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In which [redacted] does an urban fantasy awakening.
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This consumes a fair chunk of mana. Not huge, but noticeable.

AlchemyComponent01

AlchemyComponent02

AlchemyComponent03...

And far down the list:

Mouse

Squirrel

Unknown

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...huh.

She hadn't been expecting that to work quite so...  Thusly, though it's not like she's complaining.

...The hell is Unknown?

$ tracert Unknown

, she invokes, adding a twist of visual let-there-be-light to point along the path.

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Unknown is outside and slightly up!

Unknown has terminated the connection.

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Buddy.  Pal.  You responded to the ping, ya dumbass.  Nice try.  You're not shaking her when you're actively interfacing with her.  Sending 'drop-me' packets?  Interfacing.

She texts Wren.

Okay so

Spooky divination result close by RN

'Unknown' in entity list

Investigating

[Alex sent you her location!]

She scribbles a horrible thing onto a Post-It, intaking air and outputting triplex-bonded water by means of two conversions through Van Berlo's Wheel.  It'll probably fuck something up.  Hopefully it will even fuck up the enemy.

She stands up.

(...she is one with the Force and the Force is with her; she is one with the Force and the Force is with her; she is one with the Force and the Force is with her...)

She approaches the mystery entity's location, apprehensively, scanning the area.  She remembers to look up.

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The Unknown is long gone.

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What kind of unknown?

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An Unknown unknown!  ...Also one that has apparently run off.  Which is both kind of a relief, and really annoying, because I don't know what it is.

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I'm confused

What kind of divination makes a list?

Do you need me to come over?

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One that runs a Linux local-network device enumerator from a router in the noösphere, apparently.  I wasn't even trying to find that; I was just trying to figure out if I'd left something lying around by accident when it slipped from my metaphorically-real clutches.

...I don't...  Think I need backup, right now, anymore, if I even did?  No, like, danger-sensey things, are doing any sensing of immediate danger.  But...  What the fuck could whatever-this-is have even been?

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Maybe a scavenger or a familiar? Or a hiveling?

Not enough information at all tbh.

My gut says that if it was just a weird animal most divinations would go 'Squirrel???' instead of 'Unknown', but maybe computers are fussy about precision?

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Computers are in fact notable for doing exactly what you tell them to do.

It was able to send (something the interpretive layer parsed as) a drop-me packet, which...  IDK if that's evidence for or against any of those things.

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I don't think you made an actual computer

You're just using it as a metaphor

I've seen it before

I could maybe rush over and try to pick out its scent but

That probably wouldn't work

And I kinda had plans?

And don't want to actively sniff after trouble too much

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No yeah it's fine.  It should be fine.  Don't, like, upend your day 'cause I saw something funny.  But I really do need to go find the damn LARP club.

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Well good cause my plans are awesome

I've got a date~

Not a romantic date obviously but the other kind of date

The kind where we flirt and drink booze

It's going to be fun

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Have fun!  o7

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This...  Thisness, has really driven home how badly she'd fall to pieces in an actual zombie apocalypse.

She scribbles over the bodgey mess of alchemy that she had laughingly thought might be useful in combat.  It really quite probably wouldn't be, in the light of day.

She emails Sebastian deGaulle.  (Not on the same reply chain as the silver prism commission conversation.)

M. deGaulle,

...It has recently occurred to me that I have no idea how a mage should prepare themself for the inevitable moment in which they must act in self-defense or defense of others.

I expect you've some experience in the subject, and that if you do not, you would likely know a great many people who do.  That, and you're the only other mage I know I've met, so far.

I expect that a foundation of physical fitness and martial arts does anyone good, but the possibilities magic presents are vast enough that I do not expect I can truly encompass the relevant concerns with creativity alone.

I don't suppose that I might therefore ask of you if there are specific things one ought to keep in mind, whether in developing or utilizing spells for such purposes, or in preparing to face such things used against oneself?

