019

Spinlaunch

The city of Axiom was home to many things. The Kroan Academy of Arcane Applications and the Palace were perhaps its most well known sights, but in such a large capital city there were many other locations worthy of attention.

Alexandrite knew most of them by heart. His job did not consist only of digging around through official records, after all—he was to find and report on anything that might even be remotely interesting to Gronge, and this extended beyond academics, though research did take up most of his time. The old angler yearned to know as much about the world he could never visit as he could—or, at least, that’s what his messages suggested. Alexandrite often felt that the distance that came from communicating only through secondary means limited how much he could know who his employer was.

Gronge was particularly fond of hearing things that were rarely officially reported. How did the lower classes live? What sorts of games did the children play? What were the real dispositions of Ikyu’s various races—not the oversimplified opinion of some stuffy academic in some stuffy room. As such, Alexandrite spent a fair amount of time simply roaming the streets of Kroan.

In smaller towns and cities, the sight of a dragon, even a relatively young one such as himself, would have caused great upheaval and a change in everyone’s behavior. But this was Axiom. There were hundreds of dragons living in the city. Seeing one of his kind walking or flying around was almost a daily occurrence. As such, it allowed him to view the people as they were, without his presence clouding things.

For instance, today, he was roaming through a particularly poor part of town. Now, the word “poor” was rather relative in Axiom—food was plentiful and there were more than enough Sanctuaries to ensure that nobody was ever homeless. Unlike most of the towns in Kroan, nobody ever went to bed starving in the great city. The royal family were quick to take credit for this but it really was the work of the Sanctuaries—and even this wasn’t as altruistic as the religious organization would like the people to believe. There was a fair amount of competition between the Aware, the Yellow Seekers, and the Green Seekers in Axiom to seem like “the nicest people.” The Aware were currently winning that little competition as the various Seekers couldn’t organize in the same way they could, but they couldn’t afford to lose their diligence.

As such, the poorest part of the city was simply that with the smallest houses and the greatest distance from a Sanctuary or Colored Temple. They weren’t cleaned very well and generally twenty or so people were crammed into a living space that, reasonably, should only have fit five or so. The government didn’t spend much on infrastructure in this district, so the cobbled roads were cracked, if even paved at all. Everything was dirty and smelled a bit, and there weren’t any trees in sight.

It was here that a bunch of children were playing a game Alexandrite had not seen before. He paused to watch—there were four of them. Two male gari, a female lesser unicorn, and a boy of the floating, balloon-like j’loon race. The clothes that the gari had were little more than rags, and neither the unicorn nor the j’loon opted to wear anything. When it was considered decent to go out unclothed, clothes became a frivolous expense and not a necessity.

The four of them were moving in a circular pattern. They were not going fast, they were not going slow, but they were all going at the same relative speed, more or less. Previous games of this sort Alexandrite had seen were usually accompanied by singing some kind of silly tune, but these children were just humming a series of notes. There weren’t even any words, just a series of tones that were melodious, yet haunting in a way.

As he was not learned in musical theory he could not write the notes down, but there was some part of him that wished to. To understand why it wormed its way into his mind so well.

Why did he feel like he had heard it somewhere before…?

The children continued their circular dance. They were not perfect by any means, but they kept at it, smiles on the three of them that had faces. The j’loon looked happy as well, as far as Alexandrite could tell.

They showed no signs of stopping anytime soon.

“Message for Deep Messenger Alexandrite.”

Alexandrite shook his head and tore his gaze off the children to see a light-blue slime messenger floating in the air next to him. Not unusual for an air slime, though this one had remarkable control over the wind and was able to float without creating a havoc-wreaking tornado.

“Yes?” Alexandrite asked.

The air slime reached into his Messenger’s satchel and provided Alexandrite a notice. “The Orange Tower has your order fulfilled.”

“Ah, of course. Thank you, Messenger.” Alexandrite quickly turned away to examine the children again—but they were already gone. Strange… I’ll probably never figure out what that was about. With that, he spread his great wings and took off into the sky, feeling the warmth of his attribute spread throughout his heavy body.

One of the benefits of being a member of a flying race was easy access to almost anywhere—in this case, the balconies of the Orange Tower of Kroan Academy. All the towers of Kroan Academy were smooth, largely cylindrical structures in the mundane color of their respective crystals. The Orange Tower was slightly different, though, as it had several structures floating disjointed from it—the Orange Wizards bragging about their mastery over forces. Granted, the floating sections were hugely impractical as new will had to be constantly shunted into them to keep them afloat, but it was a good thing to have the less-than-successful students work at.

It still wasn’t as impressive as the Red Tower’s eternal flame, but the idea was that the flame didn’t require much effort to maintain, so the Orange Tower had to be more impressive, right?

Personally, Alexandrite preferred the Purple Tower, which, despite having the flashiest magic possible, chose to embrace the connection of Purple with secrets and go for a mundane, unassuming shape.

But he wasn’t there, he was at the Orange Tower, where a large crate was waiting for him.

A fat gari—something almost unheard of in their species—woman with orange plastic and orange robes crossed her arms as he landed. “Oh, look who’s here! The dragon with the very mysterious and very complicated order! Hmph!” She tilted her head, her pointed hat flopping awkwardly to the side of her head. Her plast hair was sculpted into something resembling an octopus at the moment, though last time Alexandrite had seen her it had taken the shape of a mathematical wave of some sort. “Mind telling me what this is all about?”

“Rigelia, I put in the order and I paid, I am taking the components and leaving.” He latched his claws on the box and started to fly away.

To his immediate chagrin, the master wizard enveloped him and the box in a field of Orange—he did not feel so much grabbed as trapped within an invisible ball that pushed harder the more he tried to escape in exactly the right direction to keep him still.

He knew she was just showing off. There were much more efficient ways to stop him, but her and her precious “Orange fields” had to be used for everything. Including what he had purchased in the box.

“Come on little boy, can’t you cure my curiosity just a little?”

Alexandrite did a quick calculation. He was a young dragon and she was an old gari. Yet, even with the lengthy lifespan of gari by human standards, he was still fairly sure he was older than her by a decade at least. Coming to this conclusion, he let out a huff. “Your insult is incorrect. Check your calculations again.”

