Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.
Some sort of porcelain mannequin stands about a foot to his left. A scattering of similar automatons sit or stand around the room, in postures that suggest contemplation. It would probably be a lot easier to tell what emotions they were experiencing if they had any facial features to read: as it is, they're only barely differentiatable from statues.
"Hello, summoner," he says to the summoner in her peculiar creole. "What can I do for you?"
He munches his sandwich.
"Well, you could start by explaining why you suddenly appeared just as I was about to start doing a delicate thaumatological process. I think you're the first thing that's taken me legitimately off-guard in about a decade."
She gestures to her automatons, and a pair take up positions to each side of her, each a full head taller than herself. This is more due to her being short than them being particularly tall: at a rough guess, she's perhaps twelve years old?
"The circle is necessarily bloody - what, do you think I enjoy getting this stuff on my hands? - and is not intended for summoning anything. I wasn't aware that summoning demons was even possible. Is this the part where you rip out my soul and turn me into a slavering were-beast?" She raises an eyebrow.
"Not my style. Usually this is the part where you want some medium-sized material good and offer me a list of your favorite authors as payment. This is clearly not usually. Unless you've been living under one hell of a rock which has had a few centuries to generate languages I've never heard of among other peculiarities."
"Well, there's another one the Victorian priesthood got wrong, then. Hello, mysterious demon. My name is Isabella Katarina Markova, but you can address me as the Lady Markova - or Isabella, since I highly doubt you count as one of my subjects. This - " she waves vaguely at the surrounding walls " - is my castle. Now that the introductions are done: What sort of books do you like to read, what material goods are on offer, and are there any other issues I should know about?"
"Now hang on a minute, can I get more detail on where I am than 'your castle'? Not that it isn't nice, or anything, but the last time I was summoned it was to a world where this language we're speaking did not exist - at least not as anybody's native tongue - and also everybody knows you can summon demons in lieu of shopping if you want."
"That would be rather unsettling. However, the question of our current location is somewhat of a difficult one to answer. Perhaps I should just start listing nations and other locations I know. Grand Victoria, Mori, Lupinia, Oceania, Ulvenwald? Are any of these familiar to you?"
"I'm most familiar with Grand Victoria. I was born there about seventy or eighty years ago, now, but I've kept up with the times, more or less. Grand Victoria is a mercantile empire, with colonies in the south and west. They used to have a major colony in Ulvenwald as well, but it attempted a revolution and collapsed. The state religion is Taifide, the veneration of the sun and the Empress Hikari Gloriana's line as its mortal agents here on earth, in addition to standards of proper ettiquette and behaviour. There's also a smattering of folk religions, which are generally looked-down-upon but not exactly heresy. Victorian manufacturing is the best known in the world, being the only country with truly interchangeable parts: they are especially known for their airships, which are exceedingly fast and long-range compared to any of their competitors."
She spreads her hands. "Should I go on, or would you prefer I gave you some books from my library?"
A moment later, Isabella returns, bearing a small sheaf of cards in neat handwriting.
"Please, be careful not to damage these: I wrote them myself."
She offers them to the demon, then looks at the chair.
"... What material is that chair made of, exactly? It seems organic, but at the same time not. It's almost like someone took 'essence of chair' and made it a thing, that's how subsumed the material is to the design. Does it even have fasteners in it?"
"I don't actually know much about the manufacturing process, because why would I, a demon, bother to learn about a manufacturing process? It can be just about arbitrarily flexible depending on the kind." He makes a small square of plastic wrap and folds it in half a few times.
"It's almost like a fabric at this thinness. How fascinating."
Then she suddenly straightens from her lean inwards, the movement almost a start.
"One moment, I've just realized I'm being a terrible hostess. Would you care to have some tea and a better-appointed room? This is intended as a ritual space, so I keep it quite bare: one of my parlors or sitting-rooms would likely be much more comfortable."
She smiles, then opens the brass-hinged door again, revealing a distinctly different room from the last time she did so: rather than stone hallway, the room behind the door is a small parlor with a hearth and a pair of tables, one of which is set up with a small set of stone game pieces on a checkered board.
The other, larger table sits in a wide alcove, lacquered wood reflecting the faint glow of the moon through the three large picture windows. An observant person might notice that they can see the moon three times, once through each of the windows: indeed, each of the glass panes opens onto an entirely different landscape.
Isabella pulls out a chair for her guest. "Please, sit, and if you want tea I'll be happy to fetch it."