-- Alex Marche

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With that settled, she realizes that... she has completely lost track of what she was doing, and needs to go get some more food.  (All-you-can-eat dining hall for the win.  Even if the normal schedule fucks over night owls.)

She doesn't happen to see anything that'll help her with this whole 'surviving fights she may or may not end up getting into' business on the bulletin boards, does she?

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The campus bulletin boards are pretty as-usual. Mexican Day at the dining hall. Study calls arranged by enterprising students. Someone wanting to sell a guitar. Board game group. Tennis group. A PSA to get more sleep. A movie night. Belegarth, which fights with foam swords and shields and considers itself not larp. (They fight, they don't roleplay.) Office hours for various people. Bus schedule. A reminder that quiet hours will be different during finals week.

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She'll take one Belegarth, please.

By which she means 'add them to her schedule and hope she can just kind of show up without providing advance notice'.

Boffer fights are probably not the best training ever, but she has to start somewhere.

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...Speaking of training fights, though, she should really make some sort of actual weapon.

And lightsabers are really cool.

So maybe if she just...

 

Alright, this is going to be by far the most thaumaturgically complex problem she's ever dealt with.  First off, she needs to make quintessence.  It's the only material in the O-M catalogue that she can convince herself is a good representative of magic-itself.  And that's simple enough, really...

But what's complex is when she needs to build her ritual sigils out of it - at the very least, she needs to build a sort of floating I/O anchor, to turn the chains of triplex-bound air around at the tip of the blade.

...She may actually need to build the tip of the blade out of magic; as it is, she's not sure it would thrust properly.

Anyway.

First step: a reservoir, to store the quintessence that she will make the blade out of.

She can, at least, sort of reuse the framework for the silver crystal that she has already worked out...

Silver, gold, or platinum...

...Actually, no, the first question is how she should create the input/output nodes.

She has some ideas, at least - and it oughtn't be extremely difficult to create what she needs, though it will stretch her skills to their limit.

...It's a very artistic design, what she comes up with.  It intakes, in a roughly atmospheric ratio, many 'air-2' (Things That Aren't Oxygenated-2), a 'fire-2' (O2), 'water-3' (H2O, represented with a pair of triplex bonds), and fire-earth-fire (CO2), as well as 'lead' (an 'ingot' of pencil lead).  It outputs a version of her circle-spiral/hex-triangle sigil, the 'circle' (diagrammatically, a truncated hexagon of r=5), and triangles, made of quintessence and accented at their meeting with gold (to anchor unto other parts), while she renders implicit the hexagon by the triplex bonds that ring the center-point in fire, and crafts the two spirals - one that elevates the raw material into 'alchemical reification-space', and one that draws those raw materials out - of the four elements and 'vitae', and salt and 'mors'; the first plunging to the center's quintessence molecule, the second folding out within the outer rings.  (These, too, are bound with triplex bonds, for their 'nature' as energy-conductive.)

The way she fudges the structural bonds shall not be elaborated upon here, being as it is quite messy - but she does, in fact, believe that were she to assemble the bond structure from magnetized rods, orbs upon which to anchor them, and perhaps a bit of liberty taken with certain parts, that she could well draw them into a properly circular shape.

 

...With that settled, it is now time for her to contemplate how to actually lay out a lightsaber.

This may well end up being hell, if she's honest with herself.  She still doesn't have normal ways to etch alchemy-space into metals.  Though, now that she's thinking about it...

She could just put the alchemy-space into an alchemy-space.  Well, not exactly 'an alchemy-space', so much as 'the space in which alchemy-"space" itself is reified' - but all she needs to do is transfer the diagram's mana-structure into an I/O point, because those already abstract size/structure.

...Yeah.  She can work with this.  It's basically what she already does, when she flips things across planes or into different tilesets or through chemistry/alchemy transitions.

And producing one sigil is much less difficult than producing many sigils.

