The Royal Academy of Sciences, Sindaenaway, Rhydia.

The gnome took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his large nose, trying to rub away the headache that was building. That was three summons today alone. Three separate pattern reconfigurations, and another three failures. Alister was going to be unhappy, and when that man was unhappy, things got very, very scary.

Fortunately, this time, the Kobold in question was alive afterward. It was in the cage, smashing against each side in turn and screeching at the top of its lungs and apparently sobbing. Maxwell would have to dispose of this one, it was far too active for one of the students to dump it as usual, and like the last one that came in intact enough to stay alive, the band had refused to accept it.

Research was like that. Sometimes it took thousands of experiments to produce one useful result, and you often learned far more from failure than you would ever learn from success. Professor Bartholemew Gaslightopper, as a white necromancer, knew that better than most. Alister might be terrifying, but killing the gnome or even destroying the entire academy, which was easily within his abilities, would only hinder his aims. Everyone already knew what he was capable of, and was working as hard as they could to assist him, making an example would serve no purpose but to force him to start over.

Bart tried to quell his own terror of the man with such reasonable, logical rationalizations. It might help, it might not, but Alister’s sponsorship was essential for keeping control of Sindaenaway. Without the knowledge of Alister’s support, the senate or nobility might try to take control of the city once again, and such stupid, uneducated people should never be allowed to rule. Sure, they are good for building cities, but their foolishness and mismanagement were detrimental to the real purposes of civilization, supporting the intelligent mages that made all true progress possible.

As Maxwell, the half-ogre orderly, wheeled the thrashing, spitting, maddened creature’s cage out of the laboratory, a tall, slim figure with white hair and sharply-pointed ears slid in sideways past the cage, deftly avoiding the Kobold’s claws which tried to lash out of the cage at him. The creature’s nonsensical screeching and babbled words in some sort of incomprehensible and illogical tongue had no real effect on either of the men, and the sky elf slipped into a much larger chair near the Gnome’s stool, spreading out his legs in front of him and relaxing exhaustedly.

“No luck again?” Asked Peregrine, brushing his long hair out of his eyes. His ears were sharp but didn’t stick too far out of his hair, an aesthetic failure that was probably the cause of his being ejected from the sky elf city. They had no tolerance for anyone who wasn’t born sporting the latest biological fashion.

“Well,” Bart said, “At first it seemed well, but then it began spouting that stupid language again. The one that didn’t resemble common at all. I think it was threatening me, the only words I could catch were screaming about Mahmee or something, obviously insane nonsense, but the band rejected it again, and it went crazy, trying to escape. Still, it was alive this time, and Maxwell is going to go wring its neck and dispose of it so the Winnowrill won’t make a big deal about it.”

Peregrine nodded slowly, “Yes, but it being able to use something like words, even insane words, is a huge step in the right direction. Sooner or later you are going to get the soul transfer rune perfect, and the bands will accept them, and at that point, crazy or not, Alister will be out of our hair. His support without breathing on the backs of our necks will be worth it. Do you have any more spirit traps for me?” He asked, curiously.

“Yes, I am sorry I have to keep asking you to do this, but you are the only one who has enough temporal mastery to keep snagging the spirits in transit.”

Peregrine nodded and shrugged, “Not that big a deal. Way better work for the academy than trying to eliminate senators before they are born, and no real paradox. Plus, it would be nice to be able to snatch the immortals before they even get here. I know they are useful for getting materials and completing quests, but when they stick their nose in our business, eliminating them from that dead world is a nightmare, loads of paradox for even little changes. Why does Alister want to bring them here for real instead of using their constructs, anyway?”

Bart sighed, “As far as I can tell, living on a nearly dead world makes them natural essence sponges just to survive and stay alive with almost no essence. Their constructs take a ton of mana to maintain, even though the bands get most of that back, Alister wants a lot more. If we get their souls in a local body, they are almost like channelers, producing scads of essence that can be easily harvested.”

Bart smiled a little. “People like Alister will always exist, and will always need more power. Better them than us, I say, and besides which they are all humans. Only one sentient species and massively overcrowded to boot. If we can figure out how to yank the souls directly without having to wait for them to unlink their own minds, we would be doing them a HUGE favor by reducing their population. You know how humans get if you let more than a million of them get together, they get all grabby and conquest-y.”

Bartholemew Gaslightopper grinned somewhat evilly, “Besides, if it works, who’s to say Alister is the ONLY one that will get an unlimited supply of channelers? Imagine the kind of Mana we would have available if we could tie a couple of them to our stores, or maybe even lock them in a soulstone instead of a body. Can you imagine?”

