Dear Diary,

Nah, just kidding. I'm not going to start it like that. I'm not in grade school any more. Although that was definitely the last time I wrote anything down in a journal.

Agh, I feel so stupid writing things down like this. What if somebody were to find it?

Well, I guess if that happened I'd be dead and it wouldn't matter. I can't be embarrassed if I'm dead, right?

It's so weird. Looking at what I'm writing is like looking at somebody else's thoughts, some teenager's diary or something. Do I really think like this? I haven't felt this self-conscious since I did my first PowerPoint presentation for a client. Consulting is stupid. So is journaling.

Right. I'm just going to pretend that this is a debriefing. I'm not keeping a journal like a middle schooler or some kind of mad scientist.

Yeah, that's what it is, a debriefing log.

Log entry 1, mission debriefing,

Nope. Doesn't work. Guess there's a reason they do debriefings in person. I'm just going to force myself to write and not read what I wrote until I'm done. Here goes nothing.

Day 47 of my time here in Fantasy Land, where magic is real and not all of the monsters are human.

Gideon was the one to suggest that I start writing everything down. He said that would help me make sense of it all. So here I am, taking advice from an HVAC guy turned magical rebel assassin. Always knew I should have gone into the trades.

Anyway, I'm going to try to write every day, to help myself keep grounded and focused on what I'm doing here and what my goal is.

I started noting stuff down in the system a while back, but it's really just a list of ideas. Plus, writing stuff down in the System just seems so… impermanent, ya know? Like sure, it's private, but it's just stuck in my head and if I die, it all goes away. So I stopped after a little while. It didn't seem to help. I realized there was so much I didn't know that trying to keep track of it didn't even matter.

But now that I'm writing actual words with an actual pen (quill, actually, as if I were some kind of medieval monk! at least it's self-filling — spatial enchantments for the win) and paper, it all feels a lot more real. More tangible, you know?

They say the simple act of writing down a goal makes you ~40% more likely to actually achieve it. Now that I write that down, it sounds like an empty platitude.

But just in case:

I'm going to get home.

I'm going to get home.

I'm going to get home.

I'm going to get home.

I will get home.

DAY 48.

Now that I'm done showing off with the bullet spell, Gideon thinks I'm ready for another one. My magical education is starting with… an incredibly boring spell that will create water. Empire-ending spells of doom, here I come!

It's something he's calling an alchemical spell that seems complex but is actually really simple. Essentially, you're creating hydrogen molecules (out of mana? like I'm supposed to be fine with violating conservation of energy by just making up matter on the spot?? exactly how much energy does a mana-day contain???) and binding them to oxygen molecules. Of course, since I can't see the molecules, the system is doing this for me, so I'm kind of flying blind.

Casting more complex spells is like getting DALL-E or one of those other stable diffusion image generation tools to come up with the image I want by giving it a specific prompt, except the prompt isn't words, it's nonverbal visualization in my mind and me attempting to tug the psuedo-tactile mana tendrils my other spell, Mana Sight, lets me see, around as a form of rudimentary spatial input.

This is a pretty well-known spell but normally it's slow and costly, because the locals here are actually creating the water from scratch, summoning into existence the general idea of water.

Our approach is different, and more refined; this spell actually sucks oxygen from the air and combines it with made-from-scratch hydrogen molecules. It's way cheaper, mana-wise, than how they do it, which I honestly still don't fully understand. But you need to do it in a well-ventilated space, otherwise you suck all the oxygen out of the room and don't end up with hardly any water to show for it.

It's still really slow, though.

Why is he teaching me this now? It's to help me learn how manipulate alchemical spells and area-of-affect spells efficiently, or so he claims. Personally I suspect he likes watching me struggle.

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I have an idea for an experiment: if I can use this spell to create a measurable quantity of pure water, I can subtract the weight of the oxygen atoms and find out how many helium atoms I just created. Some back of the napkin math from there can tell me how much energy a single mana-day contains (hint: a lot, if my guess is right).

But before I can measure that, I need to make some water.

DAY 49.

I'm not making much progress with the water summoning spell, but Gideon assures me it's normal to have some trouble with it at first. My focus keeps wandering. I'm eager to try something else, but he keeps insisting that I take it slow. That's fair. I remember what happened from going too fast.

I should write more, but it's late. I spent a lot of the day catching up with the others.

DAY 50.

Success! I got a droplet of water to appear. Soon this world will drown in my vengeance! Ugh, I need to journal more. But writing is such a pain in the butt. Every time I accidentally drag the quill upwards ink spatters and I have to try to dab it off.

Somebody needs to invent a magical BIC pen. Apparently Sung doesn't feel the need to.

