Whatever happened to Sagan Snow?

EYE IN THE SKY - THE MAGAZINE OF RECORD IN MAGIMUNDI BUSINESS
June 2021, pg 11.

SNOW IN THE SUNSHINE

by Rookery DeCarabas

There is a pylon in the woods of the cascade mountains of Thunderbird, well off the beaten path.  Mundanes don't go that way.  And unless any mage or wizard has a particular way with the clans of Chupacabra that live in the area, it remains a more pristine example of the pacific northwest.  The pylon stretches 15 stories skyward from a clearing just above the tree line on an undisclosed mountainside.  It stretches several more floors below the ground.  It would appear its resident wizard built it from a retrofitted subterranean mundane weapon complex.

The pylon itself is a featureless cylinder of windowless brushed silver that does not tarnish.  Not even in the cool rains of the region.  It dominates the scene.  Surrounding it is a plain of solar panels so dark that it feels as though you could step off the path and fall into their inky black forever and ever.  And before you think this seemingly austere imposition of the countryside is more unnatural than it should be, think again.  Because every other available inch of the landscaped space at Snow Tower is ringed with richly colored roses and hyacinth.

I was escorted up here to see the place's single occupant by a local who just attended her second year at Lewis and Clark.  You understand, hearing my own voice coming from her mouth as she spoke was a little unnerving.  She mentioned to me that a newer innovation being worked on for the next model of the universal translator is one where the listener hears translation in another voice.  In this case, in the gender or voice of the person the listener's subconscious might assign based on gleaned impressions of the speaker.  Presently, the newer 'teck' tends to shift voices as the listener's opinions of the speaker change.  And while investors are asking for specific voices that can be chosen, the device's artficer has thus far refused to accomodate them.

After we reached the main gate, my chupacabra guide thanked me for not being afraid, and gave me a little warning.  "Be careful around Winter.  She's very protective of Mr. Snow."  And with a flip of her tail, she apparated back to Seattle's new enclave.  Thinking again of how well spoken my guide had been, I turned back to the pylon and was met by the faceless gaze of a cybergolem.  Its form was lithe, athletic, female, and as black as deep space.  It did not speak, but guided me to the pillar itself.  And while there  were no visible doors, we walked through the wall itself as easily as one might stick their hand into a pool of water.

The inside was a surprising mix of organic wood, alloys and utilitarian design.  The floors above were all visible, as they were comprised of great ringed balconies with a great central well.  That went all the way to the roof, as well as deep into the 'silo' below.  Stepping out into the empty air in the center of the room, we rose upward by looking that way until we reached the top.  Stepping back out of the well onto the deep purple carpets, I finally got my first good look at Sagan Snow. 

The fellow was in faded jeans and a black tee shirt.  The shirt was printed with a head on fire design.  And in a skitchy metal font read the words, 'Hail Sagan'.  He didn't look up from the Iktus Engine he was currently typing away at, but said in a bemused tone, "Get yourself something from the icebox.  I've got less than a page left to type here and honestly, that's a whole page more than this person deserves."  There was unsweetened raspberry tea, a grocery store-branded cola supply, and blackberry juice within.  I went for the juice.  Again, without looking up, I heard him say, "Good choice."

You had the idea that he was considering what you might need before you knew you needed it.  He assured me later, there were no mind charms in the room for that.  Anticipating what people might need is how Mr. Snow has made his fortune.

'The Man Who Blew Up the Market' back in 2016 isn't what most expect.  Sagan, as I was later invited to call him, seems to have a sort of ever-present demeanor of a man who is either bemused or impatient with any given situation.  But this is also tempered with a fierce benevolence and protective side beneath my own feeling that I might be wasting his time.  He has that effect. 

"Go ahead and print this if you want to.  If he wants to be a fool, let him be one publicly.", he told me, finally sending off a mailing to a grudging professor in Destiny.  It would seem the professor in question was entirely unwilling to subject some of his more valuable volumes on elemental magic to the 'Forsythe Shredder'.  "I tell the man that there's not a problem here.  The books go in, they get shredded, then scanned and reassembled digitally.  Then they reverse back up the chute they came down and are re-assembled physically in a reverse temporal field.  But this guy's not going to hear that.  All he can think of is his precious books, and he won't take the wards off them.  His precious one-percenter school can do without its donation if he's not going to play ball.  My terms were ALL of the library or they can go screw."

EitS:  "And this is a professor from Imperial Magischola?"

Sagan snorted disgustedly.  And with a smile that did not touch his eyes, toasted me with a coffee cup with a blue box on it. "He professes to be."

This has been Sagan's iconoclastic style with the entire of the business world that won't 'play ball'.  The Snow Foundation has been entirely ruthless in its pursuit to drag the Magimundi kicking and screaming into the 21st century and beyond.  And those who kick and scream too loudly are unceremoniously left to rot by the wayside.  "I'm very much a Darwinist when it comes to whether people want to do right or not.  If people want to be ignorant or stupid, I don't have time for them.  I have things to do, and a better world to make."

The iktus engine turned itself off.  Sagan looked at it with a species of disappointment.  "Ah well... fair enough.  It won't come back on for me for at least 4 hours.  None of them in the tower will if I come at them with the intention of working.  It's play and relax or nothing for a while.  Even the workshops downstairs are locked."

EitS:  "I can't imagine that's something you put up with gladly."

Sagan closed his eyes and shook his head.  "I programmed it to deal with me like that.  I made a promise.  And I mean to keep it."

Now for the part I have to write about.  Sagan Snow is the CEO and chief research artficier for The Snow Foundation for Technology Research.  The son of public servants, he attended Lewis and Clark, and later New World Magischola in 2014.  Graduating in a rather tumultuous (or shall we say, infamous) 2016, he took the world by storm by inventing the universal translator.  An artifact that allows any sentient species to communicate and be understood when worn.  The original prototype in a shadow box on his wall is far from the slick manufactured earpieces we have today.  "Yeah... this is the telemarketer version." he told me, without letting me know what a telemarketer was.  Somehow I feel I'm better off not knowing.

He waved a hand away when it came to the rumors that he was able to start production and accquire the means to refine orichalcum in the quantities his 'teck' needs by underhanded means.  Popular gossip always points to how Foresight Industries divested from several markets that specialized in Chupacabra breeding and use.  The resulting panic in the market as well as the shockwave that went through our world when Chupacabra were demonstrated to be thinking and feeling beings destabilized the business world.  At least enough to allow Sagan to get a foothold without opposition from what were then, companies that would have had a vested interest in stopping him at any cost.

The rumors appeared to amuse him when I mentioned them.  "I did the translator as a side project for the Sentience Advocates back at NWM.  I was actually working on the Euryale process for solar power back then.  This business about me tipping off people like Medard never happened.  Honestly, we didn't even run in the same circles.  Give me some Veritas and I'll tell you the very same thing.  I hardly said two words to anyone about the headset and what it did.  Given the interests in Avernus prison as well as the Chupa farming industry and all the OTHER industries that used them as slaves?  I was pretty paranoid.  My house presidents didn't know whether that paranoia was my best feature or quality back then.  I called it a feature, not a bug."