"Sure, I'll try some local tea," he says, following her and sitting in the chair offered. It's not designed for his wings, but he manages. He does indeed look out the window. "Are those screens? No, probably more magic, isn't it, you haven't invented plastic and probably don't have monitors."
She sighs.
"Oh well."
Making a small hand-sign to one of the dolls that followed her in - tea - she settles into her chair, her eyes lingering on her servant just long enough for it to affirm her request.
"While we're waiting for tea, did you have any other questions you would like to ask?"
"Do those dolls take orders from everyone or just you?" he asks. "What manner of aristocracy supplies you with your title and castle? Are there any significant social problems that could be solved with the application of a large quantity of nonmagical material goods?"
Isabella settles into her chair with a small smile.
"Which should I elaborate on first?"
"...Regarding assassination attempts, it is possible - but I cannot guarantee it, since I don't know how I got into an unprecedented other world in the first place - that if and when you die you will become a demon, angel, or fairy. That's what happens to summoners who die back home."
"What exactly does being a demon, angel, or fairy mean, exactly? Apparently if I become a demon I can conjure things out of nowhere, but I wouldn't expect it to require a... species name? ... unless there was some other major difference. The wings and tail are definitely at least part of it, but I would rather not assume."
"The three species are collectively called 'daeva'. You wouldn't start out with wings, let alone a tail, you'd have to make those yourself - or if you were a fairy you'd have to take a sort of potion thing they have in Fairyland if you wanted a set, but that'd be optional. Fairies are telekinetic, angels change existing matter. Daeva are also indestructible, though I'm not sure I'd bet on that against magical harm, there just isn't any on offer at home."
"That sounds very inconvenient. If it turns out that summonings and dismissals from here work the same as those from the usual destination, an angel may be able to help you with that, although it'd be tremendously complicated and delicate. If it doesn't work the same, I might be stuck here forever, or you might not be able to get anyone else, or - something else may be in effect, I don't know."
She shrugs.
"In any case, I'm glad to hear that I now have a decent alternative to going insane in another century or so."
She lets out a small breath.
"Alright. As far as this castle can be said to have a real location, it exists in Shadescast, which is a vampire city. I am a vampire. Vampires are hated almost everywhere else in the world, for good reasons: the vast majority of vampire culture sees humans as little more than slaves, chattel, and food. This is a result of a bad power structure, which has been further corrupted by horrible and or insane people in power. Vampires need to feed on blood from humans every month or so on average, requiring no other sustenance: animal blood doesn't work, it has to be blood from a thinking organism. Side-effects of chronic or acute exposure to vampire feeding include short or long-term memory loss, fugue states, and catatonia. Given vampire attitudes towards humans, few of them are careful."
She smiles, showing her fangs now.
"Would you care to try the experiment?"
"Maybe. One sec." He makes a black stick-shaped device, and without appearing to manipulate it in any way, sets it up to reflect the immediate surroundings. "Marker," he says to it. "Recording a test of offering this vampire here half a cup of blood designed to be from the hypothetical offspring of, oh, let's say C.S. Lewis and Joan of Arc, I think I can be tolerably sure they have never actually reproduced." He looks at Isabella. "How do you take it? Teacup? Straw? Aerosol?"
"Yep, it's blood, but it's from a person who doesn't exist. They could've, but do not. Okay, I'll try some of what would have been mine back when I ran on biology." He makes another, matching teacup, puts a dram of blood in that one too, and offers it, crossing his fingers.
"Perhaps it's somehow related to the fact that if you feed off someone until they go catatonic, you stop being able to draw sustenance from them, even if they still have blood left. I haven't done this experiment myself for obvious reasons, but I have confirmation from multiple vaguely trustworthy sources."
"Okay, I'm out of ideas for categories of demonically created blood. I guess I could do angel or fairy but I can't think of a principled reason for them to be different from demon blood." Cam picks up his device again. The reflection of their surroundings winks out. A few lines of text in a language Isabella won't recognize appear in its place, and then they too disappear.
"Would you prefer for me to starve to death, or to have to concentrate my feedings such that they would permanently harm those I fed upon? I have to maintain a certain number of servants in order to limit exposure, and those who would willingly be fed upon out of the goodness of their hearts are few and far between. The current arrangement is not ideal, but it is acceptable to all parties."
"If I go outdoors on a bright, sunny day, I spontaneously catch on fire wherever the light touches me, regardless of how many layers of clothing I'm wearing. If I go out on an overcast day or towards twilight, that can be safe, but if have to watch the sky carefully and keep a tight hold on my parasol."
