Charles paced the length of the ship waiting for approval for the first test to start. He spun threads of power that stirred his jacket with eddies of air and sent motes of light dancing through the cabin. He had been waiting for this moment for hundreds of years, ever since he was a kid growing up with war stories from his parents. After spending years working with Spellweavers to create spells to manipulate mass and gravity and Runemages to create the control systems to precisely modify those spells they finally had a true starship. Unlike the ships used during the war, primitive affairs that were barely better than chunks of metal tossed between the planets, this was a ship that was designed to travel between stars. They had solved the problems with faster than light travel with a bubble of warped spacetime instead of clunky kinetic acceleration. The ship was constructed of the latest innovation in material science, Xethalt. This material, like all of the best advances in modern society, was a result of the combination of the Spellweavers of Elevir and the Runemages of Koltath. It was raw carbon that was compressed to be harder than diamond using a Spellweave to force chemical bonds. It also featured a rune matrix that would absorb mana and energy, this would prevent basic spells from affecting it though any moderately skilled Spellweaver could get around it with precision or layered weaves and any adapt Runemage could simply brute force through it or inject a few runes to ruin the matrix. It wasn't a material meant for military applications, it was meant to be a cheap material that could survive anything.
Charles was another result of the alliance, a Twinmage. This was mainly due to his heritage, a Spellweaver mother and a Runemage father. It was technically possible for any mixed race Xarian with both talents to become a Twinmage but generally they were of lesser talent in one or the other. The crafts were simply too dissimilar from each other as Spellweavers wove spells from threads of power, an intuitive process that differed from individual to individual so practitioners needed to find their own path while Runemages used runes that represented concepts to form patterns either physically or mentally that they then fed mana to.
The alliance they had now wasn’t always the case. When the two races first met the unstable Emperor of Elevar declared war on Koltath in an attempt to preserve his power. During the War of the Twins the Runeships were bulky and difficult to destroy while the Spellwoven craft were barely more than a metal shell with some batteries piloted by a single Spellweaver. There were few casualties as neither side truly wanted bloodshed with the other. The conflict was finally ended with a shaky truce after the Emperor fell in battle trying to save face from rumors of cowardice. After the end of the war the two planets eventually began cooperating and it was discovered that Spellweaving and Runecrafting were compatible and could make up for each other's weaknesses. After hundreds of years of advancement things such as automated machines, storing and sharing information across the Twins, and generating power from both planet's cores were suddenly possible. A part of this golden age of magic, science, and technology was the colonization program; a program approved and funded by the Alliance.
“Alright, Charles you can begin”, said Luvia. I guess no one else wants to join me while I make history. Am I the only one who thinks this is awesome? Maybe I am the only one who is good at piloting it, I guess all of those Twin War games have paid off. Or maybe I’m just bad at making simple controls. "Beginning initial acceleration test", he said as he manipulated the controls with his Spellweaving. Immediately the station in the viewscreen began to shrink into the distance as he accelerated at 100 gravities. "Sublight acceleration successful, mass reduced to 1/10th and no noticeable effect within the ship", he reported. “Excellent! I know you really wanted to test the superlight acceleration but I don’t think we have tested the solar tether enough”, said Luvia “maybe it’s better if you give us some time to test it more thoroughly”. “I think we have tested it enough. Besides it has been running planetside for a hundred years without any problem. We haven’t had any issues with it there. You are project lead though so I will defer to you”, he replied. “Alright you convinced me. I don’t think you would purposely put yourself in danger just to live out your war fantasies, go ahead”, Luxia said. With the go ahead he began spinning a new tether using the stations power and stretched one end towards Xar. Once connected it would convert energy into mana and widen itself until it could provide enough raw power to reach the edge of the solar system and return in under a minute. "Beginning tether connection to Xar... Successful... Beginning full power acceleration", he said. As his speed approached and then surpassed the speed of light he grinned. It faded when suddenly the power tether surged and the speed indicator spiked. What’s happening? Charles thought, even a solar flare should be evened out by that power core we oversized it on purpose. Before he could react suddenly the runes controlling the Gravity Drive burned out and the spellweave went out of control. Charles tried to manually wrestle the weave to decelerate and managed after a few seconds to bring the ship to subluminal speed before he lost the weave completely. He cursed when the viewport showed a yellow sun instead of the familiar green of his home system. What the hell happened?! I need to find a place to land the ship before I drift off into space. He initiated a scan of the nearby planets and found one with an oxygen rich atmosphere and a rocky surface. Setting the autopilot to aim towards the planet he activated the inertial dampeners before the backup kinetic drive could paste him into the wall. The autopilot is going to have to do some aerobraking along with the kinetic drive to bleed off so much speed. Otherwise I’ll drift forever or slam into something so hard the Xethalt won’t survive much less me.
