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[Volk's never seen this thing before.]

Home. Thanks for asking.

But if you mean what do I want to see a video game of...

I don't know. How does it work?

[Is it like, you can pick from BEACH, TOWN or FARM or is it like a maps app where you can scroll around and zoom in, or...?]

[Neither has Waver, and he's curious. "For therapeutic use only", suggests the instructions he's giving a quick read over.]

Can't do that, but... you could see it, if you really wanted. [The tone of his voice suggests it might not be a good idea. It would probably only make homesickness worse.]

It claims to be able to replicate just about any place. Just be specific, and see what happens. It works on voice command.

[He gives Volk an expectant look. He could choose something, but he'd rather Volk get first try.]

Really.

[Volk snaps into the console:]

Where's my sister.

[The room changes.

There's a dormitory hall; worn carpet, families chattering, doors propped open. A girl, eighteen, with red hair, leans out of a doorway and looks directly at Volk and Waver.]

Gail, I-

[The girl speaks over him. "In here!" she says. "I think there's only-"

The room skips.

Volk holds his ground. One of his hands closes into a fist.

There's a dormitory hall; worn carpet, families chattering, doors propped open. A girl, eighteen, with red hair, leans out of a doorway and looks directly at Volk and Waver.

"In here!" she says. "I think there's only-"

There's a dormitory hall; worn carpet, families chattering, doors propped open. Two boys go by carrying a bin full of bedding. A girl, eighteen, with red hair, leans out of a doorway and looks directly at Volk and Waver.

"In here!" she says. "I think there's only-"]

Stop.

[She freezes, half way through resetting to the next skip. The top of her head has flickered away.]

Edited 2022-02-24 01:43 (UTC)

[While he shouldn't be, Waver is a little surprised by Volk's choice. But who wouldn't want to see their families? It was all rendered so realistically, the skipping scene and frozen frame was downright disorienting.

This machine probably too much, especially for inmates. Waver has to cut himself off from immediately thinking of all the things he wants it to show him. Tantalizing illusions.]

Volk... Are you alright? We don't have to do this.

I know what this is. I just don't know how they're doing it.

[He's upset. The line of his shoulders under his coat, the refusal to make eye contact, the tightness in his voice - it's not hidden well.

He steps further into the room, anyway.]

Show me... this machine's casting mechanism.

[The room chimes an error. Inmate access denied. :)]

They're not even going to tell me that. But I can tell you that there's no magic here. I've tested it. Everything on this ship is completely technologically based.

[Waver decides to take over for just a moment. Tit for tat.]

SIRE, show us... London, The Clock Tower. Current-- ah, 2006. Make it a nice day, hmm?

[The scene filters away to show a sunny spring day outside Parliament, and Big Ben. There's the usual crowd of tourists and passers-by, but they seem to ignore an area where a lone teenage girl heads towards. Her outfit makes her stick out in the crowd, but no one seems to pay her any mind as she carries a bag of groceries inside a set of doors down a hallway. The doors close behind her, and as they do, the placid scene starts again like Volk's did.

Waver tilts his head, watching the scene with a wistful look.]

Mm. Quite realistic, isn't it. I don't know how I feel about this.

[The city appears. Volk looks up and up and up and up at the buildings, at the alien city.

The green parts are green. Like home.]

That's such a ridiculous limitation to put on yourself. No magic.

Where'd you hear about this?

[The planet, he means.]

Edited 2022-02-24 03:11 (UTC)

I agree with you there. But it's not a surprise. Even where I'm from, technology is quickly outpacing magic.

[Waver watches Gray trot inside again, smile on her face, enjoying doing errands on a pleasant day.]

Hmm? Oh, this? This is where I'm from, Volk. Home sweet home. Though I suppose, to be more accurate, this is my workplace. Hidden inside is the academy where I teach.

What? It's not a contest...

