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.
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