Sovereigns game
Reset. Where are we even going with this?
Int. The wide room. The grand hall. Visitors Center to the right, gift shop attached. Some cafes, probably; this is civilisation, after all. Hallways leading off. Wide doors. Staircases. The entire second floor is a conference venue. This is the base floor of the Atlas Tower of the Magi. There are five towers in total, rising above the great city covering the plains, between the forested mountains. Seres, Gorgon, Torrent, Calcutta, and at their center, Atlas, the main one. The tall one. There are other floors below this, but they are not typically open to the public. The floors above vary. Most of the libraries have hours. The restaurants, the overlooks, the gardens, these are all open when they are open. Anyone could probably walk into one of the meditation chambers at any time, if only they knew where they were going, and as long as they didn't make trouble, nobody would mind.
Nissa is in the base now, getting coffee, or whatever their local equivalent is. Whatever her equivalent is. Something sticky and unpronounceable. Boba. She's that kind of student, not that most of the folk around her would take her for a student. She's not really dressed like one, but nor is she dressed like a master. Mostly she's just dressed like a random person, surrounded by random people, chatter filling the space.
She finds a table, sits down, pulls out a tablet, pulls up some spells. Their forms hover over the table, the accompanying text appearing on air, backed in opaque white. She reads them carefully, mouthing the forms, trying to shape them in her mind. There are rooms set aside for exactly this higher up. Quiet rooms. Fireproof rooms. Rooms with serene views and carefully constructed soundtracks and no distractions, carefully designed to facilitate learning and retention.
Nissa doesn't want facilitation. She wants the real world. She wants to learn in the same chaos and cacophony she'll be using it in. She wants her damn boba.
Her fingers spark, and she shakes it off onto the table. That wasn't even remotely related to the spell she was trying to do. She peers at the notes, flicking through the pages - has she stumbled upon something else, perhaps?
The problem is, Nissa is brilliant. Among the Magi, she's considered a prodigy, a sensitivity to the Source unlike anything they've seen before. But it's not true. She might be good, rather better than average, even, but her skill is not talent, and she isn't some sort of magical nexus. It's all skill, trained by an intellect ever seeking answers, with a focus born of practice and discipline. If it were the same discipline employed by the Magi, it would be fine. But it isn't. She made it all up as she went, following the mathematical patterns of the physics of the rest of the universe, assuming there would be parallels with the magic of the Source itself.
And, though she doesn't fully understand it yet, she was right.
Int. Elsewhere. Ciphreya: another city, another world, another galaxy. Civilised, but differently. This is much smaller, and isolate. A sanctuary in crystalline architecture, away from the troubles of the rest of the universe. They consider themselves the apex of development, here, the heart of a monumental organisation. They're right, to a point. Their influence is huge, and spans across the local clusters. Beyond that point, they're not so right. It's too far away. They don't even know what's out there. The void. The abyss. Dark beyond of the universe. Other civilisations, perhaps, with other apexes. They haven't made contact, and the gods have been vague to a fault.
But their gods back them. Their gods are among them. That makes it all right. Right?
Rahah doesn't think so. She wants everyone to just leave her alone, let her grow up, play, make friends and be ridiculous. She's only six. She's a god, or at least the reincarnation of one, or so everyone keeps insisting. She doesn't want to be a god. She wants to be normal.
She's incarnated as a Deresi, but passes for Nissai: an elf apparently in her adolescence, adult proportions, but lanky, short. Her control over her magic betrays her most of all. A teenager would be able to cast a light without setting it on fire. A teenager would actually know how to cast in the first place. But everything Rahah tries comes out wrong. She can't shape the spells at all. Mostly she can do tricks with force, pushing and pulling at a distance. Sometimes she manages to control the flow of raw energy. But she can't shape it.
So mostly she doesn't. She pretends not even to be a caster at all. It's easier than to admit the truth: as Deresi, her connection to the Source is different. She is her own source, her own nexus. And so the general hatred and mistrust of Deresi passes her by, but so, too, do opportunities. Opportunities to learn and grow. Opportunities to understand.
The Source. One of the lingering mysteries of the universe. Every great civilisation has, if they progressed far enough, tried to tap into it at some point on a global scale. It is, after all, a source of power, a connection between worlds, the exception that makes Darstaddian physics work. Like the ambient matter that holds galaxies together, it is the ambient energy that pulls all forces together, and so it is used to power entire civilisations, to reinvent travel, to rebuild the foundation of the very concept of existence. The downfall of many, in time, has been taking this too far. The cenva, the first ones, remade their very selves upon this, and thus unmade themselves. The gods were reborn of these fragments. The Artiil, the humans, launched themselves into the cosmos on the tails of their own unmaking, destroying their homeworld, but not, at least, their own being.