[Like, planes are cool, they do things aeronauts can't, but they're still really clumsy and can have mechanical failures, and more or less even the smallest ones are still cars in the sky, it's the difference between running and driving-

Oh, what in the shit, actually, hang on.]

You - huh?

[LITERALLY NO ONE HAS EXPLAINED THIS]

Edited 2022-02-24 03:52 (UTC)

Yeah. And that-- [He nods towards the girl] That's my assistant. Either this is a memory, or this thing can form something very close to one.

[The former seemed a little much, so it was probably the latter. But how else would this machine know what Gray looks like? Or Volk's sister?]

I don't remember this, but it's a pretty mundane thing. Maybe I was just a minute ahead of her, or behind her.

[Waver taps something on the commlink to bring the scene to an end. The implications of this left a bad taste in his mouth.]

Here I was just thinking maybe we'd find a nice park or something to walk around in.

No, no no - [wait? go back??] You're an alien?

[What. That's not what he expected to hear.]

I... Volk, we all are. We've all been brought on board a space ship from various times and places.

[As a mage, it's a concept he takes for granted. Not everyone knows about this sort of stuff. But Volk had been here how long now?]

It only makes how this place runs without magic even more perplexing, but um. Yes. I am. You are. We all are.

No, by DEFINITION I'm not an alien to myself.

[Nitpicking is going to be a red flag for Volk being on defensive.]

Don't fucking say that like it's obvious! That's insane! How was I supposed to intuit that, what the fuck! You look exactly like a person!

Edited 2022-02-25 01:54 (UTC)

[Waver jumps slightly at the outburst, but he should have expected it. His voice is quiet, apologetic.]

No, you're right. I'm sorry. I'd thought that since you'd been here this long, someone would have clued you in. I shouldn't have presumed that.

[He sighs quietly, pausing for a moment to find a place to start.]

As a mage, it's something I've known about for a long time. The existence of things like parallel timelines and dimensions. Just proof that I need to get out of mage society more, to stop taking things like that for granted.

[He doesn't want to drop too much on Volk, but the floodgates are open now. He sets his comm aside.]

I can't claim to have all of the answers, but I can try to field any questions you have. But the truth is, the universe is a very, very big place. I look like a person because I am a person. I'm human. But because we come from different worlds, doesn't mean either of us is more or less human than the other.

[Volk takes off his glasses and just ... rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

Huge advantage of Lover's Kiss as makeup: the bright red winged "eyeshadow" doesn't move an inch. Really good stuff, actually.]

Alright.

We have. We have wildly different definitions of "mage."

[To start. Just so we have somewhere to fucking START?]

That's probably true. There are other mages here, and I'd wager that we're all very different from each other.

[Okay, enough of this standing around in a void. Waver grabs his comm for just a moment.]

SIRE - My Clock Tower office, please. Nighttime.

[The room becomes an office typical to a professorial mage. Old fashioned leather couches, antique desk and furniture, walls lined with books upon books. There are two desks; one for writing, complete with fancy pen set, and another small one tucked in the corner holding a 2006-era PC. The whole place is pristinely clean.

Waver takes a seat in one of the chairs, motioning for Volk to have a seat on the couch opposite of it.]

Might as well get comfortable. So, what do mages do where you come from? Because for me, it's a lot of fascinating studying and practice, and absolutely mind-numbing political rubbish.

[Volk squints cautiously around the room once it appears, waiting for something fucked up to happen. Oh surprise! We're not on Nephele, that's not a couch, IT'S A GUN. Fuck you! Nothing is real! Nothing means anything!

He kicks the couch leg before he sits, not because he thinks that particular anxiety fear is rational, but because he knows it's a hologram and he doesn't want to go clean through the bastard. Fine. Whatever. Seems solid.]

Everything. I guess? This is going to be a - do you have the one about a thorn that's lived her whole life in a room with a black and white TV as her only link to the outside and your job is to explain the color red?

[Please tell him you have that one.]

