Magic Under Construction: TOMU 2-17
May. 24th, 2011 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinStarted: 5/24/2011
Status: In Progress
Word Count: ~2000
Hours Writing: 2
[2 hours in]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
"Right," Stone said. "But what you are so eager to get your hands on isn't a weapon. It's a model of a weapon, built on a one:one scale. The imperial contract requires that the coronation weapon be absolutely unique. Some newly-elevated emperors have required that the models be destroyed, or that there be no model... after the design is approved, the initial sword is enchanted. In the few cases where Clan Schwertgriff was allowed to make and keep an initial mock-up, they secured the permission by making it clear that the model could not be taken for the finished copy. Doing so may have involved a slight adjustment to their thinking, but it netted them a few historically significant showpieces for their vaults."
As little as I cared about swords or weapon enchantments, I had to admit that I found this interesting. I'd never given much thought to where the emperors' personal regalia came from. There were the artifacts that had been handed down, officially or traditionally, from Magisterion I and later emperors... I knew the provenance of such historical relics.
But things like the coronation gear that was made fresh for each emperor? That wasn't history to me. That was fashion. Any rich or powerful man might have a dwaf-made sword or jewelry. It was only in hearing about it from the point of view of the swordmakers that I began to see the actual historical context. If Clan Schwertgriff had been making the coronation swords since Magisterion I, there was a continuity there. It would probably be possible to infer things about the state of the Imperial Republic, the relationship between humans and dwarves, and the character of each new emperor, by examining the relationship he had with the swordmaking clan.
Even though it was beyond the scope of the class or our immediate assignment, Professor Stone seemed happy to answer questions about the enchantments that had gone onto IX's coronation blade and how it had differed from the ones that came before and after. If there had been nothing else more interesting around, that might have got my attention... but in a room full of actual enchanted objects that I was supposed to be examining, hearing about an enchanted weapon that wasn't even actually there just didn't seem like much of a draw.
I knew I was going to end up at the staves and wands, but I didn't want to fulfill my assignment with nothing but wizard implements. It seemed like a better idea to spread things out a bit.
I headed for the TVs first. They weren't attracting a lot of attention... probably because they were so common. There had only been a very brief period where a television box had been considered much of a wondrous item. Like communication mirrors, their usefulness went up with their ubiquity. The more people who had TVs, the more money could be made producing content for them... and the more content there was, the more reason there was for people to buy a TV.
There wasn't much to the design of a television, nor had the basic design changed much over the decades: it was an empty box, with an opening on the front. It had to be tall and wide enough across the front to provide a decent viewing area, and deep enough to accommodate all the action that would be shown in miniature inside it. Techniques existed to create the appearance of greater depth, like having an image that's part of the backdrop shrink away to nothing... and that worked fine, for background stuff. But for anything important, it was easier and gave better results to have things moving around each other in real three-dimensional space.
The newer of the two TVs was only about half as deep from front to back as the older one, proportionally... until you looked inside it. The very most expensive TVs used the same extradimensional enchantments as a bag of holding to fit all the space they needed into a box not much thicker than a picture frame. This one used a simpler space-stretching enhancement to roughly double its interior depth, or to cut its outside in half, depending on how you looked at it.
But while the basic design hadn't changed... well, there was quite a difference between the elaborate classical-looking style of Stone's personal television and the sleek modern one. Stone's was a work of art, designed to stand out. The modern one was designed to fade away. The thinner margins around the opening didn't do as much to widen the viewing area as they did to make the viewers less conscious of the frame around what they were seeing. The lack of ornamentation did the same thing.
I was supposed to be noting three constants of design and three specific changes. "Box with hole in front" seemed to about sum up the whole thing. I decided to go with the basic shape, the general size and shape and position of the opening, and the underlying enchantments.
Television had really grown out of two separate devices. The first television had been a divination device for remote viewing... hence its name. The immediate precursor to the modern-day entertainment device were magic puppet shows, self-contained theaters that used a mixture of illusion and physical effects.
