Raistlin Upadesa casting magic in the style of Léon Spilliaert, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Raistlin woke up feeling he was ready. He canceled the usual appointment with Genry, claiming he was not feeling well. Then he prepared for the showdown.

  Around the regular time, his detection magics warned of an incoming scan. As usual, he dropped everything except for obfuscation magics. As a diversion, he accessed the news on the ether and made his surface mind pay attention.

  The scan did its thing. After a short while, he started raising energy for a detection project focused on the scan.

  This detection project was embedded in three layers of obfuscation. The first layer related to the immediate countermeasures presumably added to the scan itself.

  Whoever was behind the scan would have a separate surveillance engram attempting to detect Divination of the scan. If the scan was an eye floating across the world, this surveillance engram was a second eye looking at the area surrounding first eye.

  Raistlin’s first level of obfuscation ensured – to the best of his ability – that this second eye would not perceive him looking at the first eye. Furthermore, this layer should protect against third parties. If somebody else was surveilling the scan, Raistlin obviously did not want those people to observe him observing the scan.

  A second layer of obfuscation worked in a temporal sense. If the people running the scan were very careful, they might want to use Divination magic to look back at a specific point in time and see how the scan was doing then.

  Obfuscation magic working here and now was not always reliable over time, so looking back at a given point in time was a way to counteract such magics. In effect, Raistlin’s second layer of obfuscation hid his detection magic from history.

  Unless the people behind this were spending enormous resources, the second layer was probably an unnecessary precaution, since it would be extremely unlikely for someone to pinpoint the scan (presumably one of many) just at the time when Raistlin was observing it. As such, it was not entirely clear to him whether he was being careful or paranoid.

  Finally, a third layer obfuscated the obfuscations. Obfuscation magic was by its nature hard to perceive, but not impossible. People who suspected that there might be obfuscation magic at work, or who otherwise knew what they were looking for, would often be able to detect obfuscation.

  With the traditional way of casting magic, the detection and three obfuscations would all be separate engrams and might in principle be separately targeted by hostile magics.

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  Of course, Raistlin’s approach combined all this into one energy flow, and he felt that it would be very difficult to target any one aspect of this combined energy flow separately. This implied that he would probably have been safe without the third layer of obfuscation, but he saw no reason to take any chances.

  He spent a few minutes watching the scan watching his mind. It was fun and interesting.

  In the magical space surrounding the scan he noticed several irregularities – something like a drop of translucent oil swirling around in a glass of water. Obfuscation magic: not so hard to notice when you know what to look for.

  There were three distinct such areas or blobs. One of these was probably the second eye watching out for observation of the first eye. Another may be a third eye, perhaps, or possibly an engram watching the informational space surrounding the general concept of scans. Such a thing would probably show up in this magical space.

  It was also possible that one of the swirling obfuscation blobs was hiding some sort of automated response to anyone targeting the scan with Divination magic. Instead of sending an alarm report – which might be intercepted – and then showing up in person to deal with the nosy Diviner (or renegade) yourself – which might be dangerous – an automated attack engram might be hiding behind one of those blobs.

  Raistlin was so fascinated by observing the scan that he barely noticed it finishing with him and moving on to someone else. The fact that the scan left him made no difference to his observation of it, although at the time of casting it would have been hard to target the scan unless it was actively working its way through his own mind.

  The need for caution had originally made him believe that he would not follow the scan onwards to someone else until he was well experienced with observing it, but now it was obvious that observing the scan while it was doing its thing on a different person was not more dangerous. Instead, it was considerably less dangerous. The riskiest thing was to observe it observing him; from here on, everything was less risky.

  As this insight unfolded in him, his feeling was to stay with the scan. He observed it for hours.

  Eventually, it identified a disgruntled Transmuter named Steve Furnival who thought the Protectors were not doing enough to fight off the Blight, and who spent his time thinking about how he might get near the Lord Protector and transform his brain into mud – which would be something of an improvement for that lousy scumbag.

  The scan sent off a report – it was obfuscated, but Raistlin recognized the swirl as the report left the magical space he was observing to go who knows where.

  It was easy to resist the temptation to follow the report – it would be ridiculous to wait for so many years and then move so fast all of a sudden. But it was clear to Raistlin that he should be able to follow the report, and also that he should be able to intercept it. He had options for the future.

  By the time the scan came around to him again in the evening, Raistlin was resting. He did not attempt to observe the scan this time around, instead just waiting for it to finish. Then he projected his life force to visit the Citadel.

  ---

  The Citadel is beautiful as always. In the chamber of memories, he works his way through everything that related to Ykka’s arrest and its aftermath. None of it triggers any fear. Raistlin understands that he will soon be able to move on.

  Agata Tong Namma, Evoker, casting magic in the style of Léon Spilliaert, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.