[Waver spends a few moments looking over the chair he's in himself. It's replicated perfectly, just like the rest of the office seems to be. This definitely wasn't going to help with homesickness, and he seems momentarily distracted as he was wishing he'd chosen a different location now.

Nope, sorry, that just gets a curious tilt of the head out of him.]

Sorry? Afraid not. But now I definitely would like to hear it. I could bore you with details about magic theory from my world, but I'd like to know where you're coming from first. [Both literally and figuratively. He didn't want to drop too much on Volk right now.]

[Volk makes a pained noise, leans his elbows over his knees, laces his fingers together.

This - THIS feels more like real therapy than anything has so far. Trying to explain to someone well-meaning a completely fundamental building block of your lived experience that you've never been without. Having no frame of reference for what its absence is like. Having no idea where it ends and you begin, elementally.]

I'm going to ...try to explain color to someone who has never seen it.

You'll be doing the same thing, in a second, I'm sure.

Magic.... does anything non-magic does, but stranger? No, wait.

Magic, uh. Here's a starting point, okay. When a Prince happens, the Prince gets magic and so do all of her followers. If a Prince ever gets the Throne, like, actually, they get even stronger. Its fucked up. We actually have ours cordoned off by an international peacekeeping organization to keep it from happening.

[There's like no way other worlds don't have Princes, right? No, no, society would never make it out of caves without Princes, it'd be too wild card. Volk is positive that Princes are going to be a universal thing.

Plus, every planet has a Throne, intelligent life doesn't even evolve without one?

...

There are a couple of fish swimming along in the ocean. An old fish going by says: "Morning, boys! How's the water?"

Once he's gone the fish both look at each other. One says: "What the hell is water?"]

Edited 2022-02-26 16:01 (UTC)

[Waver has a hand to his chin, considering this. He didn't want to ask too many questions, he wanted Volk to just talk. It really seemed like he just needed someone to hear him out. But even if their respective worlds were very different, it seemed like there was still enough common ground between them.]

Already I'm afraid this is unlike anything I've heard before. [Which is saying something, coming from him.] But my guess is that it might become more familiar the more you explain.

A Prince "happens". How? And, I'm assuming this Throne is some nexus of power. Is it the source of power, or are there others? [Volk said "ours", leading him to believe there must be more.]

A...

[How does. A Prince happen. Shit. Okay. Uh. It isn't that it's complicated, it's just that he's never had to explain to someone that sometimes plants get really big and they grow tough skin and we call them trees, either.]

No. No, I just ... do you not have a Throne? You might call it something else. It's the, it's where the world came from - probably - and it's the reason the laws of physics work? Gravity. Thermodynamics. Courts.

Uh, Princes happen, when... when a person gets popular enough. It's a popularity contest. Once a certain number of people are willing to jump off a bridge if you told them to-

[Volk has one hand covering his face, and the other makes two fingers walk across the air and then jump - whee!]

- every one of those idiots gets cosmically rewarded with magic, and so does the idiot they're following.

We do - we know it as the Root. Very few mages have ever reached it through our history, though. But it's practically every mage's focus to attempt it. Reaching it would be like attaining godhood. True Magic. I often use the terms interchangeably here, for sake of ease, but what I do is not considered Magic. It's Magecraft.

[He's on board with this idea. It's the rest that is a totally new concept to him, and he's fascinated. He's thinking on this, trying to piece together how popularity could equal magical power. A transfer of energy that he's never really considered before.]

How popular is "popular"? Is it only one person at a time who can become a Prince? Competition must be unbelievably fierce.

Oh, thank fuck. Yeah, that's it.

[So at least he doesn't need to figure out how a world even exists without a Throne.]

No, no, there's usually... I think right now there are twenty, but now that the internet is big, they come and go really quickly. Only about, mmmmmmeleven? Are really serious contenders, CEOs or activists - the others are just content creators. Idol bands. They've got it but it's reallllly temporary. I think the threshold is usually between three-hundred-k and a million people who think of you as THE person that's most important to listen to, and if they go to rehab or people turn on them, which, like, you know - they will - their Prince title will just drop right off of them and they'll go back to being a regular idiot with a ton of money and a great bone structure and tons of industry contacts.