How the two had come to be combined was something that had been the subject of much study and little in the way of solid conclusion. The modern television essentially used divination in reverse in a way that no one really understood. Instead of a diviner using the box to locate a distant point and view what was happening there, a channeler sent the view from a distant spot through the ether in a way that boxes with the right divination sympathies could view, the image being displayed using the box's illusion-generating capacities.
The thing was, it really shouldn't have worked. "Reverse-divination channeling" wasn't actually a thing... the theory sounded like a joke to anybody who knew enough about divination or thaumatology in general to understand it. And the illusion component should have been completely redundant, since the original televisual divining boxes hadn't needed to be able to generate illusions any more than a crystal ball or magic mirror did.
But no one had ever managed to make a functional receiving television box without weaving in the illusion capabilities. There was a joke among TV makers that their products didn't work, and so the illusions were necessary to make it look like they did. A slightly more serious theory was that it was necessary to make the divination box into a puppet theater before it would reliably function as one.
The truth was probably somewhere in that neighborhood, but it was a question that could only be probed very gently... the invention of modern television had been something of a miracle, and it was hard enough to mass-produce a miracle without overly inquisitve magical theorists looking over one's shoulder.
Knowing it was relatively easy to throw the enchantments of a television out of balance, I resisted the urge to examine them. It wasn't like TV enchantments were so fragile that an inquisitive mind brushing up against one automatically would destroy it, or even do any harm... but they were notoriously temperamental and the possibility was there.
I probably could have done so without any harm, and given that he apparently made them for fun I figured Professor Stone could sort things out if I did mess something up, but I'd have a hard time explaining why I'd gone all "hands-on" with the magic in the first place.
For the differences, I noted the lack of ornamentation, the slimmer profile, and the ditching of the curtain. The curtain had been a relic of the box's origins as a puppet theater and a way of linking it in the viewer's mind with a theater.
A layperson might make the mistake of thinking that the curtain was to make it work better, but magic worked or didn't work regardless of what the viewer thought or felt. Some theorists used phrases like "subjective reality" to explain mysteries like how the TV enchantments operated together in spite of all other prevailing theories, but if reality was indeed subjective then it was ultimately subject to something other than us.
No, the curtain was purely a marketing thing. When TVs had been new, it had been important that a person who saw one could instantly grasp what it was for. There was also some concern that an empty box with one side open might be visually unappealing, or end up attracting odds and ends from someone who mistook it for a cabinet.
Once TVs became more common, the curtain had disappeared... as an unnecessary impediment to the act of watching television, it had been phased out even before the "exquisite" television that was trashed in the fight where Sooni had attacked me
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"It's not too soon to begin thinking about your final project, but if
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
[1.5 hours in]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
"Right," Stone said. "But what you are so eager to get your hands on isn't a weapon. It's a model of a weapon, built on a one:one scale. The imperial contract requires that the coronation weapon be absolutely unique. Some newly-elevated emperors have required that the models be destroyed, or that there be no model... after the design is approved, the initial sword is enchanted. In the few cases where Clan Schwertgriff was allowed to make and keep an initial mock-up, they secured the permission by making it clear that the model could not be taken for the finished copy. Doing so may have involved a slight adjustment to their thinking, but it netted them a few historically significant showpieces for their vaults."
As little as I cared about swords or weapon enchantments, I had to admit that I found this interesting. I'd never given much thought to where the emperors' personal regalia came from. There were the artifacts that had been handed down, officially or traditionally, from Magisterion I and later emperors... I knew the provenance of such historical relics.
But things like the coronation gear that was made fresh for each emperor? That wasn't history to me. That was fashion. Any rich or powerful man might have a dwaf-made sword or jewelry. It was only in hearing about it from the point of view of the swordmakers that I began to see the actual historical context. If Clan Schwertgriff had been making the coronation swords since Magisterion I, there was a continuity there. It would probably be possible to infer things about the state of the Imperial Republic, the relationship between humans and dwarves, and the character of each new emperor, by examining the relationship he had with the swordmaking clan.
