Millennial Mage

Tala and Rane walked down the spiral side by side, weaving their way through slower foot-traffic or those traveling the other way.

They could have asked Terry for a ride, but they weren’t really in a hurry. This was meant to be a mental break, and a celebration of Rane’s soul-bond to Force.

As they walked down the spiral, they talked about small things, only occasionally falling back on talking about magic and combat, and Tala occasionally flicked out bits of jerky. I’ll need to get more of this, sometime soon.

After nearly a full circuit of the city, they passed one of the large shafts that Tala had occasionally seen. This time, a woman was standing next to it, and the entire shaft glowed incredibly oddly to Tala’s vision.

Gravity. I’m seeing the manipulation of gravity, there! “Excuse me, Mistress?”

The woman tsked. “I’ve no time for tourists. Please move along.” She didn’t turn, dismissing them out of hand.

Tala cleared her throat.

The woman turned, rolling her eyes, but stopped when she saw them. “Ahh, Mistress, Master, feathery…creature. I apologize, I have my work interrupted all too often by the…curious. What can I do for you?”

Tala grinned at her. “I’m Tala. I’m curious what you’re doing.” She winked, then continued. “I dabble in gravity Magic a bit, myself.”

At first, the woman looked a bit irritated, but she brightened when Tala explained further. “Ahh, Mistress Tala, good to meet you. It is always fascinating to discuss magics with a fellow practitioner. I’m Haiba.”

“Good to meet you, Mistress Haiba. So, I’m an Immaterial Guide.”

“Immaterial Creator.”

“I see.” Tala actually did. “So, what is your foundational understanding?”

Haiba snorted a laugh. “Ahh, I haven’t heard that question since the Academy.” Her voice got much deeper, in an obvious imitation of someone she’d known. “Rock is hard and heavy.” Her voice went higher. “Wind moves around and within us all.” Her tone became flippant. “I don’t know… light is bright, I guess?” She giggled, her voice returning to normal. “Gravity accelerates all, equally.”

Solid for area of effects.

“You?”

“All mass attracts all mass.”

Haiba frowned. “Huh… I don’t mean to…question your foundation, but no? It takes stellar-scale mass to create gravity fields.”

Tala grinned. “It takes that much mass to create noticeable gravity fields. Magic aside.”

Haiba waved her hand. “Magic aside, of course.” After a moment’s thought she shrugged. “Is this some Guide-nonsense, like: The air always has dust, which is just very small rocks? No offense intended.”

Tala sighed. Typical Creator thinking, if it’s too small for me to notice, it doesn’t matter. “Sure, something like that.”

“Ahh, okay. Neat.” She turned back to the shaft. “One moment.” A large cylinder shot up through the altered gravity, and Haiba watched it closely as it passed, muttering to herself. “Good stability and acceleration.”

Rane was gaping. “Wait. You can make gravity go up?”

Haiba gave him an odd look. “Of course.”

Rane turned to Tala. “You can make gravity go up?”

“Of course not, gravity isn’t a repulsive force.” After a moment’s consideration, Tala shrugged. “I could increase gravity of the object towards the top of the shaft. That would do effectively the same thing.”

“That’s ridiculous, gravity is an area of affect, it affects all things equally.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. Though, your own actions prove that wrong. Gravity is affecting that shaft differently.”

Haiba shook her head. “Magic excepted.”

“Well then obviously gravity affects all things equally, but we were discussing the application of magic.”

She opened her mouth then closed it, considering. After a moment, she shook her head again. “True enough, but even so.”

Rane was looking back and forth, a question clear in his mind. Finally, he addressed Haiba. “So, you must be an incredibly effective warrior. Simply reverse gravity and throw your opponents into space.”

Haiba laughed far more than the comment deserved and patted Rane on the shoulder. “Oh, no. I can’t make an altered gravity field that reaches space. Rust, I doubt anyone could. I can reverse gravity in a ten-foot by thirty-foot column, though.” She said the last with obvious pride. “That’s why I’m head of gravitational transport…” She hesitated. “Well, one of the divisions.”

