[Amber Brightwing]

Over the next few days the Fae tried perfecting the pressure plate technique further, experimenting with several degrees of pressures ranging from mere touching to pushing, standing on it and people having to stomp on the plate. She saw more potential hidden though.

This time the target would simply be the doorknob. The spell wouldn’t be encapsulated lightly this time as she didn’t intent it to be activated by simply applying force. Instead the unshaped Mana was carefully woven around the spell as normal. Instead of locking it away inside the object she went beyond those boundaries however. The unshaped Mana was extended to include the small part of the door where the knob was attached to it. She wanted to capture the spell inside the doorknob, but merge part of its wrapper with another object.

When fifteen minutes later a student tried to open the door, the turning of the knob relative to the door ruptured the wrapper of unshaped Mana and set free the spell. The students hand flew back as a jolt of pain shot through it. Amber had used a modified version of Venom for her test. Nothing truly harmful, but simply a short lash of concentrated pain that would disappear almost as soon as it came into existence.

She grinned at the result. In many ways it was just a more elaborate version of breaking glass objects, but it had as advantage that more sturdy objects could be used to carry spells. With a case full of glass balls with Acid Cloud in them and a decent ambush you could probably take out a small army, but you really didn’t want to trip when carrying them around.

To further try out the possibilities she ordered a bunch of simple blocks or balls made of sturdy wood with a hole drilled in it and a wooden pen pressed in the hole. It was something that wouldn’t break easily, yet anyone could remove the pin when applying some pressure. The first series of experiments was much like the one with the doorknob. A spell would come into action as soon as the pin was pulled out of the wood.

This wasn’t useful to store more offensive spells however. You didn’t want those things to go off in you hands after all. Therefore she continued with trying to bring the pressure plate idea and the doorknob idea together. She wanted to create an object that while the pin was still in it would be no different from a regular imbued object. Once the pin was pulled however she wanted it to be volatile and have it go off with the any rough handling – such as the object flying against something or falling on the floor after being thrown. For this she would only merge the outer part of the surrounding unshaped Mana with the pin. It took her several more days of trying and testing, but eventually she managed to get it so that the objects acted as she wanted them to.