The Dreamer Awakens (TES/Multicross)

[yinko]

When I was born the first things I saw were the stars. We're all told that the stars are holes through Aetherius, that they are what allows magicka to leak through into Mundus, maybe that's why I've always been trying to reach them.

By the time I was four I had heard the stories of the Mananaughts and the Flight of the Sun Bird countless times. They were silly, barely based on fact by this point, but they gave birth to countless dreams of a future amongst the stars.

When my father visited Cyrodill to consult the Mages' College he took me with him as a special treat, so I could see the actual vessel the Mananaughts used. It was old, hidden in a dingy basement, but that moment was the most moving experience of my young life. My eyes still fill with a few tears when I consider the brave beings that went up in there, the sheer history represented by the vessel. It's the greatest gift my father could have ever given me, that opportunity.

Like any good Telvanni clansman I studied magic, but while most of my peers were studying to be able to lay low great cities or collect vast wealth, I studied with one thing in mind, to travel the endless reaches of space.

I studied Conjuration to learn about Oblivion, I studied Mysticism to learn about Aetherius, I studied Enchanting to learn how to make better vessels. Anything I that could make a better vessel I had to get my hands on.

I knew from the stories that the reason the old attempts had failed wasn't due to any lack of ability. They made it into space, they landed on the moons, they had gone beyond to the outer planets. The problem was that it was determined that to reach the stars would take more magicka than could be safely presented.

This was ultimately the problem I had to solve. How to get a craft to travel fast enough so that it can reach the stars on its own, all without completely draining it of its only power source.

The first thing I considered was Conjuration, effectively teleporting it from one location to the other, but that would be extremely costly. Then I considered using a naturally occurring entrance into Oblivion. For instance, I could fly it through the stream that separates mundus from oblivion and then reenter reality at an opportune location.

The other option was to figure out how to get more effect from less power. One thing that most people overlook is that an enchantment of Feather will reduce weight to the point that it takes less effort to move it, an enchantment of constant effect for such would allow a craft to move much more easily. Though, the Mananoughts supposedly reported that there is no weight in space, so that might not matter.

Or perhaps an enchantment of fortify speed would work. Telekinesis, levitation, possibly in potion form. I was nearly tearing my hair out.

I was nearly forty, still a young man really, when I started having real breakthroughs. I had the opportunity to read about the practice of creating personal research dimensions, how the unlucky individuals used to test their early formation experiences a lack of air and pressure, far more extreme than the fools that exploited levitation spells as a cheap replacement for moon-sugar.

Using that as a basis I knew that I would have to have an airtight container that could remove the issue. I got an a couple of old metal barrels welded together and sunk them down to the bottom of the Sea of Ghosts, in that dark, dank and depressing pile of muck were great discoveries made. The discoveries that would shape my life forever.

Life's funny like that, one moment you feel like your dreams are hopeless, impossible to bring to reality, the next you have a functional set of enchantments that completely erase the need to worry about the air problem. It's really nothing more than Water Breathing designed to change old air into new, and emergency use of shield spells to make sure that I don't get pressure damage.

To start with I had no idea how to go about actually building my planned craft. In a sense the problem was materials. Of course I'd love it if I could have the whole thing made of ebony, enchanted with the souls of only the greatest of daedric lords, but I was operating on a budget.

Metal was probably not going to happen. The metals that would work would cost a literal fortune to use in that volume, and the metals I could afford wouldn't really work. Whatever I used would need durability, flexibility and enchantability. I'd heard about stahlrim, but trying to get magical ice was a fool's errand, and I'm no n'wah.

In the end I decided to use what Telvanni mages have used since time immemorial, mushrooms. The mushrooms used to grow the mage-towers are more durable than steel, more flexible than wood and more enchantable than glass. They're grown from magic, bred for war, and designed for the ages. They are the perfect instrument with which to craft my masterpiece, the ultimate statement to the world, all of them, that the Telvanni are the true masters of creation.

So I went down to the Council House, to the sub-basement where the creepy old shroom lady lives, and bribed her with a few cases of Ancient Dagoth Brandy to help me. She called it 'an insane project that would only get me killed', but she'd help for the laughs. Bitch.

