Unknown time on the 33rd day of Winter

The next day Schrodinger and I sat eating lunch together. My supplies were down to dry rations and was saving the small amount of jerky that was left for him. I got out my notebook, charcoal pencil, and a fresh light crystal.

"Okay friend." I said. "Let's think this through one step at a time."

I wrote at the top of the next page: light mage abilities.

"To become a fake light mage I need to be able to do the basics." I said. "Arin tentatively agreed to help me with what I'm working on so I also need to figure out what to tell her."

Schrodinger finished his meal and got up to leave. He was helping my process so I decided to follow him.

"She said that the basic abilities were: flash, darkness, and invisible light which is really just infrared. In addition to the whole signaling thing." I said. "I could probably fake flash and invisible light with technology alone but darkness is something different."

Schrodinger stopped to sniff something at one of the tunnel exits. I paused so he could focus and continued when he moved on.

"Observing her light magic up close it appears as if she is changing materials to emit or reflect light in very specific ways." I said. "When she comes back this evening we will have to ask her to demonstrate it on a bunch of materials and look at them under the microscope to see how they are changing."

Schrodinger seemed to find what he was sniffing for and made his way down a side tunnel. I followed at a leisurely pace.

"To reproduce the darkness effect I will need to understand how it works." I said. "I will then need to be able to store or even produce it myself. I guess I could use a monster core and channel but then I would need to find a monster with darkness magic…"

I trailed off at the end. A thought was percolating and I needed to sort through it slowly. Monsters generate their magic in a monster core. Nobody knows how exactly. People have tried to cut them open before but they have a tendency to explode when damaged. But I have a method of nondestructive internal examination.

I gave Schrodinger one last look and wished him well on his hunt. Then I returned to the campsite and retrieved one of my monster cores. I sat cross legged on my bedroll and engaged the microscope. The surface of the core was a layer of crystalline carbon, basically diamond but with a lot of defects. Below that I could sense a thick layer of graphene. I couldn't get very deep in that layer before my senses cut out. Something was blocking me. I stood up and went down to the lake. My curiosity was killing me at this point. What would millions of years of evolution do to utilize the presence of magic?

After stripping and getting into the water I reentered the microscope and started peeling back layers. Slowly and carefully, I removed the outer layer of crystal by breaking it down into hydrogen and then recombining it into water. After a few minutes I had removed enough of the graphene to see a layer below that. There was a layer of crisscrossing hairs, like the ones I was using to sense, that were wrapped around the core like the string inside a baseball. After removing that layer I could see farther inside. More crystal but much cleaner this time, almost pure diamond. How the heck do biological creatures grow diamonds in their guts? Once I removed the graphene layer completely I looked again to see if there was something below the layer of diamond. More graphene, but there was something different about it. Most graphene, like what you find in a pencil, is a mess of carbon atoms in all sorts of loose structures. What I was seeing was an extremely regular hexagonal structure. Further it was only one atom thick. This layer was sitting on top of, but somehow not bonded to, another one atom thick layer below that. There were dozens or even hundreds of these one atom thick layers.

Going further in I found eleven layers alternating between diamond and graphene before I found something else. Looking deep into the material, I began to see oxygen atoms. Unlike the oxygen in the air these were bonded in groups of eight. They were like little, densely packed boxes and we're flowing past each other like a liquid.

"What in the heck am I looking at?" I asked out loud.

I looked back at the core to another spot. Instead of oxygen below the surface, I found hydrogen. Again it was languidly flowing like a liquid. I looked again and again and determined that there were narrow channels filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen meshed all through the interior of the core. Then it struck me just how dangerous this thing was. It takes enormous pressure to force either gas into a liquid form. This was a pressure vessel and I was digging through it. If this thing decided to burst then I probably wouldn't live long enough to regret my life choices.

In hindsight there were probably better options but in the moment I just wanted that thing far away from me. I tossed out of the lake and ducked below the surface of the water. Even underwater I heard a loud snapping sound. After a second I came back up to find the cave just as silent as before. I let out a long sigh and climbed out. Dressing I started mentally chastising myself for taking that kind of risk. I knew the damn things could blow up for Mez's sake.

I walked a short distance and found the spot where the core must have popped. There was a small crater in the stone scattered with sparkling dust. I let out a whistle of appreciation for how much energy must have been in that thing. I knelt down ran my finger slowly through the dust. I activated the microscope again and looked for anything out of the ordinary. There was lots of carbon, and a whole assortment of the minerals you would expect from stone. Looking again there was a lot more carbon-14 than I would expect. Nothing dangerous but certainly strange.

My finger touched something hot and I pulled away. I looked down and in the darkness I could see a tiny spec of something that was giving off a soft glow. I put my hand next to the spec to look at what it was made of and froze. My face contorted in confusion. Why would a core have a tiny grain of extremely heavy elements? The spec was a small diamond enclosing an even smaller fleck made up of metals with atomic weights in the mid two hundreds. For reference, uranium-235 and plutonium-239 are used in atomic bombs. It burned my hand a bit but I immediately picked it up and started breaking it down into small, stable elements. Once it was done I stood and looked around. Now I have to search every inch of this cave to see if there are any more of those. Great, there goes the day.

