Nobody's Got No Class

[Hadrian]

"Worlds," he assured the man of glass. The tip of his finger began to glow blue, Water being his most basic element. He began to sketch out a circle in the air before them, his finger trailing res. It was such a simple thing now, to create a portal to Swalden. He had done it many times, but knew he would do it many times again before he felt comfortable Summoning something more intelligent or dangerous than a memosite. "They are all different. Some like ours, some most definitely not." He continued to create the circles within circles, the lines bisecting, as he spoke. "Some have human colonies that have changed over the centuries to something not quite the same as we are. Others were supposedly colonized by Alahea or Suva, and perhaps contact continues... I have never been, but I have seen. And what I have not seen, well, I have memories that aren't my own." The last was sixteen small circles around the inner barrier, and in each he placed a number: 8492841047291777. He paused to survey his work, glad they were alone out here. "I can show you wonders," he said, turning his attention on the man with whom he felt more kinship than any of the people inside. "Do you have a knife or a shard of glass?"

[Montaine]

He had watched in a morbid fascination, a combination of horror and awe, as the scholar traced his circles and numerals as though it were the most natural thing in the world. He almost told him to stop, to cease whatever magic he was doing and save it for a laboratory. Had the man no sense? Monty managed to snatch his gaze away from the remarkable scene long enough to swiftly check behind him, feeling a deep paranoia that someone, the hostess or another party guest, might walk out and catch them at any moment. The glowing map was one thing, but it was a parlour trick in comparison to whatever it was the man was doing now. He felt his lungs begin to rasp, the anxious anticipation getting to him. He almost wanted him to stop, almost. This was adventure, this was excitement, this was exploration of the unknown in a sense. He had spent years hearing wild stories of distant lands from the sailor and had nothing but glassworking tales to share in return but this, this, would be worth regaling him about. He shoved his hand into his pocket and felt his fingers curl around the handle of his knife. It was just an old eating knife. It wasn’t in any great knick but only an idiot went walking around a port at night without any form of protection. Not that he knew how to actually use it should it be necessary. He pulled it out and gingerly offered it, ‘You’re not going to summon some crazed monster what’s goin’ to destroy the city, are you? S’just that might make it a bit of a bugger to get business done,’

[Hadrian]

"Perhaps," he said, amused, as he took the knife. "Thank you." It was strange how he clammed up about his abilities around most people, but then he would encounter someone he wanted to express a thing to and would be much more public with his abilities. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the sharp point of the knife, just until it pierced the skin and a bead of blood welled up, black in the vespertine dim. No blood remained upon the blade, though, some minuscule effect of his reimancy pulling the liquid away, perhaps. He handed the knife back hilt first, and then pressed his blooded thumb into the blue glow of his summoning sigil. Immediately the crimson color hidden by the night infused the res, turning it incarnadine. As the red reached around both arcs to meet upon the other end of the circle, the air within began to shimmer like a heat wave, then turned into a silvery surface like a liquid mirror. After a moment's concentration, it began to reflect some far off spacescape rather than Montaine's face. It was a giant planet ringed in a glittering smudge. They watched for a few moments, probably longer than the glass man realized in his surprise, until the image wavered as though a rock had been dropped into a still pond. A rock had; the memosite glowed, its existence there bounded by Hadrian's power and his blood. "This," he said quietly, "is a Memosite, supposedly created by Qalaya and Semele. It has limited telepathic ability. You can ask it to share specific memories, but it will want you to share your memories in return."

[Montaine]

He had to keep reminding himself that this man was an expert; he knew what he was doing, probably. Magic was dangerous and terrifying to the uninitiated, but Montaine liked to think of himself as at least somewhat progressive. Like with the garrulous gadgeteer’s golems, they were only dangerous in the wrong hands, they only looked dangerous to those who did not understand. But to those in the know it was simple, it was everyday business and nothing at all to worry about. Animation wasn’t as scary as people made it out to be. Perhaps whatever crazed blood ritual had summoned up this portal wasn’t as horrifying as it appeared at first glance. ‘Memosite? Memories?’ he said, cocking his head and leaning in a little closer, ‘What’s it for? How does it work?’ The glassworker’s only prior exposure to memory sharing had been with the doctor’s doppelgänger, Nira’lia, when she had taken some of his memories for her own. He hadn’t even been aware it was happening until she had confessed after the fact. Perhaps it was much the same; perhaps he was sharing memories now, without even realising it. He didn’t like it. Nira’lia had insisted it was an accident but still the violation of one’s most private memories without consent was a grotesque prospect. ‘How does it work?’ he said again. He had to know if his most personal secrets were somehow being transmitted into this rock, to be sent off to some far off world for star colonists to discover and laugh over, or for djed scholars to summon up and see. It was a ghastly thought.

