Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (50/?) WiP 1 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Here is the Work in Progress for Chapter 50 I hope you guys enjoy! :D 

My question didn’t linger in the air for long.

In fact, it was almost immediately reciprocated, but not by the owl, Buddy, nor any other voice. Instead, it was reciprocated by a long, dull droning sound; one that shook the entire building to its core. A sound that was as otherworldly as the noise generated by a warp drive revving up to full power.

This was soon followed by thousands of distinct large thumps, as heavy, leather bound books smacked across an untold number of desks, tables, and plush leather armchairs not too dissimilar to the ones found in Mal’tory’s office.

Except instead of the dark, brooding, and foreboding atmosphere of that Victorian-themed nightmare, there was a certain magical nature to the whole scene. The presence of a thousand or so foxes flipping through untold pages at blistering speeds definitely helped to offset the otherwise bizarre and ominous scene.

“Radio.” The owl parroted back, in exactly the same tone and enunciation I’d used.

“Radio.” The room of foxes responded back in unison, their page-flipping continuing for a solid few minutes before it all inexplicably came to a stop as suddenly as it began.

With a resounding thump of tens of thousands of books closing all at once.

“Radio not found.”

The whole library began producing another long, dull droning. As the foxes that had appeared with books in tow, all ran off back into unseen and unknown corners and crevices, completely disappearing from even the EVI’s sensor feeds.

It was now just Buddy and the owl resting atop his head that remained. The owl in particular quickly took charge once more. “Radio.” He repeated. “Subject matter classification-”

“-Communication.” I quickly interjected, taking literally no one except for Buddy completely off guard, the armored fox cocking his head from side to side; his face locked in a perpetual expression of confusion and curiosity.

“That’s what this whole trade boils down to, doesn’t it?” I asked rhetorically, garnering a tentative nod from the owl in response. “Artificial means of augmenting communication, all in an attempt to address a problem that plagues all civilizations. A problem that becomes all but a guaranteed issue for any would-be organized group wishing to maintain any hope of cohesion beyond the sightlines of a town or village. Because the moment when you set your sights on organizing, controlling, and maintaining people and lands beyond the sightlines of your hall, keep, or castle, is the moment when you realize that we’re all fundamentally limited by the same thing… our ability to get information from one place to another. For the greater the extent of your claims, and the further you expand your reach, the more difficult this task becomes. So for an empire as expansive and as grand as the Nexus-” I spoke in a half-condescending, somewhat sarcastic tone, realizing well that doing so wouldn’t incur any faux pas’ with the library. “-this becomes a pertinent issue.” I paused, taking a moment to regard all eyes in the room before continuing. “I know this… we know this… because we’ve experienced the same growing pains back home.”

There were no gasps of surprise this time around, as the captive audience of foxes and the lone owl seemed captivated rather than shocked.

In fact, even Thacea’s expression remained similar enough to the owl in composure. Though I knew that was more than likely the result of her stoic poker face, and was most definitely not representative of what was probably brewing underneath the surface.

“I’m sure we had some parallels in this regard, I’m sure the Nexus wasn’t always capable of long distance communication using crystals. I’m sure someone had to have had the brilliant idea of running the distance between two towns. And I’m sure this eventually evolved into relying on the endurance of a horse, the speed of a pigeon, and the skill of a courier as time progressed. However, there had to have been a breaking point. A point where your ambitions grow beyond the limitations of these crude, analog, and primitive means of addressing the physical information gap. A point where these systems become too inadequate if you wish, hope, and desire for more. So whilst the Nexus dabbled in solutions to this issue utilizing magic, with their crystals and teleportation spells, we instead branched off into a completely different path; a road less taken.”

“A road not defined or limited by the skills of a mage, but created, maintained, and refined by the sacrifices of generations of scholars and researchers.”

“Because we didn’t have the abundance of mana to work with, nor were we born with the innate gift of mana-manipulation. Heck, our world doesn’t even have any mana to begin with. We were, and still are, a mana-less people, with no less of a desire to expand, progress, and push forward our reach as the Nexus clearly did. Our ambitions could not be tempered by the supposed reality of our situation. Our sights were always set upon the next hill. Our hearts were always drawn to the next horizon. Our destiny was always to cross the distance of oceans. Regardless of if they were oceans of water or oceans of stars. It’s not in our nature to sit idly by, and we definitely were not willing to accept the limitations imposed upon us by the natural world. So we pushed forward. Each generation dedicating their lives to the observation and study of reality, and each generation making gradual, consistent improvements by harnessing everything from the world around us, using our understanding of its rules to construct a reality we wish to see, all in service of our own aims.”

I took a deep breath at the end of my preamble, just in time for the building around us to once again drone and creak loudly, giving the owl pause as he addressed me just as the noises settled.

“So in a similar vein to how magic and the magical arts were constructed to observe, understand, and to eventually manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe, so too did Earthrealm do this with another set of fundamental cosmic paradigms?” The owl shot back questioningly, his eyes burrowing through my opaque lenses not with predisposed doubt and scrutiny, but with a fiery curiosity barely contained behind those spheres of amber.

“Correct.”

“And you do not call this magic?”

“No, in fact, that term is exclusively used for impossible flights of fantasy; reserved for the realm of fiction and the imagination. Only now are we seeing that it is, in fact, a very real reality. A reality that we were not able to actualize, for reasons that are now very clear to us.”

“So what do you call it then? Your study of the fundamental forces?”

“We call this discipline science, and we call the practical application of its scholarly endeavors technology.”