Chương 50: 032 – A Different Kind Of Magic

More than twenty Kaedekin simply walking out of the gloom of the park was very creepy. Intellectually, Loren knew it had to be planned. This was their station and their tour, so it only made sense that the volunteers who would be meeting them at the end point of the tour would know where the end point was, and would be waiting nearby to step up when they were needed. That still didn't change the fact that it was very creepy.

Now that she knew what to look for, Loren was able to spot the colored buttons at the collars and sometime lapels of their clothes, as well as the armbands on their biceps. Though that was the second thing she noticed, because the first thing she saw were the weapons they were carrying. Many carried swords in a variety of shapes like Rain did, including what looked like an aesthetically nice-looking but very impractical fusion of sword and gun—"Hey Rain, is it all right if I be the one to accompany Loren here?"

Seraphine said cheerfully.

"Since we're already friends and all."

"Sure, as long as that's fine with her," Rain said. The two of them looked at Loren.

"I have no problem with it?" Loren said uncertainly. After all, it wasn't like she knew anyone else.

"Great!" Seraphine said as the other Kaedekin approached and started introducing themselves to the other members of the away party.

"So, what do you want to do first?" Loren considered the question. Intellectually, she knew she was supposed to try and find out about the Kaedekin 'force field technology'. And given how they've been willing to answer practically any question sent their way, all she probably needed to do was ask. However, Seraphine… well, she didn't seem to possess the same magic that Rain did.

Loren hadn't expected to be greeted by a fellow Pyrotheurgist practically on stepping off the utility boat, and upon considering the question… well, wasn't this a golden opportunity? They were unlikely to be able to replicate anything from whatever magic the majority of the Kadekin possessed without their active participation, but a fellow Flame? Loren could definitely learn something from her, even if it was only how Kaedekin Pyrotheurgists lived on their planet. …

And that still didn't really answer the question of 'what do you want to do'. Looking around, Loren grasped at a pretense the environment around her presented.

"Actually, could you tell me more about the people depicted in these statues?" she said.

"While Rain said they were a group who protected their planet from invasion, it's not really clear to me how. I mean, they don't look like military officers, even ones from 800 years ago. And while I know some places still used child soldiers during that period of earth's history, I don't think any place that practiced that would be able to fund a credible defense against extraterrestrials." Seraphine's face brightened.

"Oh, sure! First off, you're right, the Outguard weren't military personnel. Actually, it would probably be accurate to call them 'violent vigilantes'." She said that in the tone of someone repeating a well-worn joke.

"The time they lived in was… not peaceful. Materialized keres, demons and gravehearts were on the rise—" Wait, gravehearts? Weren't those just a story?

"—and the governments could no longer cover up their existence as they used to. Every few months it seemed like some idiot had some kind of industrial accident that left them irrational and violent, and deciding to use their PhD to make some weapon of mass destruction in their garage and go on a killing spree. Violent daylight crimes were becoming common again, even outside the United States—""Where?" Loren asked, confused.

"It's the region you know as the American Archipelago, before they did horrible things to their topography."

"Ah. Got it."

"As I was saying, it was probably a terrible time to live," Seraphine said.

"The members of the Outguard were among the many people who chose to act and protect those around them. In the beginning, they used their abilities to protected their cities against crime, monsters and disasters. But as time went on, they each widened the scope of their purview, until the day they scopes became so wide they intersected and finally met each other."

"And what abilities were those, exactly?" Loren asked, looking at one of the statues in particular. From the pair of swords she held, it was easy to guess. Seraphine followed her gaze.

"Well, in Bloody Mary's case, she was a Pyrotheurgist, though not a classically trained one. She was self-taught, so she was really only good at three things: Life Flame to heal, Energy Flame that she turned into kinetic energy to push herself around like a rocket, and pure fire generation that she used to augment her swordwork and shoot plasma beams. With those three skills and the swords in her hands, she helped save the world several times." … Wait, did she really just say—?