You're ...I'm probably getting lots of things wrong, actually, I'm not a physicist.

What's the difference between Magic and Magecraft...?

Edited 2022-02-26 23:12 (UTC)

Magecraft comes from practice, ritual, research. The possibilities of what you can do are endless, but-- [He loses a bit of his enthusiasm for a moment] --you're limited by your amount of power. Your magic circuits, as we call them. Your lineage tends to be the biggest factor there.

[He really doesn't want to dwell on those ideas, and moves along quickly.] True Magic is beyond that. Limitless. Miraculous. With Magecraft, there's a price to casting - energy, reagents, your own skill level, what have you. Magic has no need for any of that, drawing directly from the Root itself.

[He's trying to not go full-blown professor mode here, but he can't help himself. Waver stops for a moment, looking like he's about to turn around and talk to someone who's not actually there. He pauses, frowning.]

... I was about to ask Gray is she could fetch us some tea. This simulation is a little to real for my tastes. Anyway. How do you fit into all of this? You seem to at least know a fair amount about it. If it takes than many followers to become a Prince, I imagine this is mostly common knowledge where you're from?

[Volk is squinting trying to understand what Waver is describing.]

Okay. We have Magecraft, then - I've never heard of someone being born better or worse at it innately. WELL-

I don't know, tall people are innately better at basketball? If that's what you wanted magic in and you're short, you're shit out of luck? But, I don't think ...either we don't have circuits, or nobody's discovered them. We're not uh. Breeding, people, for more magic, like Pomeranians...

[Volk glances over at the door. No, it is not possible for him to forget he's in a hologram in jail. That sounds nice.]

Everyone knows it - I'm in Legends' Court, half of everybody's in a Court. A lot of jobs require you to join a Court as part of your employment contract, not that they can enforce it.

[Waver rubs his temple with a hand.]

Yeah, it's not... ideal. But it is, unfortunately, how it works. You're born with a certain level, and learn to work within that limitation. And Mage families pretty much do just that.

[He sounds pretty unhappy about it himself. This is the guy who spent a lot of his young life trying to disprove lineage wasn't necessary. He was wrong.]

So, does that mean you've ascribed yourself to a potential Prince? Or you're just along for the ride because you have to be?

That's pretty Dark Ages...

I am technically "loyal" to a current Prince. I don't really...

[Volk shrugs.]

He's an important guy. He's an entertainment billionaire, and part of onboarding besides being trained to use his Court gift is they sit you down in front of a lot of movies to convince you to convert. I guess it worked, I mean, it helps that the guy is a visionary. Everybody more or less knows Pinwheel as a brand, he's defined post-Empire culture for the last hundred years. Even if you don't agree with his values, you can't deny that he's, you know.

A Great Man. Like the kind we talked about last month.

If civilization went under tomorrow, the first three names aliens digging through the wreck would find Saint Sacrifice, Spar Cola, and the Prince of Legends. I guess I'm loyal. Could I stop being loyal, if someone else offered me more money? Probably.

So long as you get to work where you want. Makes sense. [He nods, and idea comes to him. Waver waves an arm to indicate the SIRE, their surroundings.]

I'd been thinking. You work in entertainment, yes? While we don't have much here in the way of actors, I'd assume, but the comms have camera settings, and we have this... thing. You could make any set you could ever want to imagine. Might be something to consider. Doesn't have to be right away. But it could be interesting to see what you could do with it.

[Everyone needs an outlet. Maybe he was getting ahead of himself, but he feels it might do Volk some good to have something to work on.]

Afraid I've only ever written academic papers, though. Nothing very exciting.

[Volk goes completely quiet.

A switch has flipped, here, or something - he's checking every part of the room, the textures, where he knows the real chamber ends and still retains the illusion of depth.]