“Oh, feisty!” Rigelia chuckled. “But I’m afraid I really would like a little explanation. And you could get all fussy about it and make a scene, but that would take time. You could just let out a little bit of information and be on your way in a matter of seconds!”

“You really are a pain,” Alexandrite grumbled.

“Oh my! Were I of a different disposition I might be inclined to exact revenge for that remark!”

“Hence why I said it aloud and not silently.”

“Well, how quai—“

“Let him go, Rigelia.”

Alexandrite was more than mildly surprised to see two other master wizards come out onto the balcony, neither of them Orange, but both well known. Richard Xerxes the Magenta and the often considered paradoxical Pepper the Red—a free leaf dryad with an eternal halo of fire around her verdant green head. She was one of the few wizards who refused the pointed hat*. She cited many reasons for this, but everyone knew it was just so she could keep her halo of fire up at all times.

*Technically speaking, the hat is a required part of any official Kroan wizard’s outfit. Also technically speaking, Pepper keeps a tiny pointed hat in her pocket. Normally, this wouldn’t fly, but Pepper is one of the most respected Red wizards in the land and is known to go out into the wilderness to fight hordes of monsters for fun, so who’s going to stop her? Would you?

It had been Xerxes who had spoken. His simple request was enough to get Rigelia to release Alexandrite. “Why are you here? I should have had plenty of time before somebody showed up…”

“Dia likely ordained this meeting to keep you from harassing the poor dragon.” Pepper commented with a childish giggle. “Fate will continue to conspire against you.”

Rigelia twitched.

“But we were also here because we had an order from you. You know. The fine-tuned compression device?” Pepper fluttered her eyes rapidly. “Can we pleeeeease have it?”

“We have also already paid,” Xerxes said. “And have no intention of telling you what it will be used for.”

“There will be highly dangerous explosions inches from my face if all goes well~!” Pepper sang.

Xerxes, unlike his current companion, did not give away any information by continuing to speak.

“Right this way…” Rigelia said. She turned around to glare at Alexandrite. “Why are you still here?”

“This conversation was quite fascinating,” Alexandrite said. “Master wizards are just as much people as the rest, it seems, just a bit more mentally unhinged.”

Pepper clicked her tongue. “He’s got us there.”

“He’s got you there,” Rigelia countered.

“Can we please keep up some air of the dignity we are supposed to have?” Xerxes asked. “We are the faces of magic in this nation, not bickering children.”

“To be like a child is a virtue, though!” Pepper said.

“Yes, Pepper, everyone knows that.”

“But more people could stand to act like it!” The three wizards turned together to walk back into the Orange Tower, but Pepper didn’t stop talking, jumping into a pseudo-philosophical musing on the nature of childish innocence.

Alexandrite was suddenly very glad that the Wizard Space Program was being managed by a bunch of crazies in the middle of nowhere rather than a bunch of crazies with substantial power in their hands.

He took off into the sky, box in his claws, heading southeast to the sleepy little town of Willow Hollow…

~~~

The moment Alexandrite brought the box back to the Wizard Space Program, construction began immediately. Ideally, Suro would have done all the work himself, but the crystal chunks were a bit too large for his little cat body to work with. As such, he had to rely on those with more traditional strength to do the lifting for him—be it Big G and his muscles or Vaughan and his Orange mastery. Alexandrite lacked the fine motor control required to manipulate the crystals without breaking them, and Blue was, as she put it, “Busy!” With what, they weren’t exactly sure, but it probably had something to do with math given the disheveled state of her mane.

The largest pieces were assembled first, and getting them set only took a day, and it already looked something like what its final state should be: a series of Orange discs arranged in a donut-like pattern that brought attention to the fact that each of the discs were larger on one side than the other. Each and every one of the discs had a Magenta component attached to them—and a large one at that, a fist-sized triangle with three spheres on the corners that were each burning rather brightly. Someone had stored some rather will-intense spells on these triangles, which was understandable considering how quickly they were intending to launch rather large satellites with this device.

At the end of the first day, a big Orange donut with a Magenta-lined interior was set up in Vaughan’s backyard. It was currently held together by a bunch of metal wires—clearly not what was going to hold it in the end, but it had to do for now, because it was time for Suro to retreat into his workshop and carve some of the smaller, finer pieces. In the nearly-a-year since Vaughan’s initial flight and his subsequent creation of the drive currently in the Skyseed, Suro had spent much of his time fine-tuning his craft so he could carve precise Magenta crystals. He still wasn’t the best, but the specialty-made parts had already arrived, he just had to make the things to fill in the gaps.

This turned out to be a bit more difficult than expected and resulted in the full construction of the spin-launch device taking several more days than anticipated.

“Is… is it wrong that something so expensive makes me so hungry?” Mary asked one day, staring at how the Orange donut glistened in the sunlight.

“Not at all!” Seskii said with a chuckle. “Just don’t eat it. Like seriously, crystals are very bad when ingested.”

“…How bad?”

“Eeeeeeh… you don’t want to know.”

Krays jumped into the conversation. “But I want to tell her! Crystals are rather easy to fracture, and their edges like to be really sharp! You could eat it and it might pass right through… but one wrong move and crack suddenly you have a thousand knives piercing you from the inside! You’ll cough up blood for hours. Green won’t be able to help you since it doesn’t work on other crystals and even if you get a really good Green wizard on your side, chances are your stomach lining is ruined forever and you’ll starve! Probably to death, too! Feeding someone a hidden crystal is a great assassination method.” She took a bite of a pear she was holding. After thinking for a second, she offered it to Mary. “This is completely unrelated, but want some of this?”

Mary slowly slinked away.

“And a point for Krays…” Krays chuckled. “Anyway, when’s the kid coming out?”

“Jeh?” Seskii asked.

“Yep! Hear she’s going to do some training today.”

“Oh, well, right now, actually.”

Jeh ran out of the cabin into the backyard. “All right, let’s do this thing!” In her hands was the old practice chair she had used to learn how to balance the Skyseed. While it had many cracks in it and numerous places where it had been repaired, it still had a brass disc on top and one on the bottom, perfect for levitation testing. She slammed it on the ground and turned to her audience of two gari, bowing. “You will now watch as Jeh floats in the air for several hours, blindfolded!” She strapped a blindfold to her face and jumped into the chair. Slowly, she lifted herself into the air until she was at about the height of the tallest tree.

“So!” She called down. “I bet you’re all wondering what I’m training for?”

“We already know!” Krays called.

“Tell us again anyway, I know you’ve got a speech prepared!” Seskii countered.

“Don’t mind if I do!” Jeh laughed. “So, you see, when I’m up there with the spin-launcher, I need to be upright and shoot the satellites perpendicular to the surface of Ikyu—yes Blue taught me those fancy math words and yes they really are fun to say. This is so when the satellite is launched it enters a circular orbit and not some sort of slanted weirdness that might send it crashing into Ikyu and might send it into a weird elongated orbit that Blue really doesn’t want to do the math for.

“The problem is that it’s really hard to tell if you’re flat with the surface or just nearly flat when you’re up that high! But we do have information—we are always pulled directly down. If the drive—or my magic—is pointed directly upward and perfectly cancels out the downward pull, I’m pointed the right way. But if I’m not pointed the right way then I’ll start drifting left…” She twisted the chair to the left. “Or the right!” She drifted to the right suddenly. “I need to train myself to feel even the tiniest of drift, so I can correct for it until the forces are balanced! Then I activate the spin-launcher and send our little satellites into the unknown.”

Krays blinked. “We’re relying on your sense of balance to launch these things. I just realized. That is a huge potential for error.”

“Not if I train enough!” Jeh declared from her blindfolded position above them. “Now, I just need to feel the pull…”

“…Excuse me,” Krays said, turning to leave the backyard. “I’m going to go build something that can do her job for her.”

“Good luck with that!” Seskii cheered.

“I don’t need luck, I just need stupid ideas to give me motivation.”

“Wait, I didn’t quite catch that!” Jeh called down. “Did you insult me or yourself?”

“The world will never know,” Krays said with a sarcastic clap of her hands before scampering off.

Jeh shrugged and got back to her balancing.

She only crashed once that day.