The planet grew closer in the viewscreen and he tried to remind himself of all the safety features he himself had designed for circumstances like these. It didn't comfort him when he remembered that he had designed the Gravity Drive too. The ship made minute adjustments in order to enter orbit and bleed off momentum in the upper atmosphere. It began a landing pass that would take it near a range of mountains. The ship landed in a forest of strange green trees and dug a huge swath before coming to a stop. A warning appeared on one of the viewscreens and Charles released the crash landing spellweave. An attack? Right after landing? Did someone try to stop my ship? It looks like the magic isn’t one that is known by the scanners. At least it’s not getting past the protection matrix. He linked with the ship’s control system to get a full view of his surroundings and prepared a few weaves he was glad his mother wasn’t here to see. He wasn’t sure what to make of the view around him. The magic is relatively weak but looks like it goes on for miles. Some kind of natural phenomenon? It looks the magic is shaped in some kind of half formed rune that’s repeated thousands of times. He watched as one of the halfrunes formed, activated, and formed more runes with the ambient mana. It’s almost like a fire! Someone spread mana through the air and cast this repeating spell in order to... well it doesn’t seem to be doing anything so let’s see if it’s having any effect. It appeared to be some kind of healing or growth spell based on the way it suddenly gathered around some of the trees he had crashed through and they started rapidly repairing and growing taller than the surrounding trees. Maybe this is a nature preserve? Though the cost would be staggering in raw power. Satisfied that he wasn’t in any immediate danger he registered the current pattern as a natural phenomenon for now. Okay, now what burned out or unravelled thanks to that power surge? He wove a few threads into the controls and brought up the ship’s status.
Life Support
* Oxygen - Functional
* Water - Functional
* Food - Functional
Power
* Core - 56%
* Tether - Missing components (Weave)
* Regulator - Missing components (All)
Movement
* Gravity Drive - Missing components (All)
* Backup Kinetic Drive - Functional
Combat
* None
Armor
* Structural Integrity - 100%
* Protection Matrix - Functional (Draining power from Natural Phenomenon)
Utility
* Scanners - Functioning
* Control Matrix - Functioning
* Fabricator - Functioning
So no real power source, no drive, and no idea where I am. With everything else working I can at least attempt to rebuild it all. The Xethalt hull seems effective at keeping my ship charged. It’s interesting that my power core is over halfway charged even with the massive power draw the Gravity Drive would have had. Charles pulled up his list of schematics from the ship
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* Fabricator
* Life Support Suite
* Power Core
* Communication Array
* Xethalt (material)
* Tether
* Gravity Drive
* Constructor Drone
* Staff
* Environment Suit
* Combat Drone (incomplete)
* War Staff (incomplete)
* Combat Suit (incomplete)
* War Era Runeship
* Test Runeweave concept (incomplete)
It’s a good thing I kept some personal projects stored on here but it’s a bit embarrassing I put my war reenactment and military designs on here. It’s not like there has been armed conflict for the last 500 years... Hmm... I still feel like I was so close with that runeweave idea, maybe when I’m not dying. Charles decided he could solve some of his power issues with more surface area to draw power from the weird spell. He built a constructor Drone and tasked it with building a small Xethalt building to surround the ship and give him a place to start building a lab. He also built a Staff and Environment Suit so he wouldn’t be completely helpless if it did come to armed combat. The staff was a general aid for all magically inclined Xarians. The user could use a variety of predefined functions, write their own quick rune patterns on it if they had the talent, allow Spellweavers