"What's a Pyrotheurgist?" asked someone nearby, making Loren jump in surprise… or try to, at least. In the suit, it was more of a stumble that nearly made her fall over backwards if it weren't for Seraphine quickly reaching out a hand and arresting her fall.

"A Pyrotheurgist is a kind of wizard," Seraphine said distractedly as she helped Loren get back on her feet and balance her weight again.

"Back in the old universe, we were the most prevalent kind on Earth. Not the only ones, of course, just the ones who were the most common. Are you okay, friend? Be careful. You wouldn't want to break your suit." Embarrassment burned Lorne's face.

"I'm fine, I'm fine. S-so… those are the abilities you meant? P-pyrotheurgy?"

"Yes. Though of the Outguard, she was the only Pyrotheurgist. Everyone in the group had a different kind of magic." Seraphine gestured towards the short-haired woman in a red sweater and loose red slacks as the one who'd spoken and his Kaedekin tour guide joined them.

"Mortal was capable of Cultivation of Essence, which in addition to exponentially increasing her physical capabilities also accelerated the speed of her thoughts and granted her eidetic memory." She pointed at the armored, knight-like figure next.

"Poise was a Symbol of Fear, with a focus on physical and mental speed. Corona was a Crystalborne who could generate and control electrical fields and currents, and Xynodob… well, we don't actually know what to call her magic. She never gave it a name. Its capabilities were well-recorded, though. Black-colored pseudo-matter elemental manifestations, wormhole teleportation, physical and mental enhancement, and rudimentary pseudo-matter homunculi. Or possibly golems, we might not be remembering correctly."

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"That sounds… vaguely impressive?" Loren said, trying to go for understatement. That was a third kind of magic capable of generating pseudo-matter. Technically, it was apocryphal, and possibly only of historic interest, but it was still 200% more than they had even known about previously.

"She could create monsters almost 200 meters long that could defy gravity and shoot out energy beams," Seraphine said.

"Or a small army of a thousand of them, each one able to tear through metal with their claws." Loren's feelings went from understated impressed to understated horrified. That was… several orders of magnitude more pseudo-matter than she'd ever heard Symbols produce… not that she'd ever actually met a Symbol in her lifetime, but they'd kept records. Obsessive record keeping was what made something scientific. Numbers were optional but welcome, and the maximum number theorized was a cubic meter of pseudo-matter.

The actual measured number on record was less than half that.

"I am not a student of ancient Earth political habits," Falling Stillness said, "especially as they apply to the theoretical Earth of a theoretical other universe—" Ah, there was that Changer academic pedantry, "—but given the modes of thought of humans, this… Xynodob seems like the sort of person that humans governments would try to kill as a threat to their monopolies on force, hire to work for them, incarcerate to indenture to work for them, attempt to legislate them, or some combination of all those things."

Surprisingly, every Kaedekin nodded.

"Exactly correct," one of them said.

"Though they would also be doing unethical, illegal scientific experiments on one's person without their consent." … yeah, Loren could believe it.

"Governments wouldn't do that," someone said.

"They'd just pay people to agree to be experimented on."

"The Outguard found at least thirteen government black sites conducting illegal human experimentation on condemned prisoners," another Kaedekin said.

"Not all in the same country, of course. But some countries did have more than one…" Loren coughed, then turned to face Seraphine specifically.

"That's five kinds of magic," she said.

"What about those two?" She gestured towards the child on the elevated plinth and the one in the ballistic armor.

"Also, why is one depicted as a child?"

"Three," Seraphine corrected.

"That's Stardancer and her buddy Lyrica. Stardancer was a Thaumaturgist, like… like most Kaedekin."

"Sister, stairs aren't that bad."

"Then you climb them!"

"Don't have to, I can fly."

"I swear to justice and Stardancer, I WILL find a way to manipulate gravity with the Flame and I will NEVER have to climb stairs again!" Loren wished her luck. They'd been trying for centuries. And this was probably the most humanizing exchange she'd ever heard from the Kaedekin. For a moment, the cheerfulness had vanished not to solemnity, but just because someone was really, really annoyed at having to climb stairs. Seraphine coughed, and gave her an embarrassed smile.