~~~

Darmosil picked up his on-the-job melding kit—which consisted of a lot of Red crystals and a few pointed metal rods in a black bag. He was almost out of the shop he and Krays owned and on his way to Vaughan’s when he realized something.

The arcane furnace was on and Krays was staring at it.

“…It doesn’t dance, you know.”

“Shhht!” Krays declared. “I… am playing… with liquid.”

“Yes. That’s what a forge does. To metal. And glass. And other solids.”

“Liquid in liquid! And air. All the states of matter are at my disposal and no one can stop me!”

“I could tear out some of the furnace’s crystals.”

“You wouldn’t live to see the morning.”

Darmosil glanced out the window. “Sunrise is in two minutes, I think I can hold you off for that long.”

“Oooh, we should test that theory, see how dead you really are.” She shook her head. “Later, though, I really do need to focus on this. Come on… come on…” She let out a particularly colorful swear—which meant she was particularly annoyed, as she usually prided herself on being much more creative with her expletives. “Heeeeere we go again!”

Darmosil knew it probably wasn’t wise to prod her further.

But he did anyway.

“I see your finesse hasn’t improved.”

“Darmosil, I will call down razor-sharp triangles from heaven itself and rip out your small intestine!”

“In your dreams.”

“Yes. Exactly. And then I’ll make you watch. A few weeks down the line you’ll forget all about this and I’ll ask for a Yellow connection and BAM horror.”

Darmosil smirked. “Ah, stealing my ideas I see. Are you still upset about the glass snake incident?”

“YES!” There was the sound of shattering glass, followed by Krays’ angry stomp. “Oooooh, Darmosil, you play dirty.”

“Really, I thought that was you.”

Krays threw a glass orb on him that shattered on the wall. “You’re cleaning that up!”

“Ah, but I have a job to get to.” He waved at her. “Be back whenever it’s done!”

“Don’t you dare show your face around here again, glasswrecker!” Her tone suddenly changed. “By the way I was thinking of fixing cheesy rice tonight, but we’re out of cheese, could you get some?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Good. NOW GET OUT OF HERE! Those razor triangles from heaven are coming for you!”

Darmosil left and, a few seconds later, Krays let out a dreamy sigh. “Yes, Krays, you found the perfect man.”

The sound of boiling water came from behind her. The sound of failure.

“He may actively hinder you getting any work done, but if this ain’t worth it, I don’t know what is.”

“You switched from talking about yourself in the third person to the second to the first,” either Rina or Rona said from the doorway that connected the bakery and Krays’ shop.

“Grammar can go die in a fire,” Krays said with absurd cheerfulness and an innocent smile on her face. She smashed a glass rod on the table for dramatic effect before returning to work.

~~~

Darmosil’s job was to meld the various metal pieces of the spin-launched together without damaging the crystals. He had more than enough of a steady hand to accomplish this, but both Vaughan and Suro felt the need to watch his every move. Vaughan because he felt like he was being shown up in Red usage and wanted to explain how Red wizards had better things to do than learn precision of basic spells that had minimal application, while Suro was scared silly that Darmosil was going to break something because the cat had rarely seen Red used in a way that wasn’t chaos-inducing in some way.

Which was to say this entire situation was Vaughan’s fault, not that Darmosil said anything. Sure, were it a different situation, he’d probably be spouting subtle deadpan insults, but he really did need to focus in order to do this right.

But, in the end, he did complete the work. Stepping back, he looked up at the fruit of his labor.

A giant Orange donut with a glowing Magenta center that had a few metal bits poking out of it. This, in turn, was melded onto the top of the Skyseed’s lid in multiple locations in order to make sure it stuck. The spin-launcher was going to stay stuck to the Skyseed..

“Well, it looks tasty,” Darmosil observed.

“Don’t eat it. It’s bad for you,” Mary warned.

“Obviously, everyone knows not to eat crystals.”

“…Can I fly yet?” Jeh asked.

“No,” Blue said—her mane looking combed and orderly, for once, a sure sign that she’d actually gotten an acceptable amount of sleep last night. “We have to do some double and triple calibration testing—but soon. Very soon. If all goes well, tomorrow, actually.”

Jeh clapped her hands. “Yes yes yes! I get to launch some satellites! I get to launch some satellites! Woohoo!”

Vaughan turned to Blue. “How are the designs on the Moonshot coming along? I would very much like to also be shouting ‘I get to launch’ at some point, you know.”

“They’re coming along. Still don’t know how to deal with the temperature problem, though.” Blue frowned. “See, we know from going up that at a certain point the temperature starts going up rather than down. We can easily regulate our temperature by heating up, but the cooling problem…” She frowned. “You did those tests I asked for, right?”

“Yes. It was quite fun, actually… I blew up a jar!”

“Wh… how!?”

“Well…”