Rane frowned. “So, you could throw an enemy sixty feet up?”

“If I had to, yeah. It’s pretty power intensive, though. I can only do it a few times a day, and the inscriptions are expensive. More so if I use more than the standard force of gravity to do so, but that would get a higher throw.”

Tala was trying to hide her smile. Exactly why I didn’t pursue that sort of foolishness.

“Wait…” Haiba turned to regard Tala with a quizzical look. “When did you graduate?”

“Not too long ago.”

A light of understanding entered the woman’s eyes, and she gasped. “I remember you!”

Tala frowned. I don’t know who this is.

“I graduated,” she glanced towards Rane, then back to Tala, “more than five years ago. There was a new student, making all sorts of fuss about gravity and how the teachers were silly for how they were teaching it. They asked me to talk to her, to you!”

Tala slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember that at all.”

Haiba laughed. “Of course you don’t! You refused to meet with me.” She grinned. “As soon as you were told that I was a Creator, you said I had nothing to teach you.”

Oh… That’s probably right… “Oh, sorry about that.”

She waved Tala off. “It’s fine. We clearly have utterly different foundational understandings. How’d yours work out?”

Tala shrugged. “Pretty well.”

Rane grinned. “She can crush one massive enemy in the middle of a horde of allies.”

“Crush?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen massive opponents just go splat.” He clapped his hands together.

“There’s no way. To ramp up the gravitational field that much would take a ridiculous amount of power. What, do you increase gravity…” she seemed to be grasping at what she wanted to say, “six times?” She said it like a joke, even chuckling a bit.

Rane was giving Tala an odd look.

Tala gave a small smile. “Something like that.”

“Incredible. You must have an incredibly high magical density to do that even a couple times a day.”

Rane opened his mouth, but Tala gave him a quick look, which Haiba didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, I need to watch for the next shipments, and keep them from wobbling. We do our best to balance the loads, but center-mass is never exactly in the same place.” She gave a half bow to each of them. “Thank you for stopping, and for the chat. It’s been interesting.”

Tala returned the half-bow. “Good to meet you. Take care.”

As they walked away, Rane leaned close. “Why didn’t you correct her?”

“It’s the same argument I’ve had a thousand times. Most gravity mages stop at: Gravity accelerates things equally, regardless of mass. Or some derivation of that.”

“That’s true.”

“It is, but it’s also a bit simplistic.” Tala laughed. “Though, I’m sure my understanding is far from perfect. It works for me, though.”

“Seems like their understanding has its uses.”

“You’d be surprised how few creatures will die from a sixty-foot fall. Gravity, as they use it, isn’t combat capable, except as support magic.”

“Why?”

“Power consumption. Even in the best case, they have to undo their working after they’re done, else they’d throw off the planet, or slowly fill up the world with wonky gravity fields.”

“Ahh, yeah, that would be bad.”

“Just a bit.”

“And you don’t do that?”

“Nope. I attach my alteration to the identity of the target. I’m basically writing an exception to the universal laws, pointed at that one thing. Doesn’t change anything else, and once that thing is gone the exception has nothing to point to, so it ceases to exist. Nothing left to clean up.”

“That’s clean.” He gave her a small smile.

“Exactly.”

“So… how did you come to your understanding?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… your teachers disagreed with you.”

“In a sense, but not really?”

“Alright, you have to explain that.”

“Well,” she wrinkled her nose, thinking for a moment, “let me give an example: What’s the most important part of a sword?”

Rane frowned. “Well, it’s the blade that makes it a sword. Replace that with something else, and it’s a knife, or mace, or hammer.”

“That is a good point. I think it’s the handle, because without the handle, it’s just a blade, and you can’t use it at all. At least with the other options you mentioned, there is still utility.”

He opened his mouth to argue, then stopped. “I see. The argument isn’t between two wrong points of view. It’s between incomplete points of view.”

“Precisely.”

“So, why not complete your perspective?”

