Alfric proceeded to touch various parts of the book, running his fingers all along it. His approach wasn’t all that different from Isra’s, when he thought about it. The obvious thing to do with a blank book was to write inside it, but he was going to hold off on that until he’d tried other things.
The answer finally came when he pressed firmly against one of the open pages. His fingers sank in, and as he kept up the pressure, his entire hand disappeared into the book, until finally he was in it down to the arm. As no more of him would go in, and because he was mildly worried, he extracted his arm back out of the book, leaving a blank page. Trying a different approach, Alfric pressed something else against the open page, this time a small rock picked up from the floor, and when it sank down into the book with light pressure, it stayed there, visible as a picture of itself with ink. After a few seconds, the picture of the rock was surrounded by a frame of black ink, and below it a small description was written, a simple paragraph that described the rock.
Alfric stared at it for a moment, then flipped the page and pushed in another rock, which had the same effect. Finally, he tried his best to get the rock back out, which he eventually found was possible just by pushing his hand in and grabbing it.
It was a storage entad, and a fairly good one, though it didn’t take anything that was larger than two feet on its longest side, and getting things in and out of it took some time. Still, with a thousand pages of storage, it meant that they would be able to take the entirety of the book collection downstairs with ease.
If it was unbound, which they wouldn’t know until later, then it was probably worth quite a bit, since storage entads were always in demand. If it bound to one of them, which could happen but was fairly rare, then it would make for a particularly good item, one that he would try to get for himself: you had a better chance of personal binding if the entad was physically on you as you left. But the best-case scenario, at least for Alfric, was that it was partybound, because that would mean that they would have much more incentive to keep the party together. He prayed to the six gods, a short, simple prayer for each, appealing to their better natures.
It was while he was thinking about the party dynamics that Isra loosed an arrow. One moment she had it pointed across the room with the arrow nocked, the next she was standing against the far wall and plucking her arrow from where it was stuck in a wooden beam. She looked the arrow over once, then looked at the others.
“It’s a good one,” she said.
“Moves you to the arrow’s destination?” asked Alfric, when no explanation seemed to be forthcoming.
“No,” replied Isra. “The world slowed down, and I walked with the arrow.”
“Time manipulation?” asked Alfric, raising an eyebrow. “That
Isra began experimenting with it more, and for a time, they simply watched her. The arrow would be let loose, and then Isra would be standing somewhere else in the room, usually directly along the route it had taken. She wasn’t the most articulate at describing its effects, but when Alfric took a turn, he could see the notions she’d been pointing at.
Shooting an arrow created an invisible sphere, maybe ten feet across, that followed the arrow. So long as you stayed within that invisible sphere, time was slowed to a crawl, the arrow’s flight easy to keep up with even if you were walking at a leisurely pace. It was hard to affect things in this slowed-down time, but as Isra had found, you could still fire arrows, and while those didn’t create little time bubbles of their own, they did seem to interact with the world in the normal way, which meant that you could fire that first arrow, then walk along beside it firing other arrows, and end up spitting out five arrows in the time that it took a normal archer to fire only once.
“It’s very powerful,” said Alfric. “We’ll need to see how it binds, if it does, but… it’s world class.”
“Meaning best in the world?” asked Mizuki.
“Yes,” replied Alfric.
“It doesn’t seem that good,” said Mizuki, giving the white longbow a skeptical look.
“Entads compound,” said Alfric. “If you have a good one, then mixing it
with a second good one can make for a much more powerful result. Take a
bow like that one, add in a quiver that lets you shoot faster or with
more arrows, or that
“So you’re saying we’re rich?” asked Mizuki.
“It depends on whether it binds,” replied Hannah. “Bound, we’re not rich, no.”
“Then how do we get it not to bind?” asked Mizuki.
