Perhaps For Love, Or Maybe Justice (A Tokusatsu/Magical Girl Quest)

…Am I going to get sued for this?

(Image ID: A stick figure in a suit sitting at a desk, concerned. Alt Text: You could have asked Yuki about this, y'know.)

Well. I suppose I may as well. I mean, the worst that could happen is I get my pay docked. Welcome to What Are…?, the online internet magic novel where I, Bashira Akasuki, Archmage No. 5 (Kira, I want No. 4 back!) answer all your questions about the newest and fanciest fields of study; Magic and Alchemy.

Assuming that the government doesn't break into my house after I finish answering this question.

(Image ID: The same stick figure from before, running away from wizards that are breaking through his window by flying. Alt Text: The chances of me getting fired in a way like this are low, but never zero.)

Well, I should probably lower the chances of the above happening, so:

DISCLAIMER: MAGIC PRODUCTS MADE WITH REPUTABLY SOURCED GLYPHS SHOULD ALWAYS BE USED ACCORDING TO THE INSTRUCTIONS. DO NOT TRY ANY OF THIS AT HOME, PROFESSIONAL THAUMATURGES ONLY.

Alright, now that I'm not going to show up in the next Apollo Justice game as the guilty party, let's get started. For this list, we'll be rating Francesca's list of horrid, terrible things as a group on a shared scale. They'll be rated by everyone's favorite- the Pain-o-meter!

(Image ID: A thermometer with two ends, one of which shows a clock and the other of which shows a face. Alt Text: He's baacckkk!!!)

This meter goes from 1-10 on both ends. 10 on Pain means that it's likely one of the worst things that you can do with your time and will subject you to endless torment. 0 on Pain means that you won't be able to register the pain from the thing that's killing you before you die. 10 on Time means that it will last for an amount of time that will basically turn the rest of your long, long life into a living hell. 0 on Time means that your brain will not be able to register it in time to even say "oh fuck".

This is also very painful, for me and the Pain-o-meter. Just wanted to let you know.

(Everyone, just remember that this is Francesca's fault.)

(Image ID: A stick figure redhead running away from a stick figure with a suit on, who's meant to be Akasuki. Alt Text: Can you people send me nice and peaceful questions? For once???)

1. Getting Shot

Pain: 0-6/10
Time: 0-3/10

Thankfully, in Japan, we have half decent gun laws, unlike Ame certain other countries that will not be named here. However, by combining enough Prana with the right [Moving] spell, you can theoretically accelerate a small bullet to the speeds of what it would be able to achieve if it was shot out of a regular gun.

(Image ID: Two stick figures shooting a bullet, one is holding up a gun, while the other is casting a Fire Spell, with a matching Glyph in the air in front of them. Alt Text: First though, you'd have to get your hands on a spell like this, and you'd have to get past the lines of motorcyclists wanting those for the next BMX Games.)

As for getting shot, either you'd get headshot (which would get you, er, subtracted from the census immediately) or shot in somewhere not immediately lethal but still deadly, like the stomach. Either way, you'd die from internal wounds and/or bleeding out. Ouch.

2. Getting Hit By A Rampant Glyph
Pain: 6/10
Time: 4/10

To our knowledge, there can be situations where naturally-occuring Glyphs go crazy. These are usually during natural disasters, so Fire during wildfires, Water during Tsunamis, Earth during earthquakes, and the works. During these times, spells cast using the glyphs of said Rampant elements will usually not work, or be way too powerful for their intended purpose and effect.

If you get too close to one of these Rampant Glyphs, it'll hit you with a burst of pure elemental energy. And that might hurt a bit. Yes, even on the less obviously painful ones.

(Image ID: A stick figure getting hit by a storm of leaves. Alt Text: Should have cleaned up your yard.)

The Rampant Glyphs have a very generous area of effect, so they won't hurt you until you've gone past the area where it's already become hard to breathe. If you get close to the instant-death fire expecting to live, I genuinely don't think even one of us Archmages could help you.

(Image ID: A stick figure turning into ashes. Alt Text: He was already sweating like a dog when he got within 20 feet! Not my fault he thought he could get a good tan!)

3. Draining Yourself Of Prana
Pain: 7/10
Time: 7/10

At this point, we've gone from "things that could possibly happen to you by accident" to "things that you'd have to have done yourself". You have been warned.