I summoned up a small hoard of high level daedra and dropped them to their deaths, they never understood it was all a trap to get their souls. Soul gems are really physical representations of prismatic space, complicated stuff, but that's what made it so easy to find them. Once you understand what they are you can use Mysticism to look for such things in the fabric of reality.

Once I handed over the gems needed to grow my ship I let the old bitch alone to grow my ship.

As soon as one issue is solves another rears its head. I needed a crew. This is a problem since I was largely discredited as a loon in academic circles. The political Telvanni didn't care about me since I didn't care about them, while the academic ones thought that everything worth doing in space had been done during the Reman Dynasty.

If I couldn't get my intellectual peers on board then I'd get those that could be of aid in other ways, even if I had to buy their services.

I started by considering sailors, but they'd be of no use in space. Then I considered the Temples, I actually approached a few priests but their position was that to actually set foot on the physical manifestations of the gods was effectively blasphemy. The Mages' Guild were fools, every Telvanni knew that, not even worth asking. The other Great Houses were too focused on the mundane realms to consider the possibilities.

There had to be a better way to go about this… That's it! It'd take a while but this method would get me my crew easily.

With plan in mind I hunkered down and started to play The Game. I took delivery missions, gave gifts to the Mouths, leveraged my family's connections, and generally kissed a massive amount of ass. After two years it finally payed off, I was granted the title of Mouth and was given the authority to have a tower of my own as well as to recruit retainers.

Naturally I designated my ship, long since completed, as my tower. With my new credibility the young, desperate and ambitious of Great House Telvanni flocked to my banner. Of course I only selected the best. A few that had some knowledge of each of the Schools, a former member of the Morag Tong, a retired Boyant Armiger, people with skills that wanted a new future.

With my ship and crew complete I decided to set off.

First I made sure my enchantments were all set and permanent, the shield charms all worked, the automated air cyclers, the feather enchantments, the fortifications spells, the telekinesis and levitation, everything all fine.

I made sure to pack plenty of food and water. I did have a small farm near the base of the ship, it was mostly for alchemical purposes but we could eat from it also, and in an emergency we could always summon animals to butcher for meat.

On a cool morning in First Seed the great Telvanni ship Tel Thaga rose majestically into the sky in an attempt to reach the stars, the first such attempt in thousands of years.

I kept a cool head, if this attempt failed then there'd be another, and another, and as many more attempts as it took to succeed. If I had to make a bargain with Mehrunes Dagon to get it done then that's what I would do. No price is too great in pursuit of a dream.

However everything seems to have done according to plan. Of course I had learned from the mistakes of the past, I had planned out every detail. All my the crew knew how to act when the weight left them, they put on their levitation rings and began to move freely. When the ship left the last of the layer of air surrounding Nirn my stomach was tight with anxiety, would the shell hold, or would it crack and spill the air out into the void? But hold it did.

The problem that the Mananaughts had, that the Sun Bird had, was that they were trying to use magickal storage to fuel their ships, like a cast-when-used enchantment, they'd eventually run dry. I suspect that the projects were never terribly important to their respective governments as more than publicity, or they would have done as I had done and used constant effect enchantments regardless of the exorbitant cost.

Additionally, having active mages on board means that I can summon new daedra to fuel the existing enchantments placed on the ship. So there's really no problem with power at all.

The fools, they all laughed at me. Well who's laughing now! …I am. And it feels great.

We pass Masser, then Seconda, eventually we reach the divines and pass them as well. Such barren representations of divinity are of no use to me, useless balls of rock. My goal is the stars, nothing less will do.

It takes a week, a full week burning through high powered souls all the way, it's like fighting against a current of pure magic, power flowing in through the holes in reality, across the void. When we reach it… It's stunning, like the finest gems, beauty and terror and everything I'd ever imagined all rolled into one. I have to turn away so that the retainers don't see the tears in my eyes.

I order the vessel to move through the hole in the edge of reality and suddenly the force we'd been fighting against for the last week is gone, the pressure the shields had been forced to bear against absent. Aetherius, a realm of pure spirit, a realm where the souls of the dead go to rest, the realm where Magnus ran off to sulk, and we were there.

Sure a few living people had visited before, but they had all used loopholes to get there, none had used their own effort to achieve the unachievable. The power of the enchantments grew as they soaked up the pure essence of magic, of the soul, granting the Tel Thaga new life, and I too felt reinvigorated.