~~~

A few days ago, Vaughan had pumped as much air as he could out of a glass jar with the bellows. He stuck a heated pebble in and levitated it in the middle of the jar so it wouldn’t touch the sides. Then he kept it there. For several hours. When he removed it, it was colder than when he’d put it in.

He also did this with a red-hot pebble. Then a molten ball of white-hot rock.

Then he just kept turning up the temperature until eventually the pebble radiated enough heat to the glass to shatter it.

~~~

“So, in conclusion, it was boring until the end,” Vaughan said. “But I was able to confirm the transfer of heat with minimal air present. It happened much faster with the glowing objects, too. And, because they were able to cool to temperatures below the air, it means they were radiating the heat away.”

“So the mad wizards really were right…” Blue said, hoof to her chin.

“Academia is good for some things. Most of us would just trust the findings of Pepper.* Her work on heat transfer is second only to her work on explosive reactions.”

*Pepper’s experiment did not involve removing air from a chamber. Rather, it involved having an ice elemental cooling a chamber to an absurdly low temperature and then putting objects of various heats into it. While Ikyu lacks a proper way to quantify temperature, Red wizards know that objects at certain high temperatures glow certain colors, and that these colors can be used as a relative measure of heat. Pepper investigated rapid cooling of materials resting on top of various types of conductors and insulators, largely because she wanted an excuse to do a “test of ice and fire!” One of the major discoveries of this experiment was that there was a mechanism that took heat away from the hotter objects faster than the colder objects that didn’t care what the material they were touching was. We know this process as radiation heat transfer. To them, this is cutting edge magic science that would eventually get Pepper the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was limited to a single nation.

“Right, so, fine, heat transfers through conduction, convection, and this ‘radiation.’ The problem is we only have radiation to work with in space, and we’re not sure how it works except that it’s faster for hotter objects. But that kind of defeats the purpose since we don’t want to be so hot we’re glowing in space.”

“I’m a Red wizard, I can run tests on heat transfer… I just…” Vaughan frowned. “Hmm. Precision measurements were never my thing, and this might require that.”

“Perhaps this Pepper would be interested in applying her discovery?”

“Me? Talk to Pepper?! Are you insane?”

“Uh…”

“BEHOLD THE ANSWER TO ALL YOUR PRAYERS!” Krays declared, charging into the backyard with a strange glass object in her hand. It was composed of four thin cylindrical rods, each filled with water and a single bubble that wiggled as Krays moved it. “I’ve made… a level!”

“Um… yay?” Blue said, cocking her head. “Why do we need one of those, exactly?”

“So we don’t rely on Jeh’s meat senses to shoot satellites at level angles.” She held the glass object up and gestured at it. Three of the rods were arranged in a flat star-shape, while the fourth was vertical, piercing the other three. “Behold. If you tilt it any way other than straight up… the bubbles don’t stay in the center! And if it’s straight up but you start moving to the side…” Krays rushed to the side, prompting the bubbles to move. “Oops, unbalanced forces, the bubbles jostle! And this bubble up here—“ She pointed at the vertical rod. “Well, this one will change based on vertical adjustments! Granted I realized as I was walking over here that that may not be as helpful as the drift detection but…” She handed it to Vaughan. “Now you can know if you’re straight up and down in every direction!”

Vaughan blinked. “…We’d thought of this before, hadn’t we?”

“I think so,” Blue said.

“Did we just… forget?”

“I think so.”

Jeh looked up at the liquid in the glass with a frown. “…I bet I could have done it just fine without this.”

“Can’t hurt to have it on board, though, right?” Blue said. “As a check.”

“…Fiiiine…” Jeh said—but her smile quickly returned to her face. “Ooooh, I don’t care about that thing, I’m going to launch a satellite into orbit! Into orbit!” She started dancing and cheering again.

Over the laughter and commotion, Darmosil walked up to his wife. “So, how many attempts did that precision project take?”

“Uh…”

“How much glassy slag are you going to have to clean up?”

“Uh…” Krays tried really hard not to think about the oversized pile of glass shards just sitting rather unsafely next to the forge. She was lucky she was a gari, or all the glass would have cut her hands and feet open several times. The benefits of having natural armor.

Darmosil chuckled. “Well, I have some cheese to go purchase, you have fun with that.” He patted her on the back and walked away—his work here was done.

Krays’ left eye twitched. “You win this round… but just you wait… I will have my revenge… MUAHAHAHAHAH!”

The rest of the Wizard Space Program stared at her with uncertain glances.

“I’m allowed an evil maniacal laugh every now and then, don’t judge me.”

~~~

There was still much work that needed to be done. Calibration, tests, calibration, more tests, and even more tests. Tiny little adjustments needed to be made in the crystal matrix and some of the metal needed to be worked a bit more.

But all of that passed with time. In the end, the Skyseed rested on top of the launchpad, an orange donut resting on top as a hat. The donut was wider than the lid it was affixed to, but it wasn’t wider than the Skyseed itself—the fins spread out to a larger radius.

The two satellites themselves were not currently attached to the Skyseed, but were just in a large bag resting on the launchpad next to the ship. They were to be hung on the bottom after the Skyseed levitated into the air, where they could be accessed by Orange telekinesis and placed next to the spin-launch device, where it would pick them up and throw them into the depths of space. At least, that was the plan.

