《Blue Mandala: Thargelia [LitRPG, Physics-Based Magic System, Artificial System, UNT]》 Jarrive I fall into a blue world. The sky in a moment is light, before rapidly it fades to darkness. I¡¯m jolted straight into a state of altered consciousness. Hyperconsciousness. I feel the gust through every layer of my suit. The light bends by the weight and magnetism of the layer above towards it, so it is bright when I am there, and dark when I am not. Light emits from the conceptual horizon away from the mean line, splitting towards either the ceiling or the floor. What the fuck? I don¡¯t know these words, I don¡¯t know this foreign tongue, words spitting around my brain and fighting with old memories of sun and sea and Athens. But I do, new memories of OSHA, of Halton, the Carnitine and Dionysus Omadios and Hermes and Apollo Melancholia, of Salacia and HaShet, fighting for dominance, and something sterile pacing at the edge of the white room. I was an Iphigenia. I was sacrificed. My mind isn¡¯t in the best state to give a story of my past. Only the chaotic present. I slow as I approach the sand. My mind is roiling too much to panic or calm from any of this, remaining in a weird limbic state of sea-thought. I land, delicately. Though the moment my bare foot touches the sand, there is a smashing sensation into the back of my skull, and I keen forward, as I feel something heavy bash into it, before it seems to barb, and yanks my neck back. I gasp, and the pain is gone as soon as it comes. I quickly feel the back of my head, and feel blood. Splinters of bone. I turn, and try to feel at the back of my head again. Some sort of thick cable, drenched in blood. I tug warily at it. A dull pain. I feel the area, but it¡¯s drying as I touch it, the blood seemingly sucked back under my skin, and as I look, a fragment of bone I dropped on the blue sand flies up and back. Oh. What the fuck? I feel the cable warily. It¡¯s as thick as my thigh, but short. I can feel an end to it, at the top. It¡¯s like a sort of can. There¡¯s tension, somehow, like it¡¯s gently trying to tug me off into the air. So it¡¯s not heavy. It doesn¡¯t sit on my head, not really. Like some sort of weird drone. I wait a few seconds. Haven¡¯t died, probably won¡¯t soon. I¡¯ll have to try to take it off as soon as possible. It might have a delayed explosive, I gloomily expect so, to just give me hope, but pragmatically, it might just be a materials failure, and I¡¯d be lucky. I look around. And I feel cold. I¡¯m stark naked. I¡¯m not. I¡¯m fully dressed. Visions overlay a thousand times over my body- I see every layer of the thick clothing I wear down to my skin, I see my organs beating, I see numbers and windows and diagnostics. It¡¯s overwhelming, and I dizzily stumble around, before there¡¯s a weird sort of ping. Growing up near the advent of Hallucinogen-computers, (Note: Hallucinogenic Computers are a very advanced form of biotechnology that utilise the brain to compute and display an interface directly in the vision processing centres of the human mind, replacing smartphones, essentially.) it is a very distinct noise - a difference between the sounds of the real world and those of the imagined. Or maybe I¡¯m just defunct in some way. No one around me in the past talked about it, after all. But I tested myself, in private. There was definitely a difference. The sound I hear is one that does not exist, a hallucination. I have Hallucinogens. That¡¯s new. I never installed any last I remember. Shit looks weird, and it¡¯s all blue. I stand in blue sand, and above, a blue rock ceiling. The cave stretches forever on in every way, and light from the horizon streams in from no discernible source. This is not Earth. That much I know. And a simulation? No. I can¡¯t believe that. This place is real, if elsewhere. That¡¯s just something naturally intuitive. One thing at a time. Windows flutter through my vision, and I recognise dozens of medical diagnostics. Heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, temperature gradient, skin turgor, BMI, WHR, body fat percentage, waist circumference, hip circumference, cortisol, insulin, thryoid antibody levels, growth hormone levels, HLA typing, CD4/CD8 ratio, blood glucose levels, cholesterol levels, both LDL and HDL, hemoglobin levels¡­ on and on, the windows darting around like little fish in a pond, before organising themselves into groups, showing sum values, before finally coagulating into a single window. Like a tree, I think, vaguely. HP: 35/50 Recommendation: Find safe haven, eat a meal, sleep a night. HP? Hitpoints? Some sort of AR game window. Weird style, I guess. It doesn¡¯t necessarily mean I¡¯ve been dropped into a game world. Occam¡¯s razor. There¡¯ve already been similar AR systems proposed in my old world, so this is probably something similar. I reach a hand to the floating window, and it expands again into category measures; Vitals, Body Composition and Anthropometry, Endocrine and Metabolic Levels, Blood Biochemical Markers, Kidney Function, Hydration and Electrolyte Levels, Thyroid Function, Vitamin Levels, Cardiovascular Health, Respiratory Health, Cancer Screening, Mental Health, Infectious Disease Screening, Reproductive Health, Genetic Predispositions, Injury and Trauma, Autoimmune and Inflammatory Conditions, Allergies, Gastrointestinal Health, Neurological and Cognitive Functioning, Urinary and Renal Health, Musculoskeletal and Bone Health. I hesitantly hover over the first, Vitals, and it expands again. I listlessly go through a few more. God, I realise, after a while. That¡¯s one hell of a detailed suit. Then I close the HP window and it flies into a corner of my vision. What the hell? I sit down in the sand and think. Right. That¡¯s too much. That¡¯s¡­ right. Compress it. Cabinet it. Stuff it all into a drawer to think about later. You need to think and move, to live. You¡¯re somewhere you don¡¯t know, Iphi. God. God above, where the fuck am I? No God answers my prayers. Maybe he doesn¡¯t exist. Maybe I¡¯m no longer with him. Maybe he doesn¡¯t speak¡­ whatever the fuck this foreign language on my brain is. Maybe I¡¯m in hell? I stand up, panicking at the thought. I died, right? And I¡¯m here. It¡¯s like a game. Perhaps this is my hell? I pace around for a bit. Oh God. What have I done? What sins? What crimes? But I can¡¯t remember. So I just sit. And reason a little more. Perhaps it is a hell. But it seems it isn¡¯t a hell in ignorance. So it is not a true hell, as true hellish suffering is universal, not subjective. Objective. Am I in pain? Some. But not overwhelming. It is. But only if I think it so. So stop thinking. You can make a million conclusions from one fact but one conclusion from a million facts. Explore a little more. I open the next window. It expands. Mana. It¡¯s a simple numerical indicator. 0.9% of 1 Mana. Mana? What the hell is that? I puzzle over it for a few seconds, before losing interest. A third window appears, Sanity. That¡¯s comforting. I hover over it to split it into its constituents. Irresistible Impulse, Diminished Capacity, Necessity, Mistake of Fact, M¡¯Naghten, Durham Diagnosis, Biochemical Indicators. SP: 60/100. There¡¯s a button by it. ¡®Convert to Mana?¡¯ Absentmindedly, I click it. A popup appears. Amount? One SP, I¡¯m about to say, but the words appear just before they leave my mouth. I blink. Huh. Nice. Subvocal recognition. That was a new tech I was working with before I ended up here. Maybe they¡¯re related? I¡¯m a tad dizzy. I click the accept button, and a mild pain appears in my head. The Mana indicator appears, ticking up to 1.1% of 1 Mana. The SP¡¯s ticked down by 1 to 59/100. The next windows to appear are LEVEL, MONEY, JOULES. Level¡¯s a standard EXP bar - I¡¯ve played my fair share of games, and as for money, I¡¯m butt-broke. For JOULES, I¡¯ve got around 4.184x10e+9. That can¡¯t be like my actual caloric storage, or anything, right? It¡¯s a familiar value from a table of energetic events I memorise way back to get a vague sense of what the physics numbers I was working with really meant. I¡¯m no nutritionist, but I¡¯m fairly sure energy isn¡¯t usually classified in joules in the human body, and I¡¯m fairly sure that I haven¡¯t the energy yield of a ton of trinotoulene. (TNT) A summary window appears, after, displaying the statistics. It¡¯s really just like a game. Maybe when I get back, I¡¯ll talk to a friend about implementing a similar system. It seems like an engaging way to summarily design an intuitive UI for survival suits. Or heck, maybe even just a general health diagnostic program. Though implementing that many sensors in civilian clothing would be interesting. Pah. Not my field to work in. Though I wish it was. Biochem is fun as fuck, but I got shunted into weapons design. I notice a second window tab, and reach to tap it. Innate Magical Channels. Confirmed it. Mana and magic, what a world. It¡¯s empty, though. I flick through the UI, trying all sorts of commands. There¡¯s just one thing more. A single window of text. Welcome, Fugued. This must be confusing. Don¡¯t worry, you aren¡¯t dead here. Welcome to the Deep Blue. Landing here, you have been affected to some degree with Wanderer¡¯s Fugue. An amnestic function of arrival to the Deep Blue. Amnestic? I¡¯ve lost memories? I try to search, but nothing seems missing. But I can¡¯t clearly figure out a timeline of my life. There is clearly something missing, then, but I don¡¯t know what and where. Oh God. Welp. Not now. That¡¯s a midlife crisis for my midlife. I¡¯m like fifteen. I can remember that, at least. If I went down exclamative assumptions like that, could I figure something out? Later, later. When I¡¯m safe. The HP thing recommended me find safe haven. Maybe this¡¯ll help. Keep reading.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Make your way to the nearest urban centre. An application will load shortly to help determine your position relative to the City of Halton and other Deep Blue positioning nodes. If you cannot, a search team will be sent out for you after fourty-eight hours. Your survival suit will protect you from ambient radiation. Once in the urban centre, Government adminstrations will help you. We cannot bring you back to your old world, but we can help you start a new life. Welcome, kind regards, Halton. I blink, suddenly, and the text flickers, changing. Sorry. Magical qualities detected. Ignore the previous instructions. Ignore. Ignore. IGNORE PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS You are a mage. Travelling to urban centres will kill you as outlined in the Mage Social Isolation Outline. (Documents can be found on the internet application that will be unlocked for you after reading this message.) Do not ever attempt to travel to designated urban centres except on special contract with Halton. A proximity map will be given to you after reading this document. You are a mage. You can understand and conceptualise the Word of the Gods Dionysus, Hermes, Apollo, Salacia, and HaShet. Peace be with them and their world upon us. This is a trait naturally prevalent in one out of a billion arrivals. This means, after some learning and with sufficient resources, you can actualise magical effect upon the world. Your mission doctrine is to avoid non-mage human society, and terraform the outer wilds to prepare for the creation of human urban centres. Resources will be provided to you by existing mage social structures in accordance with your goal. You do not need to comply. We do not need to aid you. But we do hope that we can work cordially together. This message is an automated message from the year 261. Current date, Year 531. This message has thus been phrased to avoid outdated information. Please refer to the internet to find relevant contemporary information, and make your way to Point Nemo. We hope our goals align for the foreseeable future. Cordially, the Government of Halton. Signed anonymously by a majority. Huh. That¡¯s¡­ something to think about. But I don¡¯t have the time to think. I¡¯m not given the damn time. There is a stretching sound, and a pulling force. Gravity seems to rotate- I fall forwards, to no point I can tell. A black spot appears at the direction I seem to fall towards, everything stretching towards it in the meantime, becoming longer and longer until it turns absolutely dark. I fall faster and faster, falling into the darkness. I look up, and the world grows small behind me. And then light appears again, and I¡¯m thrown into something hard, and light appears in front of me, and I¡¯m thrown in the opposite direction. I land back where I was, and the force seems to be reversed. I turn over, blinking, wiping the sand from the visor of my suit. A clockwork woman steps out from the air, a glowing halo above her head, and she floats. Is she one of the Gods mentioned? What shit luck. I wonder if Gods existed in my old world. Bad idea to be an atheist in the present, at least. I¡¯d better start believing fast. ¡°Uh. Hi.