Apparently, West Gate station was divided into sections based on the normal gravity of each member species of the Gaian Collective. Most were close enough to Earth normal to use it as a comfortable median, so a good three fifths of the wheel were dedicated to that. The other two were the outliers: the nearly half gravity required by elves- or rather, fay- and the over double gravity needed by the dwarves. To further accommodate the many disparate species aboard, the Earth normal section gradually increased in gravity close to the dwarven section and decreased close to the fay section.
This, naturally, led to the many species aboard naturally arranging themselves in a gradient around the wheel-shaped station, which by extension, caused restaurants and other services to cluster around the people they catered to. It kind of reminded Miliam of a certain theme park, actually. West Gate greatly resembled the one that showcased Earth’s cultures in an arc around a lake. A person could experience the culture and cuisine of every major homeworld in the Collective just by taking a stroll around the station.
That may have actually been the point. The station was, along with its seven siblings, the first place any visitor would encounter. How better could one show guests what the Collective was all about?
Well, that was all a very long winded way of saying that Aoibhe was kind enough to take Miliam to a restaurant focused on food from Earth. Only so many food cultures could be represented, even on a station this size, but she had been satisfied with the American-centric location they’d visited, even if it had had a strange focus on Ohio.
Now Aoibhe was taking her to purchase a grimoire, which promised to be a more expensive investment. Miliam felt a bit uncomfortable at having this much money spent on her, especially when they’d yet to get an estimate on the corvette’s repairs.
“Mmm…this place should do,” Aoibhe declared, cutting through a busy thoroughfare to reach a store that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 21st century mall. It was quite fortunate that the fay woman was as tall as she was, as it made Miliam’s efforts to trail her through the crowd significantly easier than they would have been otherwise. She found herself being jostled by all sorts of people she still struggled to believe weren’t wearing Halloween costumes, and when she emerged on the other side, she had to pick something out of her hair that had been left behind when something smacked her in the head.
It was a feather. A…person feather.
She entered the store breathing heavily, feeling as if she’d just fought a mob for her life. With the height she’d lost in her transformation, not to mention the muscle mass, Miliam felt she was going to have to relearn how to navigate crowds. That was an unforeseen consequence she would never have predicted in a million years.
Now she found herself within an overly-white showroom packed to the gills with myriad devices she assumed were grimoires, given that the store was named ‘GrimOURS? GrimYOURS!’, which was so fantastically bad Miliam almost cringed herself to death upon reading it. The reason she had to assume was that there was nothing that even remotely resembled a book, not that she’d expected any, having seen Aoibhe’s device.
There were items that looked like one-handed video game controllers, remote controls, dated music players, wrist-mounted screens, and even smartphones. Mostly smartphones. It was a panoply of electronics that could have been dropped in Miliam’s own time period without anyone ever realizing they were from the future. She had to admit, though, that there were only so many ways to design something that stored a large number of individual files and allowed the user to select one and use it.
And despite the sheer number of anachronistic offerings, there were a number of them that made her think ‘wow, this really is the future’ as well. Some of them were telepathically operated, although they came with a bevy of warnings that allowing that level of access to your brain is dangerous. Miliam had a hard time figuring out how that differed from translation charms and normal grimoires, however. Others looked like a pane of crystal, precious gems with buttons worked into their facets, or tactile interface gloves. Aside from the grimoires that reminded Miliam of home and the ones that looked futuristic, there were even extremely old timey-looking ones like wands, staves, and rings.
With such an overwhelming selection, Miliam immediately knew she’d just end up with a smartphone.
“Take a good look around, we’ve got plenty of time, and a lot of options. I’d recommend one with a screen though; it can be hard for a beginner to memorize every spell slot, especially once your repertoire starts to expand,” Aoibhe suggested, pointing towards the section of the store with the phones, tablets, wrist computers, and weird crystal panes, oblivious to Miliam’s train of thought.
“Do they just cast spells or do they do other stuff?” she asked in return, with the many features of smartphones and other mobile devices in the back of her mind. She’d actually be a bit baffled if people had moved away from concentrating everything and anything into one device.
“Aye, most of them do. The screenless ones are usually for specific jobs,” Aoibhe explained, waving her own grimoire as an example. “Mine is a compact model for pilots. I’ll need to get a new multipurpose grimoire, since mine was lost with the crew quarters on the Kinzela. Up to you if you prefer a phone with grimoire features or wants to keep them separate.”
“What are the wands for?”
“The aesthetic.”
“So Salem Witch Trials chic is back in fashion, then,” Miliam remarked dryly. Aoibhe began browsing the grimoires herself, picking some up and comparing them. “So those ones are basically like, phones that cast magic? Doesn’t feel like mobile phone tech has advanced much in the last few centuries…”
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“On the outside, nay. But there’s only so many ways to make a box with a screen,” Aoibhe shot back using that infuriating thing called logic. “Sure, you can make them fold in half or make them thinner, but there’s only so many ways to innovate it.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Reaching into her pocket, Miliam pulled out her own phone to compare. They really weren’t that different in appearance, though there were some new features. A placard told her that these phones allowed you to change the outer shell’s appearance by selecting a new skin inside the device, which, combined with a mithril alloy casing, rendered phone cases obsolete. The screen could even repair itself over time if it was damaged.
In addition, they could be charged with either mana or electricity, although the exchange rate was apparently horrible according to Aoibhe. Something about electricity being easier to convert into mana than the other way around. Miliam ultimate decided to make her earlier prediction a fulfilled prophecy by being a boring person and selecting a phone as close to her current one as possible. The prices didn’t differ all that much, not that she knew how much any amount of GC currency was worth.