Even though it was beyond the scope of the class or our immediate assignment, Professor Stone seemed happy to answer questions about the enchantments that had gone onto IX's coronation blade and how it had differed from the ones that came before and after. If there had been nothing else more interesting around, that might have got my attention... but in a room full of actual enchanted objects that I was supposed to be examining, hearing about an enchanted weapon that wasn't even actually there just didn't seem like much of a draw.
I knew I was going to end up at the staves and wands, but I didn't want to fulfill my assignment with nothing but wizard implements. It seemed like a better idea to spread things out a bit.
I headed for the TVs first. They weren't attracting a lot of attention... probably because they were so common. There had only been a very brief period where a television box had been considered much of a wondrous item. Like communication mirrors, their usefulness went up with their ubiquity. The more people who had TVs, the more money could be made producing content for them... and the more content there was, the more reason there was for people to buy a TV.
There wasn't much to the design of a television, nor had the basic design changed much over the decades: it was an empty box, with an opening on the front. It had to be tall and wide enough across the front to provide a decent viewing area, and deep enough to accommodate all the action that would be shown in miniature inside it. Techniques existed to create the appearance of greater depth, like having an image that's part of the backdrop shrink away to nothing... and that worked fine, for background stuff. But for anything important, it was easier and gave better results to have things moving around each other in real three-dimensional space.
Television had really grown out of two separate devices. The first television had been a divination device for remote viewing... hence its name. The immediate precursor to the modern-day entertainment device were magic puppet shows, self-contained theaters that used a mixture of illusion and physical effects.
How the two had come to be combined was something that had been the subject of much study and little in the way of solid conclusion. The modern television essentially used divination in reverse in a way that no one really understood. Instead of a diviner using the box to locate a distant point and view what was happening there, a channeler sent the view from a distant spot through the ether in a way that boxes with the right divination sympathies could view, the image being displayed using the box's illusion-generating capacities.
The thing was, it really shouldn't have worked. "Reverse-divination channeling" wasn't actually a thing... the theory sounded like a joke to anybody who knew enough about divination or thaumatology in general to understand it. And the illusion component should have been completely redundant, since the original televisual divining boxes hadn't needed to be able to generate illusions any more than a crystal ball or magic mirror did.
But no one had ever managed to make a functional receiving television box without weaving in the illusion capabilities. There was a joke among TV makers that their products didn't work, and so the illusions were necessary to make it look like they did. A slightly more serious theory was that it was necessary to make the divination box into a puppet theater before it would reliably function as one.
The truth was probably somewhere in that neighborhood, but it was a question that could only be probed very gently... the invention of modern television had been something of a miracle, and it was hard enough to mass-produce a miracle without overly inquisitve magical theorists looking over one's shoulder.
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"It's not too soon to begin thinking about your final project, but if
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
[1 hour in]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
"Right," Stone said. "But what you are so eager to get your hands on isn't a weapon. It's a model of a weapon, built on a one:one scale. The imperial contract requires that the coronation weapon be absolutely unique. Some newly-elevated emperors have required that the models be destroyed, or that there be no model... after the design is approved, the initial sword is enchanted. In the few cases where Clan Schwertgriff was allowed to make and keep an initial mock-up, they secured the permission by making it clear that the model could not be taken for the finished copy. Doing so may have involved a slight adjustment to their thinking, but it netted them a few historically significant showpieces for their vaults."
As little as I cared about swords or weapon enchantments, I had to admit that I found this interesting. I'd never given much thought to where the emperors' personal regalia came from. There were the artifacts that had been handed down, officially or traditionally, from Magisterion I and later emperors... I knew the provenance of such historical relics.
But things like the coronation gear that was made fresh for each emperor? That wasn't history to me. That was fashion. Any rich or powerful man might have a dwaf-made sword or jewelry. It was only in hearing about it from the point of view of the swordmakers that I began to see the actual historical context. If Clan Schwertgriff had been making the coronation swords since Magisterion I, there was a continuity there. It would probably be possible to infer things about the state of the Imperial Republic, the relationship between humans and dwarves, and the character of each new emperor, by examining the relationship he had with the swordmaking clan.