Peregrine nodded. A single channeler soulstone in his possession would give him the kind of power the old elves took for granted, and he could return home in triumph. Heck, with that kind of power he could take back his home as a true elf and conquerer, or even lift a new city! He had a little list…

Professor Bartholemew Gaslightopper’s dream was much simpler. Gnomes came across as friendly, affable, and delightfully absentminded little tinkers, but they were geniuses with magitech when they had the power, and they had very long memories. Lighthearted affability was a survival trait when you were the smartest and the smallest, otherwise, people would feel threatened. If he could lay his hands on an endless supply of channeler soulstones, his people would no longer be tied to the City of Brass.

They would destroy Alister and his people, and then move on to wipe all traces of Peregrine’s people and their offshoots off the face of Antowyn and then take over. Destroying the elves utterly was one thing that the City of Brass and the Onyxian Empire had in common, but unlike the Onyxians the gnomes had a hundred thousand years of abuse at the hands of the magically powerful elves and a destroyed homeworld to pay back.

Of course, he would never tell Peregrine that. They were friends and allies, right? And the temporal magus was tremendously useful for furthering his goals, it wouldn’t help him to know that Bart and most other gnomes wanted him and his entire species exterminated, would it?

For right now, though, Alister’s patronage and support were vital tools, and he knew that sooner or later they would succeed in stripping the human’s souls out of the stream and tying them to the bands. The bands were very useful, and unlocked enormous growth potential in both the immortals and the locals, stripping out the lengthy process of educating the hard way for a set of simple and well-charted methods of advancement, as long as you had a little essence to keep them powered.

Professor Bartholemew Gaslightopper was very proud of the bands. Yes, they limited the wielders a little bit in terms of magical paths, but with a pre-established framework and Alister’s ‘system’, you had unlimited potential. Besides, Gnomes were known less for their magical than their magitech creativity, and the bands helped you quickly obtain the magical might necessary to run even the strongest magitech and didn’t interfere with gnomish mechanical ingenuity in the least.

Because it was Bart’s own uncle that first created the bands and worked up the system that made them look like a gift from Librus, the god of forbidden knowledge, hundreds of years ago, he had the right to feel a bit of pride about them.

Yep, the world would simply be a lot better off with the cool, smart heads of gnomes ruling it. It would be...organized, with paths and classes chosen based on logic and necessity and a smart gnome figuring out where you were most needed rather than that chaotic and messy ‘pick what you want' thing, where people constantly chose classes or paths based on their desires or ambitions and usually wound up making a poor, stupid, or selfish choice.

Free will for the lesser races was always a bad idea. Look at Goblin valley. Nothing but Orcs, Kobolds, Goblins, and other monster races running around, living their lives of chaotic stupidity and simplistic tribalism. Once the Gnomes ruled, they would have to be eliminated or brought to heel.

The Professor didn’t allow his daydreaming about the best possible future for all the races to interfere with the real world, he slid three more soul traps, little brass funnels, and coiled piping at the end of contraptions made of gems and copper wiring, to the elven temporal assassin. “We are going to need three more if you can get them quickly. Alister plans on inspecting tomorrow, and while we have made some progress, I hope to show him something a little more solid than just insane kobolds that cannot accept a band.”

Peregrine nodded, slipping the contraptions into his long, feathered trenchcoat and turning to leave. He turned back for a moment, and stated, “You may not realize this, but in the world where they come from, in one of their local languages, ‘mahmee’ means mother, usually spoken in that way by prepubescent children, and she was saying ‘please mother’. That soul in the kobold was probably a child.”

The Professor shrugged a little and said “So? It’s a kobold.” He turned back to rearranging the glyph in a new configuration, a slight change over the prior one. White necromancers may have used death magic, but they used it for good and moral purposes, and he was a hero and didn’t want to accidentally create an undead. Stuffing souls in undead bodies was always so messy.

Peregrine shrugged and turned away, heading out of the room. He had a job to do. The end result was unfortunate, he was sympathetic, but the way their low essence world worked, the way they lived, crowded into boxes like rats, he almost was doing them a favor. Besides, this world was vastly better than their own, with endless potential. The ghoulish little necromancer would get souls even if he didn’t deliver them, so he might as well make some money.

If the experiments ever panned out, they might be able to send bands back to Dirt and let some of those channelers start building up the local essence levels, maybe even freeing them from the endless cycle of dirty poverty that they were endlessly entrenched in. Alister was a monster, and the Humans of dirt might be grateful to an outcast elf that opened up their future with magic, enough to help get rid of the monster that was eating the souls of both worlds. A few unfortunate lives were a small if painful, price to pay.

He did feel bad, a little bit, when he walked past the disposal room and saw Max tossing a neck-broken little kobold body down the sanitary disposal, though. It reminded him of when he was tossed off the flying city as a young man, because of his unfashionable ears.

