Wizard Flux

Images by Kbignell via Midjourney

Wizard Flux was a by-product of Wizard research by Honeycut Ip. Even after the discovery that the free magic or lotret could be manipulated in a measurable way across great distance, it was 6 turns before its potential was realized in even a small way, and almost 10 turns after that before the full potential of the magic was exploited.
Today, Wizard Flux services are offered across the continent for a very small fee, sometimes even for no cost in smaller villages and towns, with the Wizard offering the service doing it part time and providing an unofficial service. More advanced countries often provide the service for their public financed by taxes and provided free or at a low cost to their citizenry. Larger towns and cities have official offices where Wizards work at sending and receiving messages as a full time job. These larger message centers have complex and specific rules about where each outgoing and incoming portal can be opened so that the flux of the local lotret does not interfere with other messages and doesn't cause issues with the standing lotret values for the area. A lesson learned the hard way when a small city became a dead zone for lotret for almost a week due to messaging not being coordinated there.
Most people across Halconiket now just refer to the Wizard Flux messaging as Flux. Today, Flux has become as ubiquitous as roads and houses.

Access & Availability

Almost every village, town and city of size contains at least one Wizard who can and does provide messaging service of some sort across the continent, even in The Arrangement of Peace they are used, begrudgingly for the most part, but still used. Only places far outside civilization lack this service.

Discovery

In turn 334 PB, the intrepid Wizard and adventurer Honeycut Ip was attempting to measure the differences in the concentrations of lotret or free magic in different parts the continent of Halconiket. To do this she opened tiny portals to access the areas of interest and measured the amount of lotret in these remote locations. The trick here was that the smaller a portal, the further away its other end could be, and the less magic it took to open it. What she found was that measuring both the originating point's concentration and the remote point's concentration with the spell she'd chosen to indicate the value caused both concentrations to change until they matched over a very short period of time. Honeycut noted this interesting phenomena for later research, but did not come back to it until turn 350 PB when she realized the very spell she was using to measure the lotret changed the value, and that the spell could be varied to change the value by specific amounts, syncing the localized lotret between two very small locations over a great distance.
Continued research showed that the values could be read by a Wizard on both sides of the portal, creating a kind of signaling between two remote locations.
The research was eventually abandoned, classified as an interesting but useless behavior of portals and the commonly used spell to detect and measure lotret.
Two turns later Honeycut adapted the discovery for her personal use to signal her lowest level assistant in a remote lab outside the city when to release birds from their cages so she could track their movements magically in an attempt to create a reliable flying spell. That research failed, but the signaling spell eventually grew to a point where other wizards began to copy it and use it for their own convenience. The fact that the magic was simple and required very little skill or power of the Wizard performing it, gave rise to the Wizard Flux communication system used today to convey messages over long distances across Halconiket.