With the conversation with Abigail on hold, Miliam took the opportunity to retire to her quarters with a couple textbooks and access to the station intranet and answer some of the questions she had been piling up. She sat back in the bed- which, incidentally, she had redressed with clean sheets before using- and pulled up her elementary level magic textbook first.
“I suppose I should start with that burning sensation…” she muttered to herself, doing a text search for the word ‘burn.’ She got dozens of results throughout the book, but fortunately, it was apparently a fundamental enough concept that it was near the beginning.
In short, she had been feeling the early stages of her body breaking down from channeling too much mana. Yep. Unlike in a game, people didn’t have a pool of mana, and didn’t stop casting when they exhausted it. Mana wasn’t harmful at rest, but channeling it was, and the body could only tolerate it for so long before cells started popping. People had to build up a tolerance for it over years of pushing just past that limit and letting their bodies heal.
“Would have been nice to know that sooner…but I guess it’s unreasonable to expect Aoibhe to assume I wouldn’t know something in an elementary school textbook,” Miliam complained to herself. With that question answered, she moved onto the next one: the current year, 2690AD. That question she had to answer through the intranet, as she only had a generalized intro-to-magic textbook, not a history of magic on Earth.
“Okay, so on Earth, magic was officially discovered on…oh, you have to be kidding me.” Miliam stared in disbelief at the date listed on the page. Magic had been rediscovered multiple times over the course of Earth’s history before promptly being suppressed, but the most recent and final discovery was in…
2024.
One. Month. After. She. Left.
And 'after she left' was indeed the best way of phrasing it, because Miliam soon found a centuries old new report in which she, under her dead name, was reported missing. That settled one of her biggest questions; she was in the future, not in alternate universe.
Miliam flipped over and screamed into her pillow, having just discovered a truth so mind-bogglingly stupid her brain shut down. If she hadn’t cast the spell when she did, she could have submitted the tome for study, maybe have it deciphered by actual experts before she attempted it. Maybe she could have just sold it for a mint and flipped her family the finger as she rode off into the sunset and got a medical transition.
But nope, she’d cast a spell she didn’t understand and wound up…666 years in the future. Surely that wasn’t a bad sign, and she would live a peaceful and prosperous life doing cargo runs between planets. Yup. Not going to think about that number at all.
Still, it meant she got to leave her toxic family immediately, and humanity hadn’t left the Sol System for another sixty years after that date. Society had had to let go of a lot of preconceived notions before they could begin to explore magic as a science, much less integrate the two in order to reach their full potential. Even then, the Gaian Collective took another two decades to form. So, in, the end, despite the sheer ridiculousness of it all, she couldn’t complain that much.
After coming to terms with that revelation, Miliam decided to move onto a few simpler subjects. It was a bit of a rapid fire of terminology- ‘wave drive’ was the colloquial name for the Alcubierre drive, a theoretical form of faster-than-light travel she had heard of before which magic had made possible. Ships using wave drives could violate the speed of light without technically moving, hence the lack of a traditional propulsion system, and they could even manipulate their bubble of space to move in any direction without turning.
The wave drive wasn’t so much faster than light that one could travel between stars, as a trip across the GC would still take something like 45 years, but it was more than enough for travel between planets.
Communication was a bit more complicated. Most data was shuttled between worlds by data couriers. There were designated routes and times, ensuring all relevant data could propagate across the Collective in a matter of hours. But urgent data transfers relied on quantum entanglement communication- QEC modules, in other words. They were so difficult to make that the Collective hadn’t broken the six figure count for them, though the actual number wasn’t public, and each module could only send data to its twin.
There was a lot more information on them, but Miliam was content with that much. It was an advanced subject and trying to make sense of it past that point was giving her a headache. She rolled onto her side and dove into another line of questions.
Specifically, magic itself. She was able to locate a section in her book regarding spells, though it meant skipping ahead a bit. Apparently they could be written in any language, almost like how programs could be written in any programming language, but the GC standard used a lexicon of ideograms that condensed a lot of meaning into a single character. Like in Chinese, Japanese kanji, or even ancient Egyptian.
On one hand, that meant it was easier to fit more complex spells into smaller spell circles. And they had to be circles, apparently, but she’d skipped the section that explained why. The flip side was that learning to both cast and write spells required memorizing hundreds of characters.
Miliam decided she was going to need some flash cards.
She spent some time studying the characters used in the basic spells that had come with her grimoire next. And by basic, she meant basic. Single function, no variables. Casting one of these spells would produce a very specific, singular effect and nothing else. More complex spells would allow one to choose the shape, size, intensity, or even origin point, but these ones were the equivalent of flicking the spark wheel on a lighter: they were always going to produce an identical result of the same size originating from the caster’s hand.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Which was not to say that they were easy. Miliam was skipping steps, not to mention weeks’ worth of lesson material. She was learning how to read code by opening up a program and referring to a list of functions to understand what she was reading, in essence. That would be a stupid thing to do for most people, but Miliam had a degree in programming, so here, she was in her element.
Because magic wasn’t dissimilar to coding. The language used was developed to be used by the same species that invented the programming languages she was familiar with. It followed similar rules and syntax, as it emerged from the same cultural background. Of course a magical language invented by humans that already knew about programming languages would in itself be a form of programming language.