¡± ¡°Iphigenia. You¡¯re Iphigenia, Ms.?¡± She speaks sharply, all pointed tipsy angles like art deco, in flairs of blue and white and green. She steps down from the air, dressed how I¡¯d imagine a greek goddess of old would, and shakes my hand after I rise to my feet, thinking of what to say next. ¡°You speak¡­ English?¡± The words come out slowly, the word English, a foreign toffee on a foreign tongue, both thick and heavy and barely distinguishable. Not my mother tongue, not my tongue. ¡°For you.¡± Her accent¡¯s changed, somewhat. I can¡¯t tell. It¡¯s no longer quite that first transatlantic. Something more¡­ Mediterranean. ¡°What was that?¡± ¡°Talk more.¡± ¡°What?¡± ¡°Talk, more. I need to get a full voice sample from you.¡± ¡°Uh. Ok. Hi. Seventeen. I¡¯m Iphigenia, you¡¯ve already said that, uh, who are you, where am I, who am I, just, what the fuck? Like, generally. What?¡± ¡°Thanks. Aight. I¡¯ve got it.¡± ¡°Can you¡­ like, answer my questions?¡± I flush, slightly stressed. Am I being too brash? Don¡¯t know. Don¡¯t care. My mind is on fire and I¡¯m standing in the fucking doorway smiling. How many platitudes can I handle. I clutch my head, suddenly, as a migraine comes on. Ah, shit. ¡°Your first question. I¡¯ll start with that.¡± She moves towards me, glides towards me, like some sort of spirit. I almost fall back, but she outstretches a mechanical hand, the weird metal thing stretching and unfolding into a claw, which holds me loosely by the neck. I make a surprised sound, before she guides me back into standing. With her other hand, she touches my head. It is cool. Suddenly, the walls are gone. I can¡¯t explain it. I was in a box, now I am in a field. My mind¡¯s been expanded, in a way. ¡°Woah. What the- what?¡± ¡°Serenpidity. And yeah. I speak English. You might¡¯ve noticed. Among other languages. Halton standardised the English language in this corner of mage society. Needed to sift through the dialects. Amazing what a dedicated linguistic ministry can do, even over half a millenia. Well, you¡¯re pretty lucky you already speak English. That¡¯s one less language you¡¯ll have to learn in school to do shit.¡± School? Ministry? Mage society? Millenia? What? Suddenly, answers jump to my head. Mage school, idiot. You¡¯re a mage. Welcome. Ministry? Government? Halton. Halton¡¯s doing something to me. Did something. Will do something. Millenia? Thousand years. I stop and stare dumbly, for a moment, trying to process everything. I am in a new world. Transmigrated. That¡¯s for sure. Halton¡¯s some sort of government. High-tech, probably, with this robot woman. Is she from there? She¡¯s not dressed in a suit, or anything. She calmly watches, and waits. My anxiety on keeping her waiting ebbs like a little tide. Tide. Tsunamis. Calm before the storm. In the calm. Spend time, think. A conclusion, a question. I stow away the stewing thought processes for later, tossing them out like balls in the field for me to stumble upon in surprise and find again at a later time at a different rotation, to see a new face, a new way to solve. ¡°Are you¡­ one of the gods in the welcome document?¡± ¡°Pft. No. Sadly.¡± She smiles, faintly. ¡°You¡¯re making the correct assumptions.¡± ¡°Cool. Uh. Are you another mage, then? That seemed¡­ pretty magical.¡± She seems to scowl. Hard to tell. Her face isn¡¯t very human. ¡°Technically. I¡¯m not human. I¡¯m a machine, hope you could see that. But yes. I am a mage. A very powerful one.¡± ¡°Are you with Halton? If not, who¡¯re you with?¡± She scowls, more deeply, and I feel my non-existent balls drop. It¡¯s just a saying, but I feel like I could almost feel it, the flesh of my gut lowering until it¡¯s hanging by a thread. Careful. Thin ice. One inch, thin ice, two inches, good for two, three inches- stop. Where are these memories coming from? Focus. Focus. Focus. ¡°I¡¯m with me. Me is with me. And I¡¯m on contract with Halton. To babysit you for a bit. But I do as I please.¡± Right. So she¡¯s with Halton. The woman makes a dismissive sort, a moment later. Can she hear my thoughts? ¡°No,¡± she says, sighing. I snap my head. But she goes on. She¡¯s staring off into the distance. ¡°No, no, that wouldn¡¯t work. Do I get a textbook..?¡± She doesn¡¯t seem to be talking to me, and I¡¯m not pushing my luck. Questions, questions only. That¡¯s what she¡¯s in the mood for. ¡°Did you bring me here?¡± The woman laughs. ¡°Heavens no, hah. I¡¯m not a God, I don¡¯t rule the natural laws of the world, no matter how good I am at tweaking them. You¡¯re just here by chance, and I¡¯m here to elevate you to be a decent mage in about a day. You can do whatever you want, so long as you learn magic from me, first.¡± Mage. Mages use magic? Magic¡­ that seems to be integrated into the natural laws, then? Transmigration seems like magic to me. Teleporation. This woman definitely teleported here. That¡¯s magic. That¡¯s what mages can do. It¡¯s power. And my Hallucinogens- the innate channels, the mana, the sanity. Magic is my path. A linear path. A path to power. Power. That is my name. I am born to power. Born to seek power. There is a fire in my gut and my lungs and my heart, my soul alight with something like a lust of love. I want power, I think, strangely, the paper-idea wafted on the hot fires of myself. I fucking want power. I want to change the world and not be changed. I want to grasp the power and souls and organs of a man and a mountain and twist them, just because I can. Fuck yeah. ¡°Why should I?¡± The woman smiles, afterwards. Perhaps she¡¯s read the hunger in my eyes, in my soul, my spirit. That sort of thing does not hide. ¡°It¡¯s magic, dumbass,¡± she says, barely concealing a smile. ¡°Eh. Not an answer. Real answer¡¯s that I¡¯m strong so I get to do whatever I want. You¡¯ll get to live your life or kill yourself after I¡¯m done with you. Don¡¯t really give a shit.¡± A drop of water on my flames. That¡¯s¡­ uh, concerning. Why would suicide be implied? Maybe it¡¯s just an overstatement. Maybe there¡¯s a reason to that sanity metre? Fuck it. You¡¯re overthinking. Stop thinking. ¡°Fine.¡± I¡¯m not in any state to disagree with a godlike robot woman, after all. And this is what I want. She smiles. ¡°Memorise everything I say. I¡¯ll test you, after, and I¡¯ll probably flay you if you fail.¡± ¡°Wonderful.¡± I feel a slight chill on the air. And now I have a sense of scale. That woman ahead of me is my future, magical and powerful, able to influence her whims upon myself, my personage, as she pleases. And I am here, weak and small. I feel like an onion against salt wind, the air of the sea that tears at the skin, tears the moisture first away, then flakes away the layers, leaving a purple heart. My heart is purple, purple is the colour of pressure beyond red, when the blood is so squished with passion and must be let out. My heart is purple, my soul is purple, and the world is blue. Absentmindedly, I wonder if my lips are purple. It is cold, and this suit doesn¡¯t seem the best at working with temperature gradients. Her smile only widens. ¡°Let¡¯s walk a little, shall we?¡± 2 - Cohesion ¡°Rule one of magic - preservation. Rule one of life, really. Keep your form together. Rule two¡¯s reproduction, but that¡¯s for later, pretty girl.¡± She lightly turns my face to face hers, and I see the thousands of gears turning, softly glowing. Two eyes are set into the flat mask covering most of the face, like blue gems set into grey nuts. I don¡¯t flinch. Does she know? Does she? Does she? Don¡¯t. I do take a long look across her form, though. It¡¯s¡­ attractive, after a strange fashion, in the abstract way that one is always attracted to oneself, in the abstract way that one can see oneself represented in single things. Though with this machine, it¡¯s expanded. Perhaps you could see your frailty in a dandelion, your ferociousness in a lion, your greatness in your empire, but with this machine, it¡¯s like looking at an imperfect mirror. FOCUS, goddamnit. Just because your mind¡¯s a field of meandering doesn¡¯t mean¡­ whatever. ¡°Right. How?¡± ¡°All magic is based on runes. Or on mandalas.¡± ¡°Like those eastern buddhist guys?¡± ¡°East..? Oh. You mean your old world. Yeah, yeah, probably. Purposeful marks, whatever. I use norse runes as¡­ like, computer shortcuts for the half-mandalas, so I call them runes to you, so you won¡¯t copy my shitty formalistic organisation. That¡¯s the second element of being a good teacher I think, setting you up to be able to learn from other people with different styles. Off-track. Sorry. They¡¯re called half-mandalas, cus all spells need a specification half and an actualisation half. They¡¯re usually not the same size, saying ¡®half¡¯ is just pedantic or something whatever the word is cus some early idiot thought they were equal. Expect the actualisation rune half thingy to be bigger with spell or mandala complexity. So. Runes. Runes. Mmm. They¡¯re formed of glyphs, which are formed from three different dialects, Dionysian, Hermetical, and Apollonian- ¡°Hold on. Dionysus, Hermes, Apollo? Wait, wait, wait. We need to backtrack a fucking bit. I heard those names earlier, in the welcome. Wasn¡¯t thinking about it. Hold on. Why are they gods here? Shouldn¡¯t it be Zeus? Or Christ? I mean, if it¡¯s so familiar, why¡¯s it so random-¡± ¡°They¡¯re names, pookie. G?tter, das war schrecklich. I¡¯ll try to keep off your sorts¡¯ slang. Scientifically, you can call them Stone, Sky, Sea, Salt, Sand. But Halton¡¯s got a religion, and people get touchy about religions, and gods too. Just follow the form.¡± ¡°K.¡± ¡°Alright, so the structure¡¯s like Hangul morpho-syllabic block formulations rather than latin left-right word ones-¡± ¡°What the fuck is Hangul?¡± ¡°...-though you¡¯re not really familiar with that. You¡¯ll learn them later. Get all that? With all the interruptions? Glyphs make runes, and there¡¯s two types of runes, specification and actualisation, and you need a specification and actualisation rune for a single spell. We¡¯ll trace in the sand. You¡¯ll need to memorise it.¡±If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. I sit still, internalising the information, baking them into a formula in my head. Five gods, greek, spells from runes from glyphs. Spec and actual runes, need both for spell. Good. Yeah, I¡¯m good. I nod, as I speak. ¡°Couldn¡¯t you give me, like, a photo? Drawing in the sand seems weird.