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.