“I’m not going to bore everyone with a speech today!” Lila declared as she strutted out onto the launchpad. “We all know the drill and we want to see this thing fly already. Jeh’s mission is to take up the spheres in the bag over there and throw them into space. If all goes well, when we look at the stars tonight we’ll be able to see them, like fast-moving stars. So keep an eye out!” She quickly turned to Jeh. “All ready?”

Jeh nodded. “I’ve got my crystals and the imaging device, we’re good for the launching and the imaging!”

“Then let’s get you in there!” Blue said. She took a brief moment to give Jeh a hug before unscrewing the Skyseed’s lid—with the spin-launch device on top of it. It was significantly heavier than before, but Blue could bear it for the few seconds it took Jeh to crawl into the Skyseed and take a seat among her various devices, books, crystals, and a few snacks. She waved excitedly at everyone in the crowd.

While Big G and Suro started running around the Skyseed to make absolutely sure nothing was going to fall off, Vaughan kneeled down between two of the wooden fins and put a hand to the glass. “You’re going to make history today, Jeh.”

“Didn’t I already do that?” Her muffled voice came back. “At least, that’s what the twins tell me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Just… something about this day feels a little more momentous, like we’re actually doing something with more purpose than just because we can.” He chuckled. “Ah, well, have a good flight. I can’t wait for the day I can go up there with you.”

“You’ll love it up there! It’s so quiet, it’d be the perfect place to catch one of your naps!” She giggled.

“It’s all clear,” Big G said. “Ready to fly.”

“Good luck!” Vaughan said as he stepped back. “And please don’t throw the satellites into Ikyu.”

“She won’t if she has eyes!” Krays called. “And you’re welcome for that!”

Jeh rolled her eyes. “I’ll do my best, Vaughan. And you know that’ll be awesome.”

“Of that, I have no doubt.” Vaughan waved and stepped off the launchpad.

“All right, here goes!” Jeh said. “Hey Seskii! Countdown?”

Seskii coughed. “Countdown after hover, we still have to attach the satellites.”

Jeh couldn’t really hear Seskii’s words through the glass, but she was able to tell what was said by context and the motion of her lips. With a nod, Jeh turned on the drive, adjusting the power output until the Skyseed lifted into the air, and then she quickly set it to hover.

While she waited for Blue to secure the satellites below, she tested her balancing ability on Krays’ level. It was not difficult at all for her to keep all the bubbles nicely in the middle—except for the vertical rod, but that bubble would only move if she entered freefall or something, and she had no intention of doing that.

The bag was securely latched to the bottom of the Skyseed. “All ready!” Blue called. “Don’t shake it so much you drop them!”

“I won’t!” Jeh called, turning back to Seskii. “Countdown?”

Seskii held up ten fingers. “TEN!”

And so the numbers counted down in an eager chorus—even Alexandrite got into it in the latter half. On “zero!” Jeh kicked the drive on—but not into anything too crazy, she wasn’t quite used to flying with a sack attached to the bottom and a spin-launch device on top. She found that balancing while moving was a bit more difficult, but nowhere near as intensive as that time she went up filled with water.

The winds were the worst part, as always, but the spin-launch device had been built to withstand them—and the bag that held the satellites was loose enough that the satellites themselves weren’t in danger of being blown into the Skyseed.

She had done this so many times even the unexpected gusts of wind could be dealt with.

As was her custom, as time went on she slowly increased the speed at which the drive carried her. Faster and faster she went, putting more and more will into the drive until it carried her into space itself.

Now came the annoying part: she had to know how high up she was. There were two ways to do this that they had discussed. First, measure the curvature of Ikyu—how flat or round the horizon appeared was exactly correlated to the height from the ground. Related to this was the distance she could see—with more height, more kilometers were easily visible.

They eventually decided to use both of these measuring sticks to make extra sure. If Jeh could hold up a slightly-curved paper cutout and match it to the horizon while also seeing two particular islands at the same time, she was at the perfect height.

It took her a while to get this right. She was too low at first, then she somehow managed to shoot too high and had to back down—allowing her to see that, yes, the bubble in the vertical rod of Krays’ level really did work.

Eventually, though, she got to the correct height. The curvature was just right and she could see just far enough. 400 kilometers. Or, at least, that was where she thought she was. Admittedly this was likely off by several kilometers, but they had some room for error according to Blue and her tireless nightly calculations to see if orbits shot at off angles or at slightly different heights were stable. The answer was, surprisingly, “usually.”

Jeh quickly set the drive to hover; the speed with which she adjusted made everything within the Skyseed jump up, but she maintained control.

There was one last thing to check: Krays’ device. It seemed perfectly level, but Jeh wasn't so sure about this. Glancing down through the hole in the floor, she was fairly certain she wasn't perfectly aligned. However, she could have been crazy and the device correct, so she decided to test this.

She rotated the ship sideways. While it was rotating, the bubbles flew out of alignment, but even completely perpendicular to the ground they quickly aligned. Jeh tilted her head to the side in bafflement. On one hand, this meant Krays' device was completely useless and gave Jeh a smug feeling. On the other, Jeh had no idea why it wasn't working. She even felt like the "bottom" of the Skyseed was the floor, even though she could clearly see Ikyu to her side.

Had she been reasonable and cautious, she probably wouldn't have tried to launch the satellites and returned back to get more precision instruments. But she was neither of those things and had far too much confidence in her own ability. She was going to eyeball it and hope she got within tolerance. She slowly righted herself until she was as close to level as she reasonably thought she could be.

And so, it was time.

Keeping one hand on the drive and air restorer control rod, she used her other hand and some Orange to carefully open up the bag underneath the Skyseed. She unfurled it just enough to take one satellite out before tying it back up, trapping the other so it wouldn’t fall back to Ikyu. Out here, among the blackness of space, the spherical mirror glinted with the brilliant light of the sun, moon, and stars. Jeh could see her face in it, albeit distorted.

