xenoscience

King Zarik IV, Lord of All Demons, Emperor of Cunning, stared down at the report his spymaster had handed him, reading it over once more to make sure he apprehended every detail correctly.

“The king of demons shall return, and attempt to sacrifice the princess of elves to return to his full power. In her moment of need, a hero with a blade that shines as the sun will appear, to slay the demon king and take her hand in marriage. And you are certain these are the exact words of the prophecy?”

“Quite certain, my Lord. I visited the scrying pool personally as soon as my Watchers informed me.”

“And these elven sages, the Order of the Crystal Tower? Their prophecies are inevitable, once spoken?”

“To the best of the elves’ knowledge, yes, they are, my Lord. I have examined what records I was able to acquire, and every prophecy they have issued for the past three thousand years appears to have been fulfilled precisely to the letter.”

King Zarik ran a weary hand through his gray hair, and sighed deeply. “I’ve had enough trouble reining in the expansionist faction as things stand, and now this. I have infrastructure to oversee, trade deals to broker, a kingdom to administer. I have no need for the ancient power of my forebears, and no time for personally carrying out assassination attempts against elven royalty on the far end of the continent, let alone dying in the process.”

“Indeed, my Lord.”

“And yet, I am seemingly bound by fate itself to do exactly that. There must be –”

~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~

~~~~~
click

“Seraph.”

“Uh, hello, I – listen, Seraph, do you have a secure line we could use?”

“This is a secure line.”

“No, I mean like, a scrambled one? I have a box, I just need –”

“No.”

“… You don’t – then how are we supposed to – listen, this is sensitive, Orca always uses a scrambled line for –”

“And Orca is now unavailable, which is why you are contacting me. How long have you been operating in Sanctfell?”

“Uh, about a year now, but –”

“If you want to last five years here, you will listen to me. You do not use a scrambler in Sanctfell. It is not conducive to your freedom or your survival.”

“But I thought the phones here are –”

“The telephones are of course tapped, but there is almost nothing you can say that is more suspicious than refusal to be overheard. Your words can all be made to disappear – for the right price, which is included in my consulting fee, paid to the right people, who know me well. Your concealment, however, will eventually raise alarms that cannot be so easily dismissed, and the Commission do not need to know what you have said. They know where you live.”

“So I’m just supposed to tell you everything when I know they’re listening?”

“Are you plotting the assassination of the High Magistrate?”

“… What? No!”

“Are you, perhaps, planting bombs to destroy the Third Clocktower?”

“No!”

“Have you abducted the Ursine Ambassador’s child for ransom?”

Sundial stared out at the Arctos skyline through the large window of Silk’s new 18th-story office, and wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing with her life. She was great at dealing with the sorts of problems she could infiltrate, exfiltrate, and purloin her way out of, but that didn’t seem to be a useful approach here. If a girl buys you tickets on an intercontinental flight and has you move in together, does that mean she likes you? Or were they just fleeing the country as friends?

Her thoughts were interrupted when the front door was kicked in with a loud BANG, and a tall muscular woman with a face mask and a pistol stormed into the room.

“Hands where I can see ’em! Sundial Votive, the Reliquary would like a word with you. Now come along quietly, or –”

As Sundial turned startled to face the door and raised her hands slowly, she heard a faint sound from the window behind her, and felt the blade of a knife held against her throat.

“Sundial Votive, my employer sends their re—” The quiet voice in her ear stopped abruptly. “Anchor?”

“Tulip, what the hell are you –”

The two intruders stared at each other.

“Anchor, you said this was going to be a nice little vacation, no work stuff!”

Anchor stared pointedly down at the knife in Tulip’s hand.

“… Okay, yes, point taken, but look, the money on this contract was way too good to just pass up!”

Silk stared down at the wooden case on her desk, and at the object inside, whirring to itself and glowing softly. She stared back up at the thief, Sundial, sitting across from her, face nervous and expectant. She stared back down at the case.