I was happy, my crew was happy, we were all happy, we were alive and victorious. The mages were excited over the prospect of new knowledge, new power. The fighters wanted to face the heroes of old, I just wanted to see what was out there in this strange new place.

We sailed aimlessly at first, stopping when we encountered one realm of the dead or another. Talking to the greats of the past, learning from them, it was humbling. We landed at the Far Shores and spoke with the Sword-Singers about their insights into the nature of the soul, now that they could both manifest their souls as swords and were but mere souls themselves. If I had studied necromancy then surely this would be what it would all have been for.

It was at Sovngarde that everything went wrong.

We had been drifting aimlessly for a while, kept sated by the nature of this place, kept sane by the occasional stops, when I spotted a seemingly interesting distraction. A large bridge made of dragon's bones, with a mead hall on one side.

"Let's set down and talk a bit with the ignorant savages" said one retainer "I wish to test the mettle of Ysmir" said another. I didn't really care much, Nords were scum, worth only as front line fodder, but it could be diverting enough for the moment.

I was slowing the Tel Thaga into a low curve when something flashed past the shields.

"What in ALMSIVI was that!?"

"…dragons"

"Impossible. The dragons have been extinct for millennia"

"When the dragons were killed, where did you think they went? To feast on the dead!"

"We have to get out of here."

"Can this tower out fly a dragon? Out fight one?"

"The beasts are more maneuverable, and I doubt that they can be killed in this place, but my Tel Thaga got to Aetherius in a week, and it's only gotten more powerful since then, if I shoot forwards as fast as possible we should lose them."

"Should?"

"It's the only chance we've got. This ship has no weapons and little ability to shift its course. So unless you'd like to get out and toss a few lightning bolts at them…"

"No. You are as correct as always, let's get out of here."

I punched it. The Tel Thaga did too, right through the edge of Aetherius, beyond the realm of creation itself.

If leaving Nirn was odd in that weight was removed, and leaving mundus was odd in that the soul was replenished, then leaving creation was odd in that it was like waking from a dream, like there were still two realities in one's mind and you couldn't quite decide which was the true and which the false.

How could one exist outside of existence? I didn't have any answer for that, I doubt even the divines knew of the realms beyond Aetherius. Supposedly creations was the result of paired primordial, creation and destruction, Anu and Padomay. But if that's the case then I'm hard pressed to explain what I'm looking at now.

A whole new field of stars, far more distant than any I'd seen before, a new realm to explore, a new dream to conquer.

---
AN: It's actually amazing how easy it'd be to get into space with the TES magic system, and I've wanted to do a Space Elf story for a long time. I'm not exactly sure where he'll be going or what he'll be doing, but it should be fun. If you like it then feel free to give suggestions or whatever.

 

[Doomed Wombat]

You have my attention

 

[Algalon]

Looking forward to where this goes. Don't think I've ever heard of magical Elf-Astronauts

 

[Doomed Wombat]

Indeed tis a unique idea.

 

[DonLyn]

Oooh, nice. I love exploration stories, there are far too few of those.

As for possible crosses, I would prefer it if you gave the obvious' ones, like Star Trek, Star Wars and Mass Effect, a miss. Meeting technologically superior civilizations like that would make the protagonist's greatest achievement, discovering feasible and sustainable space-flight, far less impressive.

Personally I would love to see them explore worlds that have magic, like the Forgotten Realms, or perhaps even magitek themselves, like Eberron.
Both of those may be inhabited, but they still have vast reached of untamed space to explore, something which would be made a lot more feasible if someone were to possess, say, a mobile and self-sufficient base of operations.

The Pathfinder setting would make a decent destination as well, since it actually canonically has different settings on the different planets of the same solar system, offering a lot of opportunities for a guy with a spaceship.

The different Magic Systems in both of those would also allow the protagonist and crew to grow in power and/or upgrade their ship.


If you want to do something really unusual, though, you might try and make it a crossover with the Traveler's Gate Trilogy.

 

[ZFighter18]

I know it's only one post, but to me, this fic is McDonald's.

 

[yinko]

"We have to go back! We're beyond the reach of the divines. I should never have agreed to this."

