Stranger Seals
Twenty-Third Day of the Ninth Month 294 AC
It was all too easy to mistake the difficulties of ward-crafting, Naria had learned, as she worked on the Permeable Arcane Veil Project. After all, unlike a conjurer, there was no risk of tearing space and time asunder. Unlike a necromancer, one was in no danger of unleashing death made manifest upon the world of how evokers might set loose the dance of primal forces. Transmuters warned of cascading reactions that would render all around them to elemental dust and diviners risked madness by peering beyond the veil of the worlds.
What was the worst that some new study into protection magics could do?
All of the above and more besides, for to ward against a thing one must first produce it and then understand it down to its fundamental principles, and as their task was to find a way to allow attuned creatures, living, breathing, fragile creatures through a ward humming with enough power to hold off the bolts of spell-cannons, the results had been... predictably bloody.
One of her Tyroshi born colleagues had suggested chickens on the reasoning that they could eat the ones who did not make it. They had to scrape the first five off the stones of the testing chamber, nothing but feathers, blood and bone dust. For some reason they had all been killed from the inside out, with the damage becoming progressively lighter the closer you got to the outside of the bird, which eventually ruptured not due to any sorcery but a pressure differential.
The I.A.F. had not been amused by the prospect of the poultry grenade, and for more than a month the project had been stuck in the doldrums with no solutions in sight and no answers foreseen, not until a chance remark from the now Headmaster Marwyn had given them the key. "Have you tried weighing them before and after?" he had asked.
It took the development of a spell based on the ritual of restoration which had helped recover the lore of the Citadel, but finally they had their mostly intact though still thoroughly dead test subject, now several fractions of a gram lighter than they should have been. So how had it exploded and where had it gone?
As it happened the answer was staring them in the face. It had not gone anywhere on this Sphere or any other, but rather matter had become energy, only a fraction of it recognizable as heat and motive force with the rest of it coming out as some kind of exotic poisonous radiance. They all had to go the the healer after that, half-fearful they had contracted some curse. Fortunately, it had just been physical damage, easily within the scope of simple spells of cleansing.
Having identified the flashpoint and now able to measure it in reference to alterations in the attuning process, the project ended on time, though over budget. Though the airforce would not be able to make use of the wards yet, still being firmly anchored in place, they did have their uses for high value fixed installations as well as being a stepping stone to even more refined abjurative barriers.
Further improvements in permeable Force Effects - Tier 2: 71 (Success)
Result: Better static wards created. (Spell creation, Sign of Sealing, Superior: Allows attuned creatures and more complex objects to selectively pass through a static force effect, otherwise as Sign of Sealing, Greater).
What do you do about the strange findings during the ward research?
[] Leave them in the Scholarum-only section of the Library, this seems to deal with unknown fundamental forces which would benefit from being more widely known
[] Seal this in the lower levels of the Palace Library, it is too destructive to be broadly known even within the Scholarum
[] Write in
OOC: Yes, that in in fact radiation. Mass rad poisoning is what a crit fail on this action would have looked like.