"Light has many parts. For example, the reason plants are green is because they eat all of the parts of sunlight that are not green, and the green part bounces off so you can see it. One of the most salient things that sunshine has that other kinds of light usually don't is an ultraviolet part."
There is a distinct lack of ignition.
She sits back in her chair, takes a sip of her tea, and sighs.
"Well, it would appear we have another discarded hypothesis."
She taps her fingers on the table.
"While we're discussing my local magic, I should let you know that conjurors have been known to exist in my world on occasion, every few centuries or so. Even the specialized ones tend to have wars fought over them. I would reccommend keeping your ability to create whatever you want secret, though the wings and tail already rather preclude normal social contact."
"Incidentally, how does this device function? Is it magical or technological? It doesn't seem to do anything when I press the button: how are you certain that it's working correctly?"
She turns the penlight over in her fingers, examining its plastic casing more closely.
"It appears that you have access to technology beyond my own. Would you object to producing a few more technological artifacts that you would consider 'common' in your own world?"
"This runs on electricity? I've always thought of electricians as purveyors of amusing tricks, more akin to stage magicians than scientists. I did hear that there was recently a demonstration of a brilliantly white arc-lamp in one of the new Moric universities, but I had put it down to propaganda."
"Electricity has been known in some form or another since before I was born, but we've only known that electricity was lightning for about the last thirty. I remember the headlines. While I'm aware of sparks being created by electricity, I would be tremendously surprised if someone had actually managed to generate and contain enough charge to maintain a continuous arc. I take it your world managed to overcome that problem?"
Lioncourt raises an eyebrow. "Nonetheless, quite remarkable. What exactly is electricity capable of in your world, beyond producing light? If you were able to produce sufficient quantities of charge, then you might actually be able to put electric force to useful work."
"Yep. Unfortunately your local languages have never been programmed into a translator, so this isn't immediately useful to you - like, they resemble some Earth languages but not to the point of good mutual intelligibility. Unless there's an actual Japanese and an actual Greek and so on floating around too there would be massive frontloading to get it into a computer."
"I'm not sure how to explain most of them without context... hmm... Okay, so one things computers can do is talk to each other. In addition to the electrical grid there is what is called the Internet, which is a network of all of the computers that there are, talking to each other whenever this would be useful. People send each other mail that way, or just talk aloud over it. You can get basically the entire corpus of human knowledge and creativity off the Internet. A computer can store anything that you can render as information - text, trivially, but also pictures, including moving ones, and audio recordings. Programs can turn charts of raw data into pretty graphs or models of the solar system or whatever. Banking is totally automated. You can order delivery pizza online. I think you can still do that, anyway, I don't live on Earth myself, I'm a demon and I live in Hell and have no need to be brought pizza."
"Yes, but we already have such things as artillery charts for sighting in cannons and tables of logarithms for celestial navigation. There are many important calculations that could be eliminated or automated by this sort of device, and you use it to order food?"
Cam shakes his head. "The very triviality of it is one of the most important features. People use the 'net - it's actually the 'extranet' now, the 'internet' is the single-planet version but people live on the moon and Mars these days - to do everything. Yes, including order pizza, and look up song lyrics, and settle arguments about what year the Vietnam War ended, and share knitting patterns, and figure out the bus schedule between Phoenix and Tucson, and play stupid little timewaster games, and see what diseases their symptoms that are probably nothing correspond to, and teach themselves to play the ukelele, and collect the complete works of Shakespeare, and warn each other about incoming earthquakes, and subvert government information suppression - no specific individual thing on that list is that important, sure. Shakespeare is maybe important but regular libraries were distributing him pretty effectively before the internet. People have been subverting governments for millennia. But if you add it all up it's a fucking miracle, I tell you."
"There are such things as propeller-driven airships in my world. They have a maximum operating altitude far short of the moon. Even if the crew doesn't succumb to hypoxia, there's an eventual point at which the air is too thin for the gasbag to provide any more lift."
She pours herself some more tea.
"In any case, I believe we were talking about the 'net.' Apparently it's the best thing since fire."
"I am a fully qualified medical demon, you're in luck. Although a lot of stuff is done with angels, who can bypass the need for a lot of the intermediate technological stuff, so we haven't advanced as far as we might have done without. Better outcomes, worse process documentation and exportability."
