trans_9 | GIANT EXPLOSION [Open]

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GIANT EXPLOSION [Open]

The Jedi Temple rumbled as a portion of it threatened to collapse inwards.

"Why would THAT be a load-bearing wall?" Aibghalien demanded of thin air as he hurriedly cast a wall of force exactly flush with the ceiling above the slightly-smoking remains of the disintegrated wall. The magical force promptly shouldered the entire weight of the countless pounds above it, in efficient and good-natured violation of the laws of physics.

Satisfied that the wall would hold, Aibghalien, with magical passes and invocations, laid down several more walls of force over the walls and floor of the single room he'd cut out of three. About a hundred and fifty by a hundred and eighty feet, it seemed extraordinarily large while entirely empty. A lesser wizard might have worried that it was simply too large; Aibghalien wondered if he'd allotted himself enough space. Still, he didn't want to be greedy.

As he reached the last wall, he drew from his robes a crystal, which went dark and lifeless as he drew from it the power to fuel the spell. He frowned, then tucked it away for later recharging, once he could set up the proper devices to do so.

Gritting his teeth against the drain of strength and energy, Aibghalien laboriously laid permanency spells over each of the walls. Exhausting as this was, his time on the ship alone had given him more than enough strength to lay these spells; within a minute, though appearing utterly unchanged to the average viewer, the room had been sealed on five of six surfaces with two-dimensional walls utterly immune to anything but the most potent of magics.

He made a mental note to seal off the doors.

Now, to test the seals.

Flying out the hole he'd disintegrated in the wall before beginning the process of laboratory construction, he took pains to make sure the air and ground around the temple were clear. Then, drawing back the sleeves of his robes, he swiftly cast five spells.

Four of them were Delayed Blast Fireball, each on a shorter timer than the last. The fifth was Meteor Swarm. Four amber seeds of concentrated magical fire shot into the room, followed by four massive globes of force-bound destruction.

Then Aibghalien quickened a teleport right the hell away from there.

The explosion sounded like Armageddon itself had gotten extremely drunk and decided to wrestle a supernova.

Aibghalien had done his work well. Absolutely none of the force transmitted through the magical walls into the Jedi Temple. It all went directly outwards into the unshielded outer wall of the room. That wall disintegrated almost as thoroughly as the spell of that name would have done, and a massive plume of fire shot out in a prominence, followed by a shockwave that rolled out across the City like the deepest bass note from lowest level of the Abyss.

In the horribly quiet aftermath, the wizard drifted back to examine his handiwork. The room, with its walls intact, appeared perfectly unharmed. "That worked well," he noted to himself. "Now to set up the circle--"

Hmm.

He quickly pulled out his omnicomm and typed out a message before returning to work.

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Once upon a time, there was a Scientist.

He'd had to get out of the City, and thus his lab, but he'd recently been allowed back in. And he, as was his wont, had thrown himself back into his work with something like obsession.

At least, until an explosion rattled the windows of his chosen workspace.

It took Stephen Valkonan a handful of minutes to make his way to the Temple. He'd missed the lightshow, but his goggles were still feeding him information. Yes, there'd been an energy discharge here, one that had its genesis in magic, despite the fact that nothing seemed to be destroyed.

Well. At least it was a polite explosion?

He reached a hand back to scrub at the back of his head, and eyed the place with quite a bit of confusion evident on his face.

Perhaps things would become more clear as an elf drifted out of the large hole in the side of the Temple, floating down on the wings of magic to a large pile of salvaged goods at its base. Touching down, the elf reached for what appeared to be a large, rolled-up carpet.

Stephen paused for a few moments.

Just the fact that the guy was an elf made a couple things clear. Clearer, maybe.

Some days, he actually thought he never should have stopped drinking.

"Hey! Hey, buddy!" he called. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

Stephen Valkonan, bastion of Tradition diplomacy, ladies and gentlemen.

The elf blinked a bit in surprise as he hefted the rug. "I am putting carpets on the floor of my laboratory in the placed I don't expect a high danger of spills or other damage. If any of these were salvaged from a building you were in some way attached to, I sincerely apologize."

Stephen blinked, and shoved his goggles back up on his forehead.

"So...let me get this straight. You're building your lab? And no, no, I don't need carpets." Even if they'd come from Doissetep, he doubted he'd care a lot. He wasn't that emotionally invested in the place, though all things considered, he was amazed to find it here.

"So...any reason you specifically chose it to be here?" he asked. Aibghalien could probably appreciate the curiosity.

"Well, in point of fact, I'm not so much 'building' it as I'm converting pre-existing rooms for the purpose. In any sort of situation where there's a high possibility of structural damage to the building, I've found it best to make sure the force of any explosions or suchforth is channeled out instead of in." He indicated the hole in the wall as demonstration of the fact.

"As for why this building specifically, the head of the Magic Department, Nanoha, allowed me the use of the space."

"Oh," Stephen said. Really, it was about both statements, but...

"Oh well, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission," he muttered to himself, and then shrugged.