to weave through them giving them greater control, and power everything through a nearby power core. The Environment Suit was simple protection from heat, cold, acid, kinetic hazards, simple spells, and atmosphere. With enough gear to survive anything but someone truly powerful attacking him, or a big rock falling on his head he admitted, he stepped outside to supervise the constructor Drone. The white spherical machine could only really float, do some simple disassembly, and build Xethalt out of raw carbon. It’s a good thing I don’t have to make Xethalt myself. I have never been as good as father at remembering every rune matrix I have ever seen. I have always preferred the new way of building runes than the old manual way. Besides compressing carbon and weaving the same rune pattern countless times is just tedious. Charles left the Constructor Drone to it’s task of turning trees into walls and decided to have a quick flight to look around.
With this much ambient power he could draw from he wouldn’t even need to draw from the power core too heavily. He breached the canopy and got his first look at the world he had landed on. The forest is only a few square kilometers and looks like it’s writhing. The weird growth spell covers the whole thing though it looks like there are some periodic gaps in it where there is just pure, wild mana. Wait... what is that?! There seemed to be a tendril of pure mana near the center of the forest that dwarfed anything he had ever seen before. It appeared to be clear of the halfrunes and to be surrounded by some indistinct buildings. Charles got closer and the buildings turned out to be more like ruins. Interesting, whoever they were they had basic stone buildings but no permanent workings besides the growth spell. The weathering on the exposed stone indicates it’s hardly been out for anytime at all, maybe a few decades. I better stay clear of whatever that mana tendril is until I can make sure it’s safe. Let’s see the area outside of the spells range, it looked like a desert. Beyond the forest was a chaotic landscape of lakes, sand, and what looked like cooling lava flows. Life was still there with many thick green plants that were radiating mana and surrounded by normal soil as they pulled water out of the lakes and consumed it. Lizards dug tunnels in the lava and breathed fire onto places that were already too cool to be shaped. Insects seemed to be flying without wings and punching through the waterspout to get to the plants. A warzone? That would explain why the city was abandoned but the local Flora and Fauna seems already adapted to it. Maybe they caused the landscape to look like this. Their primal magic seems a lot stronger comparatively than what we had on Koltath or Elevir. The lizards who could use heat on Elevir could only harden mud with their magic while these can melt rock. I don't think they aren’t strong enough to cause all of this though. I’ll try to find out later, better check on the Constructor and see if it’s done yet.
The Constructor had finished the floor and the walls and was busy converting nearby trees into basic carbon for further projects. It seemed like it was struggling to cut through the trees but as it was made of Xethalt it would passively prevent the growth spell from healing the trees it was trying to process. A couple of the trees were trying to grab onto it and would have if they lost their strength the second they touched it. Even these plants seem almost sentient. Actively attacking anything that harms them and using simple magic to grow and move. If their magic wasn’t drained on touching the drone they might actually be able to trap it. Charles went into the ship and built a couple more Constructor drones and gave them the instructions to build a much larger foundation and walls. He piloted the ship into the existing building and integrated it with the foundation. This world seems a lot more harsh than either of the Twins. Maybe I should go ahead and finish those designs for combat gear. I would need to build the behaviour logic for the Combat Drones and that might take too long.