"I promise not to make an entire sun right here. I probably have some upper bound, but it is definitely astronomical in scale. Demons can and have made stars. Oh, also, if you die I vanish - assuming normal rules are in effect - so if I did want to destroy the planet I'd have to put you off it first or I'd only wind up destroying however much of it sufficed to take you with it. Not that I expect this to be very comforting."
She breathes out.
"Alright. So. I think I've more or less exhausted myself on questions for the moment. I have a lot to think about. Do you have anything more you'd like to ask about my world?"
"So far as I know, only humans. Victorian propaganda says that there are vicious were-creatures that live in Lupinia and occasionally take the forms of humans, but I am understandably suspicious of this considering that they are trying to colonize Lupinia. Ulvenwald definitely has strange things living in it, but if any of them are sentient and nonhuman we haven't found them yet. There are also rumors that Oceania is awake-in-itself - stones talking to people, hurricanes demanding tolls, that sort of thing - but it's so far away and so few explorers have been there that such stories are likely to be more myth and tall tale than fact."
"Okay, that and the gravity suggest the place is Earth-sized... and you have one moon..." He picks up his computer again and does nothing obvious to manipulate it. It flickers between various displays and settles on a picture of the Earth, spinning languidly. "Does this look familiar?"
She points at where England is on the map.
"This island is clearly Grand Victoria, but that would place Ulvenwald to the east. That coast is clearly the mainland with Mori." Her finger slides across the pacific to North America. "And here's Ulvenwald, but it's inexplicably to the west. Is this what the rest of the continent looks like? It's enormous!"
"This language is Victorian. I know one other, which is Old Lupinian, but I'm hardly fluent in it. In Mori they speak Moritic, and New Lupinian is a completely different language from the Old Lupinian. I have no idea what they use in Ulvenwald. It's most likely Victorian."
"Well, Victorian being descended from Gaelic and Latin seems reasonable, but Japanese is in what we would call Oceania, which doesn't make much sense to me at all. Old Lupinian as a greek-analogue seems likely though, since you're pointing at the right general area there."
Isabella identifies the cluster of Romance languages as all sounding vaguely like various dialects of Moritic. Mandarin gets a raised eyebrow and a 'That sounds sort of like the Church language.' Finnish appears to exist in roughly the same location as in Cam's world.
"There are unmapped portions of the planet. Victorian airships are fast and have a maximum operating range of roughly four thousand kilometers, but have the unfortunate limitation of requiring mooring masts to anchor safely. Most colonies are set up first by the navy and then kept supplied by air. Also, Mori is in a state of cold war with Victoria and is between them and the continent's interior. They may have a better idea of what exactly is in Oceania."
"I'm not sure what kind of detection I'm trying to operate around, here. It can be quiet, it can't be invisible but it can be small, it can be immune to a bunch of sensors I bet you don't have, and I got absolutely nothing on any magical divination that may be flying around."
She pushes back her chair, takes a moment to finish her tea, and then opens the door she came in from out onto a stone front porch, where gaslights flicker in the almost-starless night.
The trip is about as uneventful as covert space reconnissance of an unknown planet can be. As expected, the planet is a mirrored earth - except for China and Australia, which appear to have become an enormous volcanic archipelago with highly unusual weather-patterns.
"In my world Chinese in all its dialects is extremely old, but I'm not sure we're going to get anything much out of this kind of spotty view of history - no offense, I'm sure I wouldn't know much world history either in a world with no Internet and no casual intercontinental travel."
"... You know, this would probably be a lot more enlightening if I were a geologist. One thing that does leap out at me is that there are no additions - there's no extra landmass from your own world, only additional ocean. Perhaps there was some sort of natural disaster in my world that sank most of - China, you said?"
"The sea would still have to fill in the area, and it's a fair amount of area. If they didn't sink very far it might look the same without taking up too much ocean... I'm not immediately sure how to do the math on the hypothetical but maybe I can dig up some sort of geology simulation."
"I have an airship yard in Mark that I can sell my stake in to raise operating capital for a clinic. If we charge a nominal fee for vaccinations, then the entire venture should only produce money, given that we have absolutely no manufacturing costs and vaccine is not excessively difficult to transport. If we can then produce a working manufacturing process, we might even win the Imperial prize for Medicine this year... Or, at least, whichever trustworthy person we select as the 'inventor.'"
"Okay. I like this plan. However, I don't know if I can guarantee that the infectious diseases here are exactly like the ones I know how to vaccinate for. I can in general produce dead viruses and bacteria and so on based on local strains, but immunology is a little more complicated than that. When you say it's not difficult to transport are you including that it has to be in sterile containers and many kinds need to be kept cold?"