EitS:  "So you kept it a secret?"

Sagan:  "Oh let's be clear.  After testing the device successfully with the other members of the Advocates, I knew the kind of tiger I had by the tail here.  My very first thought was that there had to be at least 10 corporations out there that would have me quietly murdered for that thing.  So no one could know.  And while we planned to make our big statement, the only thing I did was arrange matters so that we could make a demonstration to the student body without getting exploded or something.  I let the professors know that I'd be doing something big.  Something safe.  And something world changing.  And we could use their help if things got out of hand."

EitS:  "Did they?"

He ran a hand through his hair embarassedly.  "I'll say it now... I had my doubts.  I'd gone to have a nap a few hours before the demonstration.  And I didn't sleep.  All I could think about was what I had to say and how I had to say it so as not to cause a panic when Ss'siah came into the dining hall with Delilah.  Finally I just got up and sent myself a typed letter of the points I wanted to hit."

EitS:  "So that quote attributed to you.  "Is that complex enough for you?"  Was that scripted?"

He lets out a self-effacing laugh there.  "Hardly.  That was just nicely historic."

Using the profits made through funding he'd arranged with his solar technology, Sagan accquired and designed the undercomplex that would eventually sprout Snow Tower.  The place is one of several production facilities for different artifact lines.  It was from here that he first started donating 'U-Tees' to the Chupacabra for every one he sold in the Magimundi.  Then started his real masterplan.
Sagan:  "I can't really say that I had some great masterplan to change the world back then.  Just a loose association of good ideas I was working on.  I lived on caffeine and chocolate.  I think I even ate a jackalope's adrenal gland once to see if that would help.  I slept about 3 or 4 hours for every 30."

EitS:  "By the beard, what did THAT taste like?"

Sagan:  "Cherry candy, strangely enough.  I just had too much to do."

EitS:  "Didn't you get invited to try for The Explorers of the Unknown?"

Sagan looked embarassed at that.  "I did.  And I did do a little bit of the codebreaking for that.  In the end, I didn't have the time for the society's little game.  Too much to do.  Too much homework and things to finish.  I had no time.  No patience.  I was a prick."

EitS:  "But you did have a plan?"

Sagan:  "I...  I did.  But it wasn't this one.  I was in a bad place back then.  My family had been taken 3 years before, and I hadn't seen them since.  I was angry, lost and vengeful.  And any masterplan I had then probably needed a cat for me to stroke like a bond villain."

EitS:  "A what?"

Sagan seemed to catch himself.  "Nothing.  The original plan was to mass produce the Winter series.  You've met Winter."

I had.

Sagan:  "I'd been burning my nights and most of my days with the design of the CyberGolem as a personal guardian.  Maybe as a means to help me track down who I thought the creatures or persons were that had taken my family.  I wanted revenge and justice at the same time.  And honestly if you'd asked me when I arrived at Magischola in 2016, I couldn't have told you which way I might have jumped.  Back then, I could have become another Akeldama or Slager with the kind of war I was contemplating.  By the way.  Hi Jason!  You continue to make us all proud up here."

EitS:  "You'd have gone that far?"

Sagan:  "I'd hoped not to have to.  But if it had turned out that my Family had been murdered, or that the lodge up here in Thunderbird had helped to cover that up?  The intention was to use my solar funding to get established, then make an Army of Winters to go to war with.  It would have been...  horrific."

EitS:  "And then you got involved with Sentience Advocates?"

Sagan:  "I'd actually been a member a year already.  I'd joined because I wanted to see the rights of sentient golem respected.  I never went in with the idea of freeing the slaves.  I'm not Abraham Lincoln, up here.  When the headset came about, I just got that much closer to the horrible plan.  If I could drop the bottom of the Chupa market out, then Avernus would need replacements for their Chupa army guarding the place.  I was in a good position to propose the Winter series as a humane replacement and get them mass produced.  You don't know how close it came.  Sometimes it will still wake me out of a dead sleep.  I'll hear the nightmare moans of my roommate from back then as she dreamed of what might happen.  And she was hardly ever wrong with her dreams."

EitS:  "But this time she was."

He gestured around us.  "I think we can all be glad she was."

EitS:  "What changed your mind?"

Sagan became quiet then.  "Let's go up to the roof."

Ominous as that sounded, I went with him.  The Winter followed us out over the central well; a silent metal shadow.  In the breeze outside, we looked over the edge.  Black and purple butterflies fluttered over the trees.  "Hold out your hand." he told me.  I did and one of them landed on it.  The insect was mechanical. 

Sagan:  "One of my monitoring systems.  I made it black and purple to honor both a literary reference and someone dear to me.  Someone who influenced me quite a lot that year.  With her words, as well as Kat's influence, and McCoy's and Delilah's...  I came to something of a realization.  Especially on the 'night of the storms' after our sorting and house initiations.  I found that in the end..."

He trailed off and looked out over the trees and was lost in thought.  I almost prompted him, but he continued after a time.  "I found that all this time... I'd been planning to avenge the family I'd lost.  But hadn't realized or acknowledged the family I'd gained.  The moment of clarity... if you can call it such, came afterward.  In the room Delilah and Ss'siah and the rest of us went to after the demonstration... I still wasn't in the headspace that it had actually worked yet.  Not until I saw Ss'siah gratefully weeping in Delilah's arms.  Then I knew.  And I couldn't do it."

EitS:  "Couldn't do what?"

Sagan:  "I couldn't bring myself to kill anyone.  I mean don't get me wrong.  If a gorecaster came at me with the intention of ending my life, he'd be DRT (Dead Right There) before he saw me draw on him.  Then I'd kill him again for good measure because I've seen too many mundane movies where people don't take that often-necessary extra step.  But what I had in mind before then wasn't justice.  I was on the prod for a massacre."

EitS:  "That seems a little simple for you."

Now Sagan seemed impressed with me, which made my entire week.  "You get that impression, do you?  Well, it wasn't just that.  A person whom I will not name here in order to maintain her privacy asked me.  "If you could go back and eliminate the one who took your family and change it all before it ever happened, would you do it?  Could you do it?"

He stopped again, and wiped a tear from his eyes.  Then continuing, "In that moment, I thought of all the people I'd never meet if I somehow could change the timeline.  All the people that had become important to me without my realizing it.  Including her.  And I told her no.  I had to, because I knew she was utterly serious.  She wasn't just postulating a hypothetical.  She meant it.  That woman never said an unserious thing to me in her life.  And if she sees this... wherever she went, I am always available for tea, should she provide the time and place."

He sniffed and composed himself.  "So I knew I couldn't go through with it.  I couldn't kill.  I couldn't pre-empt the 'incident'.  But I could go forward.  I had the means.  And the path to do it.  And if the translator worked, which it very happily did, I could change the world for the better and not lose any of them.  Not any of my fellow Laveau alligators.  None of my classmates.  And certainly none of the small circle I'd come to care for as my close family without realizing it.  And maybe when I come to the path at the end of the clearing...  Maybe my family will forgive me for not having found their killer yet.  I hope all the things I've done...  I hope they'll be proud of me when I see them again."