Jeh grunted to herself as she wished she had a third hand. She put the Orange crystal in her mouth to keep her hold on the satellite while she placed her hand on the Skyseed’s lid. There was a single crystal dot on the lid with a little switch. The direction it was currently set to was “hold.” Pressing her finger onto that, she pushed her will into it. It was a significant amount of will, but far less than the drive was currently requiring from her just to keep hovering.

Biting down a little harder on the crystal, she guided the satellite next to the spin-launcher. The Orange of the spin-launcher grabbed hold of the satellite, keeping it in place.

It was at this point Jeh bit down a little too hard and shattered the Orange chunk. The shards stabbed into her throat, mouth, and jaw.

She wanted to say “ow” somewhat sarcastically, but the position of the crystals made that somewhat awkward. Both of her hands were currently occupied so she couldn’t pull the pieces out, and so she might as well just deal with them.

With a face stabbed through in multiple places, she flipped the spin-launcher’s switch to “spin” and held her focus.

Slowly, but surely, the satellite began to turn around the spin-launcher. It took almost no effort from Jeh to focus on it at first, but as the satellite’s speed increased, so too did the demands of the spin-launcher on Jeh’s will. It was not long before the satellite was nothing more than a shiny blur whizzing above her head.

Jeh started to feel a headache.

Don’t think about it. She told herself. The spin-launcher will automatically release when it gets up to speed, just keep feeding it until then.

The headache increased, becoming like a spike rammed right between Jeh’s eyes that came out the back of her skull. It was pain, to be sure, pain that would have made many lose focus.

But what was pain to Jeh?

Nothing worth getting worked up over, that was for sure. She currently had Orange crystal spikes rammed through her face over and over, for crying out loud!

However, while the headache wasn’t doing much to her, she did begin to feel fatigued. She was actively pushing herself, providing energy to the spin-launcher and the drive at the same time. Nonetheless, she held fast.

By now, on the ground, the satellite would have ignited with the air and burned to a molten pile of metal. Up here, though, there wasn’t even a trace of heat. The satellite just kept moving faster, and faster, and faster. The only reason Jeh could really tell this was occurring was because of the rate at which the bright Magenta and Orange flashes came from the spin-launch device. The satellite itself was just a blur, and had been for quite some time.

Come on… Just a li—

Before Jeh even got a chance to think too much about how hard it was getting, the spin-launcher released. Jeh quickly removed her hand from the ceiling and looked around, trying desperately to see which way the satellite had gone.

I can’t see it… I ca—wait a minute. She squinted her eyes toward the north-east, seeing a tiny glowing speck moving against the black background of space. Is that it…?

It was quickly growing too dim to see—in less than a minute, her eyes could no longer discern its presence.

That was probably it… Jeh frowned. She considered taking a break… but she decided only to wait until she had gotten most of the Orange out of her face. There were some pieces stuck in her throat she couldn’t get to, but that wasn’t a huge deal. They’d probably get pulverized from her moving around so much before too long and then they’d make their way out.

She grabbed the second satellite out of the bag and levitated it up to the spin-launcher.

“You know, I think we forgot to name you guys…” Jeh chuckled. “Oh well, satellite two, away!”

And so she spun it up again. This time wasn’t so much of a nail-biter to her—but it did make her far more exhausted to launch the thing. Once again, the spin-launch device released its payload. Once again, Jeh looked around rapidly until she saw a shimmering speck fading into the distance.

“Since I saw it twice that means it is the satellite! Woo!” Jeh, no longer concerned with keeping anything balanced or level, let go of the drive’s controls and did a little dance. Naturally, this prompted her to enter freefall, but the sensation of weightlessness was more fun than anything at this point.

She didn’t let herself fall all the way back down, though. She did have some pictures to take. Righting herself and turning the drive back on, she took out the imaging device and gathered the targets. This time it was two stars and another picture of Ikyu.

“Huh,” Jeh said, as she examined one of the stars through the little telescope to take a picture. “I’m pretty sure that’s just two stars really close together.”

She took the star pictures and then turned her gaze to Ikyu. She had been told to focus on the Tempest today, but she found her gaze drawn to the Purple cube.

It was glowing. The entire thing. And it was getting brighter.

Move!

Jeh had no idea where that thought came from and she didn’t question it. She didn’t even pull out her backup Orange crystal or adjust the drive—she tapped into the Orange crystals she had embedded into her neck and threw the Skyseed to the left as hard as she could manage.

A beam of pure purple energy cut through the location she had been in less than a second before, with an area of effect large enough to vaporize ten Skyseeds set side-to-side.

She had just been attacked by a giant mountain-sized Purple cube.

Jeh was no longer holding onto the drive or the air restorer and, frankly, at the moment, she didn’t care about moving safely. She used the Orange within her to throw the Skyseed downward as quickly as she could manage. While she was doing this, she scrambled over to the drive and pointed it downward as well, turning it to its maximum setting.

She aimed toward the forest near Willow Hollow. She was rocketing in as fast as she could manage, she did not want to accidentally hit a building or someone else.

However, even at top speed… she was still a long, long way from the surface.

And now she was moving predictably.

The Purple cube released another beam of energy.

