(Two weeks earlier)
"You had assured that this would work!" Remus's face was flushed scarlet. Celine meowed in protest. Norman's cat hated loud people. It had never been a problem until they invited in Remus.
"You need to calm down. There is always some uncertainty involved when you are navigating unexplored frontiers." Kiri pleaded, stroking Celine's glossy black fur. She moaned some more and then settled into her lap. She may have technically been Norman's cat; she had taken a special liking to Kiri.
While Remus paced nervously, Kiri and Norman were casually sitting on couches in a loft in the academy. Like most of the academy, this room was spacious, minimally decorated and comfortable. The walls, painted in a soothing shade of cream, stretch up towards the ceiling, creating an expansive and inviting atmosphere. They had met here multiple times over the course of last month, and tensions had escalated with each meeting.
"We could not have foreseen that the tome was incomplete." The tablet in front of them projected annotated stacks of several pages restored from an old Yaskin treatise.
Over the last few centuries, the Irvanian Empire had discovered millions of wormholes littered across the galaxies the empire was spread over. Using these wormholes was trivial - any spacecraft that passed through found themselves in a different part of the universe, sometimes many light years away. However, the knowledge of how to construct these wormholes had remained out of their reach.
Not only did the Irvanian academic elite have no idea how to construct similar wormholes, they also had no knowledge of who had constructed the ones that existed. The leading theory hypothesized that the long-ascended Yaskh civilization were the original pioneers, but that theory too had many holes. Most of the technological advancements of Yaskh happened around the war of Herostus, whereas the old relics indicated that the wormholes had existed centuries before that.
A lot of deep space commerce heavily relied on wormholes to reduce journeys that would otherwise take multiple years to mere seconds. If anyone in the present-day world cracked the ability to construct wormholes, they would be richer beyond their wildest dreams.
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In the long term, Norman's ambition was to decipher the ancient knowledge of wormhole fabrication. However, that was too grand a goal and too far removed from his current skill set. His objective for now was to uncover some of the unknowns that would hopefully help them better understand and re-engineer Yaskh technologies. Being able to incorporate alien technologies into present-day industry was a well-trodden path to getting better sponsorships for dissertations.
Their biggest point of contention was what the translator translated as "Nightwyrms". Despite having spent two whole years exploring Yaskh artifacts and relics, Norman had no idea whether these were some sort of creature that the Yaskh harvested, some alien species they collaborated with or just a name for a group of their individuals. The tome in front of them, which Remus had paid an exorbitant sum to acquire, was the first of its kind that seemed to have contained an elaborate treatment of the topic. The two other students had bet the success of their dissertations on Norman being able to extract valuable insights from this ancient text.
But after two months of exhaustive research, Norman was now sure that parts of the tome had been selectively removed. What was even more baffling was that the text seemed to differ in its treatment of the Nightwyrms in different parts of the same work. It could partly be attributed to poor translation, but Norman was increasingly suspicious that the conflation was actually intended.
"How can the same name be used for a race, a material and a single individual?" That was the question Norman had asked himself again and again over the last few sleepless nights. And somehow these nightwyrms were intricately linked to wormholes.
"We may not have an answer for that question, but we have something else. Something unprecedented." In the fiercely competitive culture of the Illustrious Academy, an annual dissertation comprising novel, ground-breaking research was the only thing that would enable them to move forward to their next class. The extremely grueling ten-year course, which had a selection rate of 0.003% in all known universe, was the single trajectory in the Irvanian empire to become a master artificer. And achieving that was the dream that Norman got out of bed for every single day.
"What?" Remus sat down; finally, a glimmer of hope emerged in his eyes.
"There is a reference to a planet. Which nobody has been able to pinpoint."
"Norman, do you understand that there is almost zero chance of us finding some obscure planet that professional exploration guilds have not been able to locate?" Kiri was justifiably not too excited about this prospect.
"Yes, but here is the thing. The last expedition that attempted to explore this was three hundred years ago. They tried to map these routes through these four wormholes." Norman tapped through his tablet, and a holographic projection emerged showing a star chart illustrating four complex trajectories side by side. "However, just fifty years ago, a new anomalous curvature was detected in the deep space fabric which is believed to have originated at least a million years ago. The Yaskh text predates that." Celine pawed through the illusionary planet but was disappointed when it hit nothing.
Remus frowned, "So if we offset the curvature, we might be able to locate the wormhole referenced in this text somewhere in the sector fifty-nine. And if we traverse through this unknown wormhole, we should be able to discover this forgotten planet."
And, to their surprise, delight and misfortune, they had.