"Shut up! All of you. Calm down and quit your hysterics." I breathed out an explosive sight "There can be no going back. In case you've forgotten, we were just chased out of Aetherius, the dragons there were unkillable, and they were hardly the most dangerous thing that might exist in that place."

"So what, we're just going to sit out in the void, waiting to die of old age or starvation?"

"No. Look, see out there, stars. Where there are stars there is existence, just not an existence we are familiar with. The first thing we need to do is to check to see if our magic still works. Being beyond Aetherius could mean that we can no longer channel the power of the soul."

"Restoration seems fine"

"I can cast Illusion alright"

"Ok. That checks out, so we still have our souls, and they're still allowing us to bring magic through. That means we have a way to survive if things get tough. Next we need to get our bearings and check over the Tel Thaga. We were just in a fight with beasts out of legend, and I'm not going to let my ship suffer for it."

The situations moderately calmed, for the moment, the retainers set off to do their jobs. The base of the Tel Thaga had a bit of scorching damage, but it wasn't too bad, the shields covered most of the attack. The enchantments didn't seem adversely affected by the lack of ambient magic, which was good, there had never been a situation in the past where magicka was completely absent from the environment. The survey of the surrounding space was where it got odd though.

"The entire region is filled with warped space, like giant soulgems."

"What about our world? Does it look the same?"

"Yes, an orb of space that distorts the world around it, just like the others."

"Then these are all either pocket dimensions of incredibly vast size, or they're all instances of creation."

"Different creations?"

"If our world was formed from the conflict of two primordials, then perhaps something similar is true of these worlds, or all these dimensions were created from the eddies formed by the two primordials' conflict."

"So if we entered some of these distortions in space we might have a new chance at life."

"My thoughts exactly. However there's no telling just how alien or barbaric such realms might be. They might be even more terrifying than some of Oblivion, so we need to be prepared. When I designed the Tel Thaga I never anticipated that there might be something out amongst the stars that would attack us, I was so focused on getting the best linear acceleration that I didn't add on any real defensive capabilities."

"No weapons, only the standard shield, little maneuverability."

"Yes. The ship needs extra enchantments added on. Staves need to be attached to the exterior, axial levitation spells, shields to defend against all forms of destruction magic, chameleon illusions, anything that will give us the edge."

I gave out the orders and my retainers got to work. With a mixture of levitation, water-breathing and shield spells going outside the ship to alter the exterior enchantments was no problem. The issue was actually light. With no nearby holes in reality to let light through the entire environment was pitch black, they had to cast magelights all across the hull in order to see what they were doing, and even then they had to use Nighteye to get some of the spots.

I had a few staves I'd made in stock, lightning and drain life were what I had them use most. Someone from the interior would have to aim them via telekinesis, but it'd work for the moment.

The enchantments to allow the ship to more easily turn on its axis were fairly simple, just four large formations on each end. It was the illusion spells that caused problems. We had to go through and enchant the entire hull piece by piece to get it right, and then rig the whole thing to be controlled from the throne room simultaneously. It was a bit of a hack job, the unfamiliar environment making it far more difficult than usual to get everything in place.

"Alright, we're moving to pierce the exterior membrane. Hold on, we have no idea what might happen here."

As the outer shield encountered the edge of the pocket reality energy started to war across the meeting point, great discharges flashed across our eyes.

"Is this really safe?"

"Safe? No. But I don't see that we have much other choice. If this dimension isn't of use to us then we can pick another, and if we die then we'll just end up back in Aetherius. I don't see much of a downside either way."

It's amazing how great an effect having personally witnessed the afterlife can have on the morale of a crew.

As the base of the ship exited the barrier the space we'd come through flared with light. A new star was born from our passing, though it died down soon afterwards.

"There! A world, with the greenery of life and color of water."

"It's much nearer the edge of this reality than Nirn was in Mundus."

"This reality has no Oblivion, no Aetherius, the space is much smaller, more contained. Perhaps it was the prototype of a creator god, or perhaps they're just unlucky."

"If there is no Aetherius, then there must not be any sentient beings, nothing with a soul."

"Yes, a world with nothing to stand in our way but the elements themselves."

"Make for planet-fall. Set the course towards that river to the right hand side of the desert. And someone turn on the chameleon spells, I don't want some soulless monster deciding to eat us!"