EitC:  "You can't think that they wouldn't be."

Sagan:  "No.  Not really.  When your family does good, you feel pride for them.  So yeah.  I don't think I've done anything they'd be ashamed of.  I merely considered it.  Seriously.  For a long time.  And I hold myself accountable for that all the same, however irrationally.  None of us are perfect."

He took me down to the ground floor then and walked me to the gate.  We exchanged pleasantries and he gave me a packet filled with this year's business prospectus for The Snow Foundation.  One thing I noted was the scholarship and internship programs for Artficers as well as donations for schools that demonstrably show excellence in tolerance and innovation.  There was rather a large grant to the national chapter of the collegiate Artficier's Society.  I looked askance at the Winter beside him.  He anticipated my question before I asked it.

((Author's note:  When reading this aloud to myself, I started the video below the post to have the music play in the background.  It was so satisfying I about cried my damn eyes out.  ^_^;;;  ))

"There will only ever be this one prototype of the Winter Series.  My biggest and best innovations are coming.  Spellware activated computers will allow us to democratize research and magical innovation.  The research I was doing was an emotional cul-de-sac.  And rightfully abandoned."

"But Winter here will guard me for the rest of my days.  And on down the line for everyone I care for.  And if my parents' killer is ever found, and for its sake, I hope it's dead already, Winter here will help me bring it to justice.  Maybe then I can abandon my paranoia completely.  It'd be nice." 
He turned to go, then turned back to me, holding out his arms.  "I can dream, can't I?"

Winter then extended four spiderlike armatures from its back and fired a teleport spell from all four of them at once.  And then I was back here in my office here in Yorke, Destiny.  There was one of his Iktus Engines on my desk, which I have just found delivered today.  The index of magical knowledge recorded in its memory...  No hermetic library is this large.  Not a chance.

And that's how I knew that this is a thing that will happen.  Because if he can just gift me with a machine that can store all the amassed libraries he's been able to 'scan'.  He can do this for anyone.  He's still the man with the plan.  And the world will either play ball, or get left by the wayside.  I hope we'll all take it as a learning experience.
 
-Edward WinterRose
6-20-2016, 3:23 AM

A Letter From The Past From A Future I Hope Never Happens.

<<WINTER SERIES:  Archive file 1:  Sagan Toben Snow - "Message for Posterity"  To be released only in the instance of his death under certain conditions.  Condition Status: POSITIVE.  [PLAY]>>

It is unclear to me whether or not I am of sound mind to the degree that I can confidently state that I can verify that as fact.  There is an archetype in mundane fiction, as well as ours to some degree.  That of the mad scientist.  One of the most infamous figures in our history was a mad artficer.  And for what he did, he's rotting in Avernus prison.  Maybe one of the few uses of the place that I agree with is the keeping of Jack Slager where he very justly belongs.

The Winter Series has its funding.  All I needed was the Orichalcum and it was ready.  The printed CPU worked better than I'd hoped.  All the tolerances are exceeding expectations, as though I expected them to operate any differently.  It's as though having embraced the need to finally complete the design, it was a fated or predestined thing...

I suppose Kat was right about that too.

Their heads are in the workshop hall, reminding me of the success of the trial that became necessary once I found what had happened to my family...  Mounted by me..  I suppose I could do at least that much for them.  This is merely a taste of what will happen to them in the end.  In the back of each Winter's mind is the key for the Omega of the plan.  And the Garoux will know what that plan was soon enough.  The lodge responsible for what happened will cease the moment I speak the words to my own personal Winter, who will think it to every single Winter in the world.

And there are so many now.

Having become the go-to security application after the edict came down on Chupacabra Sentience, they quickly became the Golem de Rigeur for any kind of security or physical applications we couldn't do with magic already.  And I became very... very rich.  And I did like any practical artficer does who has a bit of talent and intelligence.  I re-invested it in research and the means to mass-produce and make improvements.  There were concerns, socially, but by then I had the means to produce my own orichalcum, and it was really far too late.

You have to understand.  They didn't just kill my parents.  That would have been too kind. 

All I wanted to do was change the world for the better.  And I did.  If you're reading this on a computer with my printed circuits in it, the democratization of information and spells has become reality.  Powered by solar cells using my Euryale process in your homes.

You are safe.  Really, you are.  They're only going to exterminate every last member of the Thunderbird lodge that tried to cover it up.  And every werewolf that ever kills anyone...  or intentionally transmits the Lycanthropic curse to another.  And even then, Winters are so very ubiquitous now, I doubt they'll ever go away.  There will be noise.  There will be gnashing of teeth.  And in the end, my machines will continue to help you make a better world and prepare you for when the mundanes discover us.

And that's where the Mad Scientist archetype comes in.  They too only wanted to work for the betterment of all mankind.  They only had the best of intentions.  As did I.  If you're reading this, I've come to a bad end, and there's some kind of public witch-hunt for anyone who knowingly abetted me in what I've done.  There are a few that I trusted with some of the details.  But none of them ever really knew what I intended if my investigations turned up the worst case scenario.  Sentience Advocates in particular should take no part of the blame in this.  They knew absolutely nothing of my intentions cos at the time, I didn't intend it myself.

I was just working toward the goal, whatever that turned out to be.

I do regret the pain I've caused any of you.  I hope that in the end, I found my family.  And that they were not ashamed of what I loosed upon the world in their name when they saw me once more.  But I would not take any of it back.  Actions have consequences.  Even mine.  And the guilty will be brought to justice in all the ways that the Mundi have not troubled themselves to prosecute.  And that right soon.

I am sorry that I'm not sorry, if that helps.  Don't think of me too unkindly in the end.  Villains are not what you have been taught they are.  They are in the end, twisted reflections of ourselves.  And they are just doing what they feel they have to do with what they have at the time.  And they all hope for something in the end.  Just like I did. 

In love...
Sagan

<<END OF LINE>>

The Euryale Project - A Proposal

 

1.  A Needs Assessment.

In today's modern world, we of the Magimundi find that more and more, we live in Mundane communities, using their amenities, technologies and devices.  The need to live among them stealthily and unobrusively becomes ever more important if we are to maintain the seperation of the Mundi from the Mundane worlds.

Moreover, as more and more mages and wizards of mixed and mundane heritage are discovered, living in our admittedly backwards state of domestic technology can be something of a culture shock.  This is of course putting it mildly.  Oftentimes, this is a giant step backward from a world of electricity to one of magical forces, gas and candlelight.  It becomes a bone of division in our world.  The more technologically advanced backdrop of a pre-magical childhood throws our world into sharp relief as willfully ignorant and antediluvian.  It hampers their integration into our society when we're seen as rejecting of the simplest of modern conveniences.

