014

What’s in the Box?

Lila preferred it when it rained during funerals.

She was not gifted with such weather today: the beautiful spring morning was sunny, cloudless, and filled with the signs of new life. Birds sang in the trees, bees flew from flower to flower, and there was even a bloom of drifters in the sky that took the shape of a diffuse green orb. It was an utterly idyllic day.

And basically all of Willow Hollow had gathered for the Mayor’s funeral.

Lila herself actually thought the weather fitting, for as a Keeper, her attitude towards death was understandably one of “his task is done, he is in a better place now.” However, in her years of experience as a Keeper, she’d found that vocalizing this particular viewpoint was generally best done before a death and then quite some time after. When the memory was closest, the average person wasn’t ready for that sort of comfort.

Which put Lila in quite the awkward position in most funerals, for she needed to be somber when, deep down, she was actually somewhat happy that the departed were off to somewhere better, Lila herself feeling only the pang of personal loss.

The complications were only further added to the fact that it was the Mayor’s funeral, and most people in Willow Hollow had a less-than-ideal image of the man, which, so far as Lila could tell, was an image the Mayor had specifically engendered in the people for some unknown purpose. Perhaps to make transitioning power easier?

All this to say Lila had to give a somber speech on a beautiful day to a large crowd of people who had very mixed feelings on the departed in the first place.

As always, she decided honesty was the best policy. Though, in this case, perhaps not blunt honestly. She rose to the little stool behind the coffin—she’d had the coffin engraved with a copy of his mask on the front, for aesthetic and respect purposes, not because he’d asked for it. The population of the town stood quietly in the square, waiting to hear her speak.

“I know that our Mayor was a controversial figure,” she began. “He came to town one day and proved himself an able politician and quickly claimed the seat of power. He turned the mining industry of this town from a fledgling idea to a fully-realized enterprise that has become the lifeblood of this home of ours. But after that, he spent most of his time locked away, hiding behind his mask, seeing as few people as possible.

“However, when he was required, he would always arrive and provide his much-needed wisdom. Even during the recent crisis with the Red Seekers, he came and gave his counsel. Up to the end, he did his duty, and all of us are in debt to him for it.

“A lot of you, especially the younger ones, never met him. He was quite a gruff man, and when he wasn’t talking as briefly as possible, you got the sense he was leading you toward the exact conclusion he wanted you to reach. I myself didn’t arrive until his ‘open’ career was over, so I never got to hear any of his speeches, but I hear they were absolutely spectacular.

“It really must be strange for everyone here, to come to pay respects to a man most don’t have a clear picture of. But his life was a life just like all of ours: he grew, he changed, and he made an impact. We must not forget all that he has done for us, be it in the open or from his little place in the shadows.

“He is gone now, but we must continue to love this town, as he did. Yes, he really did love this town. He wanted it to grow, to prosper… and to find a way to be. To be right with the world, right with Dia, and right with… well, ourselves. When you think about your neighbors, the community, remember that he was the one who brought all of this together. Brought all of us together, even if we aren’t fully aware of it.

“Let us remember him as what he was: the man who glued this town together and rarely asked for thanks in return.”

She quoted a few verses and said a few platitudes after that, and the burial commenced. It was short and simple, as the Mayor would have wanted. It was no secret that he absolutely hated pomp. The casket was lowered into the ground, Blue and Vaughan quickly covered it in dirt, and various people mingled around a bit to say a few awkward words of solemn observance before spreading out.

At which point Lila noticed none other than Joira standing in the crowd, though she was in a brown hood rather than her usual red one. She approached Lila after most of the others had already left.

“I… am surprised to see you here,” Lila said. “Welcome.” Despite her welcoming exterior, Lila was already making plans on what to do in case Joira tried something—a Keeper on the frontier had to be friendly to all, but expect the worst.

“Heh. Welcome. You Keepers…” Joira put a hand to the bridge of her nose. “I remember when he moved in. I wasn’t in charge at the time, and the Seekers had almost been driven out entirely.” She paused for a moment. “He let us stay. At the time, I had viewed that as a weakness to be exploited. Now, I am no longer so sure.”

“He certainly had a way with people, a—“ Joira turned away from Lila in the middle of her sentence and started marching up the path to Mt. Cascade.

Lila didn’t let the rudeness bother her. Simply having a conversation with Joira that wasn’t half-shouting was amazing progress.

She found herself chuckling. “Death, the most tragic of events by the world’s standards, can be used to open us up in ways we didn’t even know we needed… how perfectly this is all designed.”

~~~

“…and then Sandy left and then the snow melted and the next day I came to talk to you!” Jeh took a giant breath, finally allowing Ashen to get a word in edgewise.

“…You have been informing me of your exploits during the winter every chance you’ve gotten for over a week, Jeh. I think you might like talking too much.”

“I needed to catch you up on everything that happened!” Jeh said. “Oh, and then there’s the things that are happening, we’re going to try and get the Skyseed into a stable orbit!”

“Ah, yes, that thing where you’re always falling but never hit the ground. Is that right?”

“Well… yeah I’m pretty sure that’s it.” Jeh sat down on her rock and started kicking her legs back and forth. “You just let yourself fall in a circle really fast!”

“I wonder if I could achieve that...”

“Vaughan’s thinking it’s possible with our current drive and you’re much bigger, but you’d have to leave your tree behind.” Jeh crossed her arms. “And we don’t want our tree friend to suffocate now do we?”

“Definitely not.”

“Still, I wish Vaughan would hurry up and let me go back to space.” Jeh flopped onto her back. “Too risky, they say, both him and Blue. They say they accept that I’ll be fine and still don’t let me go.”

“What is the reason they give?”

“Something something, the Skyseed could break, can’t risk losing it on a flight long enough to take us around Ikyu, blah blah…”

“…So, it’s dangerous for the ship to be up there. But you need it to get yourself up there.”

“Uh… yeah?” Jeh started to grin. “Ashen, do you have an idea?”

“Maybe. Maybe you could get an orbit without the Skyseed. Just…” Ashen caused an explosion under a nearby rock, launching it into the air so quickly Jeh lost track of it. “Shoot something that’ll fall around Ikyu.”

Jeh blinked. “That. Is a brilliant idea.” Jeh stood up. “I’ve got to go tell them right now!” She scrambled off at high speed, tripping over her legs as she ran.

Ashen flashed a few times. …Well, guess I’m alone again. Maybe next time she shows up we can talk about something other than what happened in the middle of winter.

A bird chirped at her.

“Don’t you start.”