Even though it was beyond the scope of the class or our immediate assignment, Professor Stone seemed happy to answer questions about the enchantments that had gone onto IX's coronation blade and how it had differed from the ones that came before and after. If there had been nothing else more interesting around, that might have got my attention... but in a room full of actual enchanted objects that I was supposed to be examining, hearing about an enchanted weapon that wasn't even actually there just didn't seem like much of a draw.
I knew I was going to end up at the staves and wands, but I didn't want to fulfill my assignment with nothing but wizard implements. It seemed like a better idea to spread things out a bit.
I headed for the TVs first. They weren't attracting a lot of attention... probably because they were so common. There had only been a very brief period where a television box had been considered much of a wondrous item. Like communication mirrors, their usefulness went up with their ubiquity.
Television had really grown out of two separate devices. The first television had been a divination device for remote viewing... hence its name.
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"It's not too soon to begin thinking about your final project, but if
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
[0.5 hours in. Just begun.]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
Status: In Progress
Word Count: ~2000
Hours Writing: 2
[2 hours in]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
"Right," Stone said. "But what you are so eager to get your hands on isn't a weapon. It's a model of a weapon, built on a one:one scale. The imperial contract requires that the coronation weapon be absolutely unique. Some newly-elevated emperors have required that the models be destroyed, or that there be no model... after the design is approved, the initial sword is enchanted. In the few cases where Clan Schwertgriff was allowed to make and keep an initial mock-up, they secured the permission by making it clear that the model could not be taken for the finished copy. Doing so may have involved a slight adjustment to their thinking, but it netted them a few historically significant showpieces for their vaults."
As little as I cared about swords or weapon enchantments, I had to admit that I found this interesting. I'd never given much thought to where the emperors' personal regalia came from. There were the artifacts that had been handed down, officially or traditionally, from Magisterion I and later emperors... I knew the provenance of such historical relics.
But things like the coronation gear that was made fresh for each emperor? That wasn't history to me. That was fashion. Any rich or powerful man might have a dwaf-made sword or jewelry. It was only in hearing about it from the point of view of the swordmakers that I began to see the actual historical context. If Clan Schwertgriff had been making the coronation swords since Magisterion I, there was a continuity there. It would probably be possible to infer things about the state of the Imperial Republic, the relationship between humans and dwarves, and the character of each new emperor, by examining the relationship he had with the swordmaking clan.
Even though it was beyond the scope of the class or our immediate assignment, Professor Stone seemed happy to answer questions about the enchantments that had gone onto IX's coronation blade and how it had differed from the ones that came before and after. If there had been nothing else more interesting around, that might have got my attention... but in a room full of actual enchanted objects that I was supposed to be examining, hearing about an enchanted weapon that wasn't even actually there just didn't seem like much of a draw.
I knew I was going to end up at the staves and wands, but I didn't want to fulfill my assignment with nothing but wizard implements. It seemed like a better idea to spread things out a bit.
I headed for the TVs first. They weren't attracting a lot of attention... probably because they were so common. There had only been a very brief period where a television box had been considered much of a wondrous item. Like communication mirrors, their usefulness went up with their ubiquity. The more people who had TVs, the more money could be made producing content for them... and the more content there was, the more reason there was for people to buy a TV.
There wasn't much to the design of a television, nor had the basic design changed much over the decades: it was an empty box, with an opening on the front. It had to be tall and wide enough across the front to provide a decent viewing area, and deep enough to accommodate all the action that would be shown in miniature inside it. Techniques existed to create the appearance of greater depth, like having an image that's part of the backdrop shrink away to nothing... and that worked fine, for background stuff. But for anything important, it was easier and gave better results to have things moving around each other in real three-dimensional space.
The newer of the two TVs was only about half as deep from front to back as the older one, proportionally... until you looked inside it. The very most expensive TVs used the same extradimensional enchantments as a bag of holding to fit all the space they needed into a box not much thicker than a picture frame. This one used a simpler space-stretching enhancement to roughly double its interior depth, or to cut its outside in half, depending on how you looked at it.
