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

[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!"

[magictechsupport]

Terence is not immune to a pretty face that is happy and excited, and even less immune to one attached to someone who finds magic interesting and has half a clue what they're talking about.

He starts listing off what he can tell or guess about Lyrium, comparing it to other magics he knows and trying to see how well his outside investigation stacks up to her knowledge.

[all_the_thoughts]

Dagna doesn't directly say so, but it becomes obvious from the way she talks that she is the leading theoretical magic researcher on her continent, possibly in her entire world.

Lyrium is a crystalline substance found primarily as veins laced through miscellaneous other types of rock underground. It is normally blue, and used for a wide range of magical applications, frequently but not exclusively as a power source for mages. Silver lyrium, which is the variant in Dagna's blood, was discovered only in the last year, as a result of some bizarre circumstances that she doesn't elaborate on immediately. That and red lyrium were the keys to discovering that lyrium is alive; red lyrium is a parasitic variant, of which Dagna didn't bring any with her today because it's only studied under strictly controlled circumstances. Dwarves, of which Dagna is one, have a special relationship with the blue standard variant, which is also the variant most strongly linked to the Fade, although the Fade is a whole different story and she hasn't been able to study it nearly as well - "humans go there when they dream, but dwarves don't. Dream, that is."

[magictechsupport]

He has some information about how dreams, magic, alternate realms, and divinations interact in the magic systems he's familiar with, but hedges that, "One never quite knows with new magic."

Scans show that Lyrium is a strong potential power source. "Based on my estimates a solid chunk of blue Lyrium would output something almost 3 MNA per hour per kilogram. It will probably fetch an excellent price if our research department approves it, four or five thousand MTU per kilo."

[all_the_thoughts]

"Those numbers sound impressive, should I be impressed? What can you buy for four or five thousand MTU?"

[magictechsupport]

"Stop me if I name something you don't understand. Very fancy phone-book-calculator type things and a contract to keep them working for two years for, oh, sixty people of your choice. Emergency medical evacuation artifacts and one year's promise to keep them working and have the best healers in a dozen worlds on standby at the other end, for ten people. Three or four floating platforms that can lift a dozen people and fly fairly quickly, or one slower one that can lift a small house. A great quantity of luck or mental and physical boosts, though those are strictly temporary. With more Lyrium you'd be in the market for divine intervention."

[all_the_thoughts]

"Those sound pretty impressive to me! Assuming I'm not permanently stranded in this weird magic bar, which I probably should've started worrying about before now, I wonder if I should try to get your mana-buying people in touch with someone from Orzammar who could sell them some lyrium..."

[magictechsupport]

"I can sell you a link crystal no problem, it should be able to contact me even from a universe previously unknown to us, and I'll arrange a visit assuming the scriers don't come back complaining that your world is irretrievably dangerous."

[all_the_thoughts]

"...My world can be dangerous. How dangerous is too dangerous? We fixed the hole in the sky, but on the other hand, someone did manage to put it there in the first place..."

[magictechsupport]

"I don't know much about the risk levels, sorry. What were the hole in the sky's effects?"

[all_the_thoughts]

"Rifts to the Fade opened up all over the place and started spitting demons everywhere, and turned some spirits sort of inside-out so they became demons too," she says. "It was a big mess. But we got it all cleaned up eventually. Oh, that reminds me! I have a simple way to test if I'm still in contact with the rest of my world!" Blink. "Yep, looks like Prince Stalas is okay, and I can still tell, which means that my silver lyrium and his silver lyrium can still talk to each other. That's one of the less well-studied applications of silver lyrium, is that any two people who have it can check up on each other, as quick as a thought. But it's not very precise as a communication tool, not nearly as good as one of your link crystal phones."

[magictechsupport]

"That does sound fairly nasty. We'll have to see what the vegamancers make of it, I suppose."

[all_the_thoughts]

"Vegamancers?"

[magictechsupport]

"Magic-users who specialize in making things that do divination. Which is finding things out and-slash-or predicting the future."