Mm.

[He gets up, switches the flashlight on his comm on, shines it at the walls directly - nope, still opaque, good. He thumps the wall with his hand, to see if it makes a wood sound, then thumps the door to see if the sound is different. Yeah, okay... He goes up to a lamp, clicks it on and off and on and off and onandoffandonandoff to see if the response seems realistic. He knocks the lamp over, dispassionately. Does the falling speed read correctly? Does it break?]

But how would you - ? You'd need- it's bad at people. I'd need my Court gift back... This isn't that different from what Court of Journeys can do. It's a lot smaller, but the advantage is that you don't need twenty of them channeling... I'd love to see it do water, deep water in several weather conditions, orrrrrr lava. Liquid dynamics. Can it pull from places neither of us have seen....?

Edited 2022-02-27 18:46 (UTC)

[Waver couldn't tell if seeing Volk switch so suddenly to business mode was a good or bad thing yet. He's relieved he didn't shut the idea down, though.

The antique lamp tips over with that this, seemingly solid as all the other furniture. The physics were as real as anything else
around here.]

I know there would be a lot of limitations, but I think there's a lot of potential, too. You may be stuck with wardens and inmates as actors. I suppose that'd be up to you whether or not that was worth your time.

[Waver thinks for a moment, rising from his seat. Someplace he hasn't been, with water.]

SIRE - how about a beach in Perth, Australia.

[Lo and behold, the office fades into a busy public beach on a sunny day, choosing a year close to Waver's own back home. Plenty of blue water rendered into what looks like a expansive horizon, even if the room only ended about 15 feet away. Everything but the smell of the sea air.

Waver nods in approval.]

Not bad. Though I suppose I'm taking it at its word here. Never been to Perth.

Hunh.

[The surf looks good...

Volk has completely forgotten that he came here to learn about aliens and magic and magic aliens.

He's thinking: to change this place, he has to change some wardens. To change minds, you need a story.]

SIRE, can you put us on an indestructible safe platform above the middle of this... whatever this body of water is. And storming?

[SIRE does its best, but the transition isn't the smoothest. The two now sit inside a transparent box, out on the storming Indian Ocean. As it's pulling from memories, it's an easy thing to imagine just from any body of water, any life experience or even just a movie. The dark sky, distant lightning, waves crashing at the side of their protective case. It's not bad, but the room direct from Waver's memory was much more faithfully rendered and detailed than either this or the beach.

Waver seems impressed enough anyway, nodding again.]

Certainly is nice enough, a nice change of scenery if nothing else. [Space is a nice view, but the sterility of the Peregrine isn't.] What do you think?

[Volk is... slowly shaking his head.]

The corners of the room are repeating, look.

[He has to raise his voice to be heard over the lash of the simulated rain, points - there is some odd, not-quite-right physics happening where the patterns of pseudo-random waves overlap. It's very, very, very hard to see -

Unless your job is making sure things look exactly right from specific angles.]

What you call Magecraft - is it someone who practices a skill for their whole life and becomes so good at it that it transcends ordinary possibility?

Edited 2022-03-02 03:32 (UTC)

An expert eye would catch that sort of thing. [Waver nods with a smile, but it fades when asked that question.]

Someone can only be as good as their circuits will let them be. It doesn't matter how much you study and practice. That can't be changed.

[Solemn words from a man who knows all too well.]

Edited (html is for suckers) 2022-03-02 15:46 (UTC)

Ours is... if you're one of the best in the world at something, you have to want to be even better.

[Volk gives a sour smile.]

Unless you're a Prince. Then you don't need to practice or work at all. Other people make your magic for you.

What about, uh, True Magic? Is that hereditary?

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https://saklas.dreamwidth.org/2445.html <- ooc i can explain it better, just finished this

whoo booking marking that baby for later

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feel free to fade out whenever you want to wrt the drop, im just gonna keep goin <3