1.5 An Inauspicious Beginning

<div id="i4c-draggable-container" style="position: fixed; z-index: 1499; width: 0px; height: 0px;"><div data-reactroot="" class="resolved" style="all: initial;"></div></div>Coruscant.

50 by 33, sublevel C, Central floor.

Maru's Salvage

Month 4 Day 18 10:00

"Yah Silv, Yah Silv, Yah Silv, Yah Silv." I mutter under my breath as I wander down the pathways of the Junkyard, the rusting hulk of a long defunct freighter under my boots as I scuttle down the baths between aircars long past their use by date.

"So Draconic?" Chanim quips. On her belt is a radio blaring a shitty live recording of "Mad about Me" I recorded the entire concert once I actually had a bit of money to my name, partially to listen to because the Modal Nodes are actually a pretty good pub band and partially to provide background noise so that when I'm muttering out long dead magical languages so no one can get a decent recording. As a bonus it helps mask our conversation when we're talking treason.

It isn't paranoia if they are out to get you.

"Fuck yeah draconic. On Nirn draconic is sort of the admin commands for the universe, it's not like that here but as a spell focus it's still pretty fucking good. So have you found it yet?" I ask cheerfully.

I know where the peice we're looking for is, not perfectly of course, the spells simply don't have that kind of resolution. But I do know that it's probably about a hundred and fifty meters thataway which is more than good enough for government work. I can recast once I get closer.

Chanim on the other hand has at best minimal enthusiasm for this kind of magic and the mechanical thingy we're looking for has next to no 'Plot Significance' which means the force is being about as useful as a pair of climbing boots to a goldfish.

"Well?" I asks as she looks each way, one at a time.

"Shit, Shit." she mutters under her breath.

"Don't try to force it Chanim." I say taking a seat on an old aircar and pulling my water bottle. "Just stay chill and have another go. Remember you know where you're going."

"No I don't."

"Yes you do, you're going where the thing is."

"Where the thing is." she mutters under her breath, taking in our surroundings.

The junkyard isn't a particularly popular place and we're deep inside it's confines, it isn't actually part of the undercity but it's pretty damn close, more than five hundred meters from the last kiss of sunlight Sublevel C was last on the surface almost five hundred years ago towards the founding of the previous republic. As a result it's dark as fuck, the pair of us are both wearing faint light harnesses to provide the impression that we aren't grinding Nighteye for all we're worth but with the amount of light they're putting out all they do is light us up for any predators.

I'm also dropping the occasional Detect Life because there are Rats down here and they're roughly the size of Labradors.

The junkyard itself is a fairly typical thing, towers or rusted hulks all forgotten from times long past and left to sit down here int the stagnant air since "all the good bits" were "Picked over centuries ago" well that's the common wisdom anyway. most people aren't walking around with a skull full of magical bullshit.

"Define the thing for me." I take a swig of my water bottle.

"It is a CVSPGK460 Gungan variant, length of eight millimetres width of ninety six, a height of thirty seven, it is a fuel injection processor used in Gungan series GK460 skyhoppers. last used on hundred and eighty years ago."

"And the nearest example of such a part is?"

"Where we came about thirty paces back..." she stops herself and blinks in the dim light a moment. "Was that magic or the force?"

"Yes." I slide the bottle back into it's holster and stand. The durasteel hull beneath my boots. "If it were me I'd be sure it was magic, cause I don't force. With you.... EH?" I shake my hand in the either or movement.

"You're really helpful with my journey of self discovery." She mutters under her breath as we amble back up the path to where the piece is hidden under several tonnes of heavy metal husks.

"It's a pleasure to be of service." I say chirpily and she bops me on the leg.

I close my eyes and envisage the part in my minds eye, it's shape it's feel and it's proper place in a vehicle designed to take it. Of course i know where the part is... how could I not it's right where I last left it and yes I was the last person to leave it about seven meters forward of my current position and fifty centimetres straight down.

"Yah Silv." I let a little bit of extra magika flow from my internal reserves as I fortify the feeling of knowledge in my mind. Enough to keep it going for at least the next thirty seconds.

There is a bunch of different ways of doing magic. I'm not going to give a firm number because inevitably I'm going to read a new book some time in the next week or so which will provide a completely new and fresh perspective on the issue. But there's a bunch... more than four at least.

The first and probably hardest is what I'm going to call Magic by First Principles. To do magic by first principles what you are doing is hammering on the rules of reality and convincing them that they've always been different, that the chookie is in fact your friend and that the door is actually open.

It's by far the most diverse and versatile way of doing magic and adding cheats like draconic is far far easier because all draconic words have fixed fundamental meanings which makes casting using them a damn side easier than just your own thoughts. The primary benefits of first principle magic is that you can make up magic on the fly for certain specific purposes such as finding a certain specific part or item, the other great thing is that if you're careful you can completely eliminate the magical lightshow aspect of spellcasting as well as the attendant sounds.

Of course it's utterly pants as far as combat magic goes, in an emergency it takes anywhere up to a minute to get your thoughts in order, someone who has mastered Jedi Zen Bullshit or simply has much much more practice than I have could probably manage it but that is very much not me.

The second kind of casting is, by the books at least, a fairly recent invention. It's called 'Active Matrix Casting' and to use it you form a spell matrix in your hand, a specialised arrangement of thoughts and concepts expressed as shapes comprised tiny amounts of magika and to cast you funnel magika through the matrix and it comes out as a spell. The actual creation of a spell matrix is fairly simple if you've studied programming at all but there's a bunch of overheads in programming the magic correctly so that it comes out as a bolt or a spray and that you don't fry yourself while casting.

