Chapter 0.6: DC Library

The Dawn Commission's "library" is really just a room with a few bookshelves. One bookshelf looks to be the mundane NGO/business section, but the other two... The other two contain tomes!

Alric will FINALLY get some fucking answers. Barely below jogging, he swiftly walks out of the conference room and beelines it towards the inner area of the Dawn HQ, his head moving in a straight line homing in on the next crossroad, while his body scrambles to keep up and avoid obstacles. Almost there, he stops in his tracks. BOOKS! THEY HAVE BOOKS! He immediately throws himself into the adjascent room he got a glimpse of, and starts scouring the book titles. He's looking for, in order of priority:

• Anything magic plus physics crossover
• Anything introductory magic
• Anything explaining magical theory
• Anything explaining magical history
• Anything else that could remotely be useful

Rolled: [10 💥 10 💥 8 = 28, 2]+2 Result: Success with 6 raises! 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯

The books run the gamut from newly published with full-color printing to slightly disintegrating handwritten journals. Alric has gathered a number of promising-looking books in his arms before he hears a voice from the occupied corner of the room. "Whatcha looking for?" the woman the group passed in the hallway on their way in is sitting at a table, a number of books and laptop arrayed before her. She's wearing an outfit of black, blue, and silver, and a conspiratorial smirk. "The stickies in the front covers are color coded for credibility. I haven't vetted Phisikes of Magik or Foundational Names yet." She points her pencil at a couple of the books Alric is holding. "But I've read the others."

Sanity, at this of all the places? Surely not. Alric squints at her. "What do you mean? You vetted the books?"

"I made sure nothing in them would explode someone's head. After that I checked their sources and tested the stuff that was testable. Then wrote up what I found and how truthful I found it. That's all in the digital archives though. The physical sticky notes are much less polished." She squints back. "This your first grimoire, new guy?"

He drops the books onto the table. "Okay, we're friends now. Nice to meet you, I'm Alric. Yes, this is my first grimoire. No, I have no clue about how magic works. Yes, I have a theory. It's based on physics and repeatedly being contracticted by what people tell me about magic. None of it makes sense. What digital archives and can I get access?"

"I'm Saije, like a wise guy but spelled with an 'i' and a 'j.'" She extends her hand to shake. "The thing about exploding heads is hyperbole, but being driven insane while researching magic is a real risk. So my advice is to slow down and not rush it; you are more breakable than it is. Break down what you mean by 'based on physics and repeatedly being contradicted by what people tell you about magic'?"

He shakes her hand. Sage. In a library. Phoenix. Making a Dawn commission. One more, and it becomes a pattern. "Honestly, I'll go insane if I don't get any answers anytime soon. I'm fine with slowing down, but not with delaying getting started."

He takes a deep breath.

"My hope is that magic is running on some form of physics muggles haven't figured out yet. I have a pet theory based on a brief encounter involving some soul touching, which is incredibly elegant, makes everything fit together neatly, but produces a comical amount of wrong predictions. So I'm low on that one, but I haven't completely thrown it out yet. There's a good chance that whatever way magic works, be it the way I expect or some other way, the people practicing it just made up bullshit explanations."

He flops into a chair across from her.

"Are you a fae? You're legally required to tell me if you are."

She cackles. "No! I'm not. But it's my understanding that some get real mad at that question. I'm a magician. Mortal and human." She spins her pencil.

"Oh, there is a whole lot of bullshit; millennia of it all crusted up into amazing guano islands. My best theory involves physics being built on top of magic and essentially the same thing as a really really complex spell. I've gotten good traction with the theory, but it has some ugly epicycles in the details."

"Plausible. You mentioned a digital archive?" Alric starts taking notes. "I'd also like to get my hands on a book on introductory magic, just so I get a sense of what mages think happens. What would you recommend? I've also asked others a bunch of questions earlier and would like to cycle back on them if you don't mind, as I haven't gotten any answers yet." He's noticeably more relaxed now that he can actually talk to someone, you know, sane.

"And, wait, a magician? As in, card tricks? You're not a mage?"

She taps her laptop with her pencil. "You should have an account on the network now. It shouldn't be too hard to find the archive. There's also the public version online, though that's purposely hard to get to."

She looks over the books Alric brought to the table. "Dresden's Filed Rotes will give you a taste of the wizard understanding. He's one of the most humorous wizard authors I've read. It reads like a wise cracking recipe book. Also read Yeesha's A Journal of a Dreamstrider, then ponder how the two different books are valid lenses on real phenomena that simultaneously exist in this world. If your brain feels like breaking, stop until your mind resettles, then consume a bunch of mythology and folklore, keeping in mind rotes and dreams and that the authors who wrote the mythology and folklore are absolutely steeped in biases and history is a ancient game of telephone."

She glances at her open laptop, spinning her pencil again. "I have time to answer questions, yeah. No promises of complete answers though."