But while the basic design hadn't changed... well, there was quite a difference between the elaborate classical-looking style of Stone's personal television and the sleek modern one. Stone's was a work of art, designed to stand out. The modern one was designed to fade away. The thinner margins around the opening didn't do as much to widen the viewing area as they did to make the viewers less conscious of the frame around what they were seeing. The lack of ornamentation did the same thing.
I was supposed to be noting three constants of design and three specific changes. "Box with hole in front" seemed to about sum up the whole thing. I decided to go with the basic shape, the general size and shape and position of the opening, and the underlying enchantments.
Television had really grown out of two separate devices. The first television had been a divination device for remote viewing... hence its name. The immediate precursor to the modern-day entertainment device were magic puppet shows, self-contained theaters that used a mixture of illusion and physical effects.
How the two had come to be combined was something that had been the subject of much study and little in the way of solid conclusion. The modern television essentially used divination in reverse in a way that no one really understood. Instead of a diviner using the box to locate a distant point and view what was happening there, a channeler sent the view from a distant spot through the ether in a way that boxes with the right divination sympathies could view, the image being displayed using the box's illusion-generating capacities.
The thing was, it really shouldn't have worked. "Reverse-divination channeling" wasn't actually a thing... the theory sounded like a joke to anybody who knew enough about divination or thaumatology in general to understand it. And the illusion component should have been completely redundant, since the original televisual divining boxes hadn't needed to be able to generate illusions any more than a crystal ball or magic mirror did.
But no one had ever managed to make a functional receiving television box without weaving in the illusion capabilities. There was a joke among TV makers that their products didn't work, and so the illusions were necessary to make it look like they did. A slightly more serious theory was that it was necessary to make the divination box into a puppet theater before it would reliably function as one.
The truth was probably somewhere in that neighborhood, but it was a question that could only be probed very gently... the invention of modern television had been something of a miracle, and it was hard enough to mass-produce a miracle without overly inquisitve magical theorists looking over one's shoulder.
Knowing it was relatively easy to throw the enchantments of a television out of balance, I resisted the urge to examine them. It wasn't like TV enchantments were so fragile that an inquisitive mind brushing up against one automatically would destroy it, or even do any harm... but they were notoriously temperamental and the possibility was there.
I probably could have done so without any harm, and given that he apparently made them for fun I figured Professor Stone could sort things out if I did mess something up, but I'd have a hard time explaining why I'd gone all "hands-on" with the magic in the first place.
For the differences, I noted the lack of ornamentation, the slimmer profile, and the ditching of the curtain. The curtain had been a relic of the box's origins as a puppet theater and a way of linking it in the viewer's mind with a theater.
A layperson might make the mistake of thinking that the curtain was to make it work better, but magic worked or didn't work regardless of what the viewer thought or felt. Some theorists used phrases like "subjective reality" to explain mysteries like how the TV enchantments operated together in spite of all other prevailing theories, but if reality was indeed subjective then it was ultimately subject to something other than us.
No, the curtain was purely a marketing thing. When TVs had been new, it had been important that a person who saw one could instantly grasp what it was for. There was also some concern that an empty box with one side open might be visually unappealing, or end up attracting odds and ends from someone who mistook it for a cabinet.
Once TVs became more common, the curtain had disappeared... as an unnecessary impediment to the act of watching television, it had been phased out even before the "exquisite" television that was trashed in the fight where Sooni had attacked me
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"It's not too soon to begin thinking about your final project, but if
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
[1.5 hours in]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
"Right," Stone said. "But what you are so eager to get your hands on isn't a weapon. It's a model of a weapon, built on a one:one scale. The imperial contract requires that the coronation weapon be absolutely unique. Some newly-elevated emperors have required that the models be destroyed, or that there be no model... after the design is approved, the initial sword is enchanted. In the few cases where Clan Schwertgriff was allowed to make and keep an initial mock-up, they secured the permission by making it clear that the model could not be taken for the finished copy. Doing so may have involved a slight adjustment to their thinking, but it netted them a few historically significant showpieces for their vaults."