The good news is that you can do all of that in the safety of the lab and then break out your premade made matrices in the field but actually designing the damn things is a pain and a half. It's simply the best kind of combat magic, like heads and shoulders above any other casting style I've found so far even if switching between spells is a bit of a pain AND, and this is my favourite bit, magical matrices can be made out of physical things and then charged with magika which means magitek. That bit isn't particularly useful to me but the step from 'Magic is something for the living' to the theoretical 'RISE MY MAGITEKNOLOGIKAL MARVELS' gives me the warm fuzzies just thinking about it.

Not that I can do that of course. The most I've been able to use it for is making a cheap and nasty hotplate for a good cuppa.

The third category I regularly use is Formal Aldmer Magic, it's a style of magic based around specific thought constructs and is the obvious precursor to Active Matrix Casting. It's basically forming a thought matrix and casting in a single smooth motion which is fairly taxing in a mental sense but almost as fast as Active Matrix and it's much easier to actually build the spells in comparison but the obvious downside, aside from a few types of spell which it isn't suitable for, is that it's much easier to interrupt and distort a spell using it, of the three styles it's the most likely to backfire.

It's actual use to me however is for all of those little utility spells that you can't be bothered figuring out an active matrix for, things like waterwalking, silence, levitation, healing, nighteye and the two dozen fortification variants which are kicking around in the back of my skull.

Chanim jumps up onto the Car in front of her and easily slips through the narrow gaps in the wrecks until she's just above the place where the component.

"Alrighty we've found it. How exactly do we get to it?"

"Any easy access?" I ask.

"Nope, can't even see the thing you know this would be much easier with a lightsaber." She grouses.

"Right up until the bit where we die from the two dozen stormies crawling up our arse." I quip as I clamber up, over and between the wrecks until i'm next to the one where Chanim's looking for a way in. "Anyhooo What you're are gonna need to do is use telekinesis to unmount the thing and then levitate it out."

"What I'm going to have to do?" Chanim looks at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Yup. Here's a socket set, A tin opener and I hope you brushed up on 'lubrication on target' and 'disintegrate rust'." I pass the small case containing the tools into her small hands and extricate myself from the tower of rusting hulks.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The small green piece of equipment rest's in Chanims hands, it actually didn't take her that long to extract the little fucker. Inside the toughened green casing is a neat little bit of Gungan biotech which purifies the fuel feed to their particular design of hyperdrive. The living bits are still alive in there, or they should be given that we specifically were looking for a functional example, and with the light blue glow of restoration magic sweeping over the item in question we can be certain that it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

"So what are we going to do about Captain Larbort?" She asks as she leads the way to the next part on our list.

"Well I'll do the talking for a start. As a humie the imps are far less likely to shoot me out of hand. As for the "ADVENTURE!" well there's an old wreck, bout a thousand years old buried deep under thirty south, I figure that it came in real hot and the particle shields kept it in one piece during lithobreaking so it should be in something approximating salvageable condition. But I've got, like, a dozen expeditions which I was planning to get to before you came along which I'll run past the LT day after tomorrow when I go to the garrison to sort this whole thing out."

"You aren't planning on leaving them to be killed by a Rancor or something. Because they're imperial scum and people like them are responsible for mum..." She says with macabre enthusiasm.

"Yeah nooooo. The Empire is... well an Empire." I shrug. "You don't kill an empire by nailing a few ground pounders. The naval academy must be minting something like a few million officers per year. If you had a lightsaber and they lined up all nice and neat in front of you without resisting you would wear yourself out bisecting jackboots before you made a meaningful dent in the empires warmaking ability."

"Shit." She mutters. Her small hand tightening around the hilt of the small pistol she wears across her chest.

"Yeah, that's the problem with the scale for these kinds of things. The only things which can actually hurt the empire is either a major defeat, the death of one of their key figures, both of which are bonkers nasty dark jedi, or by fundamentally shifting the power structures of the galaxy. Now I can do that last one by putting digitized copies of all my books on the Holonet and posting them to each and every rebel group in the galaxy but the level of social upheaval to end the Empire is... well.. have you ever heard of the Judean Peoples front?"

"Is this another one of those movie things from another universe which I can't know anything about."

"Damn straight it is. Anyway it's an old joke from my homeworld, The Judean peoples front is a pack of peasants recently incorporated into the roman empire, like in the last century or so and they want to get rid of the Romans for suppressing their religion and laws. So who do you think they hate the most?"

"The Romans?"

"No, they hate the Peoples Front of Judea."

"Who?"

"Well the Peoples Front of Judea are a pack of peasants recently incorporated into the roman empire, like in the last century or so and they want to get rid of the Romans for suppressing their religion and laws."

Her brow furrows as we amble our way to the next part.

"Isn't that exactly the same as the other group?"

"No not exactly. You would need a microscope to tell them apart though. Point is both groups hate each other and will fight each other before fighting the Empire itself despite being near identical and I will bet you Credits to Chickens that each and every planet out there has at least half a dozen such groups."

"So you think that magic would cause a civil war?"

"No we already have a civil war. Magic on an unprepared universe would put civil war in your civil war so you can civilly war while you war civilly."

Chanim stops walking for a moment and draws a long and careful breath in and out again.

When she opens her eyes again they glow faintly for a moment before dimming.

"That is incredibly depressing." She says slightly defeated.

"Yeah. Welcome to the mortal condition kiddo." I pat her on the head as we walk deeper into the junkyard.

"You know what? Lets get this thing and go get some fucking cake, take our mind off impending galactic war." I announce.

"Yeah, Okey."

<div id="i4c-dialogs-container"></div>