It took a few minutes for Aoibhe to explain what a mana furnace looked like and where to find it, during which the other woman seemed to grow increasingly frantic as her own ship broke down. Fortunately, Miliam quickly realized that she at least knew which room to look in. She’d woken up in it, after all.

Armed with her smartphone flashlight, something she had entirely forgotten she’d had on her person earlier, Miliam returned to the room at the other end of the hall, slightly less spooked now that her vision wasn’t dependent on flashing emergency lights. It made the ship feel less eerie, and gave her a better look at the inside of the vessel.

It seemed like ship’s designers had a similar aesthetic sense to humans- the ship may even have been of human design, but fitted for carillion physiology. It was on the utilitarian end of the spectrum, made of gray steel and with visible access points to internal components along the walls. What Miliam assumed to be warning signs and instructions were painted directly onto the bare metal, though she was unable to read them.

The doors lining the hallway remained closed, but she could now see panels that likely controlled access to them illuminated by her phone. Miliam’s curiosity told her to try the panels and find out what was behind the doors, but she restrained herself due to the mission at hand. She passed by them instead, taking care with her steps not to send herself launching into the ceiling with a too-forceful movement. Trying to focus on anything but the cold, she noticed that she had to move ever more carefully the closer she got to the middle of the ship.

Entering the room she woke up in, she got her first good look at a magitech reactor room. Aoibhe’s explanation gave her something of an idea what she was looking at, but only the broad strokes. The room was long. Half of the topmost deck of the ship was given over to it in order to contain the banks of capacitors needed to power the ship’s FTL abilities, apparently, and most of what she saw along the sides of the room must have been those capacitors.

Miliam had no idea what an electrical capacitor would look like on this scale, having only really seen the small ones used in electronics, but she assumed they didn’t involve the use of crystals. Aoibhe had offhandedly mentioned she could ignore the capacitor crystals along the walls and explained absolutely nothing else about them due to lack of relevance, but they were rather attention grabbing. Each crystal was the size of her torso and encased in a cylinder halfway inside the wall, with a clear hatch making up the half that faced into the chamber, allowing a view of the crystals within.

Some were intact; only fragments remained of the rest. The ones that were intact were perfectly clear, like pure diamond, shaped like a gem with a round cut on both ends and a long and straight section between, ending both at the top and bottom with a point that was secured by a metal cage. Due to the length of the crystals, the tips looked a bit stubby, but that was an illusion: the pavilion of the crystals was easily the size of Miliam’s head.

Along the center of the room was a reactor of unknown make; the details would have been beyond Miliam’s understanding whether she was told about it or not. What she did know was that there should be a conventional reactor that ran the ship’s electrical components, and which fed into a mana furnace that converted some of that power into mana for the magical components.

That second section was what she was looking for. Magic circles were, as she had discovered, inscribed for a reason: so that they could be activated merely by injecting mana, rather than requiring a skilled caster. This was different from the spells in her grimoire; all values were preset, so anyone capable of channeling mana could activate it.

Miliam immediately dismissed the first structure she saw as being the conventional reactor because she could see computer interfaces hooked up to it. She looked past it and found another device of similar size extending to the back of the ship. It would be tricky to reach; the moment she moved past the reactor “gravity” would essentially flip, and she would have to activate the furnace while walking on the ceiling.

She walked past the reactor carefully, looking for the moment when she was in the exact center of the ship. At that point what she thought of as gravity disappeared entirely, leaving her floating weightlessly. With one hand one the reactor structure, she flipped herself over slowly, reorienting herself towards the ceiling before pushing off towards the reach of the ship, where what was now the ground came up to meet her.

Upside down now, Miliam had to take a few moments to let herself adjust to the sensory screw. Fortunately the furnace was large, nearly reaching the ceiling she now stood on, so she had little difficulty inspecting it for the magic circle that converted electricity to mana and fed it into the ship’s mana circuits. She had no idea how it worked, but apparently that single circle was connected to dozens of others inside the device that would be chain-activated when she initialized the primary. It could only function for so long an emergency power, but Aoibhe only needed a few moments to jump ships, and then she would hopefully be able to bring primary power online.

It didn’t take long to find the circle she needed. It was enormous, taking up the entire side of the mana furnace opposite the door. Miliam placed a hand upon it and tried to remember what it had felt like to activate the gender-swapping spell, channeling that mysterious something which was evidently mana into the circle.

Activating this circle felt very different from her first experience casting a spell. There was a noticeable drain as mana moved from her body and into the device. Her first spell had taken only a few moments to activate, but this one dragged on to the point that Miliam wondered if she was even doing it correctly. Her body began to tingle, then burn, starting in her extremities and moving into her core.

As the furnace spun up, the circle began to glow grow the center out, tracing the spell inscribed into it around and around towards the outer edge. When the burning feeling in her body was only just beginning to feel painful, the outer ring finally lit up and the draining ceased as the furnace stopped drawing energy from her body and began to generate its own from the emergency power supply.

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Miliam fell backwards against the bulkhead, breathing heavily. She realized she was sweating heavily, a thoroughly unpleasant feeling with how cold the room felt. Unfortunately she still had one more task to complete before Aoibhe could take over, and that was getting the beacon working. It too would require a living being to start it up from its unpowered state before the switch on the bridge would be able to operate it.

After a few long moments of catching her breath, Miliam staggered to her feet, praying to nothing in particular that this device would not be as difficult to activate. Getting back to the front half of the ship was far more difficult in her current state of exhaustion than reaching the back had been. She made the flip successfully, but pushed off too hard and missed the landing, colliding with the floor painfully, butt-first.