If this is what magic is like, I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever get home.

There. I wrote it.

That was hard.

I keep pretending like it's possible, but honestly? The Empire is ever-present and seem all-powerful. I still haven't been allowed to leave the house. The others are acting like they're practically omniscient. Although I escaped the first mana hound, apparently I'm still being kept under lock and key in case they have another way to find me. These people are a suspicious lot.

…maybe that's why they're still alive.

DAY 51.

Gideon is crazy. He took me down to the training room and we practiced jumping off of cliffs. I love it.

He told me that he's going to show me a bunch of different kinds of spells, high level, so I can pick one group of spells — a class, he calls them — to specialize in.

More to come on this subject. For now, I get to learn a bunch more magic.

DAY 52.

Big day today.

I'm making dinner for everybody later for the first time.

Can you use magic to make cooking easier? According to Graves, the answer is yes, if you're up to your eyeballs in mana. They have a perfectly functioning wood burning fireplace for most things, though. I guess if mana were more readily available this would be a post-scarcity society, but it isn't. At least, not around here. That's a shame. Although I have my doubts that such a society would even be possible, even with twice or three times the amount of mana available for everybody. The taxes are no joke. Whatever people will find a way to do to each other, they will, magic notwithstanding.

DAY 53.

They're all crazy! Graves was weird to start with, but Sung seemed normal enough and Tallahassee was understandably quiet. But even she opened up when we all went down to the training room to practice literal laser tag, though. I suppose if nothing else it was a good team bonding exercise.

Gideon taught me the same laser spell that the enemies were using against us. We all dialed them down, of course, but they still hurt worse than paintball! I've never been shot with a rubber bullet, myself, but I might just prefer that. But they all seemed to love it. I'm going to be red for days.

The spell is surprisingly mana-efficient, all things considered. Turns out the reason they don't just heat up the end point and make the whole laser is because the costs of projecting mana away from your body go up exponentially due to something called mana dispersion.

But the laser actually creates a temporary mana channel like the ones in your own body that help decrease that cost, and the majority of the work creating the superheated plasma is done really close to your body so it's more mana-efficient. Then you're just pushing it away from you. Extruding it. The closest thing I can compare it to is the way you can guide an arc of electricity down a particular path by ionizing the particles in between.

Also apparently the laser can drill through magical shields like no tomorrow.

Yeah, they have all sorts of magical shields around here. Mana shields, heat shields, kinetic shields. I guess it's kind of like an arms race that's stagnated over time? Magical development, in this area at least, has reached a local maximum. I keep saying "in this area" because the team have been cluing me into the geography of the area. Apparently the Empire is pretty big, about the size of the thirteen original states, but it's not the superpower I had the initial impression that it was.

Gideon's going to show me how that one works in the next few days, after I get good enough trigger discipline with this spell. But it's not that hard.

I guess the Accelerated Lead or whatever spell is still more efficient when shields aren't being used. Surprise attacks, non-soldiers (shudder), and the like. It's also super subtle, so, good for covert ops.

DAY 54.

Illusions are scary. Sung's the master of illusions around here and he was showing me how they work. Freaky stuff. You'd think that being able to see mana would be enough to see through illusions, but you can create the illusion of mana sight, apparently. Crazy, right? The trick is just to guess how the other person perceives mana, which is actually kind of hard. There are a handful of different spells that grant mana vision in different ways, but honestly they're all just illusion spells at the root too, generating visual phenomena based on mana inputs.

Like with any good magic trick, even a little dose of illusion magic is enough. The best lie is mostly true, after all, and it's mainly about misdirection. Sung's really good at it. He's the one who built the computer and the range.

Oh, and I learned what happened with Yang and the eight other people he took with him. They split a couple of years back. They were the ones who gave up fighting the Empire and decided to make a home for themselves here.

At least four of them were recaptured by the Empire, and the rest have gone off the grid after the last contact they made.

Ugh.

Can I even get home? If I'm a… clone of myself? They don't like talking about it, but it seems like if the spell can recreate the dead, then it's not physically bringing their bodies back. It must be some sort of copy-paste job. Does that mean there's another me back home? With my pregnant wife?

It's a weird thought. But I have to find out. If it were just me, I'd probably be fine here.

But my wife is now close to six months pregnant. Entering third trimester. She'll be pretty tired by now, I'm sure. She made me read a book on the different stages and she's probably not sleeping much these days.

The baby will be kicking a lot, probably. I wonder if it's a boy or a girl. We were going to find out, so she probably (illegible) (illegible)

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Shoot, this ink spreads a lot when you get, um, salty water on it.