[open] Maydays

[speak_n_spell]

Who: Sypha, OTA

When: May

Where: Cadens, Horizon

What: Quests, backtag fallout, May catch all

Warnings: Will add as needed

[Starter toplevels below! Feel free to pitch one of your own, I am open to shenanigans and available to plot on discord at lizaleigh#5593]

Comments

[hextechhead]

"Yes, we've been together seven years now. He has the most incredible mind." Jayce and Viktor are opposites in every way physically and personality-wise, Jayce is full of energy and warmth, enthusiastic and friendly. One of the only things they do have in common is their fashion, because you can't take them out of the academy at the end of the day, it's too ingrained in them. Jayce also has a tendency to talk about them in a way it could be a romantic or work partnership he's talking about. Viktor is far more precise about using research or work in front of the partner title.

"I'm an academic too so it's easier to blend in. I'm a scientist first and foremost, you get used to talking to them." Jayce doesn't always have the highest opinion of himself, but he is considered very charismatic where he's from. People have a way of being drawn in by his passion, and there are few things he loves more than academia and theoretical science. It meant that getting comfortable with students and professors took almost no time at all, and he didn't mention magic at all. That he knew pretty well from his own experience. Eventually they embraced magic, but not before kicking him out of the academy!

He's surprised to hear about science being rejected, although he shouldn't be. There are other lands in his world where the church has more sway, but religion is not a prominent figure in Piltover. "I would definitely have been executed by now then. It's my life." Physically Jayce doesn't look the part of a scientist, as people here have been quick to tell him, but that's the blacksmithing. Underneath he's a nerdy nerd with the best of them.

Jayce watches her create the flame with open admiration and interest, his breath even catching a little bit as she does, that taken by it. He has yet to stop being amazed by magic. He grins ear-to-ear, as bright as if he was a child again, when she makes it turn into ice. "That's incredible. And you've always had magic?"

He is beaming back at her and nods. "Yes, thanks to Viktor's help, we completed my Hextech theory that magic and technology could be used together for greater inventions. It brought our city to a state of progress never imagined before." So there, to everyone who doubted him, ha. "And I've noticed that about their reaction to the Singularity. So magic and science really are similar, and I thought if some of the Summoned scientists can figure out a way to read data mixing the two, we might be able to have the type of proof that Cadens would listen to."

[speak_n_spell]

"Oh yes!" Sypha grins, clearly much happier speaking of her people's connection to magic than the utter shitshow of 1400s Wallachia. "I've always had the ability, though not necessarily the control. Magic is the sort of thing that crops up naturally among people in my world, it's just that...well, if you go around burning people at the stake for it, they don't have much chance to pass the ability along." That grin twists into something a little more wry. "My people don't have that same prejudice, so we have a higher concentration of magicians than most."

Hextech. She mouths the word, feeling the shape of it. It's an odd combination of terms she never would have thought to stitch together. "Is the magic in your hextech an energy source? Like steam? Or is it part of the machinery? I don't quite follow." But it's clear that she wants to. It's not her fault that her world lags so far behind Cadens, and apparently Jayce's, on that front. Not everyone has access to the technological wonders of a time traveling castle, Alucard.

"I haven't met very many scientists out of our crowd," she admits, "But I'd like to be involved in that project. I've been researching some angles of connection between the Singularity and other natural phenomenon, which might be helpful? Or at the very least I can lend magic to any smaller-scale experiments."

Sypha's not quite sure what the limits of her power look like, but she can channel energy at a steady rate almost indefinitely, so long as she's awake. Elemental manipulation comes easiest of all, but the act of wrenching Dracula's castle halfway across a country barely dipped into her reserves; she should be able to serve as a sort of battery for whatever Jayce has in mind!

[hextechhead]

Jayce's heart hurts at the mention of burning people at the stake. What a terrible and backwards reaction, although not ultimately that surprising. Magic is taboo for a reason, but he's always hated those reasons. "I'm glad that you and your people have managed to keep it going, gifts like yours, they should be nurtured, not feared." He knows he's preaching to the choir here, but still. He's longed for magic for so long, he can only be dazzled by seeing more of it in person.

"It can be used as an energy source, yes. I found crystals that were embued with arcane magic, they definitely give off electricity or lightning energy, when you see them. They're explosive and were unstable, but we managed to stabilize it into a safer form." Jayce spent his entire life studying and finding crystals, doing illegal work under the guise of science. He regrets nothing. "The mage who saved me when I was a child, he used a magical crystal as a source to pull energy from and created a teleport for us across the world. He used runes as well, but I was too young at the time to memorize them."

Jayce gets mad at himself for that sometimes! If he knew all the runes he might have had an easier time going from there, but he did remember a whole lot of them, enough for them to eventually create the Hexgates and everything else using runes. "From what I know of magic in my world, it's separated into three types, celestial, elemental, and spirit. It's elemental magic that I am tapping into for Hextech, it powers our technology, but we've only scratched the surface." Jayce knows there is so much more he can use it for, but he's limited by his inability to use magic himself. Instead it's all guess work.