To engineers and architects, it is but another tool, another constraint, to use and work around.
To casters, those born with an innate sensitivity who choose to pursue its more personal application, or who have it engineered into them later in life, it is a wellspring of power and madness. Most remain at the surface, only pulling small amounts of power, for simple things: to ease the day to day, complement other skills, perform some tricks, but stick to the known, written spells, and never go too far. But some delve deeper. The madmen, the visionaries, the sorcerers. These are inevitably the pioneers, those who discover its applications, who write up the theorems that form the basis for new spells, and for the more global applications of the civilisations themselves. Some of them become gods. Many destroy themselves. Others skirt disaster at every new reach, only to find themselves changed no matter how careful they were, for it always changes its users, the more so the deeper, the darker, they go.
There are speculations as to how deep it goes. There are speculations as to there being another side: a dark side, an existence far stranger, that mirrors our own, perhaps, or something else entirely. But these are only speculations. There are no hypotheses, not that can be tested.
Even the gods don't know, save, perhaps, for one. The Spirit of the Universe. She's not even a god anymore, not really, but she was, once. Long ago. Before she changed. Maybe, just maybe, she reached that other, darker, side. Maybe this was what changed her. The Deathgods, after all, call her their Dark Sister. But she doesn't speak with mortals. She doesn't even speak with gods anymore. The Deathgods act as her liaisons on the rare occasion she deems anything worth communicating, and she doesn't accept questions.
The man sits down across from her, and Nissa looks up in surprise. It's Damorin, one of the Magi masters. "I missed you today," he says. "You need to practise."
"I do practise," Nissa replies. "I'm practising right now."
"What?" Damorin asks. "The lessons give structure. If you don't practise the key foundations..."
"Your key foundations don't work," Nissa says, cutting him off. "There's structure here, but it's all arbitrary anyway. Isn't it more important that I have a structure, rather than conflicting it with contradictory bases?"
"You're a magus," Damorin says. "You can't just make up your own basis. It doesn't work that way."
Nissa stares at him, dropping a half-shaped spell in a small flash of colour. She doesn't know what to say to this. She's already said too much. Unaffiliated magic is illegal in the Commonwealth, but it's hardly safe in the Union, either, the neighbouring militaristic state with which an uneasy truce is maintained purely out of necessity: an all-out war would devastate both parties, and leave the galaxy in ruins. So she'd joined the Magi, the Commonwealth mages, and tried to get along with their particular approach. She'd found it utterly stifling.
"What I mean to say is I can do all that already!" Nissa says. "Why do I need to go to these lessons? They're pointless."
"Really?" Damorin asks. "Show me a common star."
Nissa holds up her hand and a pinpoint of light appears above it.
Damorin nods. "Make a purification."
Nissa gives him a slightly surprised look, and then pulls up the spell on her tablet, before shaping it out according to the instructions. She drops it over the table, and it sparkles, clean.
"You need to know the spells," Damorin says, frowning. "That won't work in the field."
"Why would I need to clean something on the spot without time to look it up?" Nissa asks. "What possible situation could mandate that?" What she doesn't mention is that she already has another cleaning spell - a much less pristine version with a more variable scope. Hers looks natural, unlike this. Like cleaning by hand, it takes multiple passes, multiple castings, to make anything actually pristine. She uses it daily when no one's looking, to avoid having to clean things up by hand.
"I can think of a few," Damorin says.
Begin original
Credit
Pick up job
Pickup
Infected hand
Hopeless
End thing
Metadata
Characters:
- Rahah
- telekinesis
- weapons - swords, blasts, shield
- very basic magic
- slight foresight
- Nissa Velei
- general magic, but especially explosions, blasts, bursts
- ???
- passive ability to cause people to like her for no apparent reason (often causes the opposite reaction if they actually notice)
Crew:
- Comnen - boss, smuggler/merc, pilot, 'public relations'
- Cithandra - brains of the operation
- Sokar - second pilot, 'public relations 2'
- Khalemi - medic, tech handler in general, bot operator
- Jonas - 'public relations 2'
- Torkora Ma - wanton thief, 'public relations'
Union:
- Dazroth
- Horgon
- Lirien Mayasu
