[Dante Alan Skyisle / Vladislav Alexandrovich Kerenski]
I watched as Kliss fell to the ground and remained standing on her knees, wide, emerald eyes staring up at me.
Her actions and words reminded me of the Medieval knight ceremonies from tales of Kievan Rus conquerors I had read about as a child. Of Vladimir the Great, the Prince of Novgorod and ruler of Kievan Rus and his Vitiyaz knight-errants. The Russian word “Vitiyaz” was derived from Scandinavian “Viking” as Vladimir the Great took Novgorod with a legion of warriors assembled from the Kingdom of Norway. I thought of dedicated knights declaring their allegiance to a higher cause.
I noticed that Delta was giving both of us a glare and shook my head with a smile.
“You don’t need to prostrate yourself in front of me. You’re my friend and I’m no God or King, Kliss,” I offered her my hand. “I’m just a Soviet man who was lucky enough to be reborn on Novazem and have a good family…” I glanced at Delta and then looked back at Kliss. “...and to have met you at this intersection of space and time with the right tools at my disposal to help you out.”
Kliss stared at me, stubbornly refusing to budge from the marble floor of the Space Pavilion.
“I’m not standing up until you accept my service,” her resolute expression said.
It looked like she wanted someone to believe in, needed someone to lean on after she rejected the teachings of Equality.
“Fine,” I said as the pause between us stretched on for far too long. “As the current… Administrator of Skyisle, I will take you on as my vitiyaz, a dragon-mage knight.”
“Thank you,” Kliss accepted my hand and stood up, her eyes shining with pure joy.
Delta rolled her eyes at our theatrics.
“I’m ready to serve Skyisle, Administrator,” Kliss said with a serious look. “What will be my first quest after I level up?”
“Hrmm,” I pursed my lips. “I reckon we should secure our town's budget when morning comes.”
“How?” Kliss tilted her red curls.
“We’ll go fishing,” I said with a wink.
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Our trio had woken up a bit later than usual, as we spent extra time in the dream-world of Moscow while the System finished evolving our half-dragon friend’s soul.
I woke up in my bed in the corner of my small, cozy bedroom.
As we didn’t expect a dragon to drop on Skyisle and nor for Kliss to suddenly arrive we only had two somewhat finished, tiny rooms available in the half-decrepit Alanian tower. That left my room to me while the girls shared Delta’s bedroom.
I fished my leather bag from under the bed and headed to the living room. The door into Delta’s room was halfway open and I saw that Kliss was unsuccessfully trying to disentangle herself from Delta.
“Help,” her expression told me.
“Sis, have you considered that our new dragon-knight might need some personal space?” I asked.
“She’s soooo waaaaarm thooo,” Delta bemoaned, burying her face in Kliss as if she was a baby kitten seeking its mother’s embrace. “I don’t know how you can resist not clinging to her every waking moment.”
“My Astral Phantom state is about ¾ less than yours,” I said. “The infection is mostly contained to my hands. It’s frustrating, yes, but I can move most of my attention to my Infoscopes when the icy sensation gets really bothersome.”
“I, erm, I’ve ascended to level 4 and I have Soul-Song tokens to distribute but I haven’t decided where to put them,” Kliss said. “The Church of Equality teaches kids to dispense them all equally but I would like to hear your opinion on this matter.”
“Magic,” I replied without a second thought.
“Magic?” Kliss raised an eyebrow. “Why magic?”
“If you want Delta to stop clinging to you, then I suggest that you put all of your points… aka, tokens into Magic,” I said.
“How would that help?” She asked curiously.
“Investment in Magic will very likely give you a Skill such as magic regeneration and improve your mana storage amount,” I said. “Your dragonheart is a ridiculously powerful magical battery. If you improve how much mana it’s storing you’ll begin to radiate magic in the positively-charged spiral pattern around you.”
“How are you so confident in this?” Kliss asked.
“Dragons radiate positively-charged magic,” I shrugged. “I’ve studied what Aradria did with her supercell storm when she flew two times over Skyisle.”