Magic is a collision between two forces. Mana, which is nature's energy collected inside of each Glyph, and Prana. Prana is our individual life force. It can't be measured exactly (though trust me, we're working on it.) but us humans can use it intuitively to infuse a Glyph with energy. Spells and Runes are simply our ways of making sure that powerful combo of energy is cost-efficient and does what we want it to do.

Of course, while most civilian-level glyphs that you use on a daily basis are usually so efficient you won't notice your prana draining, some of the more government and Archmage-level spells should be used by multiple people, lest you get hospitalized or worse.

Running low on Prana is definitely not a fun feeling. It's not only just an ache and exhaustion in your muscles- you can start to feel your senses fade. Your vision blurs, your hearing gets more fuzzy, and people have even reported not being able to taste food as well for the next few days afterwards.

(Image ID: A squirrel, with the text "I'm not drawing this" below. Alt Text: I don't feel like giving myself nightmares, thank you very much.)

There have only been a few people who actually died of this. But it has been described as a "strange creeping feeling, where you can feel your organs shutting down, and the color of your memories flaking away."

I'm just gonna give that a high number on both of the scales and walk away.

4. Breaking The Sky Seal
Pain: 9/10
Time: 9/10

Are you serious about this? This is a bad idea.

The Sky Seal is the biggest magically constructed structure, ever. It's a tall, tall skyscraper located to the east of Brazil, that goes so high that it goes past the clouds. On top, there's a gigantic wind Glyph pointed skywards, a glowing green circle filled with more Runes than you'll likely ever see in your lifetime. And do you know what it does?

It pauses climate change.

(Image ID: A drawn image of the skyscraper described above. Alt Text: Like Atlas, holding up our future.)

Using ASTRONOMICAL amounts of Prana, and memories of "home" and "the future", the Sky Seal essentially stops climate change from going past the "tipping point" past which we'd all get screwed over and tornadoes and heat waves would happen every other day. Every Archmage from each country in the world is required to lend their Prana to it for a week each year. It's exhausting, and the reason I know how #3 on this list feels like. Would not recommend it, nasty experience. The people were nice, though!

It's planned to be taken down sometime in 2100, once we as humans have fully swapped from fossil fuels to magic and renewable energy. However, if you took a crap ton of [Anti-Magic] spells to it before that date, well…

It's been theorized that first of all, you'd immediately die from the magical backlash. All the memories and mana absorbed within would immediately blast directly into you, and all your organs would rupture and you'd have a brain aneurysm. That's why the pain is at 9. But why the time at 9?

Well, you'd die immediately. Everyone else, not so much. They'd die slowly.

(Image ID: One stick figure with his arms up in the air, saying "yay!" The other stick figure looks much more sober. She says: "Wait a minute." Alt Text: A slow death is not necessarily an honorable or peaceful one.)

The global tempature's drop would immediately start reversing, and fast. In countries closer to the equator, such as the aforementioned Brazil, heatstroke deaths would rise exponentially. The ice caps would completely fall apart, making smaller islands like The Maldives uninhabitable underwater cities. You know Akihabara? That would become a coastal city.

(Image ID: Another squirrel, with the text "Again, not drawing this" below. Alt Text: Absolutely not.)

This state of hell, known as the "Climate Apocalypse", would last for around 20 years. By then, humanity might not be extinct, but we would almost certainly be back to the stone ages.

To verify all this info, I called my buddy from Mexico, Miguel Merola Castos. He was the Archmage working the Sky Seal three weeks ago, and he was getting bedrest at the time. I asked him how much of this doomsday would come true, and if I described accurately how it would kill the evil person who decided to take an anti-magic spell to the most overtuned spell in the history of mankind.

"Well, if the Seal was broken, the world would certainly be in an apocalyptic state," he said, "but as for being a way of getting yourself killed via Magic? The snipers would get to you first."

5. Attempting To Break The Laws Of Physics
Pain: 0-10/10 (DATA INACCESSIBLE)
Time: 0-10/10 (DATA INACCESSIBLE)

ABSOLUTELY DO NOT TRY THIS. I'M SERIOUS.

The first law of thermodynamics states as such:

Energy cannot be created or destroyed.