If someone had been looking from the ground, all they would have seen was the gentlest of ripples in the air as the Tel Thaga passed, as noticeable as perhaps a heat-wave from a fireball, but little more. The ship landed gently at the bend of a rather average river, dividing between desert to the west, grasslands to the east, forests to the north and mountains to the south. The perfect location from which to determine the utility of the planet.

"Set up a perimeter of paralytic runes, I don't want anything possibly sneaking up on us. Test out the water, see if it's potable. I want teams to do a survey in an expanding circle for resources, use mark and recall spells to return every hour. Do a more thorough check of the Tel Thaga, make sure that the dimensional and atmospheric insertions didn't cause damage."

I kneel down to pick up some dirt, no magicka at all. What I wouldn't give for some Nirnroot right about now. Obviously the local plants grew here, but would any of our own vegetation? Alchemy might soon become a dead art if we couldn't cultivate the needed materials.

"Lord Mouth one of the traps went off!" came the call near sunset. That was supposed to have been an overly paranoid precaution. Sure there were things that could move without souls, flesh golems, automatons and the like, but they were all made by mages. What could possibly exist here that would threaten so?

"A deer?"

"Is it though? Perhaps it is some form of shapeshifting abomination, soulless and desiring only to lower our guards."

"Cast soul trap on it and kill it. I want to know for sure."

Looking down at the bleeding form of the deer shaped thing I heard my retainer tell me the spell had failed to find a target. Fuck. What kind of horrid place was this?

"We should leave this world, who knows what else is out there?"

"No. First I want that thing taken apart, investigated and burned to ashes. I want to know its weaknesses, and I don't want any chances taken with its remains. It might be more necromantic than it appears."

An hour later the report came back. A joint effort between my Morag Tong assassin, a Restoration expert, and a Conjuration specialist that had dabbled in necromancy, found that it had a perfect mimicry of a deer, but none of the normal soul or magickal elements to it. They had incinerated it as ordered.

Maybe we should leave this place… but, no. That abomination was so simple to kill and destroy, if this was the demented torture house of some mad god, then surely the beasts would have been at least as terrible as a daedroth. We would stay, for now, and investigate this strange and alien world.

Fish, rabbits, birds, everything we had caught had proven to be the same as that deer, soulless abominations. We didn't dare try to eat them ourselves. Once of the men summoned an Alit to devour a local rabbit, it seemed to be fine, but I wasn't going to let anyone take the risk.

"Lord Mouth, one of the scouts discovered tracks in the desert. He used the levitation rings to get a better view and saw what looked like troops marching."

"Curse it to the Quagmire. Are these some kind of local version of dremora, foot soldiers for their ineffable master, or are they mere beasts with the form of mer? Capture them, I want to know everything about these beings."


The plan was simple. A few of the mages would trap the area the beings were set to march through with paralysis, noise, silence and blind spells, they would hit the trap and be captured by my warriors. Not everything went according to plan. The first row of beings hit the traps and were instantly incapacitated, but the ones behind them advanced through their trapped comrades, trying to get to the mages. My warriors began to harry the advancing beings with arrows while the mages tossed elemental destruction spells.

Two of my retainers were seriously injured in the conflict, all because I hadn't considered that the beings wouldn't think to retreat into the backup traps. It should have been obvious, those with no experience in magic don't know to fear it properly, either that or the beings were designed to always advance into battle.

"Do the soul traps work on these ones?" we had captured eight of the large beings, as large as an Orsimer, but with horns on their heads.

"No. But something else is quite odd, telepathy works to an extent, and I tried a spell of drain life on one of them and it worked just fine."

"Telepathy, so they have minds without souls. How is that possible?"

"I have no idea. I'm considering the possibility that due to the lack of a spiritual plane their souls developed to be purely internal."

"Would that explain the failure to soul trap them?"

"Probably. It'd be something like a Litch I think, only with the body itself acting as a phylactery."

"Peculiar. Do you think you can alter the nature of the soul trap spell to ensnare such self-contained souls?"

"Possibly, but it might be simpler to go at the problem the other way. If they do indeed have souls, then if we set these beings up as conjuration subjects then whatever form of soul they possess would likely be slaved to the conjurer."

"Would that get us the answers we need?"

"With some careful application of Drain Willpower and Illusion spells, I think I might be able to take apart its mind and get some idea of what passes for language on this AlmSiVi forsaken plane."