“But what if I don’t get a mana-amplifying Skill in Magic from so few tokens?” Kliss asked. “Surely that’s nowhere enough to receive a specific Skill!"
“If you were a mere human teenage girl, it wouldn’t be enough, yes,” I nodded.
“Thanks for reminding me that I’m not human anymore,” Kliss crossed her arms.
“You’re not simply a half-human girl with a dragonheart,” I walked up to her. “You’re now my knight. Well, actually… no. I think that you’ve a long way to go to get to a knight level. Oh, I know! You’ll be my personal apprentice first. I’ll teach you magic.”
“You’ll teach me magic?” Kliss smirked.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Not just magic – Technomagica,” I replied.
“Techno-what-now?” She asked.
“Technomagica is a theory of how magic functions when it’s directed with specific crystalline matrices within tools,” I said. “It’s what allowed me to build armaci from Leemy’s wood and crystals for kids in Skyisle. I’ll design specialized tools for you that will amplify your personal magic. Using your custom-designed armacus you’ll begin to understand how to make your magic flow in a specific direction and get a Skill from it pretty quickly. It’s a guaranteed, working method.”
“Yeah,” Delta yawned from beside Kliss. “We tested it on select groups of children first. It totally works. Yay for science!”
“Right,” Kliss squinted at Delta. “I get it now. That’s how you two managed to give magic spells to local teens for their capture the flag game.”
I nodded with a sage look.
“So, um, Lord Administrator,” Kliss eyed me with a sly expression. “You said that you have a gift for me? A book?”
“Yep,” I nodded. Reaching out into my bag I pulled out a leather tome wrapped in thick leather and handed it to her. "Here you go."
Kliss sniffed the book and squinted at it.
“It’s… glowing,” she said after a deep pause. “Why is it glowing like that?”
“My soul’s in it,” I said. "You can see it glowing in the Astral because you have dragon-eyes."
“You… you gotta be freaking kidding me,” the eyes of my new apprentice struck me.
“He’s giving you his Phylactery,” Delta giggled. “Aren’t you glad to have such a potent first item in your hoard, Miss dragon-butt?”
“What?! You’re giving me a necromage construct?!” Kliss ground out.
“It’s the most magical item I have that I could permanently gift to you,” I explained. “I’ve been attaching microscopic crystals and little bits of my soul to this book for a year. It’s my science journal.”
“Equality damn it, Slava,” Kliss uttered as she stared at the formula on the cover. “What sort of arcane language is this? What does this even mean?”
“E = mc2,” I said with a smile. “It’s an incredibly important equation derived by an Earth scientist named Albert Einstein. It stands for the theory of special relativity that expresses the fact that mass and energy are the same physical entity and can be changed into each other.”
“Mass and energy are… a physical entity? What?” Kliss looked completely lost.
“Ohh, I know this one!” Delta grinned. She stretched one hand away from cuddling Kliss and grabbed a small springapple from the table. “See this? Springapple is a fruit that grows on shrubs in Skyisle forests every Spring. It is tasty and nutritious,” she declared, biting into the fruit.
The orange-gold-emerald eyes of Kliss went from me to Delta.
“Suppose this springapple holds a magic so powerful that it can light up our entire village for a hundred years. This magic is locked within the apple, just as a dragon is locked within its egg. The formula 'E=mc2' is the key to this magic. It says that the energy (E) or 'magic' within the apple is equal to the apple's mass (m) or 'weightiness' multiplied by the speed of light (c) squared. The speed of light is as fast as if you could circle our world seven and a half times in the blink of an eye! So even a tiny fruit holds a vast amount of energy. That, my darling, is the secret of the springapple’s hidden power.”
Delta stuffed the entire springapple into her mouth, chewing noisily.
“What,” Kliss repeated, now staring back at me as Delta was done talking. “It’s a springapple. I don’t understand. What secret power could be held within it and how can it possibly be unleashed?”
