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.