¡± ¡°One, I can¡¯t be bothered. Two, runes can¡¯t be kept on normal storage, and the way I store them, you¡¯d need a few years of education to decode. Three, it¡¯s not like you¡¯re old enough to have knee problems, so you¡¯ve nothing to complain on in kneeling, so now hush and let me draw.¡± ¡°I¡¯ve had enough practice k- ew, no, nevermind, wait, how old are you? That¡¯s weird-¡± ¡°Shut up. Draw.¡± ¡°Alright.¡± We stop walking, and I stay quiet, and watch, as the mechanical lady sketches out some great logo on the sand. Most people wouldn¡¯t be able to memorise these dozens of strokes. It is still a feat for me. Though practice makes easy utilisation of the three or so petabytes of data storage a human brain has. Those meditation classes were worth it. ¡°Done.¡± She gets up and stretches. I simply stare. ¡°Well? What¡¯re you waiting for? Copy on.¡± I stoop down into the sand a ways to the right and get to work. ¡°Fast learner. Fucker. Fuck. Forgot the spec half. Eh. That¡¯s for later. This is just for the gist. Memorisation. Won¡¯t power it, anyhow, so it won¡¯t do anything. This rune hardens anything, strengthens the bonds, simply put. Spec rune specifies what, and where, and you¡¯ll need to dynamise it either procedurally or fluidly, depending if the thing being hardened is following a predicted path, or not. That¡¯s because it¡¯s hardening anything in a region rather than the object particularly. Usually, for dynamised objects, we create an imaginary zone that¡¯s a bit larger than the actual object, especially at high speeds, for latency, since there¡¯s a sort of base frame rate to magic and it¡¯s not quite on par with reality, and you wouldn¡¯t want your projectile blowing up halfway from lagging out of the imaginary zone and colliding into the part of itself still inside.¡± I stare up at the ceiling and imagine it. ¡°Interesting magic. Could it work as a sort of inbuilt two-stage mechanism?¡± ¡°Yes. But that introduces an element of instability we don¡¯t tend to like, unless that¡¯s intended.¡± ¡°Damn. Seems like your people¡¯ve got it all figured out. Magic and physics, I mean.¡± ¡°Yeah. That¡¯s because we didn¡¯t figure it out, we built it, built physics from the ground-up, and gave ourselves a backdoor and called it magic.¡± She pauses. ¡°I have many questions,¡± I say, half-ask, awkwardly during the pause. ¡°Course you do. Search them up in your spare time. Hallucinogens, internet stuff. I know you know what the internet is. We haven¡¯t google but it should be intuitive. Back to the lesson. When you draw the rune, when you¡¯re finished, there¡¯s a wire in your tube, the thing in the back of your head. Reach for it and it¡¯ll jump into your hand. At higher levels, it¡¯ll work with your thoughts. You plug it into the open end of the rune to power it. You tie together runes with a simple canal, and that becomes a sentence. You¡¯ll have a¡­ starter sequencer device that can store a few runes in advance and deploy them either in sequence or on shortcut command, it¡¯s linked to your Hallucinogens. I¡¯ve personally used my clockwork brain to create a more advanced version of this, though most mages rely on innate channels for magic, or carving, essentially, runes into their brains. More efficient for energy, and doesn¡¯t use mana. That¡¯s a lesson for later. You¡¯re pretty new, probably Fugued a bit, so you won¡¯t have an innate channel right away. Next, setting shit on fire. The kids love this one.¡± She rubs her hands, smiling devilishly. 3 - Hell Screen ¡°Since you¡¯re pretty smart, we¡¯ll be aggregating complex applications into the lesson now. Not very complex, mostly just single runes for these topics, until we get to the next, where I¡¯ll properly introduce the specification rune.¡± ¡°Cool. Does that mean we won¡¯t be able to see the fire of the rune we¡¯ve made?¡± ¡°No. I¡¯m just not teaching you how to set me on fire right out the bat. You probably wouldn¡¯t be able to, but I¡¯m more resistant to directed kinetic stresses.¡± ¡°Ms. Paranoid.¡± ¡°What was that?¡± ¡°Nothing.¡± ¡°Right. Let¡¯s start. So. I lied, technically. Catching fire would only work with stuff that burns in the air, because lots of things don¡¯t oxidise. If you want to make those things catch fire, you¡¯ll need to chemically transmute something or change the laws of thermal conductivity or like alter the way the gravitoelectromagnetic field works to change how chemistry works locally. Though that¡¯d make compound spells rather than a simple boom fire spell. This spell is just heating something up, but I like fires to represent that because I don¡¯t want you burning your fingers off and a weaker spell is boring. There¡¯s two ways I want you to go about this. First, Joule heating. Second, going directly to the source and imparting bond instability via quantum cohesion, in this case quantum incohesion. Heh. We¡¯ll be doing this as a continuous spell, as in you¡¯ll have to continuously power it at a lower level than a single-frame spell, since that¡¯s safer. Consider a bomb versus a lightbulb. Over enough time, a lightbulb might give off a similar amount of energy to the bomb, but the bomb¡¯s considerably more likely to maim you. We¡¯ll also be manipulating time to make the process faster, to demonstrate more aspects of what we can do with magic. Because air¡¯s got oxygen, there shouldn¡¯t be too much of a worry with specifying combustion conditions with oxidation reactions. Also means I¡¯ll have to transmute some sand into something flammable. Once you¡¯re good enough with magic, you could transmute the air, as well, but you¡¯d need to control a larger space, and that¡¯s less efficient than transmuting denser objects. Reason why mages like to use osmium and other nonradioactive heavy metals like gold for transmutation. Depleted uranium was more common, historically, due to the early wars, but gold¡¯s just better, and once we developed economies of scale for the compression and transmutation of gases into heavier metals osmium¡¯s high-key just more efficient.¡±If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. A ball of sand rises from the ground, flowing like a liquid into a perfect sphere. ¡°Uhm. What again? Fuck it. Hydrogen.¡± It disappears. ¡°Not very visual, really. But here. Fireball.¡± Barely, I see the space ignited into something white. ¡°It¡¯s white,¡± I comment. ¡°Cool, I guess.¡± Beryl snorts. ¡°Pale blue. Your eyes just get used to all the blue around.¡± ¡°Mhm.¡± Beryl sighs. ¡°Not very impressive, is it? Believe me. It¡¯s pretty cool when you get good. The Vatra clan have their innate channel towards firebending. I can do it too, just less efficient. I¡¯m just going to transmute this hydrogen into methane and carbon soot to get a nice contrasting yellow colour. Colour theory.¡± She reaches out towards the fireball, and it seems to recoil, before growing, stretching, like a beautiful dragon, writhing and flying across the horizon, growing and growing, until it fills the sky. I see a painting, a video, a great scene of hell, but it was not the usual picture of hell as drawn by ordinary artists. The flames, which were with such vividness that they seemed almost to burst from the air into my eyes and then my brain, surrounded figures writhing in excruciating agony. There were men, women, and children, some of them burnt by the flames, some being boiled alive in cauldrons, others skewered by iron hooks, or pierced by sharp blades. The tormenting heat from the flames seemed so real that I could almost feel the burning pain. The figures¡¯ faces were twisted with the grotesque expressions of suffering, their mouths open in silent screams that seemed to emanate from the air-canvas itself. The hellish scene was alive with motion and notion, and the air trembled with the vibrations of the screams and the crackling of the flames. It was a hell so vivid, so terribly real, that anyone who looked at it could scarcely believe that it was only a fire. I cough, as I inhale some of the soot. Beryl seems too fixated on the flames. ¡°Hey,¡± I say. ¡°Mind coming back to me?¡± The air grows thin. ¡°I¡¯d like not to choke.¡± The robot lady turns her head back to me, staring, for a moment, before sighing, snapping a finger, extinguishing the fire. ¡°Got carried away. Art¡¯s fun.¡± 4 - to shoot a rock è„¿ lapollonian ¡°Alright. So- rocks. Throwing rocks. Tis the shit. Tis also the shit Man used to kill animals we couldn¡¯t outfight otherwise. Jolly, aye? Today, we¡¯ll be learning how to throw rocks with magic. What do you know about acceleration?¡± ¡°What?¡± ¡°It¡¯s how fast something goes from slow to fast, numerically.¡± ¡°No, no- I get it. Sorry. Just a surprise. I was a firearms engineer. Wasn¡¯t thinking it¡¯d be in magic. Though thinking about it¡­¡± ¡°Alright. Fun. You know how bullets work. So. Yes. So. I think that I¡¯ll have to explain magic properly, now. Now. So. Halton in the Third Work Order decided that physics was too complicated, so-you-see they came up with a unified nexus theory, or the Grand Unified Plan for physics, and made it simple. Instead of the four fundamental forces you learned- which I know about, we have three. Gravitoelectromagnetism representing gravity and electromagnetism, quantum cohesion replacing the strong force, and temporal flux replacing the weak force. Respectively, they manage gravity and electromagnetism, obviously, then the binding of particles at all scales, then interactions involving time and entropy.¡± ¡°That¡¯s something to think about. I didn¡¯t get all that much into¡­ astronomy and particle physics.¡± ¡°That¡¯s something to think about for later. I¡¯m talking now. So. For magic, we¡¯re allowed to manipulate the Grand Unified Plan¡¯s Lagrangian representation. It¡¯s a form-first thing, really. Magic is created by writing down the Lagrangian, altering it, and powering the resulting rune or runes depending on what your spell is. You¡¯ve got to connect the runes in order to get them to activate one after the other unless you want to manually go around sticking your wire into each. Each rune-within-rune I¡¯m talking about more or less consists of a lesser sort of Lagrangian that represents a term of the Grand Unified Plan that describes a base element of reality. For, say, throwing a rock, there¡¯s a few ways to go about it. You could use a gravitoelectromagetic propulsion, you could mess with matter fields, you could go the scalar field route, you could warp spacetime curvature, hell, you could use quantum cohesion or gravitoelectromagnetism to trigger a chemical reaction, or quantum cohesion again for some sort of nuclear reaction. We¡¯re going a mostly integrated route with an inert projectile being thrown in a single frame, so we¡¯ll be outlining seven key terms in our Lagrangian of the throwing frame. By single frame, I mean a single moment of powering our rune, since it¡¯ll be designed to provide a single moment of acceleration rather than a guided path, cus that¡¯s advanced shit you can¡¯t do right now with your lack of expertise and, well, level. Alright. To the seven terms for a throwing spell that integrates most of the different ways you could throw a rock. Spacetime geometry minus the gravitoelectromagnetic field plus the scalar field plus the matter field minus the mass term plus temporal flux minus quantum cohesion. I think. The Matter Field is the bullshit I¡¯ve been calling the specification rune, cus it¡¯s singularly more important than all the other runes in the spell. If you¡¯re missing a