As little as I cared about swords or weapon enchantments, I had to admit that I found this interesting. I'd never given much thought to where the emperors' personal regalia came from. There were the artifacts that had been handed down, officially or traditionally, from Magisterion I and later emperors... I knew the provenance of such historical relics.
But things like the coronation gear that was made fresh for each emperor? That wasn't history to me. That was fashion. Any rich or powerful man might have a dwaf-made sword or jewelry. It was only in hearing about it from the point of view of the swordmakers that I began to see the actual historical context. If Clan Schwertgriff had been making the coronation swords since Magisterion I, there was a continuity there. It would probably be possible to infer things about the state of the Imperial Republic, the relationship between humans and dwarves, and the character of each new emperor, by examining the relationship he had with the swordmaking clan.
Even though it was beyond the scope of the class or our immediate assignment, Professor Stone seemed happy to answer questions about the enchantments that had gone onto IX's coronation blade and how it had differed from the ones that came before and after. If there had been nothing else more interesting around, that might have got my attention... but in a room full of actual enchanted objects that I was supposed to be examining, hearing about an enchanted weapon that wasn't even actually there just didn't seem like much of a draw.
I knew I was going to end up at the staves and wands, but I didn't want to fulfill my assignment with nothing but wizard implements. It seemed like a better idea to spread things out a bit.
I headed for the TVs first. They weren't attracting a lot of attention... probably because they were so common. There had only been a very brief period where a television box had been considered much of a wondrous item. Like communication mirrors, their usefulness went up with their ubiquity. The more people who had TVs, the more money could be made producing content for them... and the more content there was, the more reason there was for people to buy a TV.
There wasn't much to the design of a television, nor had the basic design changed much over the decades: it was an empty box, with an opening on the front. It had to be tall and wide enough across the front to provide a decent viewing area, and deep enough to accommodate all the action that would be shown in miniature inside it. Techniques existed to create the appearance of greater depth, like having an image that's part of the backdrop shrink away to nothing... and that worked fine, for background stuff. But for anything important, it was easier and gave better results to have things moving around each other in real three-dimensional space.
Television had really grown out of two separate devices. The first television had been a divination device for remote viewing... hence its name. The immediate precursor to the modern-day entertainment device were magic puppet shows, self-contained theaters that used a mixture of illusion and physical effects.
How the two had come to be combined was something that had been the subject of much study and little in the way of solid conclusion. The modern television essentially used divination in reverse in a way that no one really understood. Instead of a diviner using the box to locate a distant point and view what was happening there, a channeler sent the view from a distant spot through the ether in a way that boxes with the right divination sympathies could view, the image being displayed using the box's illusion-generating capacities.
The thing was, it really shouldn't have worked. "Reverse-divination channeling" wasn't actually a thing... the theory sounded like a joke to anybody who knew enough about divination or thaumatology in general to understand it. And the illusion component should have been completely redundant, since the original televisual divining boxes hadn't needed to be able to generate illusions any more than a crystal ball or magic mirror did.
But no one had ever managed to make a functional receiving television box without weaving in the illusion capabilities. There was a joke among TV makers that their products didn't work, and so the illusions were necessary to make it look like they did. A slightly more serious theory was that it was necessary to make the divination box into a puppet theater before it would reliably function as one.
The truth was probably somewhere in that neighborhood, but it was a question that could only be probed very gently... the invention of modern television had been something of a miracle, and it was hard enough to mass-produce a miracle without overly inquisitve magical theorists looking over one's shoulder.
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"It's not too soon to begin thinking about your final project, but if
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
[1 hour in]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
"Right," Stone said. "But what you are so eager to get your hands on isn't a weapon. It's a model of a weapon, built on a one:one scale. The imperial contract requires that the coronation weapon be absolutely unique. Some newly-elevated emperors have required that the models be destroyed, or that there be no model... after the design is approved, the initial sword is enchanted. In the few cases where Clan Schwertgriff was allowed to make and keep an initial mock-up, they secured the permission by making it clear that the model could not be taken for the finished copy. Doing so may have involved a slight adjustment to their thinking, but it netted them a few historically significant showpieces for their vaults."