“Two reasons. First, incomplete perspectives allow things that better understanding would not. Power fills in the gaps.”

“Example?”

“Mistress Haiba, if she added my understanding to hers, she wouldn’t be able to reverse gravity.”

“Alright, so what about yours?”

Tala gave him a slightly embarrassed look. “I just don’t understand gravity as a field. It makes no sense to me.”

“What do you mean?”

She nodded. “If I told you that two feet in front of me there was a three-foot sphere of increased gravity what would that mean?”

“That if I put something into it, it would fall faster?”

“Precisely, but that’s gravity acting on a mass, not the field itself.”

Rane frowned, then slowly nodded. “Like some kinetic Mages can ‘throw force.’ ”

“Throw…force? How would that even… what?”

He laughed. “I know, right? Force is a force! It’s not a thing that can be made into a wall, or thrown at something…” He scratched above his ear, frowning. “It’s frustrating, because I would love to be able to do that, and in a sense, it is correct, but it just makes no sense to me.”

“Yeah, I think that’s a good comparison.” She smiled at him. “Different interpretations are better for different styles and use cases. And we are each hampered by what we are capable of understanding.”

“That makes sense.” He smiled in return, and they fell back into a companionable silence.

As they walked, Tala was thinking through the conversations, checking what she’d said and heard, to see if she’d said anything that she didn’t agree with, or missed something important. As she did so, one of the things that Rane had said in their conversation with Haiba was tickling the back of her mind. I can crush my enemies. I even have an amazing mental construct for it. “I’m an idiot.”

“What now?” Rane frowned her way as they continued walking down the spiral.

“I already have a perfectly serviceable mental construct for nearly instantly quadrupling an object’s effective gravity.” She pulled out a copper coin.

She put her left middle finger to her thumb, locked onto the coin and invoked her gravity manipulation. Increase.

This time, however, she used her mental construct for Crush.

She felt the need for power and connected a few large void-channels to the working.

The coin instantly quadrupled in gravity, then again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

She released the working, then, holding a copper ounce that weighed more than five and half pounds. It had taken less than five seconds.

She laughed. “It worked!”

“What worked? You pulled out a copper coin, then started laughing…”

“I made it heavier much, much more quickly.”

Rane was frowning. “Isn’t it illegal to increase the weight of currency?”

Oh…he’s right. “Fine, I’ll put it back, but this is huge Rane. I can use my Crush almost at will, now.” She looked internally at her inscriptions and almost stumbled. Well, rust. She’d used up a good chunk of her remaining spell-lines’ material in that invocation.

Right… fast takes more power and material.

Tala groaned. “Well, at least I know it works.”

“What?” He had a concerned tilt to his head.

She sighed. “That took much more of my inscriptions than I realized it would.” She was already reducing the coins weight once again, the slow way this time. It took just more than thirty seconds to return effective gravity to normal on the coin.

“How much faster was it?”

Tala thought, doing calculations on how her normal method of increase would have worked. “Five seconds vs almost forty.”

Rane grunted. “That’s a big difference.”

“Yeah, but still not something I want to use casually.” Some of her joy came back. “But it does do exactly what my ‘Crush’ did.”

“Hey! That’s great. You had a non-destructive alternative too, right?”

“Yeah, ‘Restrain.’ ”

“Does it replace that?”

“No, it won’t directly, but that’s ok.”

Rane glanced her way, cocking an eyebrow.

She smiled back and shrugged. “‘Restrain’ stole my opponents’ momentum, and then calculated exactly what level of gravity was required to put them in a stable orbit, just above the ground.”

“Ah, yeah, that’s quite a bit more complicated.”

“Just a bit, yeah.” She shrugged again. “But I haven’t used it in a good long time, and these days I feel like anything I need to use less than lethal force on, quickly, isn’t really an immediate threat.”

Rane grunted. “That’s true enough.” He quirked a smile. “You can still just reduce their gravity, right?”

“I can, yeah. I can probably even use a portion of the mental construct from ‘Reduce’ to do it quickly, if necessary, but it will be a slagging inefficient thing as it is.”