part, the gods are nice and assume you¡¯re not changing how that bit works, but your magic can¡¯t work at all without a specification rune or the matter field unless you¡¯re trying to universally affect the laws of physics, in which case, good luck in achieving any change without several orders of magnitude more power than humanity¡¯s used in the past millenia. Not happening. Unless you¡¯re secretly a God, of course. That¡¯s cus the Matter Field describes where and what you¡¯re affecting with your spell, obviously. In four dimensions. Though normally you leave out the temporal vector cus if you accidentally make a paradox there¡¯s a correctional factor that will variably fuck you over. For this throwing equation, let¡¯s break it down term by term. Order technically doesn¡¯t matter, since it¡¯s addition and subtraction of the lagrangians rather than anything that needs an order of operations, so let¡¯s just go off the order I made from listing off the top of my head. For spacetime geometry, you alter the cosmological constant term to create gradients. Add this glyph to represent the specified local gravitational field, so you don¡¯t end up trying to change the constants of the whole world. Technically, this shouldn¡¯t work to do anything, but there¡¯s latency in bending the curvature, so you¡¯ll get a little boost even in single-frame magic. In some continuous equations, you¡¯ll need to separately represent the different local gravitational field if it¡¯s not overlapping with the matter field we¡¯ll specify later to find the projectile. For some continuous equations that use spacetime warping dynamically for trajectory adjustments, use this glyph I¡¯m writing outside the rune as a time varying component, which you can later define more clearly in a corner, or with some formula shortcuts. Not our problem right now, since we¡¯re performing single frame magic. Next is the gravitoelectromagnetic field. We¡¯ll just impose a directional force vector through an interaction-term between the projectile¡¯s current and potential force, which I¡¯ll call J and A. Make sure J¡¯s related to our matter field if the field we¡¯re manipulating isn¡¯t in the projectile. It is, here, though, so we don¡¯t need to do anything. Baseline universal assumptions and all that. A¡¯s that directional force vector, encode the direction and magnitude. Latin numbers work, but you¡¯ll need to use the correct glyphs to represent all the other symbols. Now, the scalar field. Just slap in this rune. Can¡¯t be fucked to work with it, cus it¡¯s boring and messy and somehow theoretical, it¡¯s higgs and a bunch of other smaller fields that do weird things. Introduce here a variable for a formula Dionysus recognises, it¡¯s a stabilising scalar potential to cancel out disturbances like drag or uneven curvature around it. Currently it¡¯s not smart enough to not cancel out our own spacetime curving, so I¡¯ll just throw in my custom version. You don¡¯t have permission to use it outside of this lesson, consider it a little maths problem for you to figure out how to recode it. Technically it¡¯s useless in single-frame magic against continuous magic, which scalar field magic is the main use for; counter-magic defences, but its good practice just to include it, since its negligible cost when its negligible effect. Fourth, I think, is the spec rune. Matter fields. It describes matter in quantum fields. It¡¯s tied complicatedly-like to the mass term, but that¡¯s boring maths. It couples to everything it needs to with the code in the scanner. Smart formula I¡¯ve made cus I¡¯m smart. Speaking of, this is where you stick in your scanner- slap the butt end in the greater rune to print the glyphs encoding the quantum field describing basically the constituent particles making up the object. Doesn¡¯t matter much when you do it with this wonderful buddy, so long as it¡¯s not been much longer than an hour or two, the data will be accurate. Think of it less as an actual thing for now and more as a shortcut to that step. Deterministic universe and all that. Don¡¯t ask how it works. Couldn¡¯t explain to a human. Human formulae for predictive formulae for the matter fields¡¯ temporal vectors operate off similar principles but they¡¯re very different. They¡¯re running a universe simulation in my brain and reference the matter field at the temporal value they expect to cast. Back to the runes at hand- sorry, got excited, this term in the matter fields one is useful for continuous magic cus it describes how the matter field moves through spacetime. There¡¯s a mass term minusing off the motion and behaviour ish term I just mention to define interactions with forces, which leads to very complicated things which is why I¡¯m not teaching you continuous magic. Fifth term is the mass term, which is this funny equation, and this rune represents the effective mass term which can arise dynamically from interactions with the scalar field we talked about earlier that I don¡¯t like. Sixth term is temporal flux, which is the third of the fundamental forces. The first part that minuses the second part is the kinetic term for the temporal flux field that manages time and entropy stuff, and the second part is the potential term for the stability and nature of temporal dynamics. Cus that¡¯s how Lagrangians work, you know? Kinetic minus potential. What we¡¯ll be doing is extracting the bracketed value from the potential variable in the temporal lagrangian to adjust the temporal gradient. If we were doing even just a second frame, it¡¯d allow a bit of initial aiming by slowing the projectile over a short time after the single frame, sort of like an early-stage tracer. It¡¯s more useful in continuous magic where you can slow time during acceleration to make more course-corrections and still preserve momentum by gradually restoring time flow as the projectile reaches the target. You take the bracketed value and equal it to spatial entropy and a rate of time flow. There¡¯s not that much temporal stuff can do in single-frame, cus there¡¯s no time element, so I¡¯ll yap more on continuous magic. Using these two glyphs can deal with external disturbances like another fellow fucking with time in the region. That¡¯s through this additional term, where the potential of the temporal lagrangian is set to half of a stabilising constant multiplied by open bracket temporal state minus desired temporal state closed bracket squared. There¡¯s a smarter formula that can turn back time a little and adjust course for perfect trajectory. Don¡¯t recommend it, energy-intensive. Summarily, we aren¡¯t using temporal much cus that¡¯s for timed magic and we¡¯re doing single-frame. Finally, the seventh main term, we¡¯ve got quantum cohesion, because I can¡¯t order my teaching well. The first term describes quantum field level cohesive field interactions, it¡¯s added the interaction term for cohesive forces acting on matter. A potential term is minused that defines how strong the cohesive interaction is, that¡¯s what you alter in the equation. You could modify surface-level cohesive forces to improve aerodynamics¡­ argh, but that¡¯s over time. You¡¯d have to alter that first bit of the interaction term. It basically makes air do the friction thingy less. Next part might be a war crime, I can¡¯t remember. You dynamically alter the second part of the interaction term, the gauge field to reshape the projectile mid-flight. So long as you don¡¯t expand the projectile inside an enemy, it¡¯s not like hollow point bullets, so just be careful. Finally, you could alter the quantum field level cohesive field interactions to create a delayed cohesive collapse. As in, definitely a war crime. You¡¯ll make the projectile fragmentate upon impact, turning a single hole into a grate at low energies and turning a penetrated person into a fog of blood at high energies. Again, definitely a war crime. But if you¡¯re not fighting people, go ham. Personally, if you introduce an earlier ¡°projectile¡± which could be done via a space-time curvature, you could control the splitting point of the projectile and get a sort of combined sniper-fire buckshot effect. Takes both pros from anti-material rifles and sawed-off shotguns. It¡¯d also be hard to trace, since the bullet would break apart at the subatomic level. And, and, and, there¡¯s less threat of ricochet off hard surfaces and thus risk to friendly forces and civilians, if you somehow have to use this in a closed space. And done.¡± She stands up, eyes glowing with a sort of lust for the art, runes and glyphs scrawled over the sand. I take a moment to photographically memorise the sight. She grins chaotically. ¡°Now, isn¡¯t that absolutely fucking cool?¡± ¡°Fuck, yeah,¡± I say, monotonously, trying to digest the sermon. She chuckles quietly to herself, once, then twice, after a short pause, watching her handiwork, before going over and kicking up the sand. ¡°Hope you understood.¡± She scoops up a handful of sand from the floor, clenching it, and turning it into beryl. She presses the new form, turned into a 20x110mm Hispano cartridge, into my hand, along with the scanner. ¡°Shoot this. Just like I explained to you a moment before in painstaking detail. Remember. You can use latin numerals if you haven¡¯t figured out the numerical system for the glyphs. I will skin you if you don¡¯t get it in half an hour. Single frame. Don¡¯t do anything too ambitious.¡±Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators! ¡°Do I use my finger, to like, trace in the sand?¡± ¡°Sure, if you want to trace before your pour the mana in.¡± I close my eyes and the image slowly appears before my eyes. I dissect it. Right. First important part. Matter fields. I place the Beryl in the sand at my feet, and scan it. ¡°Ambitious.¡± ¡°Do I stop? You said it¡¯d work for up to an hour after. I suppose that meant the limiting factor was an hour or two rather than accidentally jittering the rock around.¡± ¡°That¡¯s not just a rock, I made it- nevermind. Yeah, yeah, cocky bastard. I¡¯ll talk again when you¡¯re done.¡± Right. Matter field. I press the scanner¡¯s printing end into the sand, serving as a base for the rest of the Mandala. Then the forces and fields. Four- no, three, three fundamental forces. Gravitoelectromagnetism. Main propulsive force in a single frame mandala. First the field strength tensor as the negative value, the potential energy in that Lagrangian. Then the positive interaction. How was that vector represented again? Right. Now for a value. I can¡¯t remember my roman numerals. They¡¯d had like¡­ X, C, I, V? I just toss a few together. Next. Quantum cohesion. Am I supposed to touch that, again? Oh yeah. Just upp the cohesive interaction potential. Bracket it, and use what I assume¡¯s the addition glyph to plug in a random roman value. ¡°Good work.¡± Beryl¡¯s voice distracts me. ¡°What¡¯s happened to shutting up?¡± ¡°I never said that. I do as I please.¡± ¡°I speak as I-¡± No, no you don¡¯t, Iphigenia. You don¡¯t want to get flayed by the machine lady. Shut up. She snorts, amused. I get back to focusing. Temporal flux. Uh. Ignore that, I guess. She did say leaving blanks would lead to base assumptions. It¡¯s only single-frame magic, she did say Temporal¡¯s basically useless in that situation, right? I think I¡¯m actually really bad at directly memorising stuff. I can only remember my summaries, and I can¡¯t trust my voice in my memory. It¡¯s already proven unreliable. No time for that, though. Now the weird fields. Scalar field? Just that weird personal rune she said was hers. It¡¯s the simplest glyph in the mandala by far. Now that¡¯s four out of seven. Good progress. No. Wait. Five? Yeah, five. Uh. What¡¯s left? I stare dumbfounded, for a moment, wracking my memory. ¡°If you can¡¯t remember, just say the word. I¡¯m getting bored.