In the depths of a place that by all rights shouldn't exist any more, something that by all rights shouldn't be alive any more drifts on the air; in the pitch-black ritual chamber, it looks rather like an array of dim stars, painting dim rainbows on the walls.
The Far Realms are dangerous beyond words, but it has survived for so long that it's got rather good at it.
It completes the ritual and tears open, for a brief moment, a rift beyond the planes.
And a Thing falls through.
It slams its Kerenzikov to maximum acceleration and begins perceiving time three point two times faster than normal before it finishes landing on the ground, and spools out a foot of softly glowing red wire from its palm, holding the end carefully with its other hand, before landing on its feet with a very solid thump and looking around wherever the fuck it is now--
A solid stone room. A very solid stone room - if she looks very closely in the dim red glow, she'll see that the floor and walls and ceiling all seem to be contiguous stone, not bricks, and on the floor is inscribed some kind of dark pattern of dizzying complexity. There's the faintest suggestion of a single massive door.
And, slowly spinning and drifting on the air like a dandelion-clock, a huge mass of liquid-crystal shards, thousands, spines around a core that's impossible to see past the millions of facets reflecting and refracting that faint red glow.
It drifts slightly closer.
Nope.
She lets the wire retract, pulls out a pistol from her thigh holster and shoots it while backing towards the - suggestion of a - door, not really expecting this to work.
The pistol fails explosively in a way you wouldn't imagine pistols could fail - a gout of flame bursts from it, and the metal sort of crumples on itself with a sad sort of sucking sound.
The inscriptions on the floor flare briefly bluish.
If she tries to step over them to get to what might possibly be a door, she'll find that -
- she can step over them perfectly well.
It spins softly back, at that.
And then up and over like a leaf caught on the breeze, and then around the room for no discernible reason candles flare to life, dozens of them, and she can see it properly - impossible gemstone shapes like the dreams of a mad jeweller-god, intricate spiderweb-archwork forming a spherical structure around a plasmic core.
There's a weird pressure at the front of her skull for a moment, and then she finds herself imagining -
[a rough, unpolished chunk of stone on a beach of smooth pebbles]
Fuck! Sabotage? Her hand is slightly singed, but not seriously harmed. Would her other pistol, the miniature railgun and not the chemical propellant one, also fail explosively? Are her implants still working properly?? No time to consider these questions.
She reflexively pushes back at the pressure, but apparently not enough. Her brain monitor watchdog program flags the thought as anomalous outside influence. No shit! Is this - some other parahuman? She thought she was the only one on her planet...
"What do you want?" She bites out, eyeing all the carvings warily...
It whirls frustratedly, sending weird spectra of unrecognisable colours dancing around the room, and redoubles its efforts. At least she's talking now, that makes things easier.
[I said, that was rude.]
[I summoned a Thing from the Far Realms, not a human. And you plant images in the minds of others every time you speak. I am only more direct.]
A pause, as it drifts softly.
[You are a human, are you not? The texture of your brain is strange.]
"I consider myself a highly augmented human. Communicating by fucking sounds is the accepted fucking standard and a thing that I am reasonably sure is not some kind of security breach, subversion, or attempt at an attack on my person. Unlike telepathy which is using some mechanism I have no fucking clue about to make unknown changes to small regions of my brain without the understood and trusted medium of my optic and aural nerves and the natural interpretation of said signals. Do me that courtesy and I will be significantly more inclined to treat this as some sort of accident instead of a hostage situation."
She has had about one subjective minute, now, of looking around and trying to make any sense of all the markings on the floor, walls, and presumably ceiling. Does anything have a resemblance to the languages in her database, or any other common images therein?
They're mostly extremely intricate geometric patterns inscribed with things that look kind of like letters, but nothing resembling any languages she knows.
...Is she, uh. She's just referring to her database and checking with her eyes, right? Not actually making and uploading digital images of the spellforms or anything like that? Because there's a good reason why spellbooks have always been copied out by hand, even in the old days.
[I do not know your language. I do not possess organs of speech. I am the Professor of Conjuration at Silvermoon. If this were an attack, you would be dead. I am being very courteous by doing things your brain will interpret as language. Mostly language. Augmented in what way? You are not a cleric. Have you trafficked with devils for magic? Where do you live?]
She's constantly recording her entire sensorium, of course. It all gets saved to her onboard Cyberdeck. Her eyes are computers. Her ears are computers. The millimeter wave RADAR in her forehead and shoulders is a computer. Her skin is partially computer. Her computers are deeply wired and laced up into her brain, which has several novel semi-biological and non-biological enhancements, both Tinkered and non. It's all very tightly integrated and well maintained.
'Courteous'. Right.
"Courteous? You're holding me here - well, I admit I haven't just asked to leave, but I assumed you would say no. May I peacefully leave or be returned home? Surely you could be patient and take efforts to learn my language. I would cooperate with that. You clearly don't see the telepathy as a big deal. I do. It is a very big deal to me. It's a matter of bodily autonomy! I have privacy. I have secrets. I don't know how telepathy works and can't trust your answers if you tell me. If you claim not to be prying into those or reading my mind, I will not believe you. You're right, you haven't killed me... Still, I don't see any particular reason to answer further questions given my current epistemic status and your refusal of what I believe is a reasonable request."
...Something anomalous is happening. One doesn't survive this long and see this much without learning to spot the increasingly rare chances to learn something new.
Well, it cannot reply without telepathy. It would be wise not to spook the anomaly any more. But it therefore cannot offer to trade a teleport home for answers.
It gives up. There is an ancient wizardly device for solving problems like this. It is called a graduate student.
[Come to help me], it sends. [There is a thing that looks human and speaks only a heathen tongue.]
There is a loud clunk and the door vibrates in its frame and creaks slightly open. It drifts politely back and waits to see what the human does.