“No one told me that would take so much out of me…” she groaned as she regained her footing. Every moment she took was one second closer to Aoibhe dying- and, as a result, herself freezing to death on this derelict ship she hardly knew how to operate. Miliam knew she couldn’t stop here.

With halting steps, she found her way back into the hall and slapped the controls for the first door. A bunkroom. There was another one opposite it. The next seemed to be an infirmary, with a small galley as its mirror. The fifth door failed to open, and the controls flashed blue to indicate a malfunction, or so she assumed. Given that the room opposed to it was a torpedo bay, it probably wasn’t what she was looking for anyway.

The seventh door, though, opened into a stairwell. Aoibhe had told her the beacon was likely on a separate floor for security reasons, and probably close to the cargo bay for convenience. Possibly even within it. The stairs were narrow and steep, but the low gravity eased the descent, and soon enough she was on the lower floor.

As there didn’t appear to be a room beneath the bridge, Miliam turned aft, continuing her impromptu tour of the vessel. If nothing else, her curiosity was going to be well and truly sated by the time she found her destination. She skipped the first few doors, opting to go right for the large hatch at the rear that was almost certainly the cargo bay first.

When Miliam palmed the door controls, there was an ominous whirring sound for several moments before the left panel shuddered a few inches towards the wall. The right panel remained locked in place as the left side continued to open in short, noisy bursts, finally giving out just short of opening all the day. The extra-large door had nonetheless opened more than enough to allow her through, and she sidled in, sticking near the door to avoid crossing the halfway mark and floating away.

Miliam panned her phone across the cavernous room, revealing numerous empty containers strewn about haphazardly. Another alien body peeked out from beneath one of the bigger boxes, surrounded by bits and bobs she didn’t know the purpose of. They were, notably, on the ceiling rather than the floor. On the opposite end of the bay was an angled door flanked by hydraulics that had to be the landing bay door, and to the left was some kind of loading equipment she assumed was intended to float, judging by the gripping arms and lack of wheels.

None of that was important. What Miliam needed was mere feet from the landing bay door, however- a spell circle ringed with bright blue paint that she had long ago decided was these aliens’ equivalent to red or yellow for caution.

“Of course it’s on the upside-down part of the ship. Why wouldn’t it be? Stupid aliens and their stupid spinning wrecked ship!” Miliam bit out as she picked her way there, stepping around debris. Fortunately the trip here had given her time to recover somewhat, allowing her to pull off the flip and landing with aplomb, but now she found herself on the ceiling, looking up at a spell circle on the floor she could only activate by touch.

“At least they were courteous enough to leave me boxes.”

Tentatively, Miliam reached down and tried to move one of the crates scattered around. It was lighter than she expected, yet rigid and unyielding. Placing it beneath the spell circle, she grabbed the next crate, and then the next, creating a staircase high enough that she could just barely reach the circle above if she stood atop it.

Her work done, Miliam clambered up, careful not to topple her precariously stacked boxes, and reached up towards the floor. Her fingers brushed the circle above and she focused again on the feeling of something flowing out of her body; mercifully, this circle was significantly easier to activate than the last one, and it glowed for a second before going dark once more.

Miliam didn’t have time to wonder if it was working, because almost immediately, a tall, lanky woman flashed into existence above her before immediately falling towards the ceiling. Both women yelped as they toppled to the ground, accompanied by the cacophony of falling boxes, which created even more noise as they bounced into other debris and sent that flying too. One box was sent towards the front of the ship, going weightless for a brief moment before falling to the floor.

“Owwwwww,” Miliam whined, rubbing the back of her head where it had struck metal. If she’d been in a full gravity environment that might have been a serious injury. Just as she realized she was beneath the other woman, Aoibhe came to her senses, but instead of jumping off, Aoibhe pulled Miliam into a hug, muttering words of gratitude.

Apparently life couldn’t stop throwing surprised her way; just when she’d begun to process that the woman really was human, a pointed ear jabbed into her cheek.

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Codex Entry: Mana Furnaces

On a personal level, ambient mana is sufficient for nearly any spell. On an industrial or military scale, sometimes a bit more oomph is required. For this purpose, mana furnaces exist. In magical societies, mana furnaces are just another part of the power grid, and reactors without a paired mana furnace are rare. On a conceptual level, mana furnaces work around a simple idea: if mana can be turned into energy and mass, and if mass and energy can be converted between each other, so too must energy and mass be able to be converted to mana.

A mana furnace can theoretically convert both mass and energy into mana, but in practice, it is significantly more cost-efficient to first convert mass to energy and then energy to mana, just as it is easier to create an effect with magic than it is to create an object. Mana furnaces exist on a sliding scale of technological sophistication, as the only requirement is that the final step feeds energy into the furnace. Primitive combustion engines can feed a mana furnace, and so can advanced anti-matter annihilation reactors.

On a practical scale, mana furnaces are typically fueled by cold fusion. Anti-matter is expensive due to how difficult it is to contain, and fission is too inefficient in its usage of fissile materials. Cold fusion is difficult to attain with only technology, but can be maintained indefinitely with the use of magic. An initial infusion of mana from a living mage is needed to begin the fusion, at which point energy produced from the fusion of hydrogen atoms is fed into the furnace, which converts energy to mana and uses some of that mana to both power the continued conversion and also to maintain the fusion reaction.

Mana furnaces have effectively a 100% efficiency rate, but this does not mean all energy produced by a furnace's paired reactor goes directly to powering magical implements. Some energy is lost between the reactor and furnace, and a sizable portion is used to directly run electrical power grids. What enters the furnace is entirely converted to mana, but some of this mana is then used to perpetuate the fusion reaction and mana conversion. What remains is then available to power magical tools- magic weapons, drives, gravity plating, and more mundane appliances.