"Do it."

The set up took two hours, a combination effort by four different mages to simultaneously prepare the being and keep it alive long enough to be useful. Once the connection was established it lasted fifteen minutes before the strain was too much for the Restoration spells to counter and it died.

"Do we need to repeat the procedure on the others?"

"No. I got what we need. Their language is simplistic, but it should be enough to interrogate the rest."

"Get everything they know. This world, what lives here, what magics there are, who rules, what they worship, everything."

They didn't know much, their daily lives were mostly scavenging and fighting, the whole history of their clan could be summed up the same way. They knew a little about the local magic, not much but that the clan shaman needed to deal with spirits and utter arcane language to wield it. They called themselves Urgralgra and were sent off by someone known as the Great King to fight in some underground city to the south.

"We should leave this realm, at first we thought that there was nothing here, but now we know that it's inhabited and dangerous."

"We should rule this place, their magic is primitive, their weapons pathetic. Let us recreate the Great House here."

"There is a war brewing, nations bordering us on three sides, we should move beyond the reach of these kingdoms and gather our power in a place of safety."

The opinions of what we should do were many and conflicting. For the most part, none of us were sure that any other world might be any better than this one, nor that any other likely spot the set down might be any safer.

"Is there any chance that we could investigate these three kingdoms? Send spies to kidnap a few of members of each one to interrogate."

"It's possible, but also quite risky. The only reason we haven't been discovered already is because the kingdoms to the north and south of us are not currently trading, if people from their outlying regions start disappearing then they might send scouts to try and find them. And if we suddenly appear when their people have just disappeared, it will most likely implicate us. There's really no knowing how such alien beings will react, they could be like Argonians or the Sload and have completely different ways of viewing the world, in which case we could not even count on predicting their responses to our actions and existence."

"What if we do nothing? If we just sit here and wait to be discovered, we play the role of peaceful settlers and allow them to come to us."

"How would we communicate? We got the language of these Urgralgra things, but the other kingdoms don't speak it, they may even name us the allies of the Urgralgra just for knowing how."

"And if we just flew the Tel Thaga into one of their cities?"

"Same problem, with no way to communicate we'd be at an impasse, plus with them being on a wartime footing they'd probably cast first and never bother questing the decision."

"What if we conquered one of the kingdoms? Surely then we could do as we liked with the people, and a few of them should know the languages of their neighbors."

"We've only three dozen Dunmer here, hardly an invasion force, and none of us are trained battle mages. Even the Tel Thaga, re-outfitted as it is, would have an impossible time fighting off an army, let alone controlling a terrified populous."

"…Shit."

What to do?

-----
AN: In case you didn't get what world that was, it was Alagaësia from the Inheritance series. He's in a world that is as alien as Cthulu, with no idea what to do and no way to communicate, no handy dandy universal communicator and even the magic and the fundamental aspects of reality are different. What would one do to survive and lead his crew?
For this world I really just want to show off some of the basic problems of crossing fantasy worlds like this, and possibly get a chance to have the Dunmer react to the highly stereotypical Elves.

 

[Pharohman777]

You should end this with the crew finally going home, and the reaction to what they have brought back.

 

[Ignuus66]

Snicker. The Inheritance cycle would be pretty funny to mess with. Still, poor deer. It never deserved that treatment.

 

[yinko]

I had made my decision

"We have to leave"

"What, why?"

"Let us use the only set of logic available to us and assume that the local populations think as we do. In even the most optimum of circumstances, that they all spoke a language we could understand, the situation would fall into one of three consequences. They would kill us as enemy agents, they would kill us to stop us joining the enemy, or they would force us to join them in their war."

"Or they would try to force us to join the enemy as agents of theirs."

"Right, I had forgotten that one. The point is that we don't have enough people to get involved, and we have no stake in this world to begin with. Magically it's a useless ball that we can't even grow our plants on. We've yet to find anything like Ebony or Glass that would make it worthwhile to mine, and their magic is so primitive that they seem to require mnemonics and the aid of extra beings. I can see no reason to stay… There is another reason as well. When we were in Aetherius we all showed a drive for adventure, to discover new things, but once we went beyond the edge of reality we lost that spark and immediately tried to tether ourselves to the first port we saw. I will not be tied down by my fears, I didn't spend my entire life dreaming of the stars to shelter on a planet like the ignorant fools back home!"