She bows slightly.
"Thank you. Suddenly appearing in an unfamiliar environment was very alarming and I interpreted it as an attack... I don't mean to hurt anyone unless I am clearly attacked."
...She's not sure if this person (and it definitely is one, odd substrate for its mind notwithstanding) understands, though. If it acceded to her request it won't.
She composes herself with a deep breath, goes up to the door, and peers through the crack?
The depths of the dungeons underneath the Faculty or Conjuration. This is a twisting stone passage lined with flaming torches, leading to a flight of steps to the left and a set of double doors to the right.
There's a large window that seems to just have solid stone behind it.
And the sound of running footsteps, getting closer.
She pushes the door open with a wary glance at the 'professor' and steps out away from its workshop, trying to appear nonthreatening. Polite 'stern but not pissed off at you specifically' japanese-corpo body language.
She comes running through the doors at an extremely impressive pace considering the high heels, and manages to somehow make it look graceful and above all natural, like a gazelle in the woods.
"Professor! I brought -"
Her inhumanly violet eyes light up when she spots the Entity. If she notices the look on her face, she doesn't let it stop her.
"Well met!" she says in Dr Baika's mother tongue, in exactly her accent, but in a curiously breathy and musical manner she's never quite heard before. "You must be the thing that looks like a human? I am delighted to make your acquaintance."
Yeah, augmented, probably, and therefore dangerous.
...Well, as far as the odd Night City dialect Japanese goes, is it setting off her mental interference alarm still? It's probably a Thinker power...
Shallow bow; High rank stranger to high rank stranger.
"Hello. I am Dr. Baika Hasumi," last name first, "Degree of medicine from Oxford university, with Ph.D., cybernetics implantation specialist. I suddenly appeared here completely unexpectedly and I am rather tense. The professor seems to have stopped using telepathy on me after I explained my objection to it, which I do appreciate. I am human, depending on one's precise definition of human. I consider myself human. Where am I, please?"
No mental interference at all. She's not actually totally sure what this Spell does, but it seems to be working. To her it just feels like she's speaking Elvish.
...Degree of medicine? Oh no, is this is going to be Necromancy? Well, there's only one way to find out, and that's talking to the Entity mysterious human! She's disappointed that it's not a creature of the Far Realms, assuming it's not lying, but opening a portal and getting a random human is still exciting!
"The Silvermoon Academy of Wizardry! Don't be tense, it doesn't help! Where is 'Oxford'?"
('University', adorable!)
"And what kind of magic is 'cybernetics implantation'?"
(That comes across as some kind of obscure term she thinks has something to do with ships.)
"What were you doing when you got here? What's wrong with telepathy? And by what definition of 'human' are you not human? Do you want to come to my room and sit down, by the way?" Normally that would be an incredible breach of academic etiquette, but if the Conjuration Professor has an office or something she doesn't know about it, and one of the few advantages of the Conjuration Department is that the head of it is not humanoid and accordingly very reasonable.
'Wizardry'. Magic? Is that how they understand their Shards and the powers they grant? Because her current leading theory is that she's been kidnapped - possibly accidentally - by some version of Earth that powers are slowly working over, much like the weird accident that crossed her over with 'Earth Bet' when she got her own power... Well, the impression she likes to give off in this circumstance is kind of 'airy, absentminded professorial type'. It's a little harder to do that while under this much stress. She defaults to 'corpo bitch' instead. She takes a moment to focus and think.
"...That's an awful lot of questions at once. The problem with telepathy is that I don't understand what it is doing to my brain, not the way I understand speech, which is vibrations in the air being interpreted by my aural nerves as concepts. If I don't understand something, it could be doing anything to my brain and I know very well how many terrible things can be done to a person's brain, accidentally or intentionally! I have to fix them in patients sometimes! So telepathy is really alarming and feels kind of hostile."
Is this- No, she didn't introduce herself. Hm. Better to assume higher status in a stranger than lower status. Did she see some kind of hesitation in the woman at the mention of 'medicine'? Is that a mistrusted and primitive art here? It makes her want to defend her profession.
"Very well, let's go to your office. Oxford is located within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... Just north of mainland Europe. On the planet Earth. It's easily in the top twenty centers of higher learning for medicine in the world. I also learned a vast amount of biology, anatomy, and other factors to the practice of medicine, the treatment of disease, the use of surgery to correct cancers, repair traumatic injuries, keep people alive and well... All that, of course, hence the general medicine degree."
And now comes the part where she tries to lie about her Tinker power, and imply it's normal.
"I wouldn't describe cybernetics as magic. Cybernetics is the practice of integrating machines into the body in order to replace lost capabilities or add new ones. Ranging from artificial eyes to correct for blindness or failing vision - or replacements to lost arms or legs or hands or what have you, polymer arteries or new hearts to correct for the heart disease that often strikes elderly humans, improvements to one's strength or ability to think quickly with machines that interface with the arms, or brain... It's normal enough that there are standards. There are many cybernetics implantation specialists. If I am not human, it's because I have surgically implanted a great many machines inside myself because they make me more like the me I want to be."
What's a nice and harmless one to show off? ...She pops out one of her optics, poking her own eye with no hesitation and then showing the glassy front and conical metal back with its interface to her optic nerves for a moment, before popping it back in.
"These let me see further, sharper, record what I see, and see things that humans normally cannot like infrared or ultraviolet. Such things are reasonably common, and I'm wealthy enough to have access to the best ones, and learned enough to customize them and use them on myself. But it's still more of a physical craft, than magic. I've installed new eyes in hundreds of people, it's one of the most common treatments. Though I seem to be far away from my suppliers and my workshop now... Which is rather worrying... What does the Silvermoon Academy teach?"
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