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***

Another unknown time on the 33rd day of Winter

I spent the whole day looking for more shards of heavy elements but didn't end up finding any. I even lugged the radiation detector over the whole cave but to no avail. I did end up finding some larger fragments of core which could be useful in figuring out how it worked but that would take a while. I had a theory. The pure oxygen and hydrogen made me think of a fuel cell from back on Earth so maybe it was a way of storing energy but the shard of radioactive material was also playing some role I couldn't quite figure out.

Arin ended up finding me trying to lower the radiation detector back down from one of the ledges.

"Hi Theod!" she said. "What're you up to?"

The rope I was using slipped a bit before I gritted my teeth and pulled it to a stop.

"Can't… talk… right… now..." I said.

She just stood there until I managed to wrestle it down. I stood panting for a bit trying to catch my breath before dealing with her.

"Can you talk now?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Hi Theod!" she said again. "What're you up to?"

"Just getting in some light exercise." I said with a smirk.

She rolled her eyes at that.

"What is that big thing anyway?" she asked.

I climbed down the ledge and responded after we were on the same level.

"It's a battery." I said cryptically.

After it was clear I wasn't going to go on she turned and walked away.

"Hey, you asked me to come back, remember?" she said. "The least you could do is answer a simple question."

After a beet it was clear she wasn't leaving. She was probably just looking for Schrodinger. Well he was out hunting again so she wouldn't find him. I walked after her.

"A battery is a way of making electrical fields by putting specific materials in contact with each other." I said. "That one uses lead so it is very heavy."

She turned back to me with a suspicious look.

"An electrical field is what makes lightning, though the battery is nowhere near that strong." I said. "I will try and be more open. However, there will be things I can't answer or explain. We both have to trust each other if this is going to work"

"And what exactly is this?" She asked. "You said we could help each other but you've already helped me. How exactly can I help you? And what do I get out of the deal?"

I thought about what to say.

"What I am proposing is that we work together." I said. "You are a light mage and can help me to better understand how light magic works. If I understand how it works then I can make devices better than that laser. That will, in turn, make you a stronger light mage."

She seemed to think about it for a while. I just stayed quiet waiting for her to make up her mind.

"No, there's something else." She said. "If you just needed magic then why not ask your family? Why are you down here in the first place? You're hiding something."

Crap. Ya, this was a risk. Well, maybe I could tell her half of the truth.

"You're not wrong." I said. "I … as I am right now, I am ineligible for mage service. I want to see if it is possible to make items that will afford me all the same abilities as a light mage."

I let out a sigh and looked away.

"So, yes." I said. "I am hiding something. Part of why I can't go elsewhere is because I need you to keep my secret."

"You want to fake being a mage with magic items?" She asked incredulously.

I looked her directly in the eyes.

"Yes." I said

"I am confident that I can reproduce flash, invisible light, and of course lasers. I think darkness will be the most challenging as I currently have no idea how it works."

Her expression was of shocked disbelief.

"You're serious!?" she said. "Of course you're serious, you're always serious."

Then she burst out laughing. She laid down on the cave floor and started belly laughing and rolling around. I could only stand there awkwardly shuffling my feet. Eventually she calmed down and wiped tears from her eyes.

"I haven't laughed like that in a long time." she said.

"Ya, sure I'll help you pull one over on those dry, over proven, morons in the mage service. Especially Commander Reod."

"Really?" I asked. "After all that I was expecting you'd tell me I was crazy"

"Oh you're crazy all right." she said. "That's why I think you'll pull it off. Oh to see the look on their faces."

Then she got to her feet.

"So, what do you need me to show you?" she asked.

Her level of playfulness about this situation was a bit off-putting. Here I was struggling for my life and she thought it was a prank. Whatever, she can think what she likes.

"Follow me." I said.

I led her back over to my campsite. She seemed surprised but didn't comment. I graped a bag I had actually prepared yesterday and brought it over to her.

"I have different materials in this bag. Please use your magic on each while I hold them." I explained. "I have … some enhanced senses that might help me to understand how it works."

"That sounds simple enough." she said.

I dug through the bag and pulled out a copper disk. I held it out in my palm.

"Can you please make this glow?" I asked.

She nodded and touched the disk. I engaged the microscope and looked at the smooth surface. With my eyes I could see the disk begin to glow with a soft white light. In the microscope I could just barely perceive the atoms begin to vibrate. No, the nuclei were as still as before; it was the spacing between the grains that would jump for a bare fraction of a second before settling back to normal. The magnitude of the jump seemed to be random.

"It looks like you are causing stimulated emission from the electrons around the copper atoms by somehow pushing them to a higher valence." I said.

But then I looked more closely.

"No, that's not right." I said. "If it was going to a higher valence then all the emissions would be of the same wavelength as the electrons fell back to their base states."

"I can make it glow blue if you want." said Arin.

Sure enough the disk started to glow blue. Under the microscope it looked similar but not quite the same. I could tell that all the jumps were now just about identical in magnitude and on the smaller end of the distribution I'd seen before.

"Oh I see what's going on," I said. "You're pushing electrons into fractional valence orbits. When they fall back down to their original orbit they emit a photon at the energy level you're looking for."

"I have no idea what any of that means." she said. "but it sounds like you are figuring something out."

"Yes, it's like … well it's like another kind of magic I am familiar with." I said. "You are changing how matter and energy interact in very specific ways. It's not that you are adding energy to the material but that you modify the strength of forces within the material that are in balance. The balance is disrupted leading to the release of energy in the form of light."

"Okay, so I'm not making light myself, I just tell the disk to make light." she said.

"Sure." I said.

"So what's next?" she asked.