She’d seen plenty of well-constructed fakes over the years, but this … no, there was no mistaking it. The longer she looked, the more the whirring seemed to resolve into whispered words on the edge of hearing, and the harder the clearly-unnatural sense of joyful wonder tried to shove its way in from the back of her mind. She lowered the lid of the case, closing it slowly with a fearful caution stronger than her sense of urgency.

Silk and Sundial stared at each other for a long silence. Finally, Silk spoke. “What. In God’s name. Have you done.”

“I – I brought it, just like you asked for? Oh, don’t worry about the box, the wood’s at least a thousand years old so it should hold fine for a week or two –”

“This isn’t about the damned box, you idiot! I know what the fuck you did, but why? Why would you actually go and steal the real thing, are you out of your mind?!”

“Y-you didn’t… want the real thing?” Sundial asked, shriveling under Silk’s glare.

“Of course I didn’t want the real thing! My clients don’t want the real thing, nobody wants the real thing! What they want is the mystique, the idea that just maybe it might be, so they can keep it in a fancy little box, maybe in a special room in their cellar, go down and look at it every now and then, feel that little thrill of terror and wonder, and then go upstairs and go to sleep and wake up alive the next morning! And they know me, they know I work with the best, they know I got whatever I’m selling from an expert thief, they don’t ask questions about where the thief got it from, and neither do I! But you, you, …”

When you’re lying in a hospital bed, you have a lot of time to reflect on your mistakes. Or on other people’s mistakes. In my case, I was reflecting on the mistakes of the dipshit design engineer at Red Planet Mechtronics who decided it was a good idea to put a high-current flash capacitor right next to one of the screws holding the main laser amplifier assembly in place inside the RPM 3730-LL’s arm module.

As we all know, one of the best parts of going out on a sortie is getting to “salvage” interesting components from downed enemy mechs after the fight. And from downed allied mechs. And from still-functioning allied mechs while the pilots take smoke breaks. “Oh, you’re missing your multifrequency blade antenna? Damn, must’ve gotten knocked off during the fight.” It’s surprisingly easy to pull off, as long as we’re not teamed up with the same squad for too many joint missions in a row.

Thing is, disassembling a mech can be difficult and even dangerous if you don’t know your way around its insides, especially if you’re rushing to finish up before the pilot gets back from the bathroom. I’ve memorized the schematics for a lot of the more common models out there, and I usually have a pretty good intuition for how mechs are put together regardless. But it’s precisely the rare discontinued niche models that are the most exciting to dig into, and that give me the most interesting hauls – assuming, that is, that I don’t get electrocuted because some schmuck couldn’t be bothered to add warning labels to the silkscreen. Not again, I decided. From now on, I was going to bring my complete collection of schematics and service manuals with me on every mission.

Professor Tarkovsky stared down at his desk, head in hands, and sighed. “So, let me make sure I have this right,” he said wearily, looking up at the two students seated across from him. “The two of you met in Miss Surn’s dormitory room for a study session.”

“Yeah,” said Susan.

Lilias nodded.

“At half past midnight?”

“Yup.”

“Exams soon.”

“Okay, 1, please knock next time. 2, this is not the reason I’m in Temporal, it’s just, like, a perk? And 3, this isn’t –”

“Look, it’s fine, Dev, you do y…yyour own thing, I’ll absolutely remember to knock –”

“No, listen, this isn’t some sort of smug intellectual nobody-else-is-my-equal whatever garbage. Look, I know sometimes I can get a little up my ow— sometimes I can get a little stuck up about grades and projects and stuff, but I’m trying to be better about that, and that’s not what this is about! Like, I spent 5 years thinking I was just asexual, and honestly, not sure this doesn’t still count? I’ve never felt sexually attracted to anyone else, but a few months ago I was hanging out by myself, felt like experimenting a little, and I ended up really liking it. So it just became something I do now and then, but like, it’s not an ego trip thing, okay?”

“Okay, yeah. I, uh, I get what you’re saying, sorry if I like, hit a nerve or…”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. Just, I’ve already spent a bunch of time beating mys— having internal negative self-talk about, do I just think I’m better than everyone, are other people just not good enough for the amazing Dev Malim or what. And I’ve mostly gotten past that by now, but I just really don’t want anyone else thinking that about me. Y’know?”