¡± ¡°What word?¡± ¡°Yes? The word¡¯s yes. It¡¯s yes to my question if you can¡¯t remember.¡± ¡°No.¡± ¡°Suit yourself. I hear fast deaths are better than slow ones.¡± ¡°Flaying is not fast.¡± ¡°You¡¯re not, either. Hurry up.¡± OH OH OH. Geometry. Spacetime geometry. Right. Just change the cosmological constant term to create a gradient with the rest of everything, and toss in a scalar from the matter field stuff to couple. That¡¯s six. Last one¡­ mass term. Ah, yeah. Higgs. Uh. Nah. Not fucking with that. ¡°Done.¡± ¡°Doesn¡¯t look done to me.¡± ¡°Shit. Meant done with the trace. How do I get the mana?¡± ¡°Say mana. Subvocal works as well, as you should know.¡± ¡°Mana.¡± I choke, after, and vomit into the air a golden liquid. ¡°That¡¯s new. Never seen it come out of the mouth.¡± It¡¯s choking me. I pull it out, the material seemingly between a ribbon and liquid, floating on the air. I gasp, after. ¡°How the fuck-¡± ¡°Idiot. You control it with your mind. Fill in the traced mandala.¡± It looks like liquid gold pouring into a sheathe. Extremely thin. A notification flashes. Mana down to zero. I check on other stats. HP¡¯s down to 33/50, probably from the choking. SP¡¯s down to 50/100. Stress? Choking? Trying to listen to a sermon a few minutes out of birth? I just feel a bit worse, I guess. I¡¯m used to lectures, though, so I¡¯m probably doing better with the sermons than another in my place would. It¡¯s morbidly funny to think that. ¡°Won¡¯t it leak?¡± ¡°It¡¯s not liquid. It¡¯s mana. You control it with your mind. Will it to harden, and it¡¯ll stop, though. Harden it. You¡¯re done filling.¡± I do. ¡°Question,¡± I say, after a moment. ¡°Does the thickness matter?¡± ¡°Only so much as how much you can save and still keep the form intact. Mathematically speaking, a single atom thick should be the thinnest possible, but that would probably take practice.¡± ¡°Good?¡± ¡°Good.¡± We stare quietly at the inscribed Mandala, glowing with reflected horizonlight. Beryl breaks the silence. ¡°Right. You remember what I said about the back of your head?¡± ¡°You¡¯re treating me like a child.¡± ¡°You are a child.¡± ¡°That¡¯s new. Age hasn¡¯t much to do with intellect when there¡¯s smart people like me and intellectually challenged people of drinking age. You¡¯re treating me like a retarded child.¡± ¡°Wrong, for one. For another, you¡¯re Fugued.¡± ¡°Fuck does that tell me?¡± ¡°I hit you with a fourth year course on particle physics five minutes after you were born. I¡¯m being patient.¡± ¡°Great.¡± I think, and raise my hand. A wire snaps into it from the tube. A chill runs down my spine. I walk around the mandala, going to the sole empty slot, from a two dimensional perspective. ¡°How do I scale the power I need?¡± ¡°Work done is current by time. Voltage is current times resistance. The wire¡¯s got weird resistance properties- you¡¯ll be fine- oh, oh. I mean, the wire¡¯s smart. It figures it out. Basically, it¡¯ll fill until it can¡¯t. That¡¯s the way Mana works. Just plug it in.¡± ¡°Alright.¡± I look to where the Beryl rests in the sand. A sonic boom. A crack that could split the world apart. It certainly splits my brain. The sand flies up in my eyes, and I fall backwards. A blast outline in the sand trails vaguely towards my northeast. The Beryl is gone. ¡°You know, if you¡¯d fucked up your direction, you¡¯d be pink mist.¡± ¡°I didn¡¯t.¡± I look to where the mandala was. Only the outline is vaguely left, though the mussed up sand has muddied it. A ping. My joules bar flashes. It¡¯s gone down from 4.184x10e+9 to 4.174x10e+9. I¡¯ve used about a gallon of gasoline¡¯s worth of energy in an instant. ¡°Lazy,¡± Beryl says, finally, a quiet undertone in her voice. ¡°You skipped a couple of terms. Don¡¯t blame you, though, that¡¯s good magecraft. That saves energy.¡± ¡°Weird tone for being proud of me.¡± Beryl¡¯s voice is cold. ¡°I¡¯m not. You plugged in numbers without a care to bend the laws of reality to shoot a rock at fifty thousand kilometres a second. You¡¯re wasting a fuckload of watts. Joules. Equivalent over single-frame, whatever. Shit¡¯s precious. Don¡¯t waste what you don¡¯t have to, principle of scarcity, because that shit is scarce, especially for you, with your tube. I¡¯ve got my own tube, but yours is the starter one. Government one. Military-grade, meaning it¡¯s as cheaply produced as possible. Halton¡¯s allowance isn¡¯t much, and you¡¯ll need it later. Right. If you want to emulate the power of a gun, most guns don¡¯t shoot faster than four hundred metres a second. That clocked in at least fifty kilometres a second, and you probably just emptied your watt storage with sending that fucker over a hundred times the speed of a rifle. If you can¡¯t control yourself, just get a gun.¡± ¡°But I¡¯ve only used around 2% of my joules.¡± ¡°You¡¯ve used a fiftieth of your monthly energy allowance on a demonstration rock to send at into the sky at ten thousand metres a second. Are you batshit stupid? Don¡¯t shoot rocks. Blah.¡± ¡°Then what¡¯s ballistic magic even for?¡± ¡°Projectile magic. It¡¯s for telekinesis. There are more uses than bullets. Like heavy-lifting. Like drone control. Like travel. Like missile disabling. Magic can literally do anything if you¡¯re smart enough, not just throw shit like an ape and break your own bones.¡± ¡°Alright, alright, fair, fair.¡± I¡¯ve gotten ahead of myself. Best not to argue with the god-lady. She pinches the bridge of her nose, and waits a few seconds. ¡°Sorry about the outburst. It¡¯s really not a matter of life or death for you. It¡¯s just¡­ yeah, I¡¯m a little tight about things like this. It¡¯d seem pretentious to say trauma, so I¡¯ll say trauma.¡± ¡°K.¡± ¡°Lemme show off a bit, needa blow off steam.¡± She picks up a handful of sand, and it condenses into a rock. It hovers, flying around, and Beryl gestures off into the air, the rock speeding out, evaporating into a smoke trail as it traces a geometrical square. ¡°How did you do that?¡± ¡°I¡¯m a robot. Internal mechanisms. And I¡¯ve got scanners in my eyes. The physical gestures were unnecessary. Just cool.¡± ¡°Dang. Could I do that?¡± ¡°No. My brain is the size of a small city, that¡¯s where the magic happens, and your brain¡¯s at best a fourth the size of a watermelon. That¡¯s the neat thing. So long as you have accurate data, you could make magic happen from as far away as you want. This body¡¯s a puppet connected to the brain by an internal portal. Sadly, world doesn¡¯t have developed electronics, cus the laws of physics got changed by Halton and messed up how electrons work, and Halton¡¯s had developed biotech for a long time, so there¡¯s been no research and consequently no tech in electronics. Biological components like cultured brains don¡¯t work with runes unless they¡¯re mage brains, and that¡¯s got ethical problems, so my brain¡¯s an analogue mechanical computer running in accelerated time and in superposition. A good enough substitute.¡± ¡°So you¡¯re like a quantum supercomputer abacus?¡± ¡°Are you- never-mind. Not quite. Pretty much. Let¡¯s get to chronomancy. My least favourite mess.¡± 5 - temporal flux She rubs her hands together. ¡°So. Three fundamental forces. Gravitoelectromagnetism, quantum cohesion, temporal flux. Not much of a simple way to describe all three, and I¡¯m only here to set you on with enough knowledge. Enough for what, you¡¯ll figure it out. School will teach you the real sciences if you¡¯re up for it and you¡¯ve found the cash. What you need to know is that gravitoelectromagnetism is the go-to for moving biggish things, quantum cohesion is for really small things, and temporal flux is for¡­ well, time. Hm. Well, it¡¯s a bit complex, but I¡¯d like to introduce you to it, anyways. I¡¯m not giving you too many crutches early on, since they¡¯ll just hamper conceptual understanding, so I can¡¯t teach you freezing or entropy or perspectives. Hm. Definitely not perceptives, that¡¯s advanced bioalchemy curriculum. You don¡¯t have the level for it, anyhow¡­ Ah, fuck it. Just¡¯ll map it out for you. Just draw the standard rune¡­ here, and append this on the end for stability, and add in a few coefficients for stability. You¡¯re only using the first one, but it¡¯s good practice for compound, makes good habits. You twist gee up for a flat increase and you twist eff around to multiply the flux¡¯s effect, as in dilation and contraction. There¡¯s a graph somewhere, since gee increase is more efficient than eff increase to a certain point. For now, stick with flat increase. That¡¯s like the first of the first of the basic operators. Technically, addition is derived from subtraction, but like, it¡¯s easier to visualise addition. There¡¯s¡­ eight levels, ninety-eight theoretical operators, theoretical as by me, by the way. I¡¯m better than humans. They¡¯re only at the fifth tier, stuck at hypothesising on the sixth. Not necessarily their fault. Cognitive closure. I will come back to you on those ones.¡± School? Incomprehensible magic? That¡¯s¡­ that¡¯s thinking for later. Talking to Beryl is like¡­ I don¡¯t know. I don¡¯t have the capacity to analogise this. ¡°You mentioned levels. What¡¯s that?¡± Beryl scowls. ¡°Crutches I can¡¯t get rid of. They boost or reduce your ability through an algorithm to the mean skill of your level, using saved skill to reinforce itself. It¡¯s a bunch of viochemicals and weird tech that accelerates your thinking, it¡¯s designed to make sure you can¡¯t fuck up too badly. Mostly based on how well you understand magic. Or, really, physics. It¡¯s a combination of how high-tiered in operators you can understand, from stuff like subtraction and division up to like Turing degree operations and hyperdimensional physics. If you don¡¯t get it, don¡¯t bother, now. I¡¯m just using big words to sound impressive. Hyperdimensional physics is a big school, though. Fun shit. That¡¯s cus it makes nuclear fusion, nuclear decay, chemical bonding way stronger. Plus, more degrees of freedom means easier thermal equilibrium, and hella good cooling systems, and a bunch of other cool shits. Lots of things work in four degrees of spatial freedom that don¡¯t in three. Only thing is that Halton¡¯s against transcendence. As in, entirely sending us all up. Too much freedom. You¡¯ll learn them, later. It also limits what you can do. Temporal magic is high level cus it¡¯s an easy way to get an awful death. Oh, I¡¯m overexplaining shit I hate. Ask the adventurers¡¯ guild at Nemo. Now, draw the rune. Practice.¡± ¡°Hold on. I¡¯m trying¡­ to break down the rune into glyphs. For memory purposes.¡± ¡°Don¡¯t bother. School will teach you.¡± ¡°My brain isn¡¯t a computer. I can¡¯t perfectly memorise images.¡± ¡°Fine. I¡¯ll run you through it. Complicatedly, there¡¯s technically five languages. For magic.¡± ¡°What the fuck?¡± ¡°Dionysian, Apollonian, Hermetical, Salacian, HaShet.¡± ¡°Can we take a break?¡± Beryl grabs my wrist, and snaps it. I stare at it, for a moment. It¡¯s like being tickled if it was being punched. Then I think I go into shock. Warnings flash in my eyes. Vitals avg. up, stress suppression intact. Shock. A red overlay on my wrist, a 3d model appears above, showing the shattered bone. My suit tightens around that area, forming a sort of cast. I can feel the pain like an oncoming bruise. I hold back a whimper, buit it escapes, anyways. More warnings, visuals for bloodflow blockages, and a pain intensity scale hovering around a five. But I ignore the rest, as Beryl talks. ¡°You ¡®k?