"Ever given any thought to altering the structure of the building itself? I mean the materials, I guess." Since that was one of the things he'd ended up doing to the old garage he'd reconfigured. Sure, it still looked like cement, but it ended up being a good deal harder.

"Of course!" Aibghalien said. "But that would probably require a detailed architectural survey to determine the exact capabilities of the lower levels in terms of weight and strength, which would have taken a great deal more time and, frankly, is not my particular strong suit. Beyond which the construction of this building is like nothing I've ever seen. It's almost embarrassingly trite, to be frank, but walls of force just let me get the job done. The only problem is properly coating the floor with material more susceptible to friction than a perfectly flat plane."

"Something non-stick?" he asked. "I could probably do that." He probably could do something about the crystalline structures in the walls, too, but there was such a thing as "going too far". Stephen didn't want a herd of angry Jedi descending on him when he mucked about too much with their Temple.

"Did you have anything specific in mind?"

"The force effect is very specifically two-dimensional, thus has absolutely nothing to grip to," Aibghalien clarified. "I prefer stone, when possible, as it's durable and readily markable, but I don't have a quantity of it to lay down, nor am I particularly good at construction. Is there a synthetic, perhaps, that could be put down? Carpet is frankly not my first choice... it stains too readily."

"If you have something relatively inorganic to cover it with...even pieces of rubble or synthetic carpeting, something like that, I could transmute it to stone. It'd be easy," Stephen said with a shrug.

"I suppose I could generate it from nothing, but it'd take it out of me." And he really didn't want to spend precious energy stores he might need later, either.

"There's certainly no shortage of rubble around here, though it will take me a while to gather. Still, I certainly appreciate the offer of help!" The elf delivered a bow in gratitude.

"I can probably help with that, too. I'm sort of between projects right now anyway, what with the last one delivered to Engineering." Stephen shrugged at that.

"So what sort of experiments are you planning to do here, anyhow?" Oh how quickly it turned to shop talk...

"Everything!"

The elf certainly didn't think small.

"The nature of this ship, as well as the apparent disconnect between the magical mechanisms on my world as opposed to others, means there are countless things to be studied!"

"You aren't joking," Stephen chuckled. It was a noise of agreement.

"I tend to do more experiments on energy and matter and the interactions thereof, stuff like that, but I'm not averse to sitting in. Or just discussing stuff like that."

"I warn you, I have been known to talk an ear or two off," Aibghalien said, quite seriously. "I pursue a theoretically specialist base, but in practice I've focused on alterations, conjuration, and evocation."

Reinforce never got the message. To the extent that she resided anywhere, it was in Matt's WITCH bus, parked outside the Temple, and needless to say, she felt the explosion quite clearly. By the time Aibghalien had gotten around to posting his rather late public service announcement she was already mid-transfer to the Temple.

She exited the transfer expecting to find a partially-collapsed temple; she was... intimately familiar large explosions and had judged it capable of causing severe structural damage, at least locally.

But all she found was a single, now very clean exterior room and some minor fires in the surrounding landscaping, which her expanded anti-heat fields quickly suppressed.

"Hello?" Her search-nodes relayed her voice as she began to sweep the site. It seemed likely from the way the explosion had been contained that any victims would either be no worse than deafened or completely vaporized, but she had to be sure. "Is anyone injured?"

"Everything is under control!" a voice called out cheerfully from the air as Aibghalien drifted into view, a large stone platform by his side in the air. "Please don't mind the explosion," he continued, smiling. "It was just a routine test of the protections I'm building into my laboratory."

It takes a very special kind of mind to call a 104d6 explosion a 'routine test'.

"A test?" Reinforce looked up at him dubiously. "What are the failure modes?"

To her testing seemed to imply the possibility of failure (else, why test?) and she couldn't imagine that failure to contain an explosion of that magnitude would have done the Temple much good.

"The containment is created by five planes intersecting in a box formation," Aibghalien said, lapsing into something of a professorial tone. "If the planes are not perfectly aligned in their intersections, a fractional amount of energy would've escaped into the structure of the Temple. I am, if you'll excuse me for seeming to boast, confident enough in my placement of them that the proportionate amount of energy allowed through any gap would've been so low that a detonation of that size was necessary for any structural damage to be observable to the eye. And I would have fixed it, had there been any."

He smiled, showing not a hint of dissembling or any lack of confidence in his actions. "I really do apologize if I caused you any worry."

"It would still have been prudent to post a notification and have the building evacuated." Reinforce... scolded, for all intents and purposes, as she rose to his level on still black wings. "And prudence for its own sake aside, not all magic performs reliably here. There are persistent errors in transfer route-forging and, I am given to understand, other forms of teleportation."

Though to be fair, she had not experienced any similar faults with such small-scale barrier arrangements.

"This is true, but I have compensated to the best of my ability for any variance in performance. Pehaps it may further allay your fears if I explain that I have performed this same setup on three previous occasions, each of which involved a building of substantially less quality in material and architecture than this one." He added yet another slight bow, which seemed to serve for an all-purpose gesture for him. "I would not risk lives or well-being," he added more firmly.