And in this regard, it's not entirely anyone's fault.  As we live in a world of magical convenience and amenity, we've never really felt the need to expand into the basic needs that mundanes have wholly embraced.  Why power a refrigerator with electricity when an icebox enchanted for cold can do the job as ably?  Most everything they do with electric power is something we've found a more esoteric solution for.  However, in my research with the bureaus that enforce secrecy and seperation, living undetected among the mundanes precludes those solutions 8 times out of 10.

Worse still, in order to maintain these lives, Mundi folk are drawn into the drudgery of mundane work or careers to survive.  Or the added step of exchanging Leewundaalders for Dollars.  This is unnecessary, and risky.  The more exposure we have between our two peoples, the higher the risk of our eventually being discovered totally.  And that we cannot risk just yet.  Neither society is ready for the revelation that would entail.  And the more advanced mechanically their society becomes, the wider this gulf yawns between us.

So if we can bridge our peoples by reducing the distance between our cultures, the better both will be when they discover one another in the long run.  If we can live among them more effectively and stealthily while catching up to them technologically, so much the better still.  And one of the first steps we must take, if we are to become a more technologically advanced and integrated people is to find a way to use the very lifeblood of that technology they have already irrevocably integrated into their lives.

Ironically enough, they have already seeded the very solutions I propose to use in order to facilitate this.


2.  The Mundane Need for Alternative Energy Sources

The degree to which the Mundanes and to a radically lesser degree, ourselves have emperilled the world and its ecology is now a matter of accepted fact; not mere alarmist conjecture.  And most of it has been to find a way to power their machines and technology.  They live in terror of their world reverting to campfire and candlelight.  Unpreserved food and agrarian reality.  They have half, or more than half spoiled the planet on which we all reside in an effort to produce the power necessary to keep the lights on.  And now that necessity has forced their hand, this is changing.

Mundane Solar Collectors and Wind Turbines

Without getting into the fine points of their technology, they are finding new ways to generate this electric potential to fuel their world without the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, or the infintely more toxic method of atomic power.  Their people have been researching these methods for years, but were dismissed as cranks by those with a vested interest in maintaining the economies centered around more traditional power generation.  Again, now that necessity has demanded it, invention has turned to these more 'green' power solutions.  They're turning to electric turbines powered by the wind.  They're using piezoelectric generation to harness power from the movement of the oceans' tides.  And the most abundant yet untapped source of power in our solar system, the light and heat of our sun itself.

Solar power is nothing new.  Merely the degree to which we can harness it.  Experiments with solar power were originally introduced to the public in the steampunk days of the late 19th century at the world's fairs of the mundanes.  Their studies have shown that the degree to which light and heat from our sun hits our planet in the space of a minute could power the entire planet for a month.  Some mundane states are now mandating its use to supplement and replace the need for atomic power.  And here is our opportunity.

This technology is nearly 40 years old.

The degree to which the mundanes can harness solar power has grown, but is still being actively resisted by vested interests in their society.  Thus, the percentage of power that can be collected from the light in the air has been limited by the degree of research that can be done to expand it.  They are using solutions to focus and intensify light into the technology that turns that light into electric potential.  But they have been unable to get such collection to a percentage of practical use.

They however... do not have the solutions available to them materially that we do.


3.  The Use of Magical Potential for Solar Technology

Mundanes are limited to the materials they can refine and what they can do with it.  We have no such limitation, and can come at the problem magically and laterally.  I have refined and improved upon the process by which some cryptid species chemically absorb and store energy from sunlight, and reproduced it in an artficed form.  Not only this, but I have found ways to increase the percentage of light energy absorbed by thaumaturgic means so simple, the least adequate mages of our society are able to reproduce it. 

I have, in prototypes, produced power levels from solar collectors indistinguishable from the mundane variety in adequate amounts to power my own residence without reliance on any kind of mundane power grid.  This, plus the normal enchantments to conceal our existence from mundane society could in fact power the homes of Mundi folk living among the Mundanes.  Without the dependance on their power grid, we increase the safety of our people among them.

Moreover, with ways to generate power for labor-saving mundane devices without being reliant on their grid, we can start making inroads towards the integration of their technology into our society.  We can finally start catching up to them in a way that will make us a more integrated people as a whole while holding on to our principles if independence and self-reliance.  The division between 'unsoiled' and people of mixed and mundane heritage becomes less of a chasm and more sympathetic to one another.  How we think of one another is the result of how we are forced to live with one another.  If we can reduce the essential differences by which we live, the more we can relate.  And in the end, we will be much more prepared for the revelatory change that will come when they discover us. 

With adequate funding and startup materials, we can start sewing the seeds now to make us all more prepared to make this a better world.  And with the fundamental change to both societies this kind of artifact/technology will bring to that world, it will be come the essential necessity of how that world will work.  The chance to invest in its inception and get in on the ground floor is an opportunity no forward-thinking, ecologically-activist or financially-wise person can afford to miss.

Thank you for your attention.

The Modern Prometheus. Or the difference between coulda and shoulda.

This is a thing that's been brewing with me a while.  This unseemly sentiment that there are things we are not meant to know.  Or things we should merely accept.  And this is a common failing in my field.  This unwillingness to question or pursue answers by means of research.  I'm not sure the word science applies in the case of Mundi folk, in that there are so many effects in magic that are reliant on intangibles or unmeasurables like belief, feeling and the liquid nature of thought.  But to a large degree, there is the application of the scientific method to magical experimentation and development.  In the modern sense, the method should be indispensible.

I went to the Mundanes' capital city just recently to visit their national museums.  In the photo above, you can see one of the first things Mundanes put together for powered flight.  Even if it needed a good headwind and its engine was bicycle chains and elbow grease.  It's inspiring all the same.  How many people told the Wright Brothers down in the Outer Banks that man was not meant for flight?  There's a bit of the old Icarus in that.  But their wings didn't melt.  And their tenacity changed the world.  These museums are full of that kind of thing.  I really can't recommend them enough, if only for perspective on our own world.

Being an artficer, I feel we cannot turn away from research for its own sake.  Why magic works.  What our relation to it is.  Why can't the mundanes do it?  What is necessary to transmit and preserve active magic the way mundanes transmit and preserve information digitally?  Etc...   For this, I seek more inspriation from the success of Prometheus instead of Icarus.  It might be argued that Old Pro didn't so much succeed when you saw how his jealous gods treated him when he gave mankind fire.  But he spread and disseminated knowledge where he saw a need for it.  He saw the suffering of man and did something about it.  Damn the consequences.  And good for him too.

When it comes to the dissemination of information, we are so very woefully behind.  And here's my own personal example today.  I went to the library because I needed to do some research on light absorption in relation to darkness spells or tinting or dye-ing magics.  I had to look up a book, make sure the book was even available after discovering one that MIGHT have the information I needed in it.  Get the book.  Read it through to see what if anything could be gleaned from it.  Consult the bibliography to see where that author's research came from.  Verify it as truth or bunk with experimentation on my own... and so on and so on and so on.