"Ah," I said. "Well, the springapple is just a symbol. Its secret power lies not in the fruit itself, but in the fundamental laws of the universe. The energy within the springapple symbolizes the potential energy in absolutely everything physical around us, locked away and unseen. The key to unleash that energy is knowledge, the understanding of the principles that govern our world. With that key, the seemingly impossible becomes possible."
"That doesn't freaking explain anything!" Kliss huffed. "How do you get energy out of something as mundane as a springapple?!"
“You could dry the springapple and set it on fire,” Delta finished chewing her morning snack. “Fwoosh!” She pantomimed fire with her hands.
“Indeed. If you put the springapple in a controlled fire, it releases heat - that's energy,” I nodded. "Everything contains energy, but it's packed into the tiny bits that make it up, so tiny that you can't see them with your naked eyes. This energy is much, much greater than what's in the springapple. But, we haven't figured out how to release it safely yet. This idea, Kliss, is what that formula E=mc2 is all about."
"Release it safely... wait a heartbeat... so you can release it unsafely?" Kliss demanded.
“Verrrrry unsafely,” Delta nodded, pantomiming a mushroom cloud. “Big-bada-boom!”
"If the energy in something as small as a springapple were to be released all at once, it could cause an explosion more powerful than the largest fireball you could ever cast. Energy far greater than the breath of [Death] cast by dragonfire. Energy that imprints itself onto the world. Invisible light… called radiation. The people of my world learned how to harness it, figured out how to control it. It was a blessing that lit up our nation, chasing darkness away and a curse that hurt far too many,” I shuddered as I recalled my excursion to Semipalatinsk Polygon and the surrounding villages with Commissar Grandensky.
Kliss’ orange-tinted face paled when she saw my grim expression.
“This leather-bound journal is full of similar mathematical formulae. Keys to incredible power attained by the greatest minds from Earth through understanding and sacrifice. My people did great and terrible things with this knowledge,” I said, pointing at the formula on the book cover. “Marie Sklodowska Curie, the discoverer of radium, was a brave woman who studied the use of this power. She died at 66 from aplastic anemia which was a sickness contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation.”
“I see,” Kliss swallowed.
“I personally supervised an evacuation of 350,000 people from the city of Chernobyl and the surrounding areas,” I said. “A disaster happened there because the people in charge of a… reactor, a radiation-powered furnace there… didn’t do a very good job supervising it. A radioactive cloud spilled across half of the world and Chernobyl was contaminated by it for nine hundred years."
“By Equality! Did you…?” Kliss looked at me, her mouth sliding open in shock.
“I blew myself up along with my laboratory because I was slowly dying from radiation,” I nodded, tapping my neck. “The doctors told me that it made my lymph nodes… immortal.”
“W-what?” my dragon-apprentice sputtered.
“Cancer is a type of an affliction due to which parts of the body refuse to die,” I said. “The cells comprising them basically keep replicating on and on and on until they kill the person.”
“Welp, this conversation is getting too dark for me,” Delta muttered. “Come on, let's go shower, Miss dragon-tater.”
“Erm, alright,” Kliss murmured as my twin started to drag her towards the bathroom past where I was standing. She clung to the book I gave her with two sets of ruby claws.
“A-are you two planning to weaponize this cancer curse?” Kliss looked at Delta with a concerned expression. “Make a radiation spell or something? Build one of these… reactor furnaces? Should I be concerned for the locals?”
“Nah,” my sister rolled her eyes. “Building a safe reactor takes way too much work, we’re making technomagic devices, not merely replicating tools from Earth. Plus, many magi on Novazem have Vitality skills which make them ridiculously tough against radiation. Why, Skyisle-born children are extra resistant to the radiation spilling from the Valley of Death!”
“Should I be worried for my health?” Kliss demanded, glancing at the book in her hands.
“Pffft. The book isn’t radioactive. It just has a bit of Slava’s soul in it,” Delta laughed. “Besides, I reckon that you’re as tough as a baby dragon. Unless you go near those glowing puddles at the edge of the Valley of Death and lick them, you’ll be perrrrrfectly fine.”
“Thank Equality for small miracles,” Kliss exhaled as the bathroom door behind the girls closed.