“That makes sense, yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Thanks. That’s all I wanted to say. Anyway, this is already an awkward conversation, it’s gonna be even more awkward to listen to again from under my blankets in half an hour, so uh, talk more later, okay?”

Aletheia University Dungeoneering Practicum

Party No. 17

• Lilias Calbach, College of Elemental Magick
• Dev Malim, College of Temporal Magick
• Susan Surn, College of Martial Magick
• Suffer Wayte-Archer IV, College of Medical Magick

Proctor’s Notes

Party “completed” the Master-Level Dungeon in 9 hours 43 minutes, the shortest time so far on record. Several of the walls will need to be rebuilt, and I will need to check the Library Archives to look up the exact text of the Riddle Scrolls in order to recopy them from scratch. Party complained that the Master-Level Dungeon was insufficiently confusing, violent, life-threatening, and flammable, and asked if I had anything “harder” available, despite my explanations that they had already received the highest possible score on the Practicum. Faced with their repeated insistent demands, I finally directed them to the Sealed Dungeon, designed and constructed by Horus Obliq the Pale shortly before the revocation of his tenure 30 years ago. As no staff member sent in to dismantle the Sealed Dungeon had ever been heard from again, I judged it to be a thoroughly suitable challenge for this group of students.

Due to the powerful barrier surrounding the Sealed Dungeon, I was unable to use the Scrying Beacons worn by the party to monitor their progress in real time, but the beacons provided a full transcript of their explorations upon their return three days later, which I have included below.

[…]

SURN: “Hang on, what’s this purple shit?”
[A purple fog fills the chamber.]
[Calbach snaps her fingers, producing a small flame.]
CALBACH: “Not flammable.”
[Calbach continues staring at the flame.]
MALIM: “I’m feeling itchy.”
SURN: “Yeah, me too.”
[Wayte-Archer examines the party’s faces and arms.]
WAYTE-ARCHER: “Hmmm, the coloration of these lesions, and this pattern of the edges… Wait, it couldn’t be… This is Langleigh’s Flesh-Eating Pox! It was supposed to have been eradicated 25 years ago! And an airborne variant is completely unheard-of, this is incredible!”
[Wayte-Archer begins excitedly pulling out vials from their satchel, collecting samples of the fog and cultures from the lesions on their own arms.]

To Chancellor Alastric Emmannulas Noens pel Colophon the Grey, XVIIth Gryphonhorn Magus, Th.M. M.Ex. O.S. Esq.

Chancellor,

It has been some time since we last had the chance to speak. I hope that you are well, and that next week’s unseasonably cold weather will not trouble you overmuch.

With the selection committee for this year’s Clarinet Lochrian Award for Thaumaturgical Ingenuity convening soon, I would like to nominate one of my students in the College of Temporal Magick, Dev Malim. Dev has consistently demonstrated an aptitude for devising creative solutions to challenging temporal problems, using finely-honed instincts to supplement his skill at complex divinations. However, it is his performance in the recent mid-semester tournament of my Paracausal Tactics course, in particular, which compels me to make this nomination.

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching Paracausal Tactics is the opportunity to work with students from the College of Martial Magick, and observe their exchange of ideas with my Temporal students. These sorts of interdisciplinary courses are where Aletheia’s students shine brightest, and it is always fascinating to see Martial students’ approaches to the field of Temporal Magick.

In this year’s course, one Susan Surn has particularly stood out among the Martial attendees. Senior Professor Blatchley has spoken quite highly of Susan at intercollegiate luncheons, and her performance in Paracausal Tactics has indeed been astonishing. While I must admit that I am unsure how much I can teach Susan from a thaumaturgical standpoint, she has aptly followed my lessons on the nature of Time and its role in combat, and her fighting instincts are truly impressive. Moreover, her presence has been highly instructive for my Temporal students. She has provided many of them with object lessons in the limitations of mere foreknowledge, and has inspired some to far greater heights of tactical creativity.