She can make this work.  This will work.

Now she just has to do some nice holographic rendering.  She can do that, right?

...This may take a minute.

Okay, seriously though, how is she going to do this...

Well.  Quintessence covereth a multitude of magical use-cases.  So if she just...  Uses quintessence-formed wireframes!  Ha!  ...She'll come back to that later.  It still has a reservoir problem.  And a structural issue, in that she doesn't have a Turing machine lying around to execute arbitrary data files or anything.  Yet.

Anyway.  She should, perhaps, make an actual magic tool.  (She wants her sonic screwdriver.)

Though the question there is 'how', once again.

Vitae, again, would elevate...  Connected to quintessence to channel and transmit -

Silver for the body, again.  And then what, though, is the question...  Or rather, she needs to get the form factor right, is the important thing.

So she has .9mm lead, and she has crystals of salt that are also totally that sort of size, she's not going to observe too closely -

- Actually, hm, she'll reuse the earlier shape she drafted, if she's going to do this in one diagram.  The lead's really a bit bigger than anything but those big honking cubes of salt that you get in pretzels, and those are bigger than the lead.

...Though, on the other hand...

...Yeah, no, she's going to create the Vitae in a different chamber.  The lead stays minimized.

Alright.  With that settled, and the salt refinery set up, she can bond the Vitae together to upsize it.  Plonk a Van Berlo's Wheel into another chamber to make Quintessence from the salt too - good grief, this is going to be a mess in terms of consumption - and she already has a lead-to-silver tower -

Anyway.  Write down a perpetual salt refinery, for fodder for the temporary projections, it'll be useful later -

The pattern for that should probably be bound by reactive air, to transmit the impulse; that means she needs to actually construct the relevant shape out of fire first and transmute it after -

Three hexes, empty centers - they'll get filled later -

Okay, she does actually need to tip the connection from the reservoirs with an emitter, fire that diagram up, hold its output -

- start assembling the casing -

input on a 'tell the device to do things' level comes from the Vitae-Quintessence -

- oh hmm if she just makes it a r=three series of hexes she should be able to bond the edges together at a semi-arbitrary angle -

- how do you tile 3D space properly, anyway, is it just only cubes or - well, apparently there's quite a few options but truncated octahedra have hexagonal faces -

- actually, no, she'll just do prisms, at least while she's constructing the bits that ought to be of equivalent vertical alignments -

- she might have to plan outside-in on this one, actually -

- anyway, how is she going to do this...

The inner core should be conductive.  Which means that the center should definitely be quintessence.  But what goes around the core - that is not yet properly defined.

Maybe, actually, if she tiled ports vertically...

...Yeah, that'll make producing a signal that actually carries far enough, easier.  And then she can always apply waldoes.

Or...  Actually maybe she should do the truncated-octahedron thing.  Because if she lines up the core vertically, she could adhere ports edgewise.

Yeah.  Yeah, she could do that.  And then...

That might mean she needs a layer of wind?  Or, no.  Quintessence again.  Or...

Hm, maybe gold wire, actually.  Yeah.  Consider these magic-particles she intends to produce to be electricity-'shaped' for carrier purposes, and promote them to a collimated beam at the release point.  Quintessence around Vitae, then bind to the wire tips as a face?  That seems like it ought to do.

(There's really quite a lot of paper laid out for this by now.  She's not sure she has enough.)

Anyway.  Cue music, because at this point she may well need to hang in there and pray for the assembly to work right.  Wire up the edge bindings for the thingamajig - she's going vertical now.  Do...  More of that.  For other things.  ...How is she even going to do that...

Realize that the whole 'central core of quintessence' thing was a stupid decision; promptly swap it for a gold wire and put the quintessence around that central point so it's adjacent to the diagrams that are now on the faces of the central gold wire.

Put in another intermediate step or three, with much frustration, to assemble a net for the 3D shape.  It's just squares and hexagons, and it'll make the embiggening easier.  But it's still annoying.