I also had occasion recently to look up a mundane painkiller to see what components it was derived from.  Willow bark, as it turned out has been used as a panacea for pain and as an anti-inflammatory all the way back to the time of Hippocrates over 2300 years ago, so it turns out that Willow Bark is old news for most healers.  For people like me who thought they'd thought of a neat trick, I was a little crestfallen.  But not in the respect that to find that information, it took me less than a minute to consult a computer internet site that gave me every fact someone who doesn't know anything about it could want about Aspirin.  Peer checked and edited information that cited its sources with instantly searchable links to those sources if I decided I wanted to read them.

I looked at my library book, and was frustrated all over again by our 19th century modality.  So much convenience and ability.  So very little actual progress.  I imagined what it might be like to be able to log into our own online Mundi research encyclopedia.  An interactive one where I could not only look into what a spell and its effects might be, but what its material, vocal or somatic components might be.  What variants there might be.  How it has been used.  What failures have been encountered.  What personal experiences might have been had with unexpected effects or interactions with other enchantments or spellwork.  Perhaps even the ability to view and save a copy of the spell itself without destroying the device you're viewing it on.

It's a dream I have.  The democratization and cross-verification of our amassed knowledge to weed out what is imprecise or what's so hidebound into sacrosanct tradition that we no longer question.  I've no time for sentiment or the lily-livered cowardice of those who accept things as they are.  Nothing will take us forward but truth or research without the taint of political correctness or emotional compromise.  That and a willingness to not hoard information like miserly old coots.

Some development on that perhaps.  Can't say more presently.  More as is permissible to print.

Some positive developments in the power source research.  A lot of people, when it comes to Golem Development point at 'The Rabbi' as the end-all be-all of Golem Enchanters.  And they tout materials like mud.  Clay.  SAND.  Even Liquid.  And honestly, these are probably more along the line of bound elementals than actual constructs imbued with life.  One of the larger problems has been how to power the things mystically without their depleting and falling apart after about 12 or 15 years.  And while the mystical power source is finite in origin, you can spend that power a lot more thriftily.  You just find other ways to power all the physical stuff while you save the mystical energies for processing.

Project Galatea continues apace, but a breakthrough with power absorption really brings it into the realm of possibility.  I've talked about the energy absorption properties I was able to isolate from Night Garg materials.  (Thank you again for your kindness, Nemeton.)  But while it already has a pretty good absorption rate, it also can be much better.  I had an idea.

There's charms for darkness, or dye-ing things or imbuing them with shadow.  In effect, this is merely reducing the reflective index of ambient light.  Black isn't a color, it's the absence of it.  Black is what you get when light pours into a thing and isn't reflected back into your eyes.  And the gathering and retention of light energy is what we're after here.  The initial tests for this kind of energy collection using the Galatea collectors coupled with darkness enchantments are exceedingly promising.  I'd be sitting on a goldmine if Mundi-folk didn't inherently distrust electric power.  But like the man said, they ain't seen nothing yet.

With a galatea layer in the composite plating for the golem I'm working on, I could likely make a golem that would last 10,000 years.  Now THAT'S something I could show as fundable research for the right kind of visionary.

Whoso would be a man, must not lose the way. Or... The Chair Leg of Truth.

I did a read a few things this week that had nothing to do with the work.  This week, it was some of the standbys I keep on hand to remind me of better ways to be.  How not to fall into the rude traps of obsession and to go my way carefully and thoughtfully.

The first is one of the mundanes' more laudable poets.  At variance with what most might think, I tend more toward the romantics, trancendentalists and revolutionaries.  The first and foremost among the elders for me being Ralph Waldo Emerson.  The audacity and sheer willingness to cast aside the mere opinions of others to stay his own course, while learning and reading all he could reads like poetry to me.  For example...

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

Naturally there's a moral ambiguity here.  One I must be wary of if I want to cleave to such.  One must not stint to explore the notion of goodness without an objective mind.  You can't hold too fast to the convictions that motivate you, lest you find yourself justifying your goals to suit some predefined idea of goodness.  You end up altering the facts to fit your views, instead of being willing to alter your views to fit the facts.  And that's pretty much slow death for any artficer or engineer.  Be objective.  But once you've established the right course, and what is right will announce itself to you when you find it, you commit to it and damn the man.
 
I don't know that I've found what's right yet.  I'm still exploring the goodness of it.  But it's hard to stay objective.  Like the man in the movie said.  "I'm trying real hard to be the shepard."

Here's Ralph's 'Self-Reliance'.  Read it twice.  Because the first time you do, you're going to want to put it down because this guy's an ass.  The SECOND time though...  You're going to go "OOHHH..  Okay.  That IS genius."

Self Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Next on our reading list takes us a lot farther back than good ol Uncle Ralph.  This one takes us all the way back to the greatest samurai that ever lived.  Miyamoto Musashi was an accomplished teacher, undefeated duellist and strategist.  Many will tout the philosophy of the general Sun Tsu, with his directives to be "extremely subtle to the point of formlessness" and all that.  And in the way of strategy, I find it to be good advice.  But the frippery of subtlety is really the luxury of people with means and armies to command.  Not someone with the desperation of defending one's self or starting a campaign of one's own.

Musashi's enduring work, 'Go Rin No Sho', or 'A Book of Five Rings' is a way of strategy that is still studied in the present day by the wise and sadly enough, the powerful.  I find it to be a much more practical work on both the personal and the trancendent level.  And while it's primarily a treatise on the way of strategy, it's also very much a treatise on how to structure one's thoughts and plans, so that you might apply that structure practically to any endeavor.  Be it artfice, mindbreaking, managing one's rather limited finances, board games...  Here's a short but important bit...

"Do not think dishonestly.
The Way is in training.
Become acquainted with every art.
Know the Ways of all professions.
Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
Perceive those things which cannot be seen.
Pay attention even to trifles.
Do nothing which is of no use."

I have not mastered these things.  I don't beat myself up for it.  People go their entire lives without getting even some of these concepts within their wheelhouse.  You need to work at it, or you lose your way.  Here's his masterpiece, A Book of Five Rings

 

Miyamoto Musashi's 'Go Rin No Sho' (A Book of Five Rings)

Finally, in today's reading list, is a more current work from the last 20 years.  This by a rather mad Scotsman who writes comic books, novels and movies.  How he's allowed to continue his rantings when he's published and movie'd by the very same powers that he seems to rail against mystifies me, but there it is.  The power of his word overcomes that kind of entrenched corruption.  They speak it in spite of themselves.  This would be Warren Ellis.  And the work in question is a comic book called Transmetropolitan. 

The mundane-born among us and to a degree, the mixed too will be more familiar with the science-fiction tropes that are expanded on here to the Nth degree.  The problems the world faces with its leaders from the huge to the very personal are writ large in the setting of 'THE CITY'.  A metropolis so huge it can only be described as such.  And our main character is Spider Jerusalem.  A full-gonzo drug-using, booze-swilling, violent seeker of truth and justice who only wants to eventually shuck the world of people, and get back to the peace of his cabin in the woods.  But America is electing its new leader, and it won't let him go back until he writes the books he promised and spent his advance on already.  And for dragging him back in, his laser-like journalist's instinct for the truth, and his capacity for benevolent mayhem will bring the corrupt in that world to their knees.