"Sorry about that. As to your second question, they're depicted like that because that's what they looked like when the Mass Production Models left that universe. Lyrica is the spear in Stardancer's hand."

"Was she malnourished?" someone—Loren sighed, and checked the HUD: Bonifacio—said.

"Because she looks like she's ten years old."

"No, humans have just gotten taller on your planet. Stardancer is exactly the right height for a thirteen-year-old adult of her genetics."

"… so she was actually a child as depicted?" Bonifacio said.

"Well, we presume she still got older after the Mass Productions Models lost contact," Seraphine said.

"This is just the age she was last seen."

"Then the Outguard really had a child among its members?"

"She wasn't just a member," one of the other Kaedekin said, sounding proud.

"She was their leader."

"Because no one else wanted the job," another added.

"It's exhausting, leading people. They keep finding ways to hurt themselves!"

"Big sis, you're a red button with a red armband."

"Exactly! That means I know what I'm walking about!" Loren actually saw Commander Bronze look up from the conversation he was having with Rain at the exchange, then nod his head. The rest of her was thinking.

"Was she your genetic donor?" she asked. All the Kaedekin nodded.

"And the one who initiated the cloning program that created the Mass Production Models," Seraphine said. All the spacers stared at her, then at the statue of the confirmed child." How?" Bonifacio asked.

"Well, she took a sample of her own DNA and—""No, no, I mean, how does a child know how to clone someone?"

"Oh, she sto—er, borrowed someone's notes and equipment on the subject, studied for a week, and started experimenting. Cloning is really easy if you're using automated equipment that knows what growing conditions need to be." That last… sounded like a direct quote, somehow.

"… where does a child find automated cloning equipment sufficient for cloning humans just sitting unattended?" Cooper's familiar voice asked. Apparently he'd been distracted from whatever weapons the Kaedekin were willing to show.

"Evidence locker," one of the Kaedekin said. There was a whole world of implications in those two simple words. How does an apparent little girl steal functional cloning equipment from an evidence locker? What sort of crime leads to cloning equipment being in an evidence locker? How integral was the cloning equipment to the crime in question? How did the little girl know about the cloning equipment in the evidence locker in the first place? How does a thirteen year-old start a cloning program?

"That sounds like a long story, and I only have two hours of air," Loren said.

"And him? What magic does he have?"

"Oh, that's Nightmare. He didn't have any magic, he's just a completely normal human being." It took a few second for Loren to process that. She also saw the exact moment most of the other listeners relegated everything they'd just heard from 'possibly factual if insane historical account' to 'definitely just mythological nonsense'. Having a 'completely normal human being' in a group of…

those monsters—the little girl was definitely a monster, because who just learned how to clone people from some notes and stolen equipment—was apparently just the thing to break their willing suspension of disbelief.

"What happened to them?" one of the other spacers asked in the tones of someone asking just to complete the lore and then write it all off as nonsense.

"We hoped they lived," Seraphine said.

"The Outguard were still alive when the Mass Production Models lost contact with them. After that… well, then they crashed into Surcease, and here we are. Building a park in their name."

"Naming planets and… stars after them." Oh. She just got it. The star was called Dancer.

"Yeah," Seraphine said as the other spacers began to walk away.

"It's all we can do to thank them for letting us be born. And they won't even know." … Put that way… it sounded absolutely depressing. Seraphine seemed to think so too, because she shook her head briefly continued with a 'change the subject' smile.

"So, what do you want to do next?" she asked, that regular cheer—which still sounded so sincere—coming back to her voice. Ah. She'd run out of pretense. Now what did she do? … Eh, fuck it.

"Do you want to go somewhere private," Loren said, "and just talk?"

"Oh, sure! Do you want sit down? That pack must be really heavy."

"I'd appreciate that." It was only later, in hindsight, that Loren realized she sounded like she was using a cheap pick-up line.