~~~

Suro stood in front of the doors to the cabin, Vaughan at his side. Both of them stared intently at the path to Willow Hollow, awaiting the arrival of a certain special package.

“She’s sure built this thing up,” Vaughan said.

“She doesn’t know what it is, the old Mayor built it up.”

Vaughan scratched his beard. “Speaking of, is there even going to be an election held?”

“Only Lila’s said she’s running.” Suro flicked his ears. “We all know everyone who would do it would much rather she did it.”

“Yourself included?”

Suro folded his ears back and smiled awkwardly. “Uh… yes. Exactly.”

“Same. I’m sure she’ll do well.”

“It certainly helps our little Program.”

At this moment, the conversation ended, for they saw the cart coming around the bend. Blue was hitched to it and trotting along at a brisk pace. Inside the cart was a large, wooden box marked with black paint and a lot of red warning glyphs, not to mention the various chains and locks on it. Lila sat on top of the box, flicking her tail and her eyes back and forth, alert for any possible threats.

“What a nice box,” Vaughan observed.

“Let’s just get it in the basement,” Blue said. “You have no idea how hard it is to take the long way around so nobody sees you.”

Vaughan opened the front doors and let them in. “Is it light enough to carry?”

Blue unhitched her cart and lit her horn, grunting, but managing to levitate the box out of the cart. “It’s… a bit heavy, but I can get it down some stairs.”

Vaughan walked ahead of them and fished out a key, unlocking one of the few locked doors in the entire cabin—the cellar. Down here was where he kept some vintage wine and not much else. He’d built it with the intention of holding valuables, but then he ended up just throwing anything everywhere since he had very little reason to be concerned about robbers. It was generally considered a dumb idea to try and rob a wizard if you weren’t a wizard yourself, and wizards could put their skills to much more profitable use.

Blue set the box down in the middle of the cellar, keeping her horn lit so the darkness of the cellar didn’t overwhelm them. “All right, we’re in.”

Vaughan closed the door behind the four of them. “So… how are we going to open it?”

“With force,” Lila said. “The Mayor threw away most of the keys to those chains a long time ago.”

“Lovely…” Vaughan held out his scepter and started applying Red to the various chains in a focused area while pulling apart with Orange. Seeing as he didn’t want to start a fire, he took his time with this, taking a few minutes to burn through all the necessary chains so the box was no longer locked up so tight.

“Remember, he said don’t touch it,” Lila said. “That probably means don’t use your telekinesis, Blue, since Colored crystals qualify that as a touch.”

“Got it…” Blue said, shuffling nervously. “I… I really wonder what it is.”

Vaughan used the Orange in his scepter to pry off the top of the box. Despite being immensely old, the wood remained strong and it took quite a bit of effort to pop it open. When he finally managed to pry it free, a cloud of dust shot into the air that made everyone start coughing.

The dust settled quickly and everyone scrambled over to the box, looking within.

The object inside was black. Blacker than any black any of them had ever seen, with absolutely no color or texture to it whatsoever. However, it somehow had a sheen of brilliant white that flashed across its form every few seconds, not lining up with any existing light source. Despite having just been witness to a cloud of dust, not a single particle had stuck to it, and it was perfectly clean.

It was a cube. Its edges were pure white, as though made of glowing wires, yet it did not light anything up within the crate.

Four pairs of eyes stared at the perfectly dark, yet occasionally shimmering object in disbelief for quite some time.

“…That’s unnatural,” Blue said, stating the obvious and fully aware of doing so.

“Technically, so are crystals,” Suro said. “We see a glow, but they don’t light anything up.”

“Yeah, but they do reflect light normally. This… I don’t even know what the deal with this thing is.”

Vaughan scratched his beard. “Perhaps it absorbs all light and releases it out in those little bursts?”

“Whatever it is, it is dangerous and needs to be destroyed,” Lila said. “I have my doubts that we currently have the capacity to do anything to it, but… Vaughan?”

Vaughan rolled up his sleeves. “Everyone stand back.” They all listened, and after they were a safe distance back, Vaughan used Orange to break the crate apart, allowing the black cube to stand free in the basement. He continued only interacting with it using Orange, lifting the cube itself and placing it in a corner, far from any of its packaging.

“Things might get a little warm…” Vaughan pointed his scepter at the cube, lighting up the Red section with as much will as he could muster.

Absolutely nothing happened.

“What were you trying to do?” Suro asked.

Vaughan pointed his scepter at one of the wooden planks on the ground. Over the course of five seconds, it burst into flame and was reduced to ashes. “That.”

“Ah.”

“Even if it didn’t burn, the air should have started warming up. It didn’t.” Vaughan smirked. “That means the cube is like a crystal, it can’t transfer heat. Anyway, up next…” He picked it up with Orange and tried tearing it apart—by direct force, sideways force, and even twisting force. The cube didn’t deform in the slightest. “And it’s not actually crystal, any crystal would have fractured from that.” He thrust his hand forward, launching the Cube as hard as he could into the wall.

The wall got dented by the place the cube’s corner hit, but the cube itself was completely unharmed.

“That was about as effective as expected,” Lila said. “I can see why the Mayor couldn’t destroy it.”

Vaughan tried some Blue, just to see if accelerating the area did anything. It didn’t. A burst of light from Purple not only did nothing, but none of the light reflected off the cube. He also tried some Magenta to see if he could jam the magic around it, but there was no discernible difference.

“Well.” Vaughan folded his arms. “There goes all my spells.”

“Crystals are capable of cutting each other at the right angles,” Blue suggested.

Vaughan pulled the extra Green he kept on him out of his pocket and levitated the shards into the air. He tried scraping, cutting, smashing, and poking the cube. His Green crystals certainly shattered a lot, but there was no change in the cube whatsoever.

“So…” Vaughan took his Green back and then scratched his beard. “This’ll be a tough nut to crack, clearly.”

“Do you have any idea what this cube is?” Blue asked.