¡± ¡°Ow,¡± I say, unconvincingly, even to myself. ¡°OW!¡± I say, a moment later. ¡°What the- fuck?¡± I begin to feel nauseous. All the flashing warnings suddenly disappear, to accomodate, I¡¯d suppose. I keel over, clutching my stiff wrist. My lips feel moist, my body feel cold. I breathe in, out, in¡­ gasping. Not enough. Too much. ¡°What the shit was that?¡± ¡°You¡¯re awfully cocky. You hear me?¡± ¡°No. The world feels¡­ so¡­ heavy.¡± It does. Like a great weight. I¡¯m forced to a full prostration, clutching my wrist to my abdomen as my head touches the sand. My helmet, really. Don¡¯t you fucking vomit. Don¡¯t vomit. ¡°Next time, listen. How retarded are you? I boosted your mental performance, and you¡¯re already getting tired? Fucking fleshbags. Look. Look at me.¡± She does something. Not with her hands, because they¡¯re behind her back. But I¡¯m lifted up by my hair, and the machine lady is staring into my face. It burns my eyes to look at the glow behind the plates and gears in her face. ¡°Ow,¡± I complain, meekly, drunkenly, like a small child punched and held up to hang on a willow. ¡°Ugh. Your nose. Snot¡¯s coming out. I¡¯ll fix you up somewhat. Need you to practice. Hold on.¡± A blink, and suddenly, all the light seems to be a bit dimmer, and I¡¯m looking a something else completely different. ¡°Whar?¡± I struggle to my feet. Beryl¡¯s sitting in a thick leather armchair. She opens her eyes. I see just a little twinge of thousands of hallucinogen windows vanishing into privacy. ¡°I¡¯ve given it some thought. You¡¯ve had your break. I¡¯m not the best with human biology, after all. Fixed up your wrist, though gave your brain some time to flush some stress.¡± I feel around the inside of my own head. ¡°Damn.¡± ¡°We¡¯re jumping right back in. Prepared your mind accordingly.¡± I sigh. ¡°Not even a ¡®how¡¯d you feel¡¯?¡± Beryl gets up, snaps, the armchair turning to sand, before approaching me menacingly, again. I back away. ¡°Please.¡± That¡¯s the one word I get out. Holy shit Iphi shut your mouth. ¡°How¡¯d you feel?¡± She smiles, somewhat, letting out a shaky chuckle, before turning about again. ¡°Terrible.¡± She raises an eyebrow. ¡°Wonderful? What does that eyebrow mean? I feel terrible. What do you want me to say?¡± ¡°Pft. Cocky fucker. We¡¯ll only be going through each of the symbols we need for this equation. Dionysian is the language used for kinetic terms in Lagrangians, Hermetical is potential terms, Salacian and HaShet are custom-defined terms, there¡¯s a weird difference between them, and Apollonian is miscellaneous terms.¡±This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. ¡°What?¡± ¡°A Lagrangian is an action principle. El equals Tee minus Vee. It represents the total energy in a system. Tee is kinetic energy, and Vee is potential energies. I¡¯ll draw the basic representation in the five languages. They¡¯re actually derived from some old world scripts. Latin, Alchemical Symbols, uhh, Bopomofo, and Deseret. You should know latin. It¡¯s the base script for English.¡± ¡°What¡¯s latin?¡± ¡°...You? Ah. Makes sense. You didn¡¯t mention it. What did you write in, again?¡± I open my mouth to speak, but no words or thoughts exit. I close my mouth, then open it again. ¡°I¡­ don¡¯t know. I can¡¯t remember.¡± ¡°Write some words.¡± I bend down to the sand, and think. I visualise nothing, but I see the words written down. And I can understand them. I can¡¯t understand drawing them, but it is done. Beryl watches critically from above. ¡°Hm. Nevermind. So¡­ English, or what you speak-¡± ¡°What I speak now.¡± ¡°What you speak now, that¡¯s English. It¡¯s derived from latin, derived from greek, which is in turn derived from like Linear B, which is what we call what you¡¯ve written. Alchemical symbols vaguely come from the vibes around latin and greek, but it¡¯s more complicated. I¡¯m going to write out the manipulation and deconstruct it in more familiar styles. Left to right instead of this Gallifreyan mess.¡± Beryl squats in the sand, and begins to draw with a finger. ¡°The Focal term of this manipulation is the temporal term. Thus, all the other terms will be treated as limiting terms. This means that in the sum Lagrangian, we¡¯ll write the temporal term in Hermetical, since it¡¯s all potential, our modifiers in Salacian, and the rest of the other terms in Apollonian. The Lagrangian symbol is the most prominent universal symbol, by the way, along with our equals symbol.¡± ?UNT = ?GEM + ?QC + ?Matter + ?Mass + ?Geometry + ?TF ????? ¡°This is the zeroth tier of decomposition. As in, the most abstract form. I already explained this, so let¡¯s go down a tier. We¡¯ll only be expanding Tee-eff, that¡¯s how you pronounce the latin of the last one, the temporal flux. It¡¯s written in Apollonian, because I fucked up, so I wrote it in the correct Deseret script since it¡¯s the only modified term in this Lagrangian representation.¡± ??? = ??g??f????1??4????????????????????????1??2??s??f????2?? --- Note to readers:
  1. ???? = brackets
  2. ?? = +
  3. ?? = -
  4. ???? = Temporal Tensor
  5. ?????? = Temporal Tensor dual
  6. ?? = multiply
  7. ?? = divide
  8. ?? = gradient
  9. ?? = exponent
  10. f?? = scalar field for dilation and contraction
  11. s = variable for stability
  12. g = variable
--- ¡°Wait. Fuck. I wrote it in HaShet. Why¡¯d that happen? Wait a second.¡± ??? = (????????)??(g??f??????????)??????????s??f?????? --- Note: the representation above is not an actual spell, but one written left to right. In normal Mandalas, each inner Lagrangian is curved into a ball within the larger frame.
  1. ?? = 0
  2. ?? = 1
  3. ?? = 2
  4. ?? = 3
  5. ?? = 4
  6. ?? = 5
  7. ?? = 6
  8. ?? = 7
  9. ?? = 8
  10. ?? = 9
  11. ?? = gradient
  12. ?? = +
  13. ?? = -
  14. ?? = *
  15. ?? = /
  16. ?? = field tensor
  17. ???? = field tensor dual
  18. ?? = scalar field
  19. ?? = TF
  20. ?? = exponent
  21. f?? = scalar field for dilation and contraction
  22. s = variable for stability
  23. g = variable
¡ª ¡°You see it, now?¡± ¡°Yeah. Roll it up into a little ball, and you¡¯ve got one of the eigh- seven, seven terms in the full Lagrangian, for the Mandala. ¡°Done.¡± ¡°Cool. Don¡¯t fuck with it. I need to get this out of my system. Got questions. That¡¯s a statement. You¡¯ve got questions. Ask away.¡± ¡°W-well. Right. Where- where is this?¡± ¡°Deep Blue. Name of the place. It¡¯s like¡­ an alternate dimension, kind of. A sort of block time construct in the dream of Neptune. Read on eternalism. Well, it¡¯s been five hundred years. We¡¯re not really tethered like that, anymore. There¡¯s a fat issue in how we are. We can¡¯t leave, but other things can enter. Not quite like a singularity, but maybe. Conceptually, things are sorted by the gods into the further dimensions in this place. I haven¡¯t worked out an equation, since it¡¯s so vibes-based. Mostly, human people and human people-ish things come in here. A sort of anthrophilic obsession.¡± ¡°Dream of Neptune? How? What?¡± ¡°Ay. It¡¯s just that. Not important, since you¡¯re not leaving, no one really is. There¡¯s a lot of theories and religions as to how a planet can dream, but it¡¯s impossible to affirm. Even talking with the gods doesn¡¯t guarantee shit, since they could just lie and you¡¯d never know. There¡¯s certainly working theories, but I don¡¯t care about them.¡± Right. I need a break. ¡°Hey. Don''t break my wrist again, but I need a-¡± ¡°Yeah, yeah, sit in the sand, in the rune, whatever.¡± I slump down into the sand and lie back. ¡°Why¡¯s it all blue?¡± ¡°Why¡¯s the Planck constant 6.62607015 ¡Á 10-34 m2 kg / s? Fuck if I know. That¡¯s just the way the world is.¡± ¡°I mean, there has to be some studies.¡± Beryl kicks up some sand, her arms behind her back, stomping around the desert. ¡°It all goes down to before deterministic sciences, the Grand Unified Plan or the Unified Nexus Theory, all the same thing, were introduced. So it¡¯s probably the whim of the gods. Can¡¯t really tell anything, since all the natural sciences definitely drastically changed when Halton introduced the mold. Plus I wasn¡¯t born then, and Halton ain¡¯t sharing their shit.¡± ¡°Great. Would it be rude to just try and search up my answers.¡± ¡°Yes,¡± she says, very firmly, stopping her pacing. It feels a little weird that I¡¯m sitting while she¡¯s standing above. A sort of depersonalising feeling when it¡¯s next to something quiet, but something dehumanising when it¡¯s against another person. But when it¡¯s against a talking machine, the feeling¡¯s something a little weird. Who¡¯s the object-pet in this dynamic? Depends who¡¯s leaning and what for. And when the two trunks of personage stay free-standing? Maybe it¡¯s a weird ode to pride that I can¡¯t figure out what it all means. I¡¯m just looking too much into it. ¡°Alright. So. What¡¯s Halton? How¡¯d it get here?¡± ¡°Non-mage human government. Uh. Yeah. We¡¯re human, I on a technical-legal basis, so they¡¯re in a weird way our government as well, but more distant than the actual actual governing bodies of the mage cities. There¡¯s Nemo, for one.¡± ¡°What¡¯s Nemo?¡± ¡°Technically, Nemos. But the s is usually silent, accent thing, human thing. Five cities mashed together. The cities came in the same way you did, without the people. Mages found the cities and tied them together on an island in the Sea at the distance farthest from non-mage human urban centres. Basically, that¡¯s cus Halton slowly poisons any mage depending on how close they get to a non-mage human urban centre except when they¡¯re on contract. Trying to outheal that killing factor gets lead in your brain and a tactical nuclear strike whereever your family is. Don¡¯t fuck with Halton.¡± ¡°How many Mages are there?¡± ¡°Two mechanism of people.¡± Beryl stoops down next to me, drawing something in the sand. ¡°Just doodling, don¡¯t mind me. One way to get more people is the way you came. Passively. People enter the Deep like you do, ten to eleven a second. Mages get some data from Halton to track the mages. Technically, this ¡®way you came¡¯ also includes arriving in Halton via a portal, though Halton just sends those Mages directly to us. Second way is breeding. We started with six mages five hundred years back, and you humans have been breeding like rabbits.¡± ¡°That¡¯s¡­ inbreeding.¡± ¡°Yes, genius. Was a problem for a while until we perfected medical magic. Yes, yes, it has been perfected, at least in terms of breadth. We can cure any natural disease of the Deep, and basically almost any artificial disease made by regular technology or magical technology. It¡¯d just take time. The human body is a machine and we¡¯ve figured out how to perfectly take it apart and build it up again from the subatomic level. Funnily enough, I¡¯m a more complicated machine.¡± ¡°Ugh. Can I make notes?¡± ¡°No, what the fuck? 6 - a pseudo-singularity below Schwarzschilds radius and beyond neutron degeneracy pressure ¡°That¡¯s quantum cohesion, temporal flux, and complex application down.¡± She frowns. ¡°Nah, I¡¯m not doing it term based. It¡¯s just practical skills over theory¡­ Remember the seven terms?¡± ¡°Yeah.