She tilts her head.
"Now, what exactly do you mean by a 'sterile container'? Containers don't usually breed in this universe."
"I mean it has to be really, really, really clean. You don't want to inject somebody with dead polio and find that accompanying it is live tetanus or botulism or something. I can make things that start that clean, but they need to be handled appropriately on their way to point B."
"The needles? It's not just sterility, it's tiny abrasions in the metal. Also, people have different blood types, even if everything in the needle was boiled to death you might have problems with antigens or something, that I'm not actually sure of because needle scarcity's not a problem I ever expected to encounter."
She hums.
"Well, we can't actually clean the needles, but we could make a show of them needing to be cleaned specially - have our locations send back their used needles to a central location, where they are replaced with completely new needles that coincidentally look exactly the same. Then the old needles would be carefully and secretly disposed of."
"Yeah. The way to find that out with minimum risk is to get all the essentials you want from me alone handled, then try dismissing me, then try resummoning me. Some daeva would take serious exception to being stranded if it turned out summoning was one-way here or something."
She sighs.
"Well, it wouldn't be the first time I taught myself a language from poor sources. Would you be willing to be my instructor in whichever is the most useful of your local languages while we're setting up the clinics?"
"English is likely the most useful, and yeah, I can probably teach it to you. The clinics are a swell idea but I'm wondering if there should be lots of parallel projects. For example, in my world people have invented high-yield, pest-resistant crops, if those would be of particular use anywhere. I can make seeds of 'em."
"Higher-yield crops could be quite useful in Victoria. There's not a lot of space on the island to grow food in, given all the people on it."
"Each amazing technological breakthrough is going to need a different face behind it: either that, or we need someone prepared to wear the titles of 'genius' and 'polymath.' Setting up that kind of trustworthy agent is not exactly easy. Either that or we need to start dropping 'hints' covertly, and that comes with its own set of attendant risks."
"Competence, trustworthiness, loyalty, and intelligence are different things. I need someone who has all four. My 'subjects' are a downtrodden group of slaves, servants, and lesser vampires. In the vampiric political climate, I can barely manage to keep them alive, let alone happy. There are a few good candidates, but none are so obvious that I would immediately say 'this is the person we need.'"
Isabella takes a breath.
"If you seriously need specifications, fine. Black hair, short for convenience but not a child, female. Do you need more?"
And there comes to exist on the floor, lying down, wearing a sort of white sundress, a human.
She opens her eyes unfocusedly; her mouth falls open; she does not make a sound.
"Never made one of these before. Demons are really bad at making minds. We can't even make, like, a dog, that will act like a dog, let alone a person."
A moment later she pulls away, shaking her head. Blood drips onto the woman's dress and spatters the floor as Isabella carefully places the arm back on the woman's chest.
"Still nothing."
She looks at the woman again.
"I'm honestly not surprised. She looks like someone who's been fed from too heavily already."
"Right. Let's put her out of her disturbingness, then -" The already fairly limp basement-dweller goes still. "And now we have a corpse, that's delightful. Well, it was worth a try. I'm beginning to suspect the blood part is basically entirely cosmetic and you actually eat, I don't know, souls."
She looks down at the corpse.
"... I'm sad to say that we will probably have absolutely no trouble disposing of this body."
She steps up into the air, and stays there. There's a vague suggestion of shadowy wings in the way the light flickers around her.
"So yes, flight. Also, we can nudge people with our voices - vampires can make things they say sound naturally reasonable and sensible. Jumping off of cliffs is a good idea. The sky is pink. As you can hear, it doesn't make you actually believe the statement, but it makes you less likely to question it. Vampires that are skilled in its use can brainwash people by suggesting things that actually are on the cusp of reasonable, and then a little further, a little further..."
She shakes her head.
"Or, if they make direct eye contact, they can dominate you outright. Domination is a unsubtle but effective tool: it's obvious to everyone that someone's been dominated, but that doesn't prevent the dominating vampire from giving orders."
"I'm also generally stronger, faster, and tougher than the average human, though I wouldn't be able to quantify it for you."
"I'll make you one too if you like. Worth testing. Gimme a sec." Cam fiddles with his computer. He adds a shirt to his ensemble; it has holes for the wings but looks like it won't come off without scissors. He tugs on one of his earlobes, and puts his computer in his pocket. "Try me. Gently, please."