Charles brought up the War Staff schematic and looked over his recent changes. He had started by adjusting the upper limit of the staff to boost spells but ran into some problems with the runes burning out with too much power draw. Historically the only things you could do with too much power draw through runes was to either put in a regulator matrix before to lower the power or make the runes bigger and therefore able to channel more power. His father, however, had been working on new metarunes that could do more than turn other runes on and off. They were designed to reinforce nearby runes and to lower the inherent magical resistance to prevent mana burnout. Charles had added the new metarunes to his compiler but hadn’t set the parameters for their use. Rune compilers were processes that Runemages used that take their abstract designs and process them into a simplified rune matrix that would accomplish what they wanted. This wasn’t the first time someone had discovered something that would solve a technical limitation and the practical Runemages had built a tool that would allow someone to easily change the way they handled something, for instance power overload mitigation, without changing the design overly much. Charles ran an efficiency test through the onboard testing suite and saw not only an increased power cap from the rune but also an increased efficiency of 50%. This is amazing! With this much more efficiency and power I can more than double the previous staff’s max output without draining the power core too much. Father will probably be made a Grand Patent holder again or maybe even Highest Inventor for this. I know he has been losing standing since he has been focusing on raising me but this will make up for it. Now that power wasn’t going to be a problem he focused on combat capability. He hollowed out the center of the staff and made a smaller version of the gravity drive there. Now the only thing I need to work on is ammo. I'll put something to print runes on any solid I put into it to make it a durable projectile and anything that gets sent through the barrel will be accelerated insanely fast by planetary standards. Maybe later I can get some proper aiming processes to help with long range shots but for now if I turn on the drive anything I point this at should be destroyed. He also added a few rune patterns for creating sonic blasts, plasma spheres, high spectrum light bursts, and some non-lethal alternatives like a time stasis bubble, electric shock, and a setting to propel things away with the gravity drive without outright killing them. Well now I can hopefully deal with anything that attacks me if I see it first. Time to finish the Combat Suit. The combat suit was focused more on defense and utility than the War Staff. It was essentially the environment suit but instead of the thin flexible material that relied on the relatively weak runes to protect the user this design used plates of Xethalt with more robust runes. It was designed to allow the user to change their mass at will, increase their strength to deal with the mass on planets, repulse any fast moving objects that were coming towards him, and he had added the constructor components so he could build and destroy things on the fly. He also decided to add a data connection to the ship in addition to power so he could eventually take advantage of the Combat drones as well as keep track of construction away from the ship. He also wanted to be able to record data and possibly start a translation profile if he ended up meeting any sentients. I should really try to figure out what that weird mana tendril is. I'll modify a Constructor to send a visual feed back to me and send it for a closer look. Maybe I'll also look for some written text to catalog so I won't have to start completely from scratch. If any locals don't decide to attack the shiny white guy on sight because I look like some demon from their religion. That was part of the original friction between the Twins, the Koltathian’s purple skin reminded the Elevarians of the mythical Sendaru. He shuddered thinking about when his mother would scare him when he was bad with tales of the Sendaru coming to take his feet. Getting his head out of the stars he had the Fabricator build his new staff and suit. He commanded one of the Constructors to follow him and took off. On his way he decided to try out his new staff on the local trees. He funnelled air through the bottom of his staff and pointed it at a few trees. The trees in front of him were blown over and snapped in the wind leaving a relatively clear patch of area in front of him. Well I guess the air doesn't stay compressed enough to slice through the trees in a beam like I thought it would. Let’s try adding a spellweave around the air so it doesn't dissipate so quickly. Charles created a spellweave that would bind to the air and keep it as compressed as it could. He wove that onto the stream of air before it passed through the barrel and was pleased when a straight line of air cleanly cut through the tops of a few hundred meters of trees. When he reached the ruins Charles modified the drone's vision matrix with a little addition that would copy it's visual feed to his suit. He commanded the drone to go through the anomaly and then return to him if it was able. Theoretically the drone should be fine but it's hard to tell what is going on inside of that thing. It should make the mana flow around it without burning out the runes. As the drone pierced the wall of mana it was buffeted by raw chaotic mana. Suddenly Charles’s vision went white.