[Hadrian]

"I can't say that I understand the process entirely," he admitted, "but you think at them, imagine pushing your thoughts into them, and then remaining quiet to hear their response. They don't speak, exactly, but when you make your request known, they will reply with memories, and then you'll feel their want, and can send memories to them much the same as you do your other thoughts. I haven't had a problem with them rummaging around in my mind; it seems to be a gentle, consensual exchange." Things could always go wrong, of course. These were god-crafted things orbiting another world, after all. "As you can see through the portal, they are innumerable. They share the memories between them, I think, like a hive mind. If you do not wish to communicate with it, you needn't. Just give the word and I will send it back."

[Montaine]

‘No, no! I-’ his eyes flashed wide for fear that the scholar would shut the portal before he had a chance to experience the wonders it purportedly possessed, ‘Please, I want to try this, I want-’ These were things from other worlds. He peered down into the portal. An alien sight lay beyond the doorway and Montaine briefly wondered just what might happen if he were to fall through. Would he carry on falling, all the way down and down and down into that blackness, or hit that great big world? He almost couldn’t grasp quite what he was seeing. Hadrian had said that these places lay hidden amongst the stars, but how could something so giant, so huge, so incomprehensibly enormous conceal itself between those tiny points of light in the sky? He looked up at the blackness overhead, and then back down at the blackness beneath. Syna and Leth’s great orbs were far further than they seemed, he knew that. They were high up in the sky, popping at from the horizon as the time of day that was their particular sphere began, and dropping back down below when it came time for it. They were higher than the clouds, because the clouds would always pass over them, yet never the other way around. The stars were even further out, for not just the clouds, but the sun and moon themselves could block out the starlight. He knew that they were far away, but never did he consider they could be so distant as to appear minute yet remain large enough to possess such vast worlds as these amongst their lights. He could no conceive of so large a universe, the scale was too big for him to understand, to great for him to comprehend. No one could ever see the world, the whole world, all the worlds; no one would ever live long enough to explore even the smallest fraction. But he had an opportunity now to see just that little bit more than the average man. Hadrian had said to think at them, to make the request. I want to see worlds. It was a shock, to say the least. The glassworker had not been prepared for the peculiar feeling of receiving someone else’s memories. He hadn’t known quite what to expect, but had imagine something akin to a vision, or a hallucination, to see the memory as though he were there. It wasn’t like that at all. The memory was splintered, and old, very old. It didn’t come as a vision, there weren’t a dozen sounds and smells and sights, it wasn’t a perfect image in his mind, but rather more subtle. In hindsight he should have expected it to occur as such. It was a memory shared, after all, and the feeling was very much like he was remembering the place instead. Vague images and fractured noises. A world of war, and fierce peoples. Angry, and with boiling blood, and barbaric faces, fearsome and fearless and destructive, wild unlike any people Montaine had ever seen, ever heard of. A word. Diverse. Monty gasped and opened his eyes. He hadn’t even remembered closing them. ‘What was that? What did I see?’ he looked to the djed scholar, ‘How does it do that?’

[Hadrian]

Hadrian was quiet while Montaine attempted to commune with the Memosite. He recognized that point where his consciousness and such consciousness as a single memory stone held began to blur. He had seen it in others, assumed the look was the same for himself. But when the eyes opened and questions poured forth, he could only shrug his shoulders. "I cannot read your mind, friend Montaine," he admitted. "If you wish to describe it, I will attempt to help you decipher its meaning. And I'm not sure of the mechanics of it... They say that Leth's gnosis grants the ability to speak mind-to-mind, but these things don't exactly have a mind in the same sense. I would like to study them up close, actually, to understand better how their mind, in whatever form it takes, works... But I don't know how I would get back." He laughed a little at that, but it would make for an interesting study for future Animation. "Or there are other djed-based bonds that supposedly link minds. Thoughts are just patterns of djed after all."