As little as I cared about swords or weapon enchantments, I had to admit that I found this interesting. I'd never given much thought to where the emperors' personal regalia came from. There were the artifacts that had been handed down, officially or traditionally, from Magisterion I and later emperors... I knew the provenance of such historical relics.
But things like the coronation gear that was made fresh for each emperor? That wasn't history to me. That was fashion. Any rich or powerful man might have a dwaf-made sword or jewelry. It was only in hearing about it from the point of view of the swordmakers that I began to see the actual historical context. If Clan Schwertgriff had been making the coronation swords since Magisterion I, there was a continuity there. It would probably be possible to infer things about the state of the Imperial Republic, the relationship between humans and dwarves, and the character of each new emperor, by examining the relationship he had with the swordmaking clan.
Even though it was beyond the scope of the class or our immediate assignment, Professor Stone seemed happy to answer questions about the enchantments that had gone onto IX's coronation blade and how it had differed from the ones that came before and after. If there had been nothing else more interesting around, that might have got my attention... but in a room full of actual enchanted objects that I was supposed to be examining, hearing about an enchanted weapon that wasn't even actually there just didn't seem like much of a draw.
I knew I was going to end up at the staves and wands, but I didn't want to fulfill my assignment with nothing but wizard implements. It seemed like a better idea to spread things out a bit.
I headed for the TVs first. They weren't attracting a lot of attention... probably because they were so common. There had only been a very brief period where a television box had been considered much of a wondrous item. Like communication mirrors, their usefulness went up with their ubiquity.
Television had really grown out of two separate devices. The first television had been a divination device for remote viewing... hence its name.
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"It's not too soon to begin thinking about your final project, but if
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."
[0.5 hours in. Just begun.]
A few guys had either ignored Professor Stone's warnings about the coronation sword prototype or were just curious about the protective spell he'd put around it. A lot of the class stopped to watch as one of them reached a hand out slowly towards the hilt of the floating weapon.
The blue barrier reappeared with a loud crackling sound and he jerked his hand back as if shocked.
"Careful, now!" Professor Stone called amiably. "That is the weakest protection the swordsmiths will allow me to have it under, and the strongest the university will tolerate. It operates on a principle of escalating deterrence."
I had to shake my head at the people who were so caught up in the sword's allure. Without any magic, it was basically a big piece of jewelry that was heavy enough to hit people with. Just precious metals and stones.
"Professor," the guy who'd tried to touch the sword said, "why wouldn't the dwarves have enchanted this, too?"
"I told you," Stone said. "It's just the prototype."
"But you said that when they made a weapon, they made a weapon," he said. "The actual coronation sword wasn't intended to be used but they still made sure it could be, right?"
[]
"Mackenzie Jo Blaise!" she said.
"Hello, Sooni," I said. "Did you look up my last name just so you could say that?"
"I didn't look it up," she said. "It was on the news last year... I remembered it so I could say that. I cannot believe you followed me into the design program."
"I didn't," I said. "I'm just here to get some crafting credit, as cheaply and easily as possible."
"Design is not easy," she hissed. "It requires a lot of hard work... or a lot of natural talent."
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at the obvious implications of the second alternative. Sooni had produced some fairly stunning original outfits along with some ridiculous ones that were nevertheless high-quality replicas of things her favorite characters wore. For some reason, it was easier for me to believe she'd lucked into the kind of affinity that made such things come naturally than it was for me to believe that she put in a ton of hard work.
[]
"The necessity of actually producing a prototype is something that you will need to take into account. Some students begin with too ambitious of an idea and have to scale it back... the sooner you are able to recognize the necessity of doing so, the less likely you are to find yourself scrambling at the end of the semester," he said. "Now, it is not actually necessary to fabricate the item yourself. If you do not have any crafting experience, you may wish to use the bulletin boards... material or ethereal... to find someone with the expertise you need. In past years, some particularly, ah, enterprising students have gone so far as to contract with workhouses in Enwich to produce a small run of their products for sale."