Spider and his Cat.

Go to this page here.  Read the issue you find there.  Then if you like what you see... and be warned.  There are some pretty adult-y things here.  The sensitive of heart will not come away unscathed.  Anyway.  If you like what you see, read the whole run like I just have.  You'll come away with a violent desire to do right in the world.  Or at least to do a world of wrong to those who commit evil in it.

TRANSMETROPOLITAN - Issue 25: 'Here To Go.'

When I wasn't reading today and yesterday, I was tending the perimeter.  The Monkshood is in bloom, and is a lovely enough sight to see.  Though I wouldn't advise a tea made of it.  The local deer seem to know better than to munch it.  The other defenses are unmolested and still armed.  The tells are untripped beyond the fences, and due to their nature, can't be reset by something that trips them.  So for the moment, I can determine from emperical evidence that no one's come calling.  Or if so, that my system is inadequate.  But let's not get into the paranoia that nothing works.

Music Time.

Adrianna's theme of Music Monday continues, where we're asked to provide examples of music that relates to ourselves in keeping with a theme.  This week's was the sort of music that activates the romantic within us...  It will come as a shock to a lot of you I think that I do consider myself a romantic.  The way I presently live would seem to contradict the idea.  There is a difference, I'd say, between not being interested in romance, and not having the time for it.  I just need to find the person with the brain as well as the heart that would make what I'm doing secondary to her.  When it comes, like the man says, "...It'll come like a wind.  And none of your plans will stand before it.  No more than a barn before a cyclone."

First...  There is a movie that will not interest most in the Magimundi.  It's trappings from the 1990's are inherently Mundane.  But it's more about trancending the mere trappings of the superficial and embracing one's potential.  It is also a love story between two people who almost lose what they had to the complications of minutiae.  The build up to the moment you see here is a man who believes he's lost her.  But before she left, he promised her that had he the power, he would roll in fog and storms.  He'd change the polarity of the planet itself so that compasses would not work.  All to keep her plane from taking her out of his life.  But for mundanes... that's not possible.  Or is it?  This is Enya's 'Exile' used in the end of 'L.A. Story'

The Final Scene from L.A. Story, and the song: 'Exile' by Enya

(Stupid Blogger Site will not let you attach video from any other place than YouTube. >_<)

The second is from Rupert Hine, a producer of groups that people know more than him.  One where someone seems to be singing to the one that's helped him out of his shell and helped him to trust in his own abilities, and knew all there was to know about him 'With One Look'.  A bit of wish fulfillment I suppose.  This is Rupert Hine - The Wildest Dream.  It's VERY 1980's.

The last here...  I think is probably one of the songs I consider romantic passion encapsulated in music.  There's other mixes of this I find less satisfying than the one from this concert album.  I envision a night all in purples and gold.  Candles and sheets.  With wind and moonlight.  And possibly some cliffside with pacific northwest waves pounding in the distance.  In the absence of Thunderbird, cliffs in Tir Na Nog will work as well.  This is from The Police in 1985 from their Bring On The Night tour... "I Burn For You".

Tea... and here I am, the only guy with the antidote. How'd that happen?

Gentle Readers, some interesting encounters this last few days.  But first, the news.

My solar projects are starting to show results in the range I'd like.  I think with a bit of networking and research, I've got some of the photoreactive properties of Night Gargoyle stone replicated in a graphene lattice.  Note, for those of you who haven't had dealings with the species, that Night Gargoyles calcify into stone when exposed to sunlight.  As do some species of hill troll.  But such cannot be negotiated with and are for the moment, not within the scope of materials I had access to.

In any case, I was able to contact someone with access to a rookery of gargs that were entirely willing to let go some of their shed scales and biomass.  My idea was that the absorbed solar energy was being converted and stored as potential energy to fuel them like food when they decalcified at night.  So the ability to collect, store and convert stored energy back to usable bioelectricity was a magical property that could be isolated and conferred onto other materials.

I've been into some of the mundane science journals' articles on the uses of 'graphene'.  Or to put it more plainly, atom-thick layers of carbon in a lattice.  These are extremely strong lightweight materials.  Just the kind of flexible sheets I'd like to be able to apply to surfaces to absorb, store and draw energy from instead of the motion enchanted generator I've got in the shed.  I'm at the moment able to get roughly 65% of the energy I estimate is being collected back from the graphene sheets with the 'euryale' enchantment on it.  Even 65% is an incredibly good result, considering what the mundanes are doing with silicates and metal that don't get even 50% back yet.


And I'm sure I could refine it more.  If so, I can probably have a mobile lightweight power source for the golems.  They could have a composite armor layer with a graphene layer in it where they're powered by ambient light.  Of course this means they'd be kind of an iridescent slate gray-black.  The darker the better actually.  The darker I get it, the more light it would absorb and store.  I probably need to dig out the capacitor research to store the excess.

And now what will probably interest you more.

Met with Adrianna McCoy just recently.  Who seemed to be hinting that she might be able to apply her not inconsiderable sway in certain circles to make an inquiry into the ongoing investigation that drives my life right now.  She also seemed to indicate that an investigation like that has a price of its own.  And while I might be somewhat unpracticed at such negotiations, I find myself not at all unwilling to pursue it.  She is, I suspect one of the most social creatures I have ever met.  Following her around online a bit in the NWM boards, she seems to know a little something about everyone.  I suppose this might be from her position on the Disciplinary Tribunal at school.  And honestly, I cannot say that I didn't enjoy our encounter.

It stemmed from a thread she posted.  A thing where she's trying to get people to be thoughtful on thursdays.  Where she asked what we'd change about ourselves had we our d'ruthers.  That and was there someone you might be able to tell 'anything'.

My answers were about what you'd expect from a summertime engineering recluse.  Wishing I could be a bit more considerate and caring with people instead of the callousness I normally present.  If only people could be a bit smarter or worthy of interrupting my work for and all that.

As for that special confidante...

...

Well, let's say the opportunity worth the risk doesn't seem to have presented itself overtly.

That said, I do look forward to my next meeting with Miss McCoy.  I'm aware of her rather public dalliances with other students at our previous years' formals and events.  And aware that for some obscene reason, I'm expected socially to disapprove of such promiscuity.  That kind of thinking is for jealous dullards stuffed with inadequacy issues.  And I've no time for it.  Not when our next meeting may be worth more than just its weight in data and practical applications.  If I'm to be more than just what I've become, then learning to enjoy the people I want to improve the world for is part of it.  Somehow, I find it hard to believe that enjoying her company will be a chore.  As to whether I can be as enjoyable for her as well...  Well, we'll see.