"That's stronger," says Cam, although he materializes a block of ice chained with more ice around his wrist fast enough to keep his arm from going up very far. "And now I have a block of ice, do you have a use for ice or should it be chucked outside and allowed to melt?"
She tilts her head. "It appears that the earplugs aren't entirely useless, but I am not currently putting any significant amount of force behind my commands. If you're to be protected from a true attack, I would recommend adding glasses."
"Okay..." Cam fiddles with his computer. "Thick lenses helps... Unrelatedly I can cure some forms of color-blindness temporarily..." Fiddle fiddle. He puts his ear-things back in. Eventually he comes up with a pair of glasses, with slightly chunky brass frames and glass lenses. "That took some doing." He puts them on, and blinks. "Ugh, the delay is just slightly noticeable. Do my eyes look more distorted than they ought?"
Isabella draws herself up to her full height, squares her shoulders to Cam, and proclaims: "I, Isabella Katarina Markova, command and compel you to raise your right hand!"
The wave of pressure is much more noticeable now, though it's still just as vague and unfocused.
"At the level that I was using it, vampires have been known to compel entire crowds at once. That never made much sense to me, considering that they would have to make continuous eye contact with fifty people or more... But if there's an underlying effect of 'pay attention to me', suddenly that becomes much more reasonable."
"Just let me get my thoughts in order..."
She steeples her hands.
"Mm. Best to start at the beginning. Memni are mental tools that emulate the function of physical ones. They are acquired by ritually practicing the action performed with the tool until the physical tool becomes unnecessary. Those who practice for decades with Memni formed from tools that work well together occasionally form Memnodynes, which are 'sets' of mental tools that have... metamorphosed? Congealed? They work together fluidly as one ability, rather than individual tools."
"I don't believe so. The 'ritual' component is a extended period where you practice a specific action - say, picking up a stone - until you can do it in precisely the same way every time you do it. Once that is achieved, you begin attempting to substitute your will for the last component step - say, drawing the stone up into your palm with your fingers. It's an exercise in extremely precise visualization, more than anything else."
"Roughly a year of study to start seeing significant results, and then four more years to manifest your first Memnos, if you do it properly. If you have a particular skill that you're already an expert at, that can sometimes shorten the amount of time spent on an acquisition - but I would not reccommend using one of those to form your first Memnos. Many new students go from a quickly-acquired first Memnos to a much-harder-to-acquire second one, and that causes the vast majority of them to give up due to the disheartening spike in difficulty."
"You are going to pick up this rock several thousand times. Choose something not too heavy, that's easy to grip, and ideally aesthetically pleasing. Take your time over the decision: after all, you don't want to get halfway through the process and then decide you hate your rock after it slips out of your hand for the five hundredth time."
"That is the standard first exercise, since it will give you the range of motion from your feet to where you hold the rock steady. At least, in the vertical direction. Others might be possible, but will give you even less useful parlor tricks than 'pick up things that weigh less than a rock from the ground.'"
"It requires your full attention. If you practice sloppily, you will have little to no results. Form is of the utmost importance - it can be casual, but it must be reproducible to a very high degree. If you can pick up the rock the same way every time without needing to pay attention, then that means you are done the first stage of the training."
"There's some debate as to the exact origin, but the most commonly accepted answer is that it probably originated with a master craftsman, who practiced their work to the level of pure muscle memory, and then noticed something odd occuring over several further decades of work. The techniques have been significantly refined since then: this level of precision is not strictly necessary, but if you ever want to do anything significant with the magic..."
The walls grow a layer of lovely white marble, with a few minimalist swirl textures making it look almost like interestingly draped fabric. He adds some half-arches in the corners and covers the ceiling enough to dangle a minimalist frosted-glass chandelier from it. "I can do the floor too, if you will just jump at the same time as me to get out of the way," he says. "Three, two, one -" He jumps.
"That's better. The Castle should adjust the door to the correct height the next time you return here. Now, back to the stone."
She produces a piece of chalk from a pocket of her dress.
"So. We've confirmed that you can pick up the rock from your current position. Does it feel natural and comfortable? Once you start in earnest, you won't be able to adjust, so do as many practice trials as you need to be certain that you're the right distance from the stone."
"Excellent. Your first task is to find a way to pick up that rock that you can repeat exactly the same way every time. With sufficient daily practice, most students build the muscle memory within three to six months. I'll check in on you from time to time to evaluate your progress and consistency. Once that first hurdle is mastered, we can move on to visualization practice and the exercise of the will."