Vaughan shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s somewhat similar to the crystals, but clearly not exactly the same. I would say it’s some kind of entity with attributal magic, except the Magenta didn’t do anything. Maybe it’s just a cube of some natural material…”

“Except touching it makes something bad happen,” Blue said.

“Yes. And, apparently, the Mayor didn’t think it pertinent to inform us what its effect is.”

Lila let out a soft meow. “He went through a lot of trouble to keep this secret, it is probably better if we don’t know any more than what we do. It must be destroyed.”

“Well, I can already think of a few ways to make sure we never see it again,” Blue said. “Strap it to a ship and launch it into a distant orbit. It’s so small nobody will ever be able to see it.”

“Until someone does by sheer chance,” Lila said. “No, it needs to be destroyed, not hidden—we can hide it here until we know what to do with it.”

“I’ll determine what properties I can,” Vaughan said. “Until then, I guess… we just keep this basement locked.”

Everyone seemed to agree. They all left the basement and sealed it behind them.

“The cube is quite ominous,” Suro said. “Is it perhaps related to Purple, since Purple crystals take that shape naturally?”

“I don’t know; it could also be associated with the Gonal goddess Cora.” Vaughan frowned.

Lila spoke up. “In Dia’s words, the square and thus the cube is often associated with us mortal beings. There are annoying theological arguments about if the cube representing us should be colorless, white… or black.”

“Looks like your old questions have caught up with you,” Vaughan said.

Lila smiled warmly at him. “Such curiosities no longer shake my faith, Vaughan. Though…” She frowned. “I… back in the Tempest, I might have heard about something like this. Vaughan, Suro, do you remember Keeper Dimmrivoi?”

Vaughan shook his head. Suro narrowed his eyes. “Maybe…”

“He was obsessed with shapes and the meaning behind them. I… I think I remember one of those drawings on that conspiracy board of his being a black cube.”

Blue blinked. “So this cube may have been in the Tempest?”

“Maybe, or maybe he’d just heard about it?” Lila shrugged.

“Should someone go and see if he knows something?”

Lila shook her head. “Dimmrivoi was… quite mad. During the… rather chaotic and brutal times before we left the Tempest, he was killed. My ship might have been the one to do it, I’m not sure.”

Blue stopped in her tracks. “Wait, you had a ship? That… could do that?”

Lila nodded. “The Tempest is… not a very pleasant place to be born into.”

“Quite,” Vaughan said. “Blue, if you ever get the crazy idea to go to the ‘most dangerous civilized area in the known world because it’ll be fun and give me experience, exactly what a Journeyman Wizard needs’—don’t. Worst decision of my life.”

“…And yet, we wouldn’t be here, now, without the horrors of the Tempest,” Lila said with a curt nod.

Blue opened her mouth to ask more questions but quickly shut it forcefully.

“Thank you,” Suro said. “It is… not a time we like to relive, nor do we let it define us now.”

Blue nodded in understanding. “So… forgetting about all this strange past nonsense, we now have a mysterious black cube locked in the basement that is apparently unimaginably dangerous.”

“Yep,” Vaughan confirmed.

“I’ve said it before, and I’m going to say it again: we are morons.”

Nobody objected to her label, but no one had any alternative suggestions, either.

~~~

When Jeh returned to the cabin, only Krays was in the backyard, working on her “space armor.” She had refined the design considerably since her initial tests: as it turned out, only a minimal separation was required between the different layers of armor to get the desired effect. Only a few millimeters could fragment whatever she threw at it, and five or so layers were usually enough to completely block all incoming attacks.

Unless she hit the same area multiple times, which she was currently doing. She kept picking up fragments of metal and hyper-accelerating them into her armor to see how long it took to puncture through. She had found that, surprisingly, glass could be used if there were enough layers of it, though it was nowhere near as effective as any of the metals.

“I wonder if Jeh’s little rock did fragment after punching through, and she just got unlucky…” Krays stroked her chin.

“Who needs luck?” Jeh huffed.

“Oh if it isn’t the little adorable pincushion! Here, why don’t you stand in front of this rock so I can test the impact trauma of a rock on the human body?”

“Uh… sure?”

Krays rolled her eyes. “As oblivious as they come, yet unable to learn from mistakes. Perpetual innocence wrapped in an enigma. Why hunger when food is unnecessary? Why—“ Krays noticed that Jeh’s expression had glazed over. “Also ungrateful, think of how much I live off the shocked expressions of my victims.”

“Yeah… um, so, I’ve been thinking…”

“Always a terrible sign. Do elaborate, the explosion should be interesting.”

Jeh tilted her head. “Uh. Okay?” She shook her head. “Everyone’s always saying it’s too dangerous for me to go into an orbit, but we need to test those orbits. But if we don’t need the drive active while in an orbit, can’t we just launch something random into an orbit? Like, without me in it?” She pointed at the rocks Krays was launching at her armor tests.

“Blue won’t work, once it gets far enough away it’ll revert to normal speed and whoops. Buuuut…” Krays scratched her head. “I don’t understand this whole ‘orbit’ thing very well, but I don’t see why not. You’d just need something to launch your object at really high speed, either Orange or Red would do it for something small enough. Vaughan could probably wipe his beard across some paper and get a hyper-accelerator device designed.”

Jeh grinned. “So it’ll work?”

“One problem. How are you going to know if it orbited?”

Jeh opened her mouth, paused, then closed it.

“Ah, she’s getting smarter.” Krays picked up one of her stones and Blue-accelerated it to lightning speeds, letting out a little burst of flame in the air. “I threw that and I lost track of it in less than a second, I’m never finding it again.”

“Make it something bright! Like… a big crystal explosion!”

“Kid, you wanted to not be the thing orbiting. You’ve committed what I’m sure is the cardinal sin of arcane device design: forgot that you need a wizard to operate it.”

Jeh furrowed her brow. “There’s got to be some way to make something visible without magic…”

“You can make it really stupid honkin’ big. Like. You know.” Krays gestured at the sky. “The moon.”

Jeh started pacing. “It has to be small, though, and easy to see… gah, why is it so much harder when you can’t use crystals?”

“Because magic is convenient until it isn’t.”

“We need something that can be seen easily from hundreds of kilometers away that doesn’t rely on magic…”

“You could use fireworks.”

Jeh blinked. “Eh? I thought those were magic?”

Krays smirked. “You’ve never seen a real firework, the stuff Vaughan pulls off are just cheap knockoff tricks. The real things have this fun little powder inside that goes BOOM!” She jumped up, startling Jeh with her sudden movements. “They come in all sorts of colors, provide real light, and are very very loud.”

Jeh’s eyes widened. “Woah… That sounds amazing…”

“Back in my hometown, we had this girl who did nothing but make fireworks all day. She was convinced they’d make good weapons, but the things she designed tended to backfire a lot more often than, say, any arcane blade or bow.* She suuuucked at making weapons. But she made some really impressive fireworks.”

*Gunpowder isn’t used all that often on Ikyu, despite its recipe being known, largely due to the relative convenience of Red crystals. Guns have, in fact, been invented, but compared to the effects a properly constructed arcane blade can produce, traditional guns are relatively lackluster. There do exist “firearms”, but these are basically just handheld chunks of Red with a specific spell affixed to their core that releases debilitating heat at a point a certain distance from the wielder. The limitation is that not every soldier has enough will to use the most impressive “firearms” at their disposal.

“We should go get some from her.”

“Fireworks are expensive.”

Jeh thought this over for a few moments. “Can I sell my bones? I have an infinite supply of those.”

Krays stared blankly at her. “That would attract way too much attention. What kind of people sell children’s bones on the black market?”

Jeh nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably a bad idea… anyway, imma go tell everyone else about our idea!”

“The lunchtime-meeting is soon, You should probably wait for that, you impatient rapscallion made of scallions.”

Jeh rolled her eyes. “Fiiiine. So…” She slid over to the armor setup. “Can you make the Skyseed safe?”

“I think I can craft a metal shell to put around the drive that will protect it when you’re not adjusting the settings,” Krays said. “It’s better than nothing. But if there’s one thing my experiments have shown me, it’s that you’re a bad luck charm. The meteoroid should have exploded into useless tiny bits after passing through the glass. The chances of it hitting the air restorer hard enough to destroy it were absurdly low.”

“So it’s safer up there than we thought!?”

“Eh… depends on how big the rocks get.” Krays hefted up a pebble the size of her thumb and launched it at a glass pane. The entire pane violently shattered, clattering to the ground. “See, get big enough, glass just crumbles under the pressure. Kind of like everyone I know.”

“You should name the panels you destroy,” Jeh suggested.

“…That is an amazing idea. See that piece of ceramic over there? It’s name is Jeh.” She hurled a rock at “Jeh” and shattered it into a hundred pieces. “Hmm. Doesn’t live up to the namesake.”

Jeh rolled her eyes. “How long until lunch?”

Krays checked the rising sun. It would be at its apex before too long. “Eh, sometime.”

“Krays! If you know…”

“Do I?” Krays chuckled to herself. “I wonder, do I know how to read the sun? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm….”

Jeh picked up a rock and threw it a glass panel. It bounced harmlessly off.

“And that one, Jeh, was named ‘Krays.’ ”

Jeh facepalmed.