Well, at least I won’t be stuck in orbi—

The Skyseed was vaporized in an instant. It, and everything within it, was reduced to charred remains.

~~~

“You know, I don’t think we ever named those satellites,” Blue said as she watched the second speck of light drift across the sky. She had seen both of them cut across the stars, but all that confirmed was that the launches had been successful, not that there had been an orbit. They’d have to wait about an hour and a half for that.

“We’ll figure something out,” Vaughan said.

He and Blue were the only ones still at the launchpad—everyone else had gone to sleep or, at the very least, back to their homes so they could watch the sky at their leisure. Technically speaking, Vaughan and Blue could have seen everything just fine from his backyard—but neither of them had wanted to leave. There was some sort of sentimental value about the launchpad they couldn’t comprehend.

“So, she’s probably taking some pictures right now, or maybe just celebrating, I don’t know.” Blue tapped her chin. “Then she’ll come down and we’ll probably know if the orbit was successful before she actually makes it back.”

Vaughan nodded. “And if it is successful…”

“Operation Lunacy is theoretically sound. Just enter a distant orbit near the moon and wait for an opportunity. The Moonshot will need a few redesigns, but with the spin-launcher we can throw things into space for people now, possibly get even more funds…” She chuckled. “I know I shouldn’t get excited until the mission is actually confirmed a success, but I’m loving the possibilities. You couldn’t have done something like this in Academia!”

“Most likely not, no,” Vaughan said with a chuckle. “Then there’d be people always breathing down your back, higher-ups trying to figure out how they can get in on this new idea and make it their own, a—“

A massive purple beam cut across the sky, originating from somewhere in the north. There was no sound.

“What on Ikyu…?” Vaughan stammered, taking a step back.

Blue narrowed her eyes, picking out an Orange speck among the stars. “I see the Skyseed, I think she’s kicked it into full overdrive. Whatever that was came really close to her…”

“It would have had to be aiming at her for that to be close!”

“Maybe it was, I don’t know.” Blue frowned. “She might be going for a crash landing at high speed, we should pr—“

Blue watched in horror as another purple beam flitted across the sky. When it cleared, there was no Orange speck left.

“Jeh!” Blue shouted.

~~~

Itlea could see the mountain range from where the beam originated.

She could hear the immense shockwave of air that rippled through the snowy mountains, throwing up snow in the largely uninhabited wilds.

“Wh-what even!?” Itlea stammered.

“I have no idea,” C-R lied—but everyone knew it. She folded her arms around her back like a bow. “Some great arcane power has been released. Perhaps we do best to avoid that area for now.”

There’s no way she can’t know we’re here, Itlea thought. That Cube has to see us, that has to have been some kind of warning. We’re all going to die...

“It was angled a particular way,” an old man with an eyepatch said, looking down at the map they had. “Let’s see here…” He cut a line across the map that crossed down through Shimvale all the way through Kroan and into the wilds.

He didn’t say anything about Willow Hollow, but Itlea knew the line cut right through it.

She was shooting at the Skyseed!?

“Let us turn back, such dangers are not for us to face,” C-R said. “We sh—“

A second beam went off, firing in, as far as they could tell, the exact same direction. Once again there was a tremendous shake as a shockwave of air hit the balloon-whale, this time prompting it to moan in pain.

Their living craft started to retreat from its current course without any prompting from its masters.

“We shall find somewhere to set down outside the cold,” C-R said, pressing a porcelain finger to the map in a location Itlea knew was outside the suspected Purple cube’s range. “Then we shall see if we are forced to make a return or if we can continue our journey into the northern wastes.”

“I for one have had enough of fancy purple lasers!” one of the men grunted.

“Where is your courage?” Itlea demanded. Have to look brave, have to look like we don’t suspect anything. “We came here to venture into the unknown, and just because we have to retreat doesn’t mean we aren’t coming back!”

“Patience, Itlea,” C-R said. “Let us have this argument at a later time when, perhaps, there is no immediate danger from mysterious beams of energy.”

Itlea really wasn’t sure if she was being chided or if C-R was just trying to keep up the act. “…Fine.”

“Everyone shall remain alert until further notice. Understood?”

“Yes, C-R,” the crew said.

~~~

“Hey, Xerxes!” Pepper said, pointing up at the sky. “You just missed the most impressive lightshow ever!”

Xerxes looked up from the book he was writing and at Pepper pointing out the window. He had honestly forgotten the dryad was still there in his office. He should have kicked her out hours ago. Girl had probably gotten into so many of his secret files while he was absorbed in his work…

But then he realized she was right. A beam of purple energy shot across the sky right before his eyes.

“What on Ikyu…?” He quickly ran to the window and pressed his face to the glass, but the beam was already dissipating.

Another one did not come.

“You said there was another one before?” Xerxes said.

“Yep!” Pepper said. “There weren’t any others, though. I… have no idea what it means, Orirok is the star guy.”

“It means the king is about to summon the wizards to explain what the deuce just happened,” Xerxes grumbled.

Pepper took in a sharp hiss. “Oooh, that’s gonna be awkward.”

“There will be no sleep for us tonight.” He marched to the door to his office and tried to open it. He realized it was locked.

“Yeeeeeah,” Pepper said, rocking back onto her heels. “I didn’t want to bash your door down or interrupt you and you’d locked me in so…”

Xerxes didn’t want to hear anymore about his lack of attention. He quickly whipped out a key, unlocked the door, and stepped out. He was half-tempted to lock Pepper in again, but no, everyone of their station was about to be called, and he didn’t want her rooting around his office even more.

My mind is starting to escape me… he grimaced, pushing that aside. Such thoughts would not do now, of all nights.

~~~

Blue sat on the launchpad, staring forlornly at the sky.

All around her, the rest of the Wizard Space Program were shouting at each other.

“Okay, look!” Krays pulled out a map. “What’s up to the north that we’ve seen from space? That big Purple cube!”

“That’s ridiculous!” Suro retorted. “Nothing can attack from that far away!”

“Have you ever seen a Crystalline One the size of a mountain before, fuzzface? Me neither! For all we know it’s got some freaky inspiration!”

“It wants to shoot us all down…” Mary said, eyes widened. “It might be coming for us…”

“Now, calm down!” Lila said. “There’s no indication that a giant Purple cube is coming for us even though, yes, it does kind of seem related. The mission is not a loss.”

“You’re all heartless,” Alexandrite said. “All you worry about is the mission and yourselves, but a child has just perished in the sky and you put her there.”

“You will not speak such things!” Vaughan shouted with a fury Blue had never heard in his voice.

Alexandrite did not back down. “A child is dead.”

“No she isn’t you thick-headed reptile!”

“Defending yourself over such a loss as this? I expected better from a respectable wizard. But what other kind of wizard would be forced to live so far away? I wonder if there were things not in your file… If—“

“Stop it,” Big G said, crossing his arms. “There’s no use keepin’ it a secret anymore, Vaughan. Stop trying to hide behind insults and rage.”

Vaughan twitched. “And what are you implying by that?”

“He’s implying that maybe we should tell Alexandrite why we’re not complete heartless monsters?” Seskii suggested. “Maybe?”