These new soul traps were interesting. The original method the professor used involved snatching bodies that were slated to die from Earth’s past, bringing them here, and then directly transferring their souls before sending them back dead to avoid paradox. It had the advantage of being both ethical and guaranteed successful since they were going to die anyway and necromancers like Bart had learned how to force transfer spirits long ago.

But those spirits were unable to use the bands. Apparently, they were considered somewhat akin to undead or outsiders, they hadn’t enough connection to the world for the bands to draw essence from them. Bart assumed that it was the method, but Peregrine had a strong suspicion that it was the necromancy itself that was the problem. Transplanted spirits didn’t have an aura connection to their hosts until they ‘went native’, that is, naturally grew into their new body.

However, humans on earth could accept the bands easily enough. They were designed based on old elven control enchantments, after all, which had worked perfectly well on this world, Antowyn until the rebels had figured out how to disrupt them. The key to disrupting the enchantments had been controlling their aura connections which the controls had supplanted, which was exactly the problem Bart’s necromancy was having. The creatures were more or less immune the same way that they had learned to fight the controls.

Professor Gaslightopper wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was. Gnomes were magical geniuses, but they weren’t particularly wise, and Peregrine was well aware of Bart’s hatred for elves. All of the really old gnomes that had been around during the crossing wanted to destroy all elves, and they weren’t as clever at hiding it as they supposed.

Peregrine’s plan, which he intended to implement as soon as Bart failed once too often for Alister’s support, was vastly more simple and clever than the Professor’s necromantic excess. That was the problem with necromancy. It was a powerful hammer, but not every problem was a nail. If fate allowed necromancy to be the ultimate magic the way Bart seemed to think, liches and vampires would have conquered all of the worlds long ago.

No, he would go back to the other world’s past and return to snatching the soon-to-be-deceased for banding. Since Earth didn’t have [inspect] there was no way that they could detect magically cloned bodies, which meant no temporal alterations and no paradox. A potentially endless supply of banded channellers for anyone that could control them, and Peregrine’s people wouldn’t make the same mistake the elves did when they first crossed over.

Even though Bart’s ideas for making soul crystals were not terrible, snatching currently living souls while they transitted to play the ‘game’ was just a bad idea in the long run. Ethical considerations aside, putting sentient souls, with potential destinies, into soul gems had a bad habit of attracting the attention of this world’s gods. Monster souls in soul gems were fine, but sentient souls, especially humans? That had the potential of spawning a slew of epic quests from the ‘system’ to destroy the black magicians and end their reign of evil.

Even though Alister and his sort had created the system, the local gods still had access and had been creating quests long before the system had ever been cobbled together out of pieces of prior magic. Alister’s ilk were the beneficiaries in many ways, but they had no more control over the system than anyone else. They had to be just as careful of tripping over its ‘Karma’ as anyone else, and maybe more than most. Even a deity getting too uppity and interfering too much could spawn an unwelcome quest to curtail their influences.

To be fair, Peregrine appreciated the fact that deities were forced to toe the line. Nosy gods were generally vastly more trouble than they were worth, and the system at least helped keep magic under control. Before it was created, new, unstable, and most importantly, unexpected sorts of magic could pop up all the time, a fact that had allowed more than one species to escape elven influence. Gods could still create paladins and champions and feed them and their worshipper's power, but creating an active avatar or major miracle would open up a raid event that every adventurer around would jump onto.

Peregrine had a band but knew the secret behind controlling them. His class, temporal assassin, broke a lot of minor rules, but that’s because he had literally lopped off his own hand to remove it until he had learned to control his own essence channels. There were a lot of options that were unlocked when you had control, as Alister had borrowed an idea from Earth, allowing ‘superusers’.

You could spawn your own quests if you could afford to supply the rewards. You could even create classes or spells, although the essence costs were so expensive that usually only gods and people like Alister could afford to do so. It had taken dozens of drained epic soulstones for Peregrine to create the temporal assassin class and its feature ability which allowed you to sidestep paradox if you were careful.

Paradox was the reason temporal mages didn’t exist.. or at least they never existed for very long, as even the slightest change to the timestream could wipe out a temporal mage in an instant. Breath at the wrong time, use the wrong fork, even stand in the wrong place for a heartbeat too long, and a butterfly effect would cause a temporal backlash that destroyed the mage.

His class, however, when it traveled through time, turned you temporarily into a feature of the collective will. As long as any minor alteration you made was subtle enough to be undetected by the locals, you could make minor changes in the time stream that wouldn’t build up a paradox, as long as your changes could be ‘smoothed over’ by will. Will was everything, after all. You could stand in one place and people would correct their path that a temporal mage standing in the same place would have interrupted, and whisper advice in a young ear that would eventually lead to their choosing a different class of their own free will, change a time when a young couple would meet that would involve their eventual offspring being a slightly different person, or alter the circumstances of a fated event so that the outcome was ever so slightly less fortuitous.

Peregrine loved his class.