~~~

“Meetings” for the Wizard Space program had been established to happen bi-weekly during lunch hours. As such, the “meetings” had essentially become community lunch between all members. Vaughan’s cooking skills and food selection left much to be desired (“Oatmeal? Oatcakes? Are you an oat elemental or something?” Krays had initially said). Thus, Mary and Seskii picked up the slack and provided most of the food for these lunches, with Krays pitching in a few dishes of her own plus whatever she’d purchased from the Sourdough Twins that day.

The table still consisted largely of various oat products, but there were also a myriad of juices, fruits, and whatever other strange things popped out of Mary’s garden. Today she’d brought over some kind of plant that didn’t have a name, but it was orange and fuzzy and tasted a bit like bacon mixed with blueberries.

Almost immediately after Jeh had taken a bite of the unnamed plant and said “wow that’s weird” she told everyone about the fireworks idea.

Big G scratched his chin. “Hmm… A non-magical device...”

“It could work,” Vaughan said. “Go up there, launch something, and have it explode a set amount of time later. …Hmm, that might require a very long ignition cord…”

“Too long,” Blue said. “Most of the mass would have to be cord!”

“It would still be very useful,” Big G offered. “You were complaining about not being able to see the Skyseed past a certain height. Just have it shoot off fireworks to gain visibility.”

“That… is actually a good idea, but it doesn’t help us with the main issue: establishing an orbit.” Blue tapped her foot. “Or, well, being able to tell when we’ve established an orbit.”

“Giant Pink Orb,” Vaughan suggested. “Have it store a useless spell and burn bright while up there?”

“Do you want to be the guy to design a device powerful enough to launch something that massive as fast as we need it to?”

“It could be big and very thin…”

“That won’t be awkward to get up there at all.”

“I feel like there’s a simple solution we aren’t seeing,” Mary said. “…Not that I know what it is.” With a shrug she took a bite of some fruit that let out a squealing noise when stabbed. “We have the capacity to get something up there, and we’re pretty sure we can make it ‘orbit.’ We just need to be able to see it while it’s up there without making it huge or relying on magic.”

“Tall orders…” Blue grumbled.

“Still, the fireworks are a start,” Big G said. “We should probably purchase some just so the Skyseed can send messages while it’s flying.”

Blue frowned. “I know I’m the trained messenger, but I have equations to work out about… a lot of other things aside from just orbits. Someone else will have to go get some.”

Big G frowned. “I’m a bit too busy with the mines to leave town.”

“Spring is always busy,” Mary said. “I do have to keep the farm running you know.”

Krays slowly turned to stare at Seskii. “Why, since I have no intention of leaving town… guess who that leaves?”

Seskii raised an eyebrow. “…I’ll need money.”

Vaughan chuckled. “Money is no object.”

“We need to talk about more extensive funding one of these meetings,” Big G said. “The more we talk about the next ship, the more expensive it looks like it’ll be.”

“For now, though, I can just give her some for fireworks,” Vaughan said.

Seskii raised an eyebrow. “You have no idea how expensive good quality fireworks are, do you?”

“Uh… no.”

“Quite spendy.”

“Take this month’s earnings from the air restorers then.”