Soon after, I took tea with Hyacinth Oeler of all people.  OUTSIDE of the library or wherever she disappears to when she's not studying like I do.  After Miss McCoy left, we talked for a little while about the sort of things I'm working on, what for, and to what end.  Which segued into a discussion about the eventual discovery of the Magimundi by the Mundanes and what horrors that might entail.  My own point was more along the lines of it being better to be a warrior who was ready to garden than being a gardener with no idea how to war.  To prepare for the fantastic possibility of peace as much as war so we don't favor a solution of the latter instead of the former.

And Hyacinth was an inquisitive, if intense, conversationalist.  One whose conversation, should we choose to talk again, I would consider my privilege to enjoy.  She seemed to not mind my own blend of blackberry and honey.  She has a leaf of her own she thinks I might enjoy the straight honest taste of.  Unless I'm reading more into her words than I'm supposed to be, it may not only the taste of tea she wanted to share.

Being as focused as I've been, it's something I hadn't considered the possibility of.  Much less from two people in the same amount of hours.  I wouldn't think either had some ulterior motive.  As antisocial as I've been, what could anyone think to want of me other than the conversation we enjoyed?  I will not let my paranoia scotch or scar this.  I had a nice day.

Well... it was nice.  It may not have been as nice for Hyacinth.  I touched a nerve with her, I think.  She folded up like the trays in my toolbox when I asked about her experiences with Mundanes.  I put forward the idea that we didn't need to talk the next time we met for tea.  Which tells me more about me than her I think.  Apparently I desired or cared enough about her company that I wanted there to be a next time.  And negotiated one.  Who knew I was capable?  I didn't.

Music time.

A podcast show I quite enjoy has a musician whose music has looped around and around for me lately.  It sets up in my thoughts.  I have procured a copy and slowed it 800% recently and enjoyed it just as much.  It feels like the place I have come to live in my thoughts and feels these last years.  The wistful echoed quality of it much like the blue-purple of misty emotion that creeps around the shadows of my skull and the work pouring out of it.  Were I to have a soundtrack of my own, this might be the first track on it.

Randomly going to the next track in my playlist...

And finally...

A person for submission, and on the submission of persons.

I was reviewing some of the first years coming in this year.  It's something necessary, even though I usually consider this something of an inconvenience.  I suppose getting used to administrative work in an official position is something they're trying to teach us as well.  I understand the necessity of it so that the new students may get proper placement at New World.  But at the same time, when I've got an idea or a thing on... which seems to be all the time now, I do admit.  In any case... when i have a thing on, it's hard not to see things like this as an annoyance.

Usually.

In particular, the case of Leland 'Lee' Radcliffe-Forsythe is a fascinating one.  This scion of the elite, straight out of P2A4 in Destiny is has the sort of lineage one might normally dismiss as destined for the plutocracy.  And it would be a sad disservice to the person in question.  Her family all but disavows her as a traitor to her kind.  Was relegated to the Morton house in Primaschola, which incidentally is where my father was sorted before he decided the institution had nothing further to offer him.  (The anonymous calls to various bureaus and the small scandals and disciplinary hearings among the elites that followed in his wake, I'm sure were 'purely coincidental'.)

In Lee's case, her dedication to study and the pursuit of a hypothesis to its logical, illogical, or sometimes outright purely nonsensical or unintentional conclusion is, from all reports, nothing short of breathtaking.  The results of her pursuit of the marriage of Mundane Technology and Mundi-Artfice, while producing often unintentional or chaotic results none-the-less GET results.  And that's right in line with Laveau's philosophy.  Properly encouraged and nurtured, her talents and abilities can be nothing but a boon for Mundi society.

Her more iconoclastic tendencies are in a word, unexpected, from one of her lineage and will likely cause difficulties for her with the more 'unsoiled' among the student body.  Especially if allowed to be inducted into a House Croatan in some misguided effort to 'fix' her by surrounding her with family and colleagues she could only hope to offend.  The Casa might be an interesting fit for her, if she is to be led into their mascot's mischief working ways, but a waste of a first rate mind and potential.  With her stated drives to bring positive change to the world with experimentation and innovation without the unnecessary fetters of tradition and mundane predjudice, it would be remiss of Laveau not to offer her immediate placement within its more tolerant environs.  How a person could come from the unsoiled so...  unsoiled is astounding.

Now to a different tack:  The mind...

Here's an idea.

Many Mindbreakers, at least from what I've seen, tend more toward 'seeing' and using one's extrasensory perceptions to get into someone's head and know what they do.  Getting around mental blocks or protections set up in the mind against untoward reading or remote viewing.  Or perhaps postcognition.

Naturally, being myself, I've often wondered what kinds of artfice could be applied to the 'science' of mindbreaking.  More to the point, there is the concept of hypnosis and framing the context of a situation in order to produce the circumstances under which a person's natural inhibitions to a suggestion would be greatly lessened, or perhaps even non-existent.

"What does any of that even mean, Snow?" you might ask.

Many of the more mundane born among us will be familiar with the concepts of hypnosis and mind control; if only through mundane science fiction, hero stories, or fantasy.  Wherein a person is fixated and relaxed, or talked into a state of suggestive hyper-awareness.  One in which the conscious mind is fixated or distracted or relaxed into submission while the 'under-mind' or subconscious takes the wheel.  And in this state, that inner computer that drives or does things on autopilot while the conscious mind is considering other things is in control, and suggestible.

Many mundanes will use props in this regard.  Usually with the intention of producing eye fatigue or conscious distraction, hypnotists will employ things like spirals and the ubiquitous pendulum or swinging pocketwatch.  And lots of times this kind of object or visual fixation is married to a spoken induction that keys into the learning modes of the subject.  Sometimes brainwave states are induced with the use of a binaural tone, or to put it plainly, an alternating tone in both ears that can induce brain states conducive to learning states, trance states or suggestibility.

You can already see where I'm going with this.  Mere clairvoyance or invasive telepathy must usually set up a combative state in the subject.  Often times this would likely affect the information gleaned from the subject.  Likely traumatizing them in the process, or damaging their sanity which further damages the qualilty of information.  Positive reinforcement instead of negative always gets better results.  You frame the situation so that it's in the best interest of the subject to want to share information with you.  In the context of trance, where the subject's subconscious is working actively towards their best interests, it will gladly cooperate with beneficial suggestions.

Now add a subliminal element to this, where the hypnotist's intentions can be communicated below the threshhold of conscious perception.  Now add a binarual tone to encourage the person's physiognomy to be more suggestible.  Add in a visual element that can not only fixate, but add subliminal suggestions faster than the conscious eye can see.  Add a biofeedback generator to encourage physical calm.  THEN start leading the person into trance.  It still takes talent and training in order to talk the person into a trance state where they'll speak to you.  But the results of a session used in combination with the suite of tech suggested here?  All of that charmed and enchanted to enhance the enchanting effect of the apparatus?  I'd think any Mindbreaker would sign up to put such a thing into common use.




Note... the staggering possibilities for misuse are of course plain.  Such tech would need to be a regulated thing.  While not entirely useless in untrained hands, there's enough people in the world who've read a book or two with untoward intentions to make them dangerous to others.  The possibilities for positive use beyond mere interrogation are just as staggering.  In the absence of actual brain damage, such a suite could be used for therapeutic purposes.  Helping wizards who've accquired the odd neurosis or mental effect in the course of their own works.  The detoxification of panic or terror in those with crippling phobias.  The elimination of undesired habits or toxic behaviour patterns.  Properly used, it could be a boon to all.