[Montaine]

The glassworker stared at the hovering rock in awe. This thing, this object, this strange and wondrous piece of celestial dust that hung in the air, patiently waiting, was unlike anything he knew of, anything he could have conceived of before that night. How rare was the knowledge that such things existed? How widespread was the ignorance of the everyday man and woman? There was an immense distrust of such magical practices and yet the potential of even those few of which he had some meagre knowledge was boundless. How many other bizarre and impossible and brilliant things were there out there that he knew nothing about? These rocks, these memosites, couldn’t be the one magical secret of which the general public had little to no awareness. The scholars and the academics studied away in their university halls, the sailors and the craftsmen and the beggars and the whores busied themselves with their lives down in the city and the two worlds were kept separate by distrust and fear and everyone seemed happy with that arrangement. But if those two worlds could come together, if these mysterious arts, these arcane sciences, could be put to use to better the city, to better the world, would it not be a waste not to do so? Something that the djed scholar had said was tugging at his mind. Not the explanation of gnoses or the djedic nature of thoughts, but something else. ‘You’d just need two of you, wouldn’t you?’ Monty said, looking back at Hadrian, ‘Not lit’rally, o’ course, but I mean, if you had two magickers- uh, mages, couldn’t you have the other make one of these swirlymajigs an’ bring you back?’

OOCSorry for the lateness of this reply, my nose is a tap right now.

[Hadrian]

"Theoretically," he agreed, inordinately pleased that Montaine was following all this so easily. "But, ah... a person could not survive where the Memosites lie, not without mastering several of the arcane arts, from what I understand, and then one would have to be a masterful astronomer, to figure out the coordinates of Mizahar from whichever world they inhabited. Much of the calculation is dependent upon where the summoner stands, and I have never spoken to a summoner who had opened a portal from another world to this one. That isn't to say it isn't possible, but merely... well, beyond my modest abilities." But this had his mind thinking, and he wondered if a Fyrdenese familiar might be clever enough to manage such a thing, certainly if it could also manage a summoning circle and the proper mathematical calculations. Summoning was a complex science that most learned by rote rather than figuring from the ground up, which was why Hadrian himself had only bothered with Swalden until now, except for that little bit of magical terrorism aimed at the Ebonstryfe that involved glassbeaks from Shoyden... but that was another story. "In the end, if one is wise and powerful, I think all manner of things are possible. Djed is the Nader-canoch word for backbone, and the energy makes up everything that we know, from matter to energy to things unseen. But I am not very wise and only moderately powerful." He smiled a little as if that would be reassuring.

[Montaine]

Montaine’s eyes wandered back to the rock floating over the shimmering portal and muttered, ‘Mod’rately,’ If this was only moderately powerful, and surely the scholar would be aware of just what level of magical aptitude might qualify one as moderately or more so, then what of those who were by Hadrian’s estimation legitimately powerful, supremely powerful. This man could make portals to other worlds and yet that was only moderate. This man could do things that, to the uninitiated, seemed like the work of the gods, yet he described them as moderate? The glassworker didn’t take his eyes off of the memosite, ‘Don’ have to be old to be wise, met enough stupid gaffers an’ knowin’ nippers to know that much. S’ppose it really comes down to what you’d do with the power if’n you had it. Would you help people? If’n I had the talent, or the skill, or the patience to learn what you’re learnin’, I wouldn’t be summonin’ rocks, as impressive as it is, I’d be summonin’ food. People starve in Zeltiva ev’ry day. Ain’t there somethin’ you c’n do about that?’ he frowned, ‘Nah, s’ppose not. You seem alrigh’, for someone I met at a nob’s party. If’n it were possible, I’m sure you’d have done it already, right?’ Monty sighed, ‘Tell us then, how do I complete the transfer, what do I do, jus’ remember at it?’ That seemed to be the logical answer, given the nature of the object, but the act of actively remembering at something seemed so bizarre, so alien, he’d rather have confirmation before he tried anything. The idea of sharing memories didn’t seem nearly so malign as it did when the scholar first introduced him to the rocks.