Seskii nodded, breaking out into a grin. “That’ll do nicely! I’ll make good use of it and get you a lot of good fireworks!” She quickly stood up. “I think I’ll go get it already! I don’t really have to be here anyway.” She gave them all a salute and ran deeper into the cabin where Vaughan kept the money.

“…Who gave her a key to the vault?” Blue asked.

Jeh snorted. “Vault.”

“What do you want me to call it? The room where Vaughan throws all of the coins in a series of random boxes?”

“Still not a vault. I could probably punch that door down.”

“You need better security,” Big G told Vaughan.

Vaughan lifted his scepter. “Any robbers will get some rather unpleasant burns.”

“Never underestimate resourcefulness.”

“Or stupidity,” Krays added. “Stupidity also factors in here.”

Blue rolled her eyes. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for the moment. What is a problem is the fact that we aren’t doing any experiments! The Skyseed is ready for suborbital flights—yes I just made that term up, thank you—and we aren’t launching it up! We need to come up with things to do while we figure out the whole orbiting problem.”

“I’m crafting armor for the drive,” Krays offered. “Well, I’m blowing things up and will have my husband make it and then take all the credit, but you know how it is.”

“Right, drive armor test, though there’s no guarantee we’re going to get hit with a meteorite again.” Blue tapped her hoof. “Anything else?”

Big G nodded. “We need to examine the properties of magic used in space. We already know air makes a difference, a complete lack of it would do moreso.”

“Oooh!” Mary clapped her hands. “We should get one of those devices that can store an image of what you see!”

“You need to be a trained Purple wizard to do that,” Blue deadpanned.

Jeh smirked. “I bet I could do it.”

“What you betting?” Krays asked.

“Five of whatever random coin I can find!”

“You’re on!”

Blue rolled her eyes again. “Okay, let’s get back on topic… if Jeh could take some pictures, we might be able to improve our maps…”

~~~

Vaughan spent most of that week with what he was calling in his head the “overly mysterious cube.”

His training as a Red wizard came very much in handy. One of the primary things Red wizards were trained for at the Academy was how to test different materials and objects for their reactions to heat. Metals heated up quickly, rubbers very slowly, and there were a number of phase changes in between. Naturally, higher-level classes taught the reactions of more unusual materials and concoctions in the midst of chemical reactions. Some of the applications of Red were extremely explosive and dangerous so many indirect testing methods had been developed. The simplest was using Magenta to activate Red from a distance. Others involved a somewhat complex pulley system and elongated wires of crystal.

For most of the tests, Vaughan hid behind a table he had nailed some other wooden boards to and then surrounded in metal so he could survive all but the nastiest of sudden explosions.

He was alone a large majority of the time, which gave him plenty of opportunities to try odd things. Naturally, he used Red as extensively as he could on the cube. No amount of heat, explosions, fire, or anything changed the cube in any discernible way. He did note that it wasn’t absorbing the heat—like crystals, it just couldn’t accept any of the heat, so had to push it to the surrounding air.

Light, however, was a different story. He was not the best at Purple, but he could shine any direct color he wanted on the cube. It never changed visually, but he discovered that the energy produced by the light wasn’t being absorbed by the cube. It radiated back out as heat directly to the air. Crystals didn’t do that, they refracted the light around and allowed it to pass right through. This was a block that, nonetheless, couldn’t actually absorb the light like natural black objects.

Which meant that the black color was probably an effect similar to the Colors of crystals. It was probably more appropriate to call it “Black,” though such a word did not exist in Karli, at least not officially. The sheen was similar, since he couldn’t interfere with it using Purple either. Maybe it should have been called “White.”

Vaughan idly wondered if the cube had some kind of magic in it unlike any of the other crystals. Perhaps something unimaginably dangerous and destructive, which was why the old Mayor had wanted it destroyed. The problem was, if it really was like a Colored crystal, it couldn’t be destroyed. Crystals could be reduced to powder so fine it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, and it could still be reformed. Not to mention the cube’s seeming imperviousness to physical damage.

During his Orange tests, Vaughan found rather quickly that the cube reflected all force pushed onto it. More than a few hammers just flat-out broke on contact with the surface. The cube itself also couldn’t vibrate—something which Colored crystals could do.

So why was it able to be carried around if it reflected everything?

Testing further, Vaughan found that the cube didn’t reflect the force applied to it if it was free to move, but if it was against a wall, it always did. What exactly qualified as a “wall” consumed a full day of his testing: a raw egg did not, a wooden plank sometimes was, depending on the angle at which it was positioned in front of the cube. Edges were more likely to not stop the cube, while a board at the center most assuredly would.

Then there were all the tests that Vaughan ran with sliding the cube at things. Its edges were always sharp enough to cut through anything, but when it hit flat against things sometimes the air around it would ignite. It was as if it had to bleed off energy somewhere.

“True invincibility should be a paradox,” Vaughan said at one point, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “You sure seem like a paradox.”

Sometimes the cube wouldn’t respond in exactly the same way. This was most evident when he positioned wooden planks near but not exactly on the center of the cube as he pushed against it. Sometimes it would rotate around, other times it would just stay put and reflect the force applied to it. He had no idea why this would be.

The cube was perfectly smooth, as smooth as crystals grown in the super-idealistic conditions in the basements of the Academy. Perhaps smoother, there was a point where smoothness was hard to measure. However, unlike crystals, the Cube never grew. Growth was extremely slow in crystals, but it could still be measured with precision instruments. The cube never got any heavier or any lighter; it was a constant.

Dropping it from the ceiling was the most fun. It would cut a hole in the floor until it couldn’t anymore, at which point any remnant force would have to be ejected and usually the air lit on fire.

That is until he dropped it and the ground itself exploded for reasons he couldn’t even begin to fathom. That one had destroyed his table. He stopped doing drop tests after that point.

His biggest discovery was that the cube wasn’t uniformly dense. Its center of mass was precisely in the middle, but when he rotated it around different axes, he found differences in the amount of torque required to turn it. It was significantly denser in the center than the edges. Colored crystals, by contrast, were always of the exact same density.

“Some kind of internal structure…” He scratched his beard. “Is it… made out of crystals?” Math was not his strong suit, but performing a quick calculation, he determined that it was too dense and heavy to be made out of crystals, even though some areas were less dense than an individual crystal. Unless there was something else going on…

Its presence interfered with Green. Green, for whatever reason, wasn’t able to “revert” the state of things the cube had destroyed properly, especially if the cube was still embedded in, say, the ground. Effects were similar to the “stripping” effect that happened when Green was used to “repair” things without the prerequisite materials around: half-repairs with thinned structures and weak connections. Whatever the cube did to the forces applied to it, Green couldn’t deal with.

The cube could be accelerated with Blue just fine, and lifted with Orange. Trying to accelerate part of the cube, however… just wasn’t possible. It was as if the cube forcefully enveloped itself in a uniform acceleration field.

He tried Yellow on it out of curiosity. Nothing happened.

At the end of another day of testing, Vaughan lifted up his hat and scratched his head. Lila was down with him that day, so he had an ear for him to rant to. “I have… no conclusions about this. It doesn’t follow patterns, it’s not quite like Colored crystals, some aspects of it are random, others always occur, and a lot of the effects seem quite unrelated. All I can say for sure is… it seems to be something constructed with a purpose, a purpose that requires it be absolutely indestructible. I refuse to believe this was something that occurred naturally.”

“And apparently it does something very nasty if you touch it,” Lila said.

“If my theory that there’s magic inside of it is correct… it may need contact with a will to react, like normal crystals. I suppose it’s possible that it could forcefully drain the will required to do whatever it wants to do…” Vaughan frowned. “I can’t imagine that’d be pleasant.”

“If that’s what it does.”

“Yes. If that’s what it does. We really… have no idea.”