This is an immutable rule. Even magic abides by it. Prana and mana do not create energy. The combined energy is simply reorganized by the rules of the spell to get what we want. But of course, there's always a troublemaker that wants to bend the rules.

Or to put it in a more crass way, somebody wanted to f around and then they found out.

10 years ago, American scientist Hudson Briggs wanted to have nuclear power as the other source powering America, along with Magic. By his reasoning, the waste products were better in the ground than in other people's lungs. Which, pretty good reasoning. But most people (and by people, I mean energy companies) in America pushed back against this.

So Hudson wanted to make a spell. A very special spell. One that wouldn't just nullify the radioactivity of the nuclear waste, but completely erase it from the face of the earth. Why would the Americans agree with this stupid idea instead of just sucking it up and digging a big hole, I have no clue.

So then…

Well, I feel like this is the point where I make an aside, to you, dear readers. While this blog is intended for either younger kids to first learn about magic or for the older folks that just want something to read, I know that I have a significant amount of teenagers that are using this as a source for their Magic classes.

So let me get something clear with you. If you wanna be a famous scientist/thaumaturge, you want two words next to your name in the history books. "Contributed to", and "created/made by". You do not want "the" and "incident" next to your name.

So where was I? Oh yeah.

Two years after his research started, Dr. Briggs started off a chain of events that would later be known as the Briggs-NM Incident. It took place on March 27, 2072, at 4:30 PM. The fact that we know the exact minute that it happened should already clue you in on the fact that it didn't go well.

Here's how it went. You had some people, including Briggs, at what was supposed to be a secret military base in the desert of New México. Briggs was going to demonstrate a prototype of his spectacular nuclear waste erasure spell! It would use a mixture of self-destroying mana and two Archmages' prana to erase about a few hundred pounds of nuclear waste. And when I say erase, I mean erase. Like deleting a game item— completely gone.

Yeah. Do you see where this is going?

The two Archmages fired up the spell, some mixture of about twenty Glyphs and Runes that had been classified. And for good reason.

1 minute passed. One pound of nuclear waste vanished away as if it was never there. And then? Everything went wrong.

Something snapped. Maybe one of the Archmages was distracted by a stray thought, or maybe the nuclear waste was enough to turn one of the Glyphs Rampant. Either way, what happened can best be described in the form of a picture.

(Image ID: A nuclear mushroom cloud. One colored black. Alt Text: A modern myth. This one teaches hubris.)

I don't use this kind of comparison often, but it's the best thing I've got. Roughly four Fat Boys got dropped on that spot in New México, all at once. People from miles away could see the mushroom cloud. A cloud which was pitch black, somehow. And the worst thing? We have measurements of the time and temperature from just before the room was leveled.

The time was being measured using super-accurate atomic clocks, the most accurate time-keeping tools in the world. Those clocks were accurate down to the milliseconds. When the logs from those clocks were read by the aftershock investigators, the time said it was 7:00 AM, in a year that was unreadable. And the temperature scale that the automatic thermometer was using? For a tiny split second, it went from Fahrenheit, to Celsius, to Kelvin. Y'know, the measurement used to measure stars and outer space.

This reaction has since been named a "Briggs-reaction", after the aforementioned idiot who caused it in the first place. We don't know how it happened, and nobody's willing to go back to that part of New Mexico to check. (It's still radioactive.)

So, what's the lesson being taught here? Well, there's two. First, there are some things that are simply meant to be figured out and worked with. Brute force is simply a key to a slow and painful death.

And second, just because you're American doesn't mean your first solution to a problem should be "blow it up".

Conclusion
Next time, I'm answering a nicer question, one that doesn't send me down rabbit holes and keeps me awake at night. Remember everyone, this is all Francesca's fault.

(Image ID: Akasuki at his desk, with his suit on and his head in his hands. Alt Text: I will be mentioning this to my therapist next time.)

(Oh, the things I do for internet clout…)

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Author's Note:
This sidestory was inspired by Randall Munroe's (aka XKCD) What If series. Here in reading form, here in video form.

Before I go, here's another fun fact: The "What Are…?" blog isn't just a solo project! Sora Kisei also answers a few questions about Magic as well. His answers are usually more formal and to the point, but they have less images and humor. Kira and Yuki also have made small cameos.

Happy voting heroes, and ask questions if you feel like it.