Music Time Again

Here's meditative and hypnotic types of music today.  Again, here's an 800% slowed piece I chanced on.  Which honestly has me considering slowing some of the music I already have down to see what effects it might produce.  The musician herself is from Thunderbird, and were she not such a public figure, I'd place money she was Mundi-folk.  As it is, I'm almost sure she's mixed lineage, or has some fey in her.

There is a Scots punk band from the early 1980's that managed quite nicely with a singer who doesn't so much use words to make sense, but as devices to use her own voice as a complimentary instrument.  It has been known for her to sing the scientific names of butterflies, or to have picked random words from a hat to sing.

When I am down...  when I need to remember that on the grand scale, none of the evils around me truly matter.  When I need to remember the goodness of a simple breath and the majesty of the great everything around me.  When I need to inspire myself to do better.  I listen to this.

And if I need to be a bit more pumped up while doing it...

I do not aim with my hand... that hand usually has a wand in it.

     Found that an esteemed Mindbreaker will be teaching the subject this year.  My parents never mentioned people they may or may not have worked with.  It is perhaps worth investigating to see if he may have known or worked with him in the two years after he left college himself.  My knowledge of the size of the community of astromancers or mindbreakers is limited.  But if he is as talented as he is hinted at being in what information there is to be had of him... then my mother knew of him at the very least.  He may be someone that could help make in-roads to professional mindbreaking as my mother did.

     Weekly practice with the revolver went well today.  It's hard to believe I won't be bringing it with me to New World.  I'm not sure I understand the ban on firearms or their research in the Artficer classes there.  I'm guessing it's probably the standard predjudices against such things when it comes to mundane tech.  And there's a point there to some degree.


     This machine in particular has one use, and one use only.  And a frightening one at that.  It's only use is the ending of a life.  One that someone has struggled to fill with all the days they ever had.  And it's one I hope never to have to use in that capacity.  Unless you've a chirurgeon or healer about, it's not a thing you can take back or fix unless your shot wasn't a lethal one. 

This machine changed the world.  It ended the days of the longbow, the sword and armored knights and mercenaries centuries ago.  There were matchlocks and flintlocks on the scene as far back as the days when Virginia Dare herself was merely a glint in her daddy's eye.  Its use doesn't seem to be specifically banned in the Magimundi.  It just hasn't really caught on like it has with the Mundanes.  And of course, why should it when we're all walking around with the stick equivalent of a flamethrower (It werfs flammen), howitzer (don't ask.), rail gun (don't ask about that one either, dear readers.) or orbital laser. (REALLY don't ask about that one.)

Some of my own experiments have been interesting in an awful kind of way.  I would imagine a lot of artficers would consider firearms to be something of a blind alley in that one really can't use them to fire a spell effect itself into an opponent or target.  Which to a large degree is missing the point.  The same kind of tunnel vision that makes most Wizards go, "What do I need one of those for?  I have a wand."

Firstly, with the resources we have available to us, we can do away with the need for black powder or any kind of gunpowder.  It takes some spellwork, yes.  But a sufficiently powerful directed repulsion spell on the firing plate that triggers on impact from the hammer would do.  Essentially you pull the trigger.  Hammer hits the repulsor plate.  The Repulsor Plate repels a loaded projectile up the barrel.  The barrel itself accelerates the projectile to merely fast, or hypersonic speeds and there you have your powderless caseless gun.  (IE: Caseless = Without a powder shell around the projectile)

Now... Taking that a step further, there's all manner of wheezes and pranks that use charmed and enchanted materials that go off when touched, or on impact after being thrown.  Usually this sort of thing is left to pyrotechnic effects in 'firecrackers' or immobilizing someone with 'spancel-grass', etc.  These ideas are a hop and a skip from things like projectiles so cold they freeze things on impact.  Or flash heat on impact so radically that they generate explosive plasma.  (Ball lightning to Mundi-folk like you and me.)  Or basically any spell effect you can reasonably enchant into a solid piece of matter.

Which brings us down to the materials themselves.  The mundanes have long used lead, or other alloys in the manufacture of their bullets.  Something that can stand up to the stresses a bullet must undergo from a gunpowder explosion behind it, followed by the extreme heat and stresses of going from rest to 1700 miles per hour instantaneously.

However, if we're eliminating the idea of a gunpowder projectile we can also start considering specialized bullets.  Even mundanes know that most lycans cannot bear the touch of Silver.  And silver bullets are the stuff of folklore and legend. 

Other creatures with more of a Fae-like origin can't abide cold-iron.  But a Mage-Gun might be loaded with all manner of specialized materals.  Petrified wood, or perhaps a seed of quick growing nettle or creeper.  Or something that fired high into the air burns visibly in the electromagnetic spectrum of sunlight.

Those two examples are pretty hot subjects, given that Lycans and Vampires are all people.  I'm not proposing some artficed-weapon meant for murdering people with abilities and pathologies that make them superhuman.  Personally, I'd rather see folks cured of their bloodlust than slaughtered.  And this kind of research would be a positive boon as a delivery system for a subsonic dart tipped or loaded with the right dosage or immobilizing potion.  Or perhaps a fast expanding and immobilizing gel to temporarily hobble or drop your target.  Given the resources at our command, and the imaginations we aspire to, lethality could be removed from the equation.

Still...  I make myself practice.  I will not be caught out like they were.  And I will not go unarmed outside of the extraordinary circumstance of New World.  School is safe.  Or at least as safe as such places go.  In the numbers of my fellow students, I think I'll be safe enough from what may be hunting me and be able to devote myself to my studies undistracted.  I wasn't firing live iron today.  Merely marbles with light enchantments on them at subsonic.  I wanted to see what I was shooting, and how far off I was from the targets on the far fence.  6 shots.  6 hits.  So like the writer says, I've not forgotten the face of my father.  I seem him well, and he is still with me through all.

Music time.

Here's a song about a mythical fantasy land dear to the Mundanes.  Not that one.  The other one written by that writer's friend, C.S. Lewis.  A bit more family friendly than the apocalyptic visions of Tolkien.  If you've the opportunity, it's a great study in the kind of fantasy meant for Mundane Children.  You have to wonder if Lewis was Mundi-Folk.

As well, from Lewis, you may want to have a listen to some of the audiobook of his much funnier and adult work, 'The Screwtape Letters'.  One in which we read the correspondance between a senior demon, Screwtape, and his minor subordinate, Wormwood.  This one is read by the incomparably funny mundane comedian, John Cleese.  As always, no one comes close to the snide, bored and entrenched malefic authority of a feared schoolteacher like Cleese.

And finally, along a different track, here's a bit of mundane music about the 'lost' colony from the Outer Banks of Solaris.  One in which a rather legendary figure from our own history is namechecked.