"The method doesn't matter, only the resulting form. If it works for you, do it. Personally, I find the process meditative: it's something useful to do with my time when I would normally be asleep, and it effectively prevents me from becoming preoccupied with stress. I've practiced for so long now that I can find the flow almost instinctually. In that space, there is only myself and the form."
"I honestly don't sleep most of the time. Sometimes if I'm bored with all my projects and don't have a new one lined up, or I'm sick of being that little bit jittery I get on the relevant dose of caffeine, but not more than a couple times a month unless I'm on a really boring summon with a tight binding. I feel like my life would not substantially change if sleeping became impossible instead of optional except that I'd drink less coffee. I thrive on things to do. Hell's kind of short on meaningful things to do but I can still learn stuff and read and play games and perform experiments and correspond with people and see what the summoners have for me to do. And fly! Flying is great."
"This is my nonfiction library. What subject would you be most interested in? I maintain a large section on the state of the medical art, but I also have smaller ones for other scientific works, biographies and so on that interest me."
"Here we are. 'A Short History of Hastum and the Lands Therein, Being the Heart of Civilization.' Pretentious and opiniated, but at least broadly factual, and a decent read. I have the distinct impression Marcus S. wishes Lupinia never fell."
She offers the book with one hand, while her eyes scan the shelf for another.
"And... here, something more contemporary to give you a handle on the current political situation. 'An Empire of Brothers and an Empire of Sons', by T. H. Kaita." She offers the book: the cover depicts a man with a bayonetted rifle astride a warhorse, pointing the muzzle at an elegant serpent that coils through the sky above him.
"Hmm. Hmm. Yes, this. And this. Alright."
She alights, cradling an unsteady stack of four thick volumes under one arm.
"Here we are. 'Breaking the Pack: The Fall of Lupinia.' As you would expect from the title, about how the old Lupine empire finally collapsed. 'One Sun, One Heart.' A theological and cultural history of Grand Victoria. 'City of Light, City of Darkness.' About the failed attempts to colonize Ulvenwald, and the rise of the free city-state of Eyesocket. 'An Account of Tribal Customs', by Leon Zaya - the most plausible-seeming book I've ever been able to find on the shamanistic practices and customs of the New Lupinians and Ulvenwalders, though it is far more a travelogue than a historical study."
"Yes, Eyesocket. It has a much more respectable formal name, which came along later - I believe 'Illumine' or some such - but the frontier town was founded on the site of a successful direwolf slaughter, in a small circular valley that may have been a dried-up lakebed. Hence the original name. It's really quite an interesting story: the colony was founded in large part by scientists and innovators hoping to be free of Victorian strictures, particularly the indictment of any form of autopsy as desecrating remains... but scientific skills do not a survivalist make. The colony foundered, and 'Illumine' is not worth addressing by that title anymore. Hence the common lapse back to the name of the original frontier town."
"And the people who perform autopies become sick as a result. Yes. We have at least noticed that link, though we don't know exactly why it occurs. Of course, the traditionalists insist that it's because we're desecrating the dead and thereby incurring their wrath, but if that were truly the case, why would they so consistently curse us with the thing that killed them? And only when it was a particular sort of disease? Clearly, it's no more blasphemy than associating with those who are sick but alive."
"Okay. Most diseases, all contagious diseases but not the ones that just run in families because that's not contagious, are composed of organisms too small to see parasitizing the infected person. A lot of the common symptoms like fever are the body trying to fight them off. Vaccines work because they teach the immune system what a disease looks like without being strong enough to make you sick all by itself - the immune system is mostly some specialized cells in the blood which can sometimes make mistakes about what's a disease, and cause allergies."
"Slow down a second and let me think. Animalcules cause diseases by parasitizing the infected? That sounds... vaguely reasonable."
She pauses significantly.
"So... assuming your knowledge holds, most transmissible diseases are caused by the movement of tiny parasites from one person to another. Let me guess - boiling kills these parasites? They cannot withstand heat, and that's why the body fights them with fevers?"
"Boiling kills 'em, they don't love heat but fevers are actually not that effective so it's safe to take symptom-reducing medications. There are two meaningfully different kinds of 'animalcule's that are most often operative, bacteria and viruses. Bacteria can be killed by a class of drugs called antibiotics, because they are alive in a fairly conventional way. Viruses are not alive in a conventional way and need different, more advanced drugs, or just symptom control and vaccinations. Some infections are instead caused by prions or protozoans or fungi or multicelluar parasites, the former of which are less alive and the latter several of which are normal amounts of alive but which you should identify so you don't try to kill them with something specialized for bacteria."