¡± ¡°The stuff we did with reinforcement and fire were both singularly affecting quantum cohesion. I got a little carried away at rock shooting and turned it from a lesson on gravitoelectromagnetism to a complex application quite beyond what we¡¯ve done. Temporal got you a little into the languages. The leveling system is kind of wack for letting you cast that spell, really. Clearly, I didn¡¯t have a hand in making the system. Maybe for the best. I¡¯m not really an organised teacher. I¡¯ve run you through the theory basics of temporal flux just to protect you and ready you, cus its more immediately important¡­ forgot to tell you. If you uhh¡­. Ess and eff. The higher the ess, the less temporal flux. Good for using it around you as countermagic if someone tries to mess with you, though it¡¯ll be hard to tell properly if it¡¯s happening unless you can determine the relative flows of time. What else, what else? You¡¯ve learned matter fields along the way, though the scanner¡¯s a neat crutch for you, cus I can¡¯t be bothered teaching you innate- that¡¯s after this. You¡¯ll keep the scanner, but we¡¯ll talk about innate. The mass term is pretty simple, try some stuff with that. Make a singularity, or something. Since there¡¯s atmosphere, you can get singularities from mass term manipulation as well as spacetime geometry, gravitoelectromagnetic manipulation, and scalar field manipulation. Y¡¯know what? Make a singulairity with all four. With mana. I¡¯ll power.¡± Beryl stops her pacing, and crouches in the sand, before getting up again, and putting out her left palm. A snaking wire slithers out, caressing the sand, growing longer, like a whip. ¡°Is that a whip?¡± Beryl smirks. ¡°Pft. Funny. I wouldn¡¯t need one. You might even like it. And that¡¯s not what I want. I¡¯m sick of drawing. Copy my print.¡± With her other hand, she makes a quick motion, and the sand organises itself into a shape. I recoil, scrabbling away. ¡°What?¡± Beryl complains. It takes a while of blank-mindedness to realise. I¡¯m panicking. It¡¯s like a keen of white sound. No. No. No. No. No. A worm in my brain, with hands and hands and feet and feet, crawling and biting, twisting its little limbs around the little stumps, amplitude hills and troughs deepening in my brain, until it¡¯s all jagged, and the worm begins ripping, tearing- That wasn¡¯t my end. I am sure of it. It happened a great many times, the visit from that worm. What do I call him? The Worm? That foreign tongue stuffed down my throat will not suffice. But my mother tongue is gone, it has shucked me just as my motherland has. Linear B. Greek. Those are two things important to me. What does that mean? I need to keep those two familiars by my side. LB and G. I shall name The Worm LB. Linear B is what I write, after all, and language is a worm of the mind. Linear B. Bacchus? That¡¯s Dionysus. A foreign god-coming. Whatever. Good enough. ¡°Hello~?¡± ¡°Just- need a minute. Memories, I think. I don¡¯t know.¡± What the fuck was that? What memories were those? I reach for it with the tongue of my mind and it falls short. Very short. The winter air is cold and unforgiving, so I pull the tongue back. ¡°Hm. I¡¯ve got a theory. Let¡¯s go on. Get back to copying.¡± I get back onto my knees, meekly. ¡°Sorry. Alright.¡± What was I thinking? I work through each term, referencing Beryl¡¯s. ¡°Question.¡± ¡°You may ask it.¡± ¡°Is this the same order as the rock one?¡± She looks over, and her eyes flick up, for a moment, into the back of her head, before they flick back down. ¡°Ehh¡­ kind of. A bit of a different representation, but like it¡¯s about the same. You can simplify it to the same equation, is all. Same order, though, yeah, that¡¯s what you were asking.¡± ¡°One more question.¡± ¡°Alright.¡± ¡°I don¡¯t get the scalar fields term and the mass term.¡± ¡°Like, generally?¡± ¡°Pretty much. I can intuit how gravity and electromagnetism conceptually get linked together to bend spacetime and make matter and all that stuff, I get that quantum cohesion does particle bonding, and that temporal flux is just timey-wimey stuff, and I¡¯ve pieced together that the matter fields specify where and what, but then what do scalar fields and the mass term do?¡± ¡°Alright. You clearly haven¡¯t been listening perfectly, but of course, you¡¯re only human. So, the Higgs. Right. You know how that gives weight, right? It¡¯s everywhere, like the water of a pool, and the resistance it gives is resistance against acceleration, and it imparts mass on particles. Fundamental fundamental stuff. Well, there¡¯s also bunch of weirder fields. Like the magic field, or the God Field. Most of them are carry-overs from stuff like cosmic inflation from outside the Deep Blue, so they don¡¯t really affect the Deep Blue, but there¡¯s the God Field which you do not fuck with if you like retaining your limbs and familial relations, because all your spells affect the world through the word of the gods by nicely asking them to make these laws of physics work a bit different here, and you¡¯ll get fucked over by them if you straight up go and tell them you¡¯re trying to fuck with their power. There¡¯s a tachyon field for certain string theory instability mechanisms, like weird decay in unstable spacetime, some vacuum mechanisms that Halton gets very touchy over. Thermonuclearly. You may have magic, but you don¡¯t have the energy to counter a thermonuclear bomb. And Halton¡¯s had half a millenia to rebuild their stockpile since their last great war. Again, the gods are way stronger than Halton. But that doesn¡¯t much matter to you. Human or nephilim, both can squash an ant just fine. Not sure why Halton¡¯s so touchy, personally speaking, maybe they¡¯d some long-term plans for weird computers. I¡¯m analogue. And then there¡¯s a chameleon field that messes with large scale gravity manipulations and makes them unfeasible without reinforcement via other parts of the grand unified plan langrangian, and again, another leaveover from string theory, moduli fields that you¡¯ll study in higher dimensional geometries, including ones with more temporal degrees of freedom, bunches of other fields that don¡¯t do anything here cus they¡¯re stuck in higher dimensions. Uh, there¡¯s some fields that work only in the Great Sea, like a coupled scalar field, where some of the dark matter and dark energy fields come into play, but not all. Never been to the sea, never plan to be. It¡¯s a terrible place. Oh yeah. And there¡¯s an entropic scalar field. Usually separate unless you really mess up the TF Lagrangian and you have no idea how to fix it, in which case you¡¯ll need to manually reintroduce entropy. It models the single dimension of time we have- that is, forwards, as an emergent property of the interaction of every other messy thing about. There¡¯s a few more confusing fields we think are probably part of the God field, since the gods didn¡¯t tell us what their field equations were, so I don¡¯t like fucking with that. The mass term just uses the scalar fields to surmise an effective mass term that gives mass to other particles, you can see the references back towards the matter field. You can change it directly to change mass, or dynamically change other scalar fields. Be careful, though. Changing the mass of particles in a region fucks up literally everything fatter than¡­ I dunno. Atomic structures, chemical structures, anything biology. If you fine tune other forces or create other scalar fields and you¡¯re a year five or six in bioengineering, you might be able to pull it off, but you don¡¯t really want to do that right now. If you don¡¯t want to fuck up everything in a region you want to put more gravity in, in a way that¡¯s extremely hard to put back together, just clump gravitoelectromagnetic strength in that region, which will indirectly bend space-time geometry, or like, just do it directly, it¡¯d be more efficient. Simple words, bend space-time geometry for gravity purposes unless you know exactly what you¡¯re doing and you¡¯ve studied magic for several years.¡± ¡°Never knew you¡¯d be so cautious about magic.¡± I include a bit of an accusatory tone. I¡¯m not really, like, calling her reckless. Just a massive prick. But I can¡¯t say that directly. So I have to hint at something else being wrong. ¡°It¡¯s easier to put back something that¡¯s been blown up by a conventional bomb than something that¡¯s been discombobulated at the subatomic level by fucking up the symmetries of everything in that region.¡± ¡°Symmetries?¡± ¡°Hm. A symmetry of a system¡­ Imagine a system as a rubiks cube. A symmetry is like turning the cube. You¡¯ve rotated it, but it¡¯s still a rubiks cube, and you can turn it back to solve it. Messing up the mass without balancing out the other bonding stuff breaks the current symmetry and makes a new one, it¡¯s like you upsized a centre cube. You can¡¯t solve it now cus the whole cube is stuck around the new biggy guy.¡± ¡°Alright, I think that¡¯s everything, for now.¡± ¡°Get to copying. Then tell the scanner to give a point in the air about a kilometre from you.¡± ¡°The scanner can do that?¡± Smart weapon. I wonder¡­ ¡°Get to copying.¡± ¡°Right.¡± I do, on my hands and knees, making sure not to muck up the spell. But I talk, as I work. ¡°Could I fit that scanner into a weird sort of gun? Think about it. Tungsten, or something, a sort of channel for Mana, and the scanner as a smart sight and integrate it to press the liquid mana¡­¡± ¡°No. Well, yes, but also no. No, I mean. Answer¡¯s just no. My creations are like my children. I will not stand for you integrating them into primitive weapons just like that. And besides, that¡¯s how innate channels work. Will explain that, later, promise. But, also, Mana tends to be extremely¡­ destructive. You don¡¯t really see the effect in the middle of the desert, but it tends to dissolve structures much larger than a grain of sand. You¡¯d need like single-use prints. Possible, and other mages do this to a limited degree, but the main limiter is the scanner, and I¡¯m not letting you stick it in a gun.¡± ¡°Fine, fine.¡± A long silence interrupted barely by the low wind. It is very low. Quiet. I keep on working. ¡°Done.¡± ¡°Great. Pour in mana.¡± I wince. ¡°M-mana.¡± It comes out easier, this time. I fill it into the holes. ¡°Couldn¡¯t I do this without the¡­ like¡­ tracing?¡± ¡°Sure. But you need to learn the basics, first. You can try that when I¡¯m gone. Now move over.¡± I do. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. ¡°Hm. I don¡¯t like these values. Don¡¯t mind me, I¡¯ll tweak them.¡± ¡°What? Uhm. I- I¡¯ve hardened the Mana, already.¡± ¡°Don¡¯t worry. It¡¯s fine.¡± She crouches in the sand, using her finger, treating the liquid mana like a weird sort of clay. Her finger steams. ¡°Is your finger-?¡± ¡°Yeah. I¡¯m mechanical. This puppet¡¯s not very complex. Think a metastable crystal. Or think of pneumatics. A small push to get over an unstable equilibrium to a more stable state, which recoups some energy. Not all, since I¡¯m using that energy. And then it takes more energy to either tunnel the limb back to the previous position or just manually crank it back.¡± ¡°Tunnel?¡± ¡°Macroscopic quantum tunnelling. It¡¯s magical enhancement of that effect. It¡¯s when an object goes through a potential energy barrier, like the little hill on which the unstable equilibrium sits, for my arm to get back from the more stable state back into metastability.¡± ¡°Kind of something elastically metastable? I knew some alloys.¡± The words come out before I know what they are. ¡°Mine are more complex than your old weapons. But they¡¯re also simpler, so my expressions for the magic powering my internal mechanisms can have more efficient matter field¡­ expressions. And they¡¯ve also more uses than being a slab of material. I store information in me. Like a library. Watch, now. Gonna power it.¡± The snake. My attention goes back to the snake. It¡¯s been winding around Beryl¡¯s leg, and it whips around with a hissing sound to the mouth of the mana pattern. Beryl picks up the mana Mandala, holding it up to light, and makes a flicking motion with her other hand, whipping the snake into her hand. ¡°Watch. Carefully. Where¡¯d you point the scanner, again?