Chapter 70: Clean Words

Chapter 70: Clean Words

I supervised Beatrice as she spent several hours containing the fire elementals. It was fun to just hang out and clean together. Well, it was only sort of cleaning, more like fixing things. I had never been much of a handyman, but it was a lot more enjoyable than I would have ever thought. Perhaps I needed to expand my repertoire.

As we finished binding the last of the elementals, I noticed that Beatrice was starting to slow down. She was taking longer to speak, and her hands were much less precise. Then something clicked in my processor, and I realized this might be a symptom of humans getting tired. I didn't think we would be able to finish exploring this floor today.

We were so close to completing our task, though, so I figured I'd let her finish up. I saw her eyes starting to droop by the last circle and ended up mostly doing it by myself. I didn't mind too much as she had gotten quite proficient, and I hadn't had to help for quite a while.

After the entire set of cages had been re-ringed, Beatrice and I left to go back downstairs. I didn't mind returning to this floor. It was nice to go explore something new, but I didn't want to get into too many new areas without Beatrice. Even though I explored a lot of the main floor by myself, I since realized that I might be missing important context about the nature of the messes I was cleaning. So it was best to have Beatrice take care of any of these odd things while I was able to do some of the more regular cleaning. She was like the specialized task force of our janitorial duo.

It was still a bit odd to think of a human as more of my assistant, but it was something I was getting used to. Maybe it was rubbing off since she had an entirely too high opinion of me. Still, I didn't imagine that would ever change. Though with how things had been going, perhaps I should try harder to meet her expectations, for her safety as much as mine.

As I tucked Beatrice into her bed, I pondered this. Could I really become powerful and capable enough for humans to look up to me so? I wasn't sure if it was possible, but I would do my best. Looking at the already snoring form of Tony across the library, I figured it might not just be for Beatrice's sake that I needed to improve. It felt like a lot of the humans around here could really use some help.

While the humans slept, I considered going for another pass around the entire main floor, but my sensors told me it really wasn't necessary for at least another day. Sure I still could, but even that would only occupy me for a little bit. I would need something to do while they slept. Going back to the book that I had been looking at previously, I continued trying to decipher the characters. I thought I was getting pretty close. I realized there were actually only 26 characters. There just was some sort of special variation of each that went after the dot punctuation marker. And also sometimes randomly in a sentence. I had to figure out the logic, but I imagined I would.

--- The source of this content nov(el)bi((n))

That was how she understood it. It was very likely something was wrong with her interpretation, though, especially with how well her potions had worked so far. But why was Void reading this? It didn't seem to realize that she was standing over it as it traced under each word with its little claw.

—

I had done it! Humans are actually quite clever, even in this bizarre place. The characters each represented a sound. And if you played those sounds out, they correlated with spoken words! How could I not have realized it earlier?

This was revolutionary. Of course, this book was full of mistakes too. I had extracted a set of rules for decoding that explained perhaps 70% of the symbols, but there were many that simply did not fit into the pattern. Many of these letters represented sounds that weren't in the words that I was pretty sure they were trying to say. And sometimes a letter was said one way and sometimes another. The whole thing was full of contradictions and really, really confusing, but I was 96% certain of my interpretation. With additional confirmation and something to check my work against, I could probably bring my 30% uncertainty down to 0.6% pretty easily. But already, I was right enough that I was getting close.

After I had that epiphany to convert each letter to a sound, I went through each chapter closely to map these relationships out. Once I did that, things really started to line up.

I had flipped through the whole book dozens of times at this point. I had it mostly scanned in my memory, but somehow, the physical presence of it allowed me to catch things that my compression algorithm had deemed unimportant and hadn't saved. At least, that's what I thought was happening, but it was quite weird. Something about having the original in front of me seemed to help me, but I couldn't exactly explain why.

Anyways, I was now working on deciphering the 9th chapter. I was having a lot of trouble understanding it. Not necessarily because the words were more confusing than the previous chapters, but the contents of the chapter didn't really make any sense. I had gone through and looked at a few of the other chapters, which explained a lot of why random salt circles were on the ground all throughout this castle. But why it mattered what you thought when you placed down salt circles was still beyond me.

I was considering skipping over this chapter and moving on to the next one. The reason I hadn't was that this seemed to focus on one of the confusing letters whose sounds didn't seem to always be the same thing. Right about when I had just given up on chapter 9, a shadow fell over the book.

This jolted me from my musings. I noticed Beatrice had woken up and came over to say hi. She was looking at the chapter as well.

Beatrice frowned at the page. "I found this chapter extremely confusing. I wish you were able to explain some of this to me. That would be really helpful." She said. Well, at least I wasn't the only one who was confused here. I was flattered that she thought I could explain it to her, but that was totally beyond me right now. She continued. "I mean, I understand the idea that you need to have the intent of doing something while you lay out your circles. But I don't understand why knowing more about the details of how the magic works to change the intent. So the particular part I'm stuck on is, does the intent guide the magic more efficiently somehow? Or does more knowledgeable intent just activate the magic held within the materials better?"

I just looked at her. Maybe if she kept asking questions, she would answer some more of mine. At least she was giving me data on what this text was trying to convey. I recorded her words to parse through further later. Though the fact that we were both confused didn't bode well.