~~~

“Funding,” Mary said at the next meeting—only Seskii wasn’t present around the table, as she was presumably still out traveling and getting fireworks. “We’ve got to figure out how to drive this little operation. Vaughan, no offense, but you spent most of your personal fortune on the Skyseed as it is. Big G has the most income out of all of us, and it’s not enough to build what Blue keeps suggesting.”

“Multi-leveled metal sphere with reinforced windows,” Blue said. “…Yes, it is a bit of a tall order. The more problems we solve, the more expensive our next ship becomes.”

“We need more funds than just the air restorer.” Big G said. “We need to think of something obviously useful about our work.”

Vaughan grinned. “If these orbits pan out, we can launch things into the sky above us and make a worldwide transportation service!”

“Getting ahead of ourselves, are we?” Krays asked. “A transport service. Hmm. How much money does it cost to run a single balloon-whale? How much money did it cost to set up the docks? How much mon—“

“Okay, I get the point.” Vaughan sat back in his chair. “Still, it’s a long-term goal of a sort. Eventually, assuming this all works out, there’ll be money in that.”

“I don’t like our odds of getting to that within our lifetimes,” Blue said. “At least not a full service. Maybe like some of those fancy Magenta communicator wires that only royalty has.”

“Ah, but that means they’ll pay good money to get the only ride in town!”

“We’d still need multiple ships and much safer ones. You know. That people other than Jeh could ride.”

Vaughan scratched his beard thoughtfully. “Still, there has to be some use to having these orbits. Some point to sticking something up there that’ll never come down.”

“You could probably dispose of things that way,” Lila said.

Blue shook her head. “Not ultimately. There is still some air up there. So little that you’d be up there a long, long time, but the air resistance has to eventually take you down. …Though, given the state of the moon, I suppose the orbit must remain stable for thousands upon thousands of years that far out…”

“So you’re telling us in a billion years the Moon will crash into Ikyu?” Jeh asked.

“Hmm. You know, it might.”

“Awesome!”

“…Such a collision could potentially destroy most Ikyu life in one single moment…”

“Guess we know how the apocalypse goes down,” Krays said, winking at Lila.

Lila rolled her eyes. “The world will have an end, I make no claims about how exactly that will come about.”

“Still, sobering thought,” Suro said. “By stumbling around in space, we’ve discovered something that could potentially destroy the entire world. True or not, we are likely to find other such discoveries when we prod into the cosmic nature of the universe.”

An awkward silence fell around the table.

“Back on the topic of money…” Big G said, folding his arms. “Even if orbits aren’t ultimately stable, they are stable enough to be used. The question is, for what?”

“If we could just make what we put up there visible, communication,” Blue said. “The objects could flash at different rates or colors or something to signal whatever they want to the world below.”

“You’d need someone up there to run that,” Vaughan said.

“…There has to be a way around that…”

“What about pictures?” Jeh asked. “Blue and I tested my skills with Purple earlier, I was able to take an ‘image’ of what I saw and store the ‘projection’ of that image in a Magenta loop so it could be re-projected as many times as we want.” She pulled a simple, flashing Magenta loop out of her furs as well as a small Purple crystal. She imposed her will on the loop, making it release a spell into the Purple that quickly displayed a two-dimensional image of Blue standing outside for a second.

“Little fuzzy around the edges,” Vaughan noted. “More detail on Blue than the rest of it.”

“Still, I can record the pictures,” Jeh said with a grin. “So you send me up there, I take pictures of Ikyu. We can make better maps and better maps can be sold, right?”

“To a point,” Big G said. “But eventually the maps from those bird’s-eye images will be so good you can’t sell them again.”

Vaughan clapped his hands together. “That’s it!”

“What?”

“Astronomers!” Vaughan grinned. “Everyone has been obsessed with examining the stars in the night sky and recording everything about them. The sky gets in the way a lot of the time though. If you just go above the sky, presto, instant access to space! Take all the pictures and readings you want!” He put a finger down on the table. “We could sell our services and perform experiments that we don’t even care about. Does someone want us to take a picture of star such-and-such on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time? We send Jeh up there, get the pictures, and give them to the customer!”

Krays clapped her hands together. “That’s perfect! There are a ton of star-obsessed people out there who would love to get a closer look!”

“I’ll need to bring the telescope, then,” Jeh said.

Vaughan nodded. “It is a risk I think we should be willing to take. Go up, take pictures, sell pictures.”

“And once we actually get to the moon we can map it!” Krays all but cheered. “The dark side won’t be dark anymore!”

“You sure are excited,” Blue pointed out.

“I’m a star-obsessed person! I want to see what it’s like!” She rubbed her hands together and started giggling with a slight madness. “To the moon!”