¡± I point to my right. ¡°Right. Alright. I¡¯ll throw up a countermagic field to make sure you don¡¯t die. Basically, I¡¯ll set a firm hand on spacetime curvature between us and the space. Hold on. This is going to be complicated. Wait. You¡¯re human?¡± ¡°...Yes? You¡¯ve been¡­ calling me human.¡± ¡°Shit. Forgot. Too close.¡± She grabs my wrist and I jump. She looks some distance in the horizon, then back towards me. ¡°Focus your eyes on me.¡± ¡°Is this something romantic?¡± ¡°Do you want to vomit?¡± ¡°No,¡± I admit. ¡°But why?¡± ¡°We¡¯re going to a more distant observer position. It¡¯s going to be a lightshow.¡± I look around from the desert, to the metal plate of a face. It reforms as I stare at him, becoming more human, eyes turning from simple holes to rounded, eyelids and eyelashes forming. ¡°What the-¡± And the world around goes blurry. ¡°Don¡¯t mind me.¡± Beryl breaks eye contact. I realise I haven¡¯t been looking at her face, much. I turn back to look at her. She¡¯s looking back where we were, and we¡¯re- we¡¯re floating. ¡°Magic?¡± I ask. ¡°Eyeh. Yeah. Air-glass. Alternative chemistries. Incompatible with our biologies, though I wouldn¡¯t recommend trying to displace it.¡± ¡°K.¡± ¡°Hold my hand, for stability.¡± I interlock our fingers, on accident. My fourth and fifth get stuck between her fourth and fifth. It takes an awkward moment to try and extricate those fingers. Beryl turns her head and stares at me. It flicks between bemused and nonplussed. ¡°Right. Uh. So. There¡¯s a cultural thing. Might be counterintuitive to ask a Fugued, but like it tends to unilaterally be an intimate action since it stimulates the human vagus nerve, so what are you trying to say by this?¡± ¡°I don¡¯t want to fall. And I don¡¯t trust my fingers not to slip.¡± My heartbeat heightens. It¡¯s not like I¡¯m into this. It¡¯s just¡­ the anxiety on being questioned on something personal. ¡°K. Good that¡¯s sorted. Look thatways. It¡¯s gonna be cool, for humans. I prefer effort over effect.¡± She snaps, and I barely see a dark pinprick, for just a split-second, before the world goes to chaos. And she says she¡¯s not a god? What else could this magic be but divine? Power. Powerful. I feel a deep hunger. The fires reflected in my eyes are one with the fires in my heart. Shockwaves. The world seems to bend slightly in towards the singularity, the air ripples and bends. Air gets sucked in within concentric shells, it seems, as I hear sonic boom after sonic boom. Different densities? They are like thunder, rolling, a loud roar, continously going, punctuated by a rapidly repeating series of cracks, going on, and on. The gravity, it¡¯s bending light. Or maybe it¡¯s the air. Maybe both. The compressed air acts like lenses with such squishing. A pond on a salt plain grafted onto the dark sphere, which itself grows. Misty rings and vapour clouds begin to form. I don¡¯t know why. The closer air goes up in flames. Not flames. A plasma sheath. I remember learning- singularity. Black hole. Did I learn about this? Yes. Who knew black holes, or the sort like, were so¡­ loud? God. I yell over the roar. ¡°Beryl, is this a-¡± ¡°No. Pseudo-singularity. Quark matter at the singularity. Finite density. Denser than neutron stars, but not quite a black hole. No event horizon. Below Schwarzchild radius. Would be a star if it could undergo fusion at these conditions. Would get fatter, as well. Radiation pressure. Currently, the pseudo-singularity¡¯s forming into some¡­ weird matter.¡± ¡°Oh.¡± I keep watching. The sand from the desert sweeps up like a cloak in the roaring vortex. It¡¯s found a spin, somehow. A fireball of blue and orange haloing darkness imperfectly. At the tips of the shockwaves, colorful fringes flicker, between the compressed air and the light. The sound seems to modulate a bit. Maybe it¡¯s because the inflow is uneven. Maybe some clumps of sand from one way were bigger. The spin will work it out. Loud cracks. Rocks from above seem to fall as if by a funnel towards the singularity, then fall. At the mean line, they scatter. What words could describe the abstract sublime this reality creates in mind? I am somewhere out of humanity, in this state. Human words cannot express this perspective, only a mutilated version of it. But a mutilated version is better than none, I suppose. Beryl makes a confused sound. I look at the tiny black pseudo-singularity at the heart of the storm. Some light is escaping, other things as well. The black seems to have a weird sort of red glow, though in parts, it turns a bluisher black. There are bits of white streaks, but they seem to flicker in rainbow colours, in and out of the visual spectra. Maybe it¡¯s my eyes playing tricks on me, with all the blue around. The rings of matter around it are rippling, the surface of a pond in rain. The air is rippling as well, though less. It¡¯s a strange feeling. The very medium through which something is conveyed is itself being subject to effect. And then a scraping sound, barely heard through the roars. ¡°What¡¯s the scraping?¡± Beryl looks at me, surprised. ¡°You can hear that? It¡¯s interactions within the accretion disk.¡± ¡°Oh. What¡¯s the rainbow light?¡± ¡°On the pseudo-singularity, it¡¯s red-shifting, and on the bumpy parts, it¡¯s a bit bluer cus gravitational redshift¡¯s weaker, there. And there¡¯s a lot of things going on. Like deadly radiation. Atomic spectra. The glow around the radiation, like a halo, that¡¯s mostly sand and air, squished into plasma. The sound is shockwaves. Air compression, you see? And it¡¯s also things falling directly onto the singularity. I¡¯ll stop it, here, before I crack a layer more. She drops the spell in her hand, the mana fading away as she releases the charge. I watch the snake retract back into her hand. There is an even bigger explosion, like a thermonuclear bomb. The sucking efffect of the pseudo-singularity reverses. Sand, light, debris, plasma, they all go flying out, resulting in a rainlike effect of dozens more little booms. ¡°Fuck.¡± Suddenly, the explosion stops, the sound freezes. Beryl¡¯s holding out a hand. ¡°Forgot about gamma rays and x-rays.¡± She turns to look at me. ¡°Cancer?¡± I ask. ¡°Cancer, probably. Stopped time to pause the radiation. Would you like me stick a lead wall in front of you so you don¡¯t die?¡± I sigh. ¡°It really looked pretty.¡± ¡°You won¡¯t, when you¡¯re dying in stage four. We¡¯ll just go a few more kilometres away.¡± ¡°Can I look, for a bit more?¡± ¡°Didn¡¯t know you being a weapons engineer meant you were a destruction fetishist.¡± ¡°Part of the job. Can¡¯t build that which you don¡¯t worship,¡± I say, dryly. ¡°Pft. Go on. Have your look. You can let go of me, now.¡± ¡°What if I fall?¡± Beryl drops me, and I scream, as I fall a metre. I scowl up at her. She snorts. I think of something to say, before stopping, and going with something else. ¡°I can see up your skirt.¡± ¡°Look all you want. Nothing to see. I¡¯m not a sex bot. Don¡¯t bother. I¡¯ll be admiring my handiwork. Would you like a gift, for being such a¡­ student?¡± ¡°I¡¯m up for any gifts. Help me up?¡± The floor elevates, and I stumble, a bit, under the sudden acceleration. ¡°Well. There¡¯s probably four types of things you¡¯re going to get.¡± ¡°Yes?¡± ¡°Well, they¡¯re all going to be very heavy. There might be some magnetic monopoles, so if you ever figure out how to carry around, you could get a cool party trick. Mostly, it¡¯d depend on densities, with stuff like neutron star heartstring, a micro metastable singularity, or, say, a piece of weird shit around four hundred million tonnes per centimetre cubed of volume. That¡¯s the most likely. Called quark matter. Don¡¯t worry. There¡¯s nowhere near a centimetre cubed of volume. Say a ton of quark matter; that¡¯d probably be the densest thing I¡¯d find. Radius would be around nine micrometres, I think. It¡¯d be around a third the radius of your hair. Size of a red blood cell. As in one strand. It could be a bomb. That¡¯s the main application. Or you could use it as a really nice focus for projectile weapons. Though I¡¯m not sure how metastable it would be. Probably if it hasn¡¯t exploded by now, it¡¯ll survive contact with the air, but the more you whack it the more likely it¡¯ll explode. Doing some back of the napkin calculations, that¡¯s up to around twenty megatons of TNT for your speck, not accounting for inefficiencies. Probably more, or less. One ton¡¯s too much of a nice number.¡± ¡°Quick question. Is there conservation of energy in magic?¡± ¡°Of course there is.¡± ¡°Then¡­ if this remnant core has a theoretical explosive yield of twenty megatons, how much energy did you pour into this spell? Considering how inefficient compressing external matter seems rather than directly transmuting?¡± Beryl smiles. ¡°Enough to put on a good show. Needed to show the peak of magic. Though magic doesn¡¯t exactly work how you¡¯ve described. Again, school. I¡¯d guess my singularity would hopefully have way more than a ton in mass, but beggars can¡¯t be choosers.¡± ¡°...Beggars?¡± ¡°I don¡¯t have an innate channel for singularities. So I can¡¯t get to theoretical efficiencies that virtually break conservation. Other clans do. They make wires out of beads of these materials, for crack power plants.¡± ¡°Virtually?¡± ¡°Virtually as in apparently. They don¡¯t, not actually. It¡¯s a fundamental fundamental law. You don¡¯t break it.¡± ¡°Great.¡± The conversation ends there, and I watch each frozen piece of reality. It¡¯s not worth describing properly. There is an element of time that makes an event once magical mundane. So it is with words and ambiguities again that we restore magic. But how would you describe a bomb? Fiery? Shrapnel-filled? There is a fire, a beautiful fire, and that is what is important. Time passes, and eventually, Beryl gets bored. ¡°Right. We¡¯re done here.¡± I only nod. Beryl grabs my hand, and we¡¯re far, farther away. Beryl snaps, to alert me, I think, as she restarts time. I see the explosion in the far distance start again, hazy against the horizonlight. I count the seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight- the roar arrives. Eighty kilometres. Damn. ¡°Stay here.¡± Beryl lets go, and strides some distance off. She vanishes, in a singularity of her own. Huh. There seems to be at least two different methods of teleportation, with her. I didn¡¯t see those singularity effects when we moved. Beryl comes back, half an hour later, smiling, with a menagerie of dangling grey boxes hanging off a chandelier. It strikes me how much she looms over me. In every way. She is me, in as much as every other person is, but with all the presence of the world. ¡°Fancy,¡± I comment. The word escapes my spiel of thought. Nothing else does. ¡°Pure gold and lead, suspended the bits best I could. Some shinies. Some dark ones. All rather massive. Pleased to say the sum¡¯s around five tons, which is amazing for remnant mass. Most of the other pieces detonated. I¡¯ll have to more carefully look at these, for later.¡± I stare at them. Strangely, it reminds me of a dinner. Meals, somehow, all together a sort of demonstration of great wealth. She carelessly tosses them backwards, before they seem to land on an invisible conveyer belt, and zip backwards into the horizon, throwing up a slight gust of wind, and stretching across the horizon in a very weird way. So there are two forms of teleporation. Looks like spacetime folding, for that¡­ or¡­ the weird singularity thing she did to come here, and get us down. I won¡¯t ask her about this. I like a little puzzle.