“But…”

“She’s proven herself enough at this point, surely, Vaughan.”

Vaughan frowned, realizing everyone was looking to him—except Blue, that is. Her gaze had not left the stars. Vaughan desperately wanted the weight off his shoulders, glancing to Lila, but all she did was shake her head.

“…She’s immortal,” Vaughan said, refusing to look Alexandrite in the eyes. “So far as we can tell, nothing can so much as injure her, much less kill her.”

Alexandrite’s eyes widened. “That… explains so much while also making me furious in an entirely different way. I have been acting on incomplete information and sending Gronge inaccurate reports!”

“What did you want us to do? Word got out, the King would forcibly conscript her into the army!”

Alexandrite growled. “And if the King did so, would that not be to her glory?”

Vaughan, for once, was actually intimidated by the dragon and took a step back.

To his surprise, Rina and Rona took his place. He wasn’t even entirely sure when they had arrived.

“You can stuff a sock in it…”

“…Deep Messenger.” They both put their hands on their hips. “Jeh does not want to be a soldier…”

“…She wants to be an explorer.”

They both gestured their arms out at the program—the program neither of them were actually a part of. “We were just doing our best by her.”

“Do you want to destroy that?”

“Can you claim you’ve never had fears for what the crown would do to you?”

“Surely they know where you came from.”

Alexandrite glared at them, but something about what they said unnerved him. He refused to interact with them. “Who are these children?”

“Jeh’s best friends,” Seskii said, putting her arms on the girls’ shoulders. “And Willow Hollow’s secret weapon!”

“I have heard of the disaster!” Ripashi said suddenly, dropping from the sky. “I shall go hunt for her landing location. Who’s with me?”

“Don’t,” Vaughan said. “She could be hundreds of kilometers away in any direction. We don’t know anything.”

“But…” Ripashi shuffled his feet nervously. “I must do something! She can’t just be…”

“She’ll find her way back,” Lila said, closing her eyes. “It just might take time.”

“How much time?” Krays asked. “You getting any visions about that, huh?”

“Do not insult my wife’s gifts,” Suro bristled.

“Oh, me, not insult? Are you—“

“You know better, Krays.”

“Stop acting like a child,” Big G grunted.

Krays scowled. “I’ll act like a child if I Diadem well ple—“

“Look,” Blue said, suddenly drawing everyone’s attention. She pointed at the sky, where a small white speck was rising from below the horizon. “Mission… accomplished.”

No one said another word as they watched with somber silence as the satellite completed its first orbit around Ikyu.

A tear rolled down Blue’s cheek.

She still did not take her eyes off the sky.

~~~

SCIENCE SEGMENT

Heat is a funny thing.

Ultimately, it is the kinetic energy of particles bouncing and vibrating around. Even if a solid looks still, in reality all of its constituent parts are jostling and jumbling around at a certain speed related directly to the heat of the object.

Funnily enough, though, temperature is NOT heat. Heat is the inherent energy of an object through its motion. Temperature is a measure of how readily an object will give up heat to others. Yes, high heat generally means high temperature, but not always.

It is extremely difficult and annoying to measure heat, though, so most often we just measure temperature. This easy enough: objects of high temperature want to give heat to objects of low temperature. Heat will flow from high to low until the two objects are the same temperature, but by no means will they have the same heat. Material also matters quite a bit: two objects of the same mass of different temperatures do not necessarily arrive at a stable temperature exactly halfway between the two starting temperatures. It takes more heat to increase certain objects’ temperatures by a single degree, while others take less.

Due to this, we can place materials that behave a certain way at certain temperatures next to other objects to read their temperature. This is how thermometers work: the material within expands or contracts depending on temperature, and since it’s so small, it’ll easily send all its heat into or take heat from a larger object without changing the bulk temperature all that much, so when the heat transfer ends, we can have a pretty good idea of what the actual temperature is.

Unfortunately for the wizards of Ikyu, they aren’t sure how to measure this very precisely yet. They could just put tick marks on a pressurized tube with water in it—and they do—but what is this actually measuring? How could they compare two different thermometers? They really haven’t been able to standardize that far.

However, there is another property that can be used to tell temperature, but only of really hot things: blackbody radiation. When things are heated up to certain temperatures, they eventually glow red-hot, orange-hot, yellow-hot, white-hot, and then blue-hot. This pattern holds true at roughly the same temperatures for most normal materials—though technically it’s only an absolute pattern for blackbody objects, that is, an object that absorbs all incoming light and so the only light coming from it is the stuff it emits. Nothing is truly that absorptive, but for dull objects it works pretty well. This is how we tell the temperature of different stars, for instance!

Since Red wizards have relatively easy access to vast quantities of heat, they can just heat up objects to these temperatures and then watch the colors. How fortunate for them, since it’s allowed them to prove that radiation heat transfer exists.

See, most heat transfer occurs because one particle slams into another and transfers some of its energy to it. But, in space, there are no particles to bump into, and so any heat generated has nowhere to go. Ironically, a human, being warm-blooded, is more likely to cook themselves rather than freeze, though in absolute vacuum any human would be dead long before that occurred.

However, there is a way to release heat through the vacuum of space: radiation. Every particle that has a temperature will release photons—at high temperatures this results in the red-hot behavior of a blackbody that releases mostly red light. However, at lower temperatures, a blackbody is still emitting photons of light, just of “colors” we can’t see—usually infrared. This infrared will, slowly but surely, carry heat away from the object making it.

These photons do not need anything to help them transfer the energy. They can just fly off into space and go warm something else up. This is exactly how the sun warms the Earth, by sending radiation at it, though the mechanism by which it does so is a bit more complicated than just vibrating and randomly sending out photons—that’s just what happens on the outer layers of stars! The insides… well, that’s not relevant now, perhaps we’ll get there later.

Also, Orange breaks the laws of physics. You can’t just add angular momentum to a system like the spin-launcher and expect everything to be fine. If the satellite had been on a cord, by making it spin faster and faster it would have eventually started spinning the Skyseed with it since they would be in physical contact via the cord. But since Orange can act at a distance with no physical connection, the Skyseed felt nothing.

Extremely convenient.