“We would be able to get clearer images of the planets as well,” Vaughan said. “Though if we want precision readings, Jeh is going to have to get very accurate with her use of Purple.”

Jeh nodded. “I’ll practice! In a few weeks my images will be just like looking at the real thing! Or sooner!”

Big G nodded. “This bodes well. We could start selling this now, if we wanted.”

“Let’s wait for Seskii to get back,” Mary said. “She’s got the economic and marketing skills.”

Krays turned to Blue with a smug grin. “Oh look, the potion seller is useful. Imagine that.”

“Har-de-har,” Blue grunted. “Anyway, it at least sounds like we have some funding ideas. So, onto something else… the weather seems clear, what kind of tests should we be running?”

Jeh raised a hand. “I should just go up and take some pictures.”

“…That is a rather good idea. Krays, how is the drive armor coming along?”

“Darmosil says he’ll have it ready tomorrow,” Krays said. “Which means it’ll be ready today and he’ll ask why you didn’t come pick it up earlier. To which you respond, naturally, with some kind of pithy remark, and then h—“

“I’ll just go tomorrow, take the verbal abuse, and leave,” Blue deadpanned. “There’s no need to go into the song and dance.”

“Oh, isn’t there?” Krays asked.

“No.”

“Spoilsport.”

~~~

Soon, the weather was clear, and Jeh was equipped with a proper imaging device. All things considered, imaging devices weren’t very complicated: a simple core that could hold a single spell that, when activated, would project the spell through a Purple crystal. The biggest issue was that you had to be trained in Purple to craft the spell that had the image in the first place, so imaging devices didn’t see widespread use, but Purple wizards sure got a lot of people to ask for their services.

Imaging devices could hold almost as many images as desired—clever Purple wizards could craft stack spells that displayed multiple images. Jeh, however, did not have enough finesse to pull that off, so she could only store one image per spell loop. The imaging device she was taking with her had three. The job was simple: image Ikyu, image the moon, and image the sun.

Since Lila hadn’t built the “launchpad” in Willow Hollow yet, the Skyseed started its journey from Vaughan’s backyard, as it had last time. Today, however, it had two separate air restorers in it in case one broke, and the drive had a metal casing around it—Jeh could still adjust the strength of the drive with it on, but if she wanted to alter the direction she was going to have to remove the armor. She only expected to have to do this once she was already back in the atmosphere, however.

With a salute to everyone—the entire program was there to see her off—she jumped into the Skyseed and waited for the countdown. It wasn’t as memorable of a moment as the first countdown, as she had already done this before. With a flick of her wrist, she started lifting the Skyseed at her desired speed—which was pretty fast but slower than the last time she’d gone up, just to appease Blue and the others who were so worried about safety.

The trip through the atmosphere was uneventful. There weren’t even many gusts of wind; the day was extremely calm.

Rather uneventfully, she made it to her destination: a bit further up than was needed to see Ikyu’s curvature, so as to make sure the atmosphere didn’t interfere with the pictures. She only stopped when she thought she had a clear view of the stars, at which point she reduced the drive to what should have been the “hover” strength.

Given her lack of nearby reference points, she had no idea if she was actually hovering or not. With a shrug, she took out the imaging device. She didn’t even bother with the telescope when looking at Ikyu, she just imaged her entire perception of it. She was still able to make out the purple cube, the Tempest, and the unknown landmass, but that moving island wasn’t visible. Maybe it was under a cloud, or it had moved elsewhere on the planet, she had no idea. Or she’d just been seeing things, that was a possibility too.

To test, she asked the device to display the image she’d just sent it. Sure enough, there was Ikyu, with all the details she could want—though there was some fuzziness around the edges, and the stars didn’t look quite right. It was quite hard to mentally focus on both the stars and the planet at the same time.

She took out the telescope next and fixed her gaze on the moon, finding it to be absolutely pocked with craters and different kinds of ridges that cast shadows in the light of the sun. “Coool…” Even so, there was still an utter lack of color on the moon, nothing but endless ridges and craters. She stored the image in the device and moved to her last subject, the sun.

As it turned out, looking at the sun through a telescope revealed some areas that were slightly darker. At least, if you were immune to the pain of staring right at the sun through at telescope like Jeh was. She stored the image and quickly lowered the telescope, rubbing her eye—she was fine, but that had been quite irritating.

As she rubbed her eye, she lost focus on the drive and she floated into the air. She quickly restarted the drive, giving herself ground to stand on again, but she inwardly cursed herself. Have to keep constant focus. Have to keep constant focus. Not much, but some.

She had the imaging device display her three images. Satisfied with the level of detail, she decided it was time to go back down. Slowly, this time, which meant she didn’t even need to reorient the drive: just have it push with slightly less force than needed to keep from falling.

The Skyseed took about an hour to lazily drift back closer to the ground. Once she was solidly inside the atmosphere and the sky was largely blue again, Jeh removed the armor. “Didn’t even need you, nothing hit us today!” With a fully controllable drive and an Orange maneuvering crystal in her hands, she examined the shape of the land below her and determined where Willow Hollow was. With a crank of the drive, she shot off at an angle, flying across the sky back to her home.

Naturally, she was careful not to go fast enough to light anything on fire this time.

Since she was going for a controlled landing this time, there was no rushed panic to set down anywhere she could manage. She lazily drifted the Skyseed over to the forest and then Vaughan’s cabin. Finding her speed a little too fast, she twisted the angle of the drive upward and pushed a bit to slow her speed.

She noticed one of the urchin spines in the drive break. Since she wasn’t using the full force of the spell, the lesser surface area didn’t alter her speed whatsoever, but it was still concerning.

The Skyseed landed in Vaughan’s backyard without much fanfare.

Blue screwed the lid off the Skyseed and deposited it near the treeline. “Sooo, how’d it go?”

“Kinda boring, honestly,” Jeh said, stretching. She tossed the imaging device to Vaughan. “Ikyu, moon, sun, there you go. Oh, Suro, one of the drive’s spines broke off.”

Suro frowned. “You weren’t running it at full blast at the time, I hope?”

“No, I was coming back down. It’s fine, right?”

Suro nodded. “It’s just proof that we’re burning through the magic content of the crystal rather quickly. Slight impurities in the crystal make such fine angles break after intense use. Since we over-designed its power output, you should still be fine using it for quite some time, but expect more spines to break and the max power output to go down.” Suro paused. “I suppose I am assuming that the Magenta crystals won’t break since they aren’t being used as heavily as the Orange. If any of the Magenta pieces break you have a serious problem on your hands.”

“I can always try to land the ship manually!” Jeh said, holding up her Orange crystal. “It’s possible!”

“But, I’d imagine, very tiring.”

Jeh shrugged. “I should try it one day. Try to land with the drive just off.”

Vaughan coughed. “How about we wait until we have ships to spare for that, hmm?”

“Fiiine…”

