To participate in the upcoming spar and do well Nick knew he needed to use his scroll writing skills or he would have no chance.
(The spells that I got from Norman won't cut it, they're mostly for doing harmless, miscellaneous things. I don't know much about battles but I've watched anime and movies since childhood so I can roughly guess what kind of spells I need to succeed against an opponent.)
Nick took out his laptop and started sorting through his math text books, looking through the definitions and theories that he had in mind to use for creating three spells.
(Why three? Because I need one spell each for attack, defense and movement.)
After spending five hours looking through his math texts he found three concepts that he would use to create his spells. The first is the theory of rotation, which in transformation means that a figure can be rotated around a fixed point by a specified number of degrees. Nick plans to use this as an attack method. How successful would that be? Well, how damaging would it be if your heart or lungs were rotated 180 degrees in any direction?
The next concept is for defense which is the parallel postulate, one of the axioms of Euclidean geometry which states that through any given point not on a line there passes exactly one line parallel to that line in the same plane; by extension parallel planes are those which do not meet one another.
The third concept is probably the most difficult to understand. Nick wants to use it for movement and the spell it will be involved in will probably be the most complicated; the concept is related to spherical geometry which can be explained like this: there are no parallel lines on a sphere because all great circles, which are the straight paths on a sphere, intersect in two opposite points. There are an infinite number of great circles that can be drawn on any perfect sphere.
Nick has great hopes in using these concepts to make spells because, one, their actual simplicity - they may be math concepts but they are actually simple parts of bigger theories, Nick understands them enough that he is confident in applying them magically, two, there were hundreds of years of literature for each concept, more than enough for him to make use of in writing the laws for these spells.
Nick resolved not to waste any time. He took out a pen and notebook and using his laptop he made notes for each concept, theorizing how they could be used in battle and creating his own proofs to show that each theory was correct, at least in a circumstance where magic is involved. This is difficult because of it being novel to him - writing proofs for theories involving mathematical and magical concepts. Each mathematical concept had a mountain if information associated with it and Nick had to condense the most important parts in a way that made sense and try to write them in magical terms using Valteese which proved to be exceptionally difficult. Five days later, Nick had written a large number on notes on each concept including definitions, explanations, theorems and proofs. He even translated each point into Valteese to make it easier when writing his spells. He had a little over a week left until the exam.
(I've already collected the raw information and translated them to Valteese. What I have to do now is put each point into a coherent sequence and combine them logically. The Valteese will need to be altered when I combine them but there shouldn't be too much more difficulty involved with that.)
Nick spent the next five days going over his notes organizing the information for each concept according to his intentions for the spell it would be used for. When he was certain that the organized information made sense he translated the whole thing into Valteese with the help of his previous translations having to make adjustments all the way through for the Valteese to make sense. Nick hardly left his room during this time except to get food at the cafeteria; he didn't even eat in the cafeteria, spending all the available time he had working on his ideas even when he was eating. With four days left until the mid-year exam, Nick finally took out his stack of special papers and started writing each of his three spells one after the other. During a period of two days he constantly reviewed the laws he had written, deciding what needed to be changed or improved based on the magical energy that was being attracted to the scrolls; normal people could feel magic energy if it was intense and condensed enough. Nick had learned over the course of five months that magic energy would be intensely attracted to a scroll with well written and correctly defined laws. Nick used up almost his entire stack of papers rewriting his spells after making correction after correction. Two days before the exam Nick had three scrolls in front of him that exuded an intense magical energy, so much so that he, who didn't have a mindscape, could feel the intensity so clearly.
(I did it...or at least I hope I did it. I have to make a few copies of each and test them. Hmmm....I can't just test them myself because if they fail, with the intensity of the magic I'm feeling, I could really end up dead. I'll have to have Norman supervise me while I test them.)
With that thought, Nick made the necessary copies and placed them into his backpack. He showered and got dressed after which he went to the cafeteria and ate lunch there. He hadn't eaten here in weeks; a change of routine is refreshing after living like a hermit for so long. After his meal Nick left his dorm and headed to the spell creation club. When he got there, as usual Derek and Lana were there working on their own spells, Derek writing Valteese on the whiteboard and Lana sorting through spell related documents. They both looked at the door when Nick walked in.
"Good afternoon club-mates. It's been a while."
Derek nodded his head in reply and turned to the white board again, Lana replied:
"Good afternoon Nick, shouldn't you be busy preparing for your exam. It's going to be hard for you since you don't have a mindscape."
"Yeah...I know but I have some business with professor Norman."
Nick replied dryly, he new that Lana was trying to bring down his mood but he ignored it. After Nick spoke the door to the other room opened and Norman came out of it.
"You have business with me. Speak, be direct, are you trying to get my help for the exam?"
"Yes I am but I'm sure my request won't break the rules. I have a few new spells that I developed and I would like you to supervise me while I use them so I don't die a meaningless death. Is that okay with you professor?"
Norman rubbed his beard, looking amused.
"You developed a few new spells on your own. You probably thought that you needed to be original to get decent marks on the exam, right? Well, I can't knock you for at least trying, it's smart of you to ask for my help with this. Okay young man, show me these spells."
Norman waited for Nick to present his spells.
"Professor, if you don't mind, can we go to a practice field in order to keep things more private and so I don't ruin your club-room."
Nick has always been wary of other people and he simply didn't trust Derek and Lana. It's not like he trusted Norman either but Norman was already a Regular Magician, there was no need for Norman to plot against him.
"Hmph, trying to act mysterious. Fine, I have a practice field that I use regularly for dangerous potions, we'll go there. Derek, Lana, don't you dare slack off while I'm gone, you also have your own exams in a few days."
With that Nick and Norman left the club-room for Norman's practice field.
.....
At sundown Norman returned to the club-room where he saw Derek and Lana still working on their own. Both looked at Norman with slightly interested gazes. Derek was the first to speak:
"How were his spells teacher Norman?"
Norman could tell that Lana wanted to ask the same question. He looked at Derek, then at Lana and sighed.
"Sigh, you two should work harder."
Saying that, Norman went into the other room and locked the door.
Derek and Lana looked at each other with puzzled gazes.