When Alric asks about her being a magician, she smirks. She spreads her hands wide, pencil now absent. "Magician, mage, what's really the difference?" With a snap her arm whips around to point intently at Alric. Her demeanor suddenly completely serious. "Names and Traditions. Names and Traditions are the only difference, and they might be the only differences ever." She brushes away her intensity, posture shifting back to her relaxed confidence from earlier. "I'm a Magician of the Randian Tradition."

*???

?

???????????

No difference between magicians and mages except names and traditions? No difference between card tricks and actual magic? No difference between visual trickery combined with wrong assumptions, and physics-breaking bullshit?

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????*

Alric notes this question down to be pondered later, and mark it as particularly important. She may be nuts, but this perspective might crack a thing or two open.

"I'll get the books back to you in a day or two." He puts them in his backpack. "So, about those other questions. Bear with me here..."

They discuss the block of questions he asked Phoenix earlier. What does Alric learn?

As Alric notes the question, he may realize that he’s using her glittery black wooden pencil and not his own.

“Sure. There’s a log on top of the bookcase for tracking check-outs.” Saije points with a clear plastic mechanical pencil that looks awfully like the one Alric was using earlier.

Alric got 7 successes on the roll. Alric may get answers to 7 questions. Some of the questions he’s asked have already been answered, so please list out the 7 top priority ones.

Does he notice the pen swap?: [4, 1] Result: Success! 🎯

He gets up to fill out the check-out form. Alric isn't just going to check out the two books mentioned by Saije (it doesn't look like they've gotten around to implementing a limit here, yet) - from his stack of books, he'll switch out the ones marked as non-credible with the ones from Saije's suggestions. That'll keep him busy, for a day or two.

As he fills out the form, he notices the pen in his hand. Looks at it, confused. At Saije, at the pen in her hand. Then back to the pen he's holding.

And then, just laughs, deeply. He doesn't know what to say.

His seven priority questions are:

• How the fuck does magic work?
• How to get access to the HQ library / wiki?
• How to get past Martha and into the actual Boston magical library?
• What online resources are reputable and should be checked?
• Do souls have the shape of their owners, or another shape?
• What's the significance of capital N Names?
• How many gods are there, if any? Closest thing to it?

1. Magic is full of seeming contradictions. There seems to be different traditions of magic that have incompatible assumptions, yet still work. Wizard magic works by repeating rote spells and imbuing them with power. Dream magic works by accessing the realm of dreams where one can divine things about the world or commune with other entities. Blood magic works though sympathy of aspects drawn from the target. Demonology works by summoning a demon and getting powers from it. Some people appear to have innate knacks that function something like magic but can range wildly to having the Gift of wizardry to having a perfect sense of direction to simply being unusually lucky, knacks may or may not be in some way genetic.
2. This is the library. Alric will be able to access the digital archives when he is logged in on a computer on the Dawn Commission's network. With sufficient time and tech skill, he'd be able to figure out how to remote in to the network from his personal computer too.
3. Don't piss Martha off. Go with someone who has a good rapport with Martha.
4. Saije lols and recommends her own blog, starspeks, which is a full quarter non-bullshit. There's also a now-dead blog by "Faeresiensis" that had great anthropological and statistical posts on various supernatural communities. It has a dangerously low bullshit quotient. The author is probably either dead or driven insane by now.
5. "Mu." Saije says, then when pestered, elaborates that there's a lot of contradictory ideas on what a "soul" is, and her bet is there are different things which people call the soul, and most of the ascribed phenomena don't interact with 3D space in a normal way.
6. Names are like a hook onto who you are as a person, and may also be one of the things some people mean by "soul"
7. Find a world mythology book and count up the entries in the glossary, there's probably about that many. Entities that are more god-like tend to be less human-like, and tend to not bother with people as much.

New objective: Become a god.

"Alright, tell me, how did you get into magic? I predict you didn't go to the local college - it seems they either actively select for a specific attitude, or beat it into you, somehow." With finally some answers, and more soon to be discovered in the books he secured, some calm seems to return to Alric. Saije seems likeable. He decides to stick around a bit before digging into the books.

"Ah, ha, ha. Pass." She waves her palm at the question. "There's a bit of a trend with magic. People usually either know about it because it is part of their heritage, or something happens to make the knowledge stick. The slipperiness of knowledge about magic explains why is isn't widely used and why there isn't a concerted conspiracy to keep magic secret that the Dawn Commission is actively defying. We're just doing the magic to see if we can convince reality to play by different rules than it has been."

"Mhmhm.. Are antimemetics a thing in magic? Or what exactly do you mean by the knowledge about magic being slippery? In my experience, people, myself included, have a hard time not to believe everything they come across. Not believing things has to be actively practiced."

Saije shrugs, "The real stuff is hard to look at. If you want a BS evo-psych answer, it's adaptively advantageous to not stick your nose in too deep, but you know, trauma responses are nature's way of saying 'actually, ignore that healthy behavior, it's not healthy in this circumstance.' Now I do actually have work to do."

"Then I shall take my exit stage left. Saije, it was great talking to you, I'll be back with more questions in no time." And with that Alric stands up, collects his stuff into his backpack, and leaves the room. To explore the HQ for a bit, and to then finally dig into the books and online sources he just collected.