"So what, every time in the future we meet some new people we're going to run away?"

"No. We now know that there are people to be met, we can plan for such a thing. If these beings here we're currently at war then we could build a vocabulary, infiltrate them, kidnap outlying individuals. We could approach the first public interaction in many potential ways, but we lack the venue with which to do so safely at the moment."

"If we're going to be returning to the void for long periods of time, possibly permanently, then we all need to think of ways to make such an existence more habitable. What problems arose before that could be corrected or mitigated?"

"Water shortages."

"Difficulty growing food."

"The ship was hit by some sort of energy that the shields only partially blocked when we entered this plane."

"If it wasn't physical, fire, ice, or lightning, then must be something more obscure like a Mysticism spell. Damage Attribute perhaps?"

"We could add on Reflect or Absorb enchantments."

"The number of spells that need to be used by those going outside the Tel Thaga within the void is growing too extensive to manage with rings and necklaces. We need to craft some sort of full body armor or clothing that can be used specifically for the purpose."

"Much more alteration the spell matrices of the ship and it will start to become self-conflicting, the magics start to interfere with each other. We might need to grow a new ship that can have the needed alterations integrated from the beginning."

"Does anyone know how to grow mushroom towers?"

"I saw how she started the process, a spore fed by a few high level souls. But she used some proprietary spells to manipulate it during growth, we'd probably have to use a mix of Restoration and Alteration to coax it into shape as it grew."

"I don't know if it's bothered any of you, but I'd really like it if we could find a way to regain weight in the void."

"That may not be possible. It's not as simple as simply increasing someone's weight, I tried that early on, the function of weight itself is removed. Manipulating that trait would probably take either Alteration or Mysticism to work out."

"If we're going to be recreating the Great House out here, then we'll need more people, more Dunmer for preference."

"The gender ratio doesn't really work out. We might need to take a page from lord Fyr."

"But where would get cloned daughters to fu… oooh, you want to make the clones ourselves."

"It might be possible, except that he was researching Corprus Disease, and I'm unsure how much that disease played a part in the creation of his 'daughters'."

"Alright, here's the plan. You go and set up a modified Alteration spell to recycle our water supplies, gather a few extra tanks of water just in case. You guys strip off the elemental Destruction shields and replace them with a wide spectrum Absorption shield that can take in more than just magicka. Your team will start summoning cephalopods to start making into armor for the void walks, I want them enchanted with air recycling, shields, absorption, levitation, telekinesis, magelight and nighteye. I don't see that there's much more we can do at the moment about the Tel Thaga or the population issue."

It only took three days to complete enough of the work that we could take off again. Leaving the realm was far easier than leaving Mundus, there were no stars to leak forth a constant stream of magicka pushing against the ship, just a blank field of darkness until the edge of reality.


Omake 1

A group was had arrived from the south.

"Dragon Rider? Dragon Cultist more like, kill them!"

Omake 2

Eragon was flying Saphira ahead of the party when he saw some great… thing floating through the sky. How could something with no wings move like a dragon?

"Move closer, I want to take a look"

Is… Is that a giant mass of mushrooms? A beam of light unceremoniously flashed out and blew Eragon off Saphira's back.

*Roar* She dives to catch him in her claws before attaching the mass with fire and claw. Smacking straight into an invisible wall and breaking her wing bones. Woops.

Eragon dragged himself out of the river where he had fallen.

"What happened to you, I heard Saphira scream in my mind?"

"I don't know, I got hit with something and it felt like half my energy was suddenly used up, as if I had just tried to use a spell far too powerful for me, then Saphira ran into a shield and her flame got eaten up like it was nothing."

"What a terrible being. We can only be glad that it was no servant of the enemy, or you would both be dead."

Omake 3

Islanzadi looked at the strangers, they reminded her of Ajihad, but they were even darker of skin, and they were clearly elven. Were there elves living to the south that they'd never heard of?

The delegation spoke amongst themselves in their own language, that barrier was terribly difficult to overcome so it was excusable if they wanted to organize their own thoughts privately before making a public statement.

"See, tree cities, vegetarians, shapeshifting, they're basically just taller Bosmer. I bet they