. We’ve been calling it the jet-black ring. That’s a color. Nobody has ever put a name to what it’s actually made of.”
“So we start there. If it comes back jet, great. If it comes back something else, that’s the first thing of consequence we’ll have gotten.”
Alexis gives a slight shrug combined with a nod to the side with his head.
“Then light. I try to put Raiden’s light onto it. Then possibly into it.”
“Then the next parts.”
“Whether it hides anything besides itself. We set it next to something we already understand and see if that thing gets harder to read with it sitting there. If it does, a ring that does nothing has just done something.”
“Whether it changes me. It comes off for a full day, and you watch me and not the ring.”
“Whether it does anything for a body in a bad spot, which means putting me in one. Water to stand on. A short drop onto something soft with a rope on me. A wall to try. A candle before anything hotter. Small first, and you pick how small.”
“I realized I never checked it for certain kinds of secrets. I’ll try those next. Mostly of the invisible kind, but also checking to see if it has alignment to the greater powers that isn’t more-easily determined.”
“And I want to see if you can wear it, and what might happen if you do.”
Alexis turns the ring over in his palm.
“Anything I’ve forgotten? Anything else to add? Other effects I might not be thinking about?”
“Good that you catch me now before you get too deep into testing the black ring.
We should both use what insight into magic we have while doing a set of simple tests.
Do you already know if it is magical? What school or focus it might have?
It would also be good to have Carmine with us. He has a set of insights that we seem to lack. Additionally he has protects and other ways to repel evils.
Beyond detecting the magic in the ring I have little else to offer there.
I could spend time studying the material and try and figure out how it was made.”
Alexis turns the ring over once, holds it up, and looks at Ethelred through the hole.
“We did this one, Red. At the Monastery, the night we went through the other items too.”
“You had it then. Slippery when you try to discern it. Evocation and transmutation, very intertwined. Passive, and it might be triggered by something. It read the same as it had previously.”
“Include Carm if you like.”
“Right. Seems like a long time ago since we studied those items. I haven’t thought about them much as I have had no use for them.
Ok. Well then studying how to trigger the power within seems like the next step. Of course we do not have much to go on.
Trying to use it as a focus for another power, like you light makes good senses.
I supposed ther could be a physical movement that might unlock its power.
Worse would be a word. Given we know nothing of it origin that would seem difficult to uncover by luck.”
“When we’ve studied it before, we discovered that it seems to have something that will make its effect trigger. No word. No way to invoke it ourselves. This is why I was thinking that my falling might trigger it. Or trying to walk on water. Or inflicting a little heat or cold might trigger it.” Alexis shrugs
“I’m trying to move toward finesse with these things. Brute force can work, but it can also get a goblin shaman taking over your body.”
“Any other tests you can think of, o reader of the most sacred of Collegium scrolls?” Alexis says with a humorous smile and surely a little bit of envy.
“Interesting. What makes this tricky is we do not know the trigger of the effect. In theory it could have already triggered and we simply missed it.
Well I can help with heat or cold. I can push you off something.
Maybe poison, maybe darkness.. like total darkness.. maybe a specific type of control magic, maybe being bound…
I would guess the transmutation would flow into the evocation…”