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this was gonna end up being about, I figured I at least deserved something I could show to my friends back in the city.
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is this?" Kam asked. She was so starry-eyed that I bet you could pick out a constellation.
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practical purpose... and a little more of a success, if I do say so myself."
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huge," Ptolema said, gaping in all directions. "It''s gotta be the size of a skyscraper! Or bigger!"
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glowing? Seth asked, staring himself.
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insane amount of energy. The gigantic, mostly-empty chamber had to be ten times the size of the entire rest of the sanctuary, and the air was still thick with enough heat that I was wishing I''d dressed for midsummer.
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very far below, along with a small segment suspended by a stone pillar.
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simulate an environment in which entropy doesn''t exist if you use a complicated enough variant of the Entropy-Denying Arcana, but it''s still just the Power holding things together. It can''t change the fundamental nature of physics, just like Aetheromancy can''t get rid of gravity, just suppress it or change how it''s expressed..."
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up with all these people. It feels like they''re all in on ten big inside jokes at once, and half of them are at our expense. ...but never mind that.
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unorthodox planar makeup going on right now?"
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complicated. "You misunderstand my statement, miss Hoa-Trinh. I do not mean that it is possible to alter the reality we already inhabit... Neither here, nor in the sanctuary above us... But rather that one can create new, limited ''realities'', partially-independent of our own. The Ironworkers used such powers to conduct tests in their reconstruction of mundane physics, before finalizing their work in the Tower of Asphodel proper." He took a breath, the machine which sustained him seeming to get strained for a sec. "But for all their power, they were from an age in which mankind''s understanding of inter-planar physics was less sophisticated than our own, and thus their tools were limited in scope. What you see here is an attempt to augment and modernize them to make a radical departure from conventional reality, of the nature Grandmaster Amat described, possible."
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volume of enchanting that had to have gone into it... Combined with its spiral looking more like one of those perspective-trick paintings than a real, physical object... And you could basically feel reality squirming with this things ass pressed on its neck.
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change it in an awkward attempt to recreate that which once was. However, there is one obvious exception."
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would be possible to restore an infirm individual back to their state of youth, so long as the brain was omitted." He frowned. "But I fail to see how the creation of a space in which entropy was absent would allow for this. A human would not be able to subsist in such a location, let alone spend their entire life there."
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miracle where time surrendered to us in utterance, and the states of the body... Or even the environments in which we inhabit... Were linear no longer, but navigable - as simple as flipping through the pages of a novel?"
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alive, and that just raised even more questions.
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accomplished it?"
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ritual we were expected to witness was getting stronger and stronger.
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secondary school."
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was confused by the magnetic field."
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five meters across, was much smaller relative to the circular walkway that surrounded it, and there was nothing fancy or artistic like the mural in sight. Like the entryway, the place was a departure from the rest of the place, the walls wrought out of stone, albeit freakishly smooth, uniform stone. It was probably part of the original structure left by the Ironworkers, assuming any of that shit was true.
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ripple in the room. Most of the inner circle gave her awkward looks, but I thought I even saw a couple of our classmates react, though I didn''t have time to process who. Maybe Bardiya?
It was a weird moment.
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think was meant to be a sigh. "What you are seeing here is the ''tail'' of the machine, the point of linkage between it and Ironworkers observational device some distance beneath us. It is one of the most vital components."
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does,"
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so still, that I wasn''t sure what was happening-- If he was hesitating, or waiting for something, or what. But eventually, in a real soft voice, he spoke again.
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didn''t see it. Because it was the kind of thing where just the sight was nothing special - it looked like just a long, skinny needle made out of something vaguely metallic, glinting in the light, but not even much. I was expecting it to do something, that Fang would flip a switch and it''d start glowing or shooting out energy like a sparkler. But they just held it there, the other shoe never dropping.
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really big deal.
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Iron...?"