So the hard part was deciphering the ideograms. A basic spell had relatively few of them, and she memorized enough of them to cast her first spell within an hour. She scooted to the edge of the bed and sat up, dangling her legs off the side. Then she called up the app that contained her spell library and selected the one she wanted to cast. Miliam fed a bit of mana in to trigger the psychic component, and the chosen spell appeared in her mind’s eye, held there not by her own will but by the assistance of the device in her hand.
She read the circle. It rotated as she went, so she didn’t have to read anything upside down. And when she finished…a little flame appeared above her index finger, on the hand that wasn’t holding the grimoire.
It would have helped if she’d remembered to hold her finger out first.
Heat blossomed on her leg as the fire manifested directly against her skin, and she yanked her hand away by reflex, cursing aloud. It hadn’t hurt much and she’d moved soon enough to avoid a serious burn, but had seriously caught her by surprise. Miliam sighed as the spell’s duration ran out and she fell back onto her bed. Although she’d messed up a bit right at the end, she’d taught herself to use magic. Just one basic spell, but the accomplishment was her own.
Time for a break.
Miliam settled back against her pillow and decided to pursue another line of…research. But just as she hit enter on the search bar, her door slid open, admitting Aoibhe inside. She jolted up, her spine as straight as a ruler and a blush on her face as she slammed her phone into the bed face down and locked the phone screen.
“Could you knock!?” she yelled out. Aoibhe gave her a look like she was the weird one.
“Just thought you might want to know that I got in touch with Abigail and she’s on her way up to meet us,” the elf said with a shrug.
“That could have been a text message!”
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Minutes earlier, Aoibhe was on the bridge of the corvette when she received a request for a video call over the ship’s communications array. She accepted, and the white-haired, red-eyed Abigail Carter appeared on screen, one eyebrow already raised in consternation.
“Aoibhe, if this is yet another prank, I swear I will-” Abigail began, cutting off abruptly as Aoibhe raised the book in her hand and showed her a page. “That is…an authentic Inquisition-era grimoire. Where in the universe could you have…?”
“Long story. Important part is myself and the owner of this book need a lot of money right now, and I wanted to know if your university would be interested in buying this,” Aoibhe said, setting the book aside.
“I expect they would,” Abigail confirmed. “That era of magic is poorly understood, as only fragments and singular pages have survived. An entire intact grimoire would be…invaluable. I am grateful that you would contact me rather than auctioning it off.”
“Aye, well, we need the money now. Can’t afford the docking fees while we wait.”
“You have acquired a ship, then, I assume. Interesting. Send me the location, if you would. Any purchase will be contingent upon my first inspecting the tome to confirm it is authentic.”
“You can get permission to leave that quickly?”
“Indeed. My department head will, in fact, be so happy to approve the request that he would most likely fill out the required forms for me.”
“Great. I wanted you to analyze a particular spell before I hand it over, anyway. The owner- my new captain- told me a strange tale about how she ended up on this ship,” Aoibhe said while glancing at the book in question. Abigail would probably be able to read the spell on the spot, coded or not.
“May I inquire as to the tale in question?” Abigail asked, raising her eyebrow once more, but Aoibhe shook her head and deferred.
“Best you hear it from her. I’m not sure I believe it yet myself anyway, and I can’t answer the questions I’m sure you’ll have. I’ll forward you the docking arm we’re on, just call me when you’re arriving.”
“Mm, very well. You have certainly piqued my interest, and I will make my way there forthwith. You may expect my arrival within the day,” Abigail said as she ended the call. Aoibhe leaned back in her seat and sighed. There had been a small amount of fear that she would say no, though the greater part of her knew Abigail would jump at the offer just as she had. Now it was just a matter of negotiating, and maybe getting the answers to a handful of questions.
Aoibhe decided she should probably go ahead and let Miliam know; when Abigail said she was going to do something quickly, she damn well did.
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Codex Entry: Wave Drives
Once known as an Alcubierre Drive on Earth, the wave drive uses magic to warp space around a ship, carrying it through space like a surfer on a tidal wave. Technically the ship inside the bubble is not moving relative to the space around it, so this has the advantage of allowing a ship to travel at great speeds with moving at all, eliminating the need for any consideration of g-forces due to acceleration. These wave bubbles allow the ship to move at speeds greater than c, although not enough so to be viable for interstellar travel. Wave drives are, however, the standard for interplanetary travel, allowing a ship to cross a star system in hours rather than years.
Since wave drives do not rely vector-based propulsion, they can move a ship in any direction based on pilot input. Ships do not have to decelerate to change directions, per se, but it does take time to undo the warping effect on space and apply it in another direction, so turning cannot be done instantly.
The effect of wave drives on the space around a ship is immense, however, making it dangerous to operate them in close proximity to anything one doesn't want ripped apart. Flexible object like cables may survive being inside the space warped by a wave drive, but people or even ships cannot survive being placed in this field. Ships are equipped with maneuvering thrusters to account for this, allowing smaller ships to land on planets without damaging them and allowing ships to approach closely to stations and other ships for docking.
Despite the deleterious effects of being caught in the path of a wave drive, they do not make good weapons. Battles are fought at distances up to a light second, so ships seldom come close enough to ram each other, and even if they did, an opposing wave drive can be used to cancel out that of the rammer, leaving it vulnerable to counterfire. Two ships using wave drives to move in opposite directions would cause a resonance effect that would accelerate them towards each other, but that first requires two ships whose crews are both desperate enough to commit to a suicidal attack to target each other, which is extremely unlikely.