She steeples her hands.
"... I've been following an alleged ritual practice of the New Lupinians by washing my instruments in purified alcohol and then water between surgeries. It appears to work, so far as I can tell. Does that also kill the animalcules, or have I just been lucky?"
She tilts her head.
"Come to think of it, that raises a rather interesting question - perhaps vampires have some form of animalcule? Oh, but we've eliminated 'ultraviolet' already."
"Sunlight doesn't produce really strong ultraviolet, or it would hurt humans, who are also pretty easy to kill with substantial quantities of many forms of radiation. Aaaand I don't think a kind of animalcule would explain you catching fire. There are conditions which cause extreme sensitivity to light but not literally catching fire."
Cam has fairly conservative decorative tastes, but he puts in a nice abstract-patterned rug and nice curtains and a hammock, and a big-screen TV/monitor (to which he attaches the computer he's holding) flanked by a pair of speakers, and a chair with a squooshy back suitably for comfortably sitting in while winged.
"One day. Shall I leave you with your books for the moment? I believe the sun is beginning to set, and I'd rather not spend my active hours speaking with you at length - please understand, no offense intended - I simply need to use this time as efficiently as I can."
Or perhaps none of those appeal. There are three more books, after all. The cultural history of Victoria: 'One Sun, One Heart.' The tale of Illumine and how it came to be called Eyesocket: 'City of Light, City of Darkness.' Or perhaps he should start with the general history, the one with a picture of a spearpoint shaped like Europe on its cover?
More windbaggery in this vein follows. Marcus S. explains that "Hastum in whole takes its name from its peninsula shape, which the old Lupinians thought was spearlike: Thus, Hastum, from Hasta, their word for spear. They could name it because they owned it: In the glory days of Old Lupinia, every lesser civilization would quake with fear at the coming of the full moon, for they knew that the Lupinian legions would march in strength."
He admits later in the text that the Lupinians "...did not necessarily draw their strength directly from the moon, as the Imperial Line does from the sun, and did not always campaign under full moons, but their success can be majorly attributed to their pack-bonds that allowed a hundred men to fight as one..."
However, he roundly decries that the "slavering were-beasts holding the ruined glories of the Old Lupinian empire in the south" could possibly share any kinship whatsoever with the ancient Lupinians and their pack-bond. "Their degraded shamanism merely apes the true power of their ancient betters, much as the revolutionary empire of Mori claims their ideals of democracy while practicing dictatorship."
Eventually, he does manage to start describing the histories of nations that are not Lupinian. Would Cam care to skip ahead to any in particular, or would he prefer to simply read them in order?
At least, not until the rise of Mori. Mori is, of course, roundly decried at every point as a mockery of the concept of an empire, but even pompous Marcus S. has to credit them for uniting dozens of disparate pocket kingdoms into an empire. "The Brothers Mori have an uncanny and unnatural gift for conquest, wether by the sword or by the word: popular opinion has it that they are never apart from each other, and teleport from place to place. Given their encouragement of the training of enlightened will among their citizens, it may actually be possible that they are travel adepts." He details their rise somewhat sketchily: while he says they were voted into power in their native pocket kingdom, far to the west, he nonetheless takes every opportunity to say that they are dictators.
After a short rant about the "deplorable southwestern barbarians", he goes on to excessively detail Grand Victoria, praising it as a "bastion of civilization" and a "guiding light", with "over 2,000 years of unbroken Imperial rule", etc, etc.
Apparently he knows which side his toast is buttered on.
One rather suspects that Marcus S. has never consulted one in his life... save where he writes about Grand Victoria. There, in-between bouts of patriotic fervour, he paints a surprisingly complex picture of the small island nation.
Grand Victoria, he writes, “...inherits the customs of the Krenna tribes as the foundation of its common-law system, but these common-sense daily laws have been majorly complicated by a history of repeated conquest and colonization, culminating in the full establishment of the Solars approximately one millennium ago. Their establishment as the de facto religious and political leaders has not been untroubled, but their reign has remained relatively stable and is now displacing older Krenna forms of worship entirely, especially as Empress Hikari consolidates her power against the Morite Scourge...”
A few paragraphs of boasting about airship building... oh, what’s this aside? “Some Victorian dockworkers hold sympathetic or even outright traitorous opinions, and on occasion Rays must be tasked with strike-breaking. A major issue is some docks’ usage of company scrip in lieu of imperial coinage, which some argue is in contravention of Imperial laws against slavery...”