"As for route-forging, I take it you mean the establishment of a teleportation circle, which is to say, a fixed location which, when entered, transports its contents to another location? I was in fact just about to embark on the scribing of a corresponding pair of such circles. If you have knowledge of previously-performed processes, I'd very much welcome your insight and contribution, though I would not be surprised to discover that my form of magic differs substantially from yours."

"Given the limited utilization and occupancy of Temple facilities it is not a precaution that would have greatly delayed your work. But I will accept your assurances." He didn't seem to have been intentionally reckless, at least, and Reinforce didn't want to strain relations within the department.

She canted her head at the description. "My magic requires the use of pre-established paths, whether they are to be used once or as part of a permanent system. However, I have yet to hear of a teleportation method that did not experience a decrease in accuracy on the ship compared to its original usage."

"Well, my intent here is to establish a path, so I hope their is some correlation. The teleport spell I cast earlier has an inherent margin of error anyway, so I presume the unreliability introduced by the ship is within similar bounds, at least for that particular spell." One gets the impression he could talk like this for literally hours on end.

"What I intend to establish here is a very short range transportation, from here to there." He traced a path from the ground to the hole up above. "Given the normal range of this spell, I hope I can marginalize any variance to within the confines of a given area not substantially larger than the normal receiving area of the spell. If not, there are other methods, and a failure is always at least as instructional as a success!"

"At that range error introduced should be negligible unless the mechanics cause a degree of magnification I have not yet witnessed. If you have already used a similar magic successfully there should be no issues." Rein had for her part been literally born to accumulate information on such subjects, though she was less inclined to speak at length without prompting.

"I have identified several sources of systematic error and authored protocols to eliminate them in transfer routes. You will likely find room for improvement as well."

Aibghalien hadn't been literally born to accumulate information like this; it simply turned out to be his life's calling and greatest joy. The more he talked (or even thought) about this, the happier he got.

"Excellent! That means a productive spell which should still allow for a thorough investigation into the underlying causes. Given the absolute precision of a teleport circle the error should be discernible even without practical effect, thus allowing investigation." He clapped his hands together, rubbing them in anticipation of the exercise.

"An established route would allow a large number of repetitions under one set of conditions," Rein agreed. "There are distortive effects that do not increase linearly with distance and that only operate in certain parts of the ship or certain boundaries within it are crossed, so it will not provide all relevant data, but you should be able to reproduce the most common with such a setup."

"If you need someone to take measurements I would be happy to oblige. Is there any minimum interval between uses of the circle?" Most people probably wouldn't have been quite so eager to play lab assistant/equipment to a mage whose only prior work they knew had consisted of an enormous explosion... but to Rein, more used to employment as a walking strategic arsenal, it seemed a more noble concept... and the possibility of huge explosions not at all unfamiliar.

"Certain parts and certain boundaries?" Aibghalien made note of that for later -- exerting supreme effort not to simply go and investigate directly. He did have a teleport circle to erect.

"There's no cooldown period. The only absolute restrictions involve destination, which are a nonissue at present since I have no intentions of attempting to violate the inherent proscriptions in this effect. The only absolute modification I intend to pursue is a distinct demarcation to display the area of effect. That being said, I intend to inscribe it on a platform placed down here." He gestured to the ground right near where they stood.

Reinforce absorbed his answer without comment; it would be useful information should he accept her offer of help but for now was merely of academic interest. "It is for visibility only, then? Not a receiver?"

Solely aesthetic, in other words. Still, seeing how his magic achieved this simple task was not uninteresting.

"Exactly so," Aibghalien said, who had yet to realize his implicit acceptance of her offer hadn't communicated. "The circle itself is almost entirely undefined by visible boundaries, save perhaps some introduced due to its nature. I expect the theory, on initial creation of the spell, was to enable it to be used as a trap or otherwise surprising form of transport. In addition, the spell is entirely contained within the magics of the circle; nothing distinguishes the point it communicates its contents, save the fact that said point is the designated point to which the circle transports."

After several months, Kang was used to seeing some strange things in the City, and on the ship as a whole; however, the sight of a giant fireball required an inquiry. He quickened his pace, knowing that Kaylee wouldn't mind staying in the tavern for a few extra minutes, and headed for the detonation site.

"...what in the Abyss caused that?"

The nearest probable cause of the detonation was, of course, the pleased-looking wizard, who even now was eyeing a veritable stack of tables of various styles and sizes. "I should probably set up the circle first," he muttered to himself. "But for that I need the platform properly in place..."

...the elf wizard. Of course. Kang shouldn't have been surprised.

"So that was on purpose, then?" he asked, arms crossed over his chest. "It would have been a good idea to warn people what you were planning on doing before you did it. They tend to notice explosions of that magnitude."

"Mmm?" He looked up from his musings over tables, only to spot the reasonably friendly scaled fellow who'd helped him on his first arrival here. To him, Aibghalien offered a bow. "I do apologize. I became overly involved in my work and forgot I was not at home, where my wizardry is more common and less surprising to the people nearby. I did send out an all-is-well message over the comms... though after the fact, I know." He did sound sincerely rueful.

"I will try to mind myself better in the future."

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GIANT EXPLOSION [Open]

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