Delightfully Strange

[magictechsupport]

At the end of the universe,

A man steps into a bar and looks around. "Huh, nobody told me they installed a break room here."

With Slayer Juliet.

With Kappa's Dagna.

With Eclipse!Bell.

Comments

[all_the_thoughts]

The room is currently mostly deserted, except for a woman sitting at a table off to the left, wearing complicated goggles and peering at some squares of old weathered metal. Occasionally she fiddles with the goggles to swing an old lens out of the way and a new one into place.

[magictechsupport]

On second thought, this bar probably does not belong to MTU. It would be expensive, and he knows this branch's typical response to proposed expenses.

Those items she's using are plainly magic of some kind, but she is not currently in the tech support queue, so instead he asks, "Do you know what this place is?"

[all_the_thoughts]

She looks up, glancing around a bit before she finally locates the source of the unexpected speech sounds.

"Sorry, did you say something just now? I was working."

[magictechsupport]

"I'm wondering if you know why a tenderless bar has replaced my office's teleport room door."

[all_the_thoughts]

"Oh. I have no idea," she says. "It's very confusing and also really interesting but I was in the middle of something when I found it and there are tables here so I just sat down and kept working."

[magictechsupport]

"I... see."

He decides to investigate, producing a shiny, glowing tool from his briefcase and waving it around, frowning at the results. "Well, it is strange."

[all_the_thoughts]

"What's that?" she asks, pushing the goggles up onto her forehead so she can peer at him without her specialized lenses in the way.

[magictechsupport]

"K-1200 series thaumoscope." He twists two knobs on it and waves it around again. "This place's mana field is odd."

[all_the_thoughts]

"What's a thaumoscope? What's a mana field, for that matter?"

[magictechsupport]

"Detects and characterizes magic, respectively. I'm mostly confused that the dimensionality scan is coming back null. Not zero, even, null. Which would imply that this place is not a location. What."

[all_the_thoughts]

"That's really interesting!"

[magictechsupport]

"I suppose it is, but I'm a bit less excited about it because I've already spent hours today untangling dimensional nonsense."

[all_the_thoughts]

"I haen't dealt with any dimensional nonsense recently," she says cheerfully. "Not since we closed the hole in the sky a few months ago. Anyway, hello! I'm Dagna. What dimensional nonsense have you been untangling? Where are you from? Your clothes and stuff are all really weird, I've never seen anything like it."

[magictechsupport]

"Yours are likewise strange to me. I just came from an office where I work as a senior thaumic architect specialized in communication and transportation. Which is a fancy way of saying I keep the phones and roads working, despite my colleagues' best efforts to disrupt them through lack of common sense. Hole in the sky, you say? Well, at least you fixed it."

[all_the_thoughts]

"I'm not sure what a phone is, either. Are we even speaking the same language? I think maybe we aren't! This is one of the most interesting things that's ever happened to me!"

[magictechsupport]

"I do admit it's in the top ten strangest things I've seen this month." A different device comes out, this one looks more like a hand-sized crystal with strange patterns of metal set into it. Tap tap tap. "This is a phone. It talks to other phones. Well, technically it's a link crystal, but phone is the colloquial term."

[all_the_thoughts]

"Talks how?" She pulls her goggles back down and arranges some lenses, then hops out of her chair and peers at the link crystal from several feet away. "Well, that's definitely not any kind of lyrium I've ever met..."

[magictechsupport]

"You speak into it, and it relays the sound of your voice to far away. Lyrium's fuel?"

[all_the_thoughts]

"Lyrium isn't primarily fuel," she says. "But at least with the kind of magic I'm used to, something that looked like that and did magic stuff would either be made of lyrium or have lyrium in it, and that doesn't. So I guess you have an entirely new way of doing magic. And here I thought all I'd be finding out about today was what the deal was with these ancient runestones. Neat!"

[magictechsupport]

"I think we are each missing a great amount of context about the other's world. I know of hundreds of kinds of magic. Would you mind if I investigated yours with my scanners?"

[all_the_thoughts]

"As long as your scanners aren't going to mess with anything, go right ahead! The runestones are pretty safe, and so am I. I don't have anything on me today that's likely to explode, or even dangerous for humans to handle."

[magictechsupport]

"And I'm fairly smothered in wards, and my divination alarms would have gone off by now if you were, besides."

The K-1200 Thaumoscope comes out again and is pointed in her direction.

[all_the_thoughts]

Dagna is magically pretty interesting. There are high concentrations of an unknown magical substance in her bloodstream, which appears to be some kind of living symbiote. Somewhat overshadowed by that, several of the lenses on her goggles seem to be infused with small amounts of the same magical substance, and several of the rest of the lenses are infused with a noticeably different variant of the same stuff. The blood-based variant is significantly more powerful.

"There mostly only seems to be one or at most two kinds of magic in my world, although it manifests very differently in different contexts," she says while he's busy scanning. "And you could mistake it for being lots of different things, and for thousands of years people did, even when they really should've known better. But one way or another it all comes back to lyrium and the Fade. And one day I'll figure out how those relate."

[magictechsupport]

"Everything you have on or in you depends on subtly different varieties of Lyrium and I won't pretend to know what the Fade is. I'm guessing that Lyrium is alive in a sense?"

[all_the_thoughts]

"Yes!" she says, beaming. "Lyrium is alive! It took us ages to figure that out, and it explained so much once we finally got it!"