“Worth meditating on?”

Tala snorted a chuckle. “I’ll add it to the list.”

Rane nodded in understanding. “You’re spread pretty thin, right now.”

She sighed, her shoulders dropping just a bit. “Yeah. I feel like I’m scrambling from one important thing to another.”

He seemed to contemplate for a long moment as they continued their leisurely stroll downward. Finally, he nodded. “Something Master Grediv would say seems to apply here.”

Tala straightened, speaking in a faux serious tone. “Please, Master Rane, share with me the wisdom of Archons.”

Rane grinned back at her. “If you insist, Mistress Tala.” He gave a slight bow of his head. “Things can be urgent, important, both, or neither. Does that make sense?”

“I think I understand the difference. Urgent needs to be handled right away. Important just needs to be handled.” She frowned. “So… how could something be urgent, but not important?”

He nodded. “Good question. If you ordered food, and it is ready to be picked up, that is urgent, but not important.”

“Speak for yourself.”

He laughed. “No, really. If you don’t pick it up, you might have to buy other food, but it isn’t the same as breathing, and no one will die.”

She bit the side of her lip in thought, then nodded. “Ok, I can understand that. So, what are you driving at?”

“That which is urgent and important, do first. If it is important, but not urgent: plan for. If it is neither, don’t do it. If it is urgent but not important, find someone else to do it.”

“Wouldn’t finding someone else take more time?”

Rane shrugged. “Many Archons, as well as many older Mages, hire at least one assistant, and that is who they have do the urgent, but not important, things.” He waved a hand, dismissively though. “But that isn’t the point. You have a massive spread of things that you are working on. Which are both urgent and important? What should you be focusing on, right now?”

Tala had an instant response. “Fusing.”

“Perfect. Can you fuse constantly?”

“No.”

“So, what do you need to do when not fusing?”

“I…don’t know… Improve my abilities in martial fighting? Expand my spell-form utility and efficiency? Grow Kit’s capacity? Figure out what else I want to do to Kit? I think it’s time for me to bind my elk-leathers, but I just haven’t had time. And-”

Rane placed a hand on her shoulder, halting her.

She stopped speaking immediately, taking a deep breath. Thankfully, they were off to one side of the walking path, so they wouldn’t really be an obstacle to traffic.

Tala hadn’t realized that the speed of her speaking had been increasing as she continued listing out what she had to do. She let out her breath in a long, slow exhale.

“Are you alright?”

She looked towards her feet, nodding and breathing deeply. Eventually, she looked up and smiled. “I think I’m avoiding thinking about all I have to do.”

Rane nodded, giving her an encouraging smile. “So, you can’t fuse all the time.”

“That’s right.” She tilted her head slightly, wondering where he was going with a return to the topic.

“Why?”

She blinked at him a few times. “It’s mentally exhausting. It strains my magical control and takes a lot out of me.” She knew her tone was defensive.

He was nodding. “Alright. So, since fusing is your highest priority, when you aren’t fusing, what can we do to recharge your mind and let your magical control rest?”

Tala turned and started walking again without comment. Why didn’t I think of that?

That was hardly relevant. What can I do?

Exactly what Rane had been encouraging: Plays, walks, eating outside the training room. She gave Rane a searching look, but he continued to walk beside her quietly, giving her time to process.

Terry was utterly unaffected by their conversation.

“Relaxing.” She went with the short answer.

“Alright. How can we help you relax?”

She gestured vaguely in front of them. “Food, plays.” She swept a hand through her hair. “Sparring? Is that odd?”

“Not at all. Physical exertion can help with mental strain, and food is needed for anything and everything, more so for you, and stories about others help us to disconnect from our own lives, our own problems, and return to them with fresh eyes and the energy required to do what’s needed.” He quirked a smile.

“So, keep doing what I’ve been doing?”

“Maybe, but if you do, do so because you know it is the best course you can take, not just because it’s the only thing you can think to do.”

She thought about that as they continued walking, and Rane gave her the space to process in silence.