~~~

Vaughan was hanging out with Blue and Jeh in the entryway, projecting the images Jeh had taken onto a wall from a projector device: it worked much like the imaging device except it continually cast the spell so the image didn’t fade after a second or so, but wasn’t quite as convenient to imprint with images.

“There are spots on the sun,” Vaughan said. “…I have no idea how I would have ever figured that out.”

“Purple can block light too, you could have shaded the telescope,” Blue suggested.

“But you don’t look at the sun! It burns your eyes out*!”

*Vaughan is entirely correct that looking at the sun through a telescope burns your eyes out. It also shouldn’t come as a surprise that numerous people who were reportedly smart on Earth decided that looking at the sun through a telescope was a good idea. Shockingly, the thought that it can make you go blind is actually incorrect, even staring through a decently high-powered telescope doesn’t deal irreversible damage. It’ll heal. In a few years.

“It doesn’t burn my eyes out!” Jeh laughed. “All the astronomers are going to be so jealous!”

“Regardless... sun has spots.” Vaughan gestured at the image.

“Sunspots,” Jeh said, finding the term amusing.

“Add it to the list of mysteries,” Blue said.

“We have a list now?”

“No… I should make one though.”

Vaughan turned his attention to the image of the moon. “All things considered, it doesn’t look all that better from up there. I’ve seen most of these details on clear nights before.”

“Ah, but it was the middle of the day when I took it!” Jeh grinned. “Behold, day-moon!”

“Looks exactly the same as night moon.”

“Eh…”

Vaughan turned to the Ikyu image last. “Now this… this makes me want to figure out how to turn these images into paintings and then hang them up on the wall. The curvature of Ikyu, the swirling clouds… it’s… it’s so beautiful…”

Jeh frowned. “You… want to go up there, don’t you?”

Vaughan nodded. “Quite badly. You… say you didn’t run into any micrometeors this time?”

“Not a one.”

“Maybe it’s safer up there than we thought…”

“We need to run a lot more tests,” Blue said. “For one, it probably gets very cold up there, and Jeh just doesn’t care that much.”

“I do occasionally use Red to warm up the air a bit,” Jeh said. “Though only earlier in the flight… weird…”

“Your temperature sense is so all over the map I’m not sure that tells us anything.”

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Before Vaughan could even stand up, whoever as on the other side realized it was unlocked and kicked it open. “I’m baaaaack!” Seskii called, rolling an entire minecart filled with fireworks into the room. “Behold, the fruits of my labor! We’ve got flashy fireworks, bright fireworks, flares, loud fireworks, quiet fireworks, what I’m pretty sure is just a stick that burns with sparkles on it, and whatever the heck this is.” She poked a green pom-pom like object in confusion. “Huh. Anyway, all ready for your space testing needs!”

Blue’s eyes widened. “How… that’s… that’s a ton.”

“Don’t ask where I got them,” Seskii said, waving her hands around mysteriously.

“…Seskii, did you steal them?”

“What? No. I obtained these without breaking any laws.” Seskii thought about that for a moment. “Well, at least not any laws that are written down in an official legal code.”

“I… what does that even mean?”

“It means fireworks!” Jeh shouted, rushing out and grabbing one from the minecart. “So, how do they work?”

“You light the fuse with Red or some kid of fire,” Vaughan explained. “And th—“

Jeh had already lit one of the fuses.

“NOT INSIDE!”

“Eh?”

The explosion was loud, silvery-gold, and threw soot all over Vaughan’s nice furniture.

~~~

SCIENCE SEGMENT

On Earth, people actually do reserve time on telescopes, usually as part of a research grant of some sort. See, there are far more astronomers and astrophysicists than there are high-quality observatories that can peer into the depths of space.

There are even fewer telescopes situated in space, which is where you really want to be. See, the atmosphere isn’t exactly clear. Even without clouds and smog and light pollution, the air molecules themselves refract and bend the light, keeping a clear image from forming. Not great when you want to, say, look at a distant galaxy or something. Time has to be scheduled on these telescopes as well, though the application process for those is noticeably more intense. Anyone can apply for the Hubble Space Telescope’s time and very few actually get it. NASA itself generally says the proposals have to have proof that the desired observation can’t be completed on the ground.

Speaking of telescopes, even putting one in space isn’t enough to get you the stuff in what we call the “deep field.” If you just looked through Hubble’s normal feed you wouldn’t be able to see the galaxies that far out. To get these images you have to take a long-exposure image—which involves making sure Hubble is pointed at the exact same spot in the sky for a very long time while Hubble is actively orbiting the Earth and the Earth is moving around the sun… not very simple, to say the least, but when it is accomplished you get those beautiful images of galaxies so distant the expansion of the universe will tear them so far away that we’ll never be able to see them again no matter what we do. We are blessed to live in an era of the universe where we can see such beautiful things just by pointing at an empty patch of the sky. If our predictions are correct, most of the universe’s time will be spent in galaxies that cannot see each other due to the immense distances between them.

Space telescopes like Hubble, however, still cannot image black holes. And yet we still have recent images of black holes. How did we get those? Why, with the Event Horizon Telescope, of course. But what exactly is that?

Well, first you build several very large radio dishes that point to the sky. Radio waves are just another type of light—just a sort we can’t see with our eyes, so radio dishes are technically telescopes. Then you link all these telescopes together, creating a web that spreads around the world. Congratulations, you’ve made the EHT. The entire Earth is now your telescope, good job.

Naturally, these are radio telescopes. They’re not observing visible light. But visible light can be redshifted by a lot over a few trillion light years...