“Aoibhe? What currency is this, anyway?” she asked, pointing towards a symbol that looked like two circle, one large and one small, with an arc tracing from the smaller one around the larger.
“Gaian Collective Reserve Currency, or ‘reserves’ for short,” the fay answered without looking up from a pair of devices she was comparing. Miliam was mildly surprised they weren’t called credits. The phone she was looking at was worth thirty reserves, although Miliam couldn’t say if that meant it was cheap or that the reserve was simply worth quite a lot. She cursed her past self for ordering food without looking at the price, figuring a cheese burger wouldn’t be all that expensive anyway and being too hungry to care.
“Is thirty reserves a lot?”
“Nay.” Aoibhe set down one phone and picked up another, checking the placard under it for any unique features.
“Phones were a lot pricier back in my day…wait, that makes me sound old.”
“If your story is true, you technically are,” Aoibhe quipped, finally making eye contact just to make a point of raising an eyebrow at her. “Most of the materials are simple stuff that can just be transmuted. I think the mithril alloy is pretty light on the mithril, too.”
“Is mithril some weird space metal that wasn’t discovered until after my time?”
“Nay, it’s just mana-infused aluminum. Some human metallurgist started calling it mithril and the name stuck. Don’t know how it’s made, just that mithril stuff is more expensive.” That sounded about right, knowing human scientists. Miliam had heard of animals being named after sillier things.
“So, if there’s mithril, is there also orichalcum, adamantite, or hiriirokane?” Milliam asked, definitely getting that last one’s pronunciation wrong. But if there was one fantasy-named metal, why not others? It took Aoibhe a moment to think of the answer to that one.
“That’s…gold, titanium, and…copper, I think? I feel like I’m back in chemistry class. If I remember correctly there’s only a few things that are actually useful when they’re mana infused, but you’d have to look up the whys,” she answered with a shrug, which was fair. After all, Miliam could tell someone that bronze was copper and tin if asked, but she’d have trouble remembering what brass is made of, much less what other alloys are good for and why.
“Didn’t, uh, fay, have their own names for those things?”
“Well, my own language has a prefix for ‘mana-infused.’ So to me, mithril is literally just mana-infused aluminum.” The Fay woman seemed to have decided on what she wanted and put down one of the devices she was comparing. “Do you need more time, or are you asking questions because you’re done looking?”
“I’m…fine just getting a basic smartphone,” Miliam said, gesturing with the one in her hand.
“Then let’s go ahead and pay. These are show models; they’ll get copies from stock if we bring them to the front.”
“How are you paying, anyway? Wasn’t all your stuff lost except the grimoire?”
“Aye, but my accounts didn’t stop existing.” They both set their selections down on the counter, and the clerk, a fellow human, scanned them, prompting two boxes to pop out of a slot on the wall behind her.
“Your purchase comes out to 83 reserves,” the clerk told Aoibhe, apparently having figured out who had the money between them. It didn’t take much in the way of observational skills to figure out that the clueless one asking what their currency was didn’t have any money, though, Miliam figured. Aoibhe pressed her thumb to a pad to process the transaction, which just made a whole host of additional questions go through Miliam’s head.
Could magic be used to change fingerprints? How did accounts stay up to date between systems? She had to assume there was no superluminal communication, given Aoibhe had needed help from a ship in the same system. Or were there planet-based communication hubs? She had too many questions to ask right now; maybe she could just look them up later.
“Would you like me to help you set them up?” the clerk asked, bringing Miliam’s attention back to the present.
“Nay, I can take care of it later. Miliam, time to go see the immigration authorities.”
Fuck. Her greatest challenge so far: bureaucracy.
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Electronic Personal Grimoires
With older mediums, a mage would typically pour their mana into the medium itself and manually fill in the blanks that required variables. This requires an extensive knowledge of spell writing to carry out and the focus to provide every needed variable at once. Modern Electronic Personal Grimoires, or just grimoires, use psychic magic to assist the user in providing these variables, pulling them from the user's mind and adding them into a temporary electronic spell circle within the device. Once each variable is saved, the user is then free to determine the next without remembering the previous one, as the device does this for them. When the spell is fully ready to be cast, the grimoire assists the user in assembling a spell circle out of pure mana, effectively casting the spell without use a physical spell circle.
Grimoires also feature an array of controls that allow the user to easily select their desired spell, even without looking, can usually be operated with one hand, and are tightly calibrated to the user, making interference nigh upon impossible. A grimoire cannot be modified without the user present, as any changes made without access to the user's unique brain waves will simply render the device unusable.
Critics would point out that modern mages often have a lesser knowledge of the ideograms used in spells and so lack the ability to produce makeshift mediums when needed, but handheld grimoires have become the primary spellcasting tool in modern society due to the sheer speed they allow for. Basic spells are nearly instant, and more difficult spells can be pared down from minutes to mere seconds. Some spells simply cannot be cast without a medium, which would normally mean hours of arduous preparation of a large spell circle with all the variables pre-set, but a grimoire makes even these spells more mobile and faster to set up.
Most computer systems are capable of interfacing with grimoires, allowing a direct neural link that improves the performance of some systems, though this does require purpose-built grimoires. How effective this is varies depending on how well the user understands the systems they are working with. For most uses the improvements are minimal and 'only' consist of removing certain physical motions needed to operate a device, which provides a slight but noticeable improvement in reaction time.