...She may need to get some pipe cleaners or something, the proper visualization of the assembly process, or rather, the lack thereof, is getting a bit ridiculous.  ...She knows how she intends it to happen, at least, which is what matters.  So she can damn well start printing sometime soon.  Right, herself?

Right, herself?

...Right.  Time to make sure everything is wired up correctly.

 

...When this is done, she is never using paper for this ever again.

Just.  No.  Never.

Actually, though, if she has enough understanding of computers that she can kinda run one as a magic emulation...

 

...Well, she has enough something built up in her head in understanding her gigantic tangle of production machinery, that she thinks that if she just draws the right symbols on herself, she could go all Fullmetal Alchemist freehand alchemy about it.

(Not that she knows all that much about that, or has incorporated it into her belief system - heavens no - but she knows it's a thing, at least.  And that it would in fact be cool as fuck.)

...And she does have a blue marker.

So if she pulls the output of the one part of production she's actually run as of yet, the I/O node itself, into herself via her sigil...

Grabs hold of some salt and some graphite...

And hooks power up to the models in her head and the diagrams strewn out in front of her by sheer force of arglebargle-frustration-determination-knowing-needing-want...

Can she maybe make a fancy magical effector stick?  Please?  She still needs to make her lightsaber!

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...You cannot, in fact, build a working factory out of spit, duct tape, and hope.  There's things she missed, things she doesn't quite get as well as she thinks she does.  And so, when she tries -

Well, the good news is that there's nothing that exploded.

The bad news is that no matter that she has now installed alchemy, that abomination of an alchemical diagram is not functional in the slightest.

The output sigil sputters out a stream of loose, intermingled stuff, clattering all over the table, and her mana supply drops precipitously as she feels her magic do something like choking but backwards, because she tried to cast a hairball.

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"...Glahckgh.  Ew.  Good gods.  ...Note to self: Don't do that again."

...At least she can probably reuse the materials.  They weren't corrupted or anything, just - shaken about, and everted, along with the so-called 'model'.  (The 'model' dissipated in a flare of mana and holography, because it was, you know, magic, projected unto the physical world.)

She butts her hand against the table, just to make sure that there's nothing left in there, and - good gods would you look at the time.  She'd better get dinner.  And then she can start stringing together a proper system with which to assemble things like lightsabers and sonic screwdrivers.

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OS has added some more files to the Google Drive, and reorganized some as well. Nothing about the Unknown, since he doesn't know about it.

Wren texted her some emoji at some point- Eggplant and peach and hearts.

Sebastian has not responded.

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She texts Wren thumbsup-kissyface-tongue-sticking-out-face, since emoji are the order of the day.

She jots off a brief "So I tried to assemble a magic effector wand because I could use it to build a lightsaber probably, but the build snarled up on me and everything went kerplooieurgh out of the space I held to do it in - probably because I tried to force it - but the space is still there so I can probably do alchemy FMA style in the future," with a picture of the aftermath, and the note that the IO rune synthesis, and absorbing it to anchor alchemyspace, worked fine, into the experiment logs.

And then, her dinner finished, she drags herself back home and lets herself pass out and hallucinate vividly for several hours.

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The next day...


Something is off when Alex awakens - for once, before her alarm drags her from visions of hexagon-arms.  There's a λ-smell of overripeness that she would have thought to be coming from the kitchen - but is, instead, seemingly concentrated outside her residence.

...Hey Wren - if I took a sample of something's magic, could you, like, tell me things about it?  Because there was something that got their magic all over my lawn last night and I can already tell that I am not looking forward to finding out what the hell it could've done.  It's, like, weirdly sickening-sweet ripeness vibes?  Like some kind of baby Nurgling.  Ugh, I need to ward the place and it's a rental.

She can, at least, quickly whip up a nonreactive and airtight container using some of the principles of her work yesterday.  On a smaller scale.

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