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.