"I don't have the ability to ask a mage anything about it, and much of the research or knowledge about magic is forbidden or unpopular." He really has had to do all of it from scratch. "Copying what I remembered from my experience, we were able to replicate the teleportation into something called Hexgates. They are giant teleportation devices that can instantly travel ships and people from one end of the world to the other." Jayce is really proud of it, for the obvious reasons. It's his life work. He could talk about it all day.

Jayce nods, eyes bright. "There's a few of us now. Maybe if Cadens can be provided with empirical evidence about the Singularity, it will be less likely to go to drastic measures like destroying it. Understanding it makes it less of a threat." He is very troubled about the fact Free Cities wants to destroy the Singularity, alright? That's madness in his opinion. But he knows from his own experience that sometimes people need answers spelled out right in front of them before they're willing to listen.

[speak_n_spell]

Magic crystals containing and perpetually generating lightning? Runes that pull from a source like that to move people and goods across vast distances? Sypha's thoughts flash sideways to the spinning dodecahedron powering Dracula's castle, to the shards of mirror scattered across the floor of his study like frozen waves. "I think perhaps magic manifests similarly in our two worlds," she says. "Elemental magic comes to me most easily, but I can channel something similar to 'spirit' magic via runes. And some incantations in Enochian, or other ancient pre-human languages, can invoke echoes of celestial magic. Do you recognize its inverse as demonic, or do you classify it as celestial in origin as well?"

Unless they don't have demons where he's from, and her world is just uniquely fucked like that. She wouldn't be surprised, at this point.

"Some very powerful magicians have something like your hexgates, in the form of mirrors that can be used to communicate across distances, or to step from one place to the next, but I've never seen one in action." Sypha's eyes light up even as she begins to pluck sparks from the air, little motes of matter vibrating until electricity begins to arc between her fingers. "And you replicated that based on a memory? That's amazing! You're probably lucky to still have all your limbs attached, but still very impressive!"

And then something occurs to her. It's obvious the instant the thought strikes, because Sypha's never had to learn to monitor her expressions; her eyes widen, then narrow to thoughtful slits, and one eyebrow tilts upward. "Do you suppose you could build a Hexgate here? Say, terminating at the Singularity? If you had an energy source, of course."

[hextechhead]

"As far as I know, we don't have anything demonic, but I'm not an expert on our entire world." There are a whole lot of places Jayce has never been, places where there are actual magic users who know everything he's only been able to theorize or question. He would do anything to find them, to get those answers. To find the mage who saved his life again.

"I'm afraid so much of what I know is limited, but creating Hexgates required the use of technology, those crystals, and runes." And Jayce smiles, that warm feeling spreading in his chest every time someone compliments him. In this case though, it's for what he cares about most. "I did, but it was a very strong memory. And we definitely blew up a lot of things over the years testing it out." Oh boy, and then some. Once they had the support of the Council they had to immediately start figuring out how to put it into practice. "Arguably we shouldn't be messing with something we don't fully understand, but then nothing would ever get done. All progress starts with a curiosity not fully explored."

It was reckless, and they still are messing with things they don't understand, that might be why Viktor's Hexcore in their world ended up hurting him instead of helping him. But that is what you have to do sometimes to push the world forward. A certain amount of reckless determination.

The question is an interesting one and it immediately sparks the same kind of thought process for him. "I ... the problem would be getting our hands on the type of magical source that powers New Magic here. I don't think they're going to hand it over to us." They're stranger and it seems only trusted or high level scientists and academics get to do that. "I wonder if they'd let us if we could guarantee them access to the Singularity, but we don't want to give Cadens that." They want to destroy it. Or do something to it unwise. Jayce can't help that.

"I think most things are possible, but powering it and safeguarding it, that would be the hard part."

man I'm sorry for the delay on this, the sickness got me

[speak_n_spell]

"Well yes of course, if we waited until we fully understood something to put it to use, nothing would ever get done," Sypha waves that particular safety concern aside. Life is a series of unanswered questions, and she can appreciate people willing to take risks to find answers. Especially if their findings are put towards the general benefit of others, which it sounds like these hexgates were!

It's that shared inherent recklessness that has her saying: "What sort of magical source do you need? Something perpetual, or would something that could fire off intense bursts for short periods work? Because if so..." The electricity writhing between her fingers consolidates to a single point of light at the tip of her forefinger, too bright to look at directly. "I could power it, if we could keep it concealed from the authorities well enough."

Never a worry!

[hextechhead]

"Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith. And hope you don't blow up." That is Jayce's motto, pretty much. He always throws his lot in with the impossible. He does try to test and safeguard their creations, Viktor and he put months and years into creating new tech, the next step after the Hexgates were such a success. But the first attempts at Hextech were all guessing games, it'd never been done before.

"That's beautiful." Jayce looks at the electricity with wistful eyes. He can learn how to do this himself, and he will, eventually, but he will never get tired of seeing it. And Sypha makes it look so easy. But! Focusing on the question.

"The gates required a lot of power. What happened was that the crystals held within them that magic. I know that they have a way here of bottling magical energy up, although I don't know if they have crystals or it looks different." He knows this because he's seen technology powered by magic, but the people who made it seem to be specific to the academy. Cadens version of a high mage council, only a New Magic place instead. "We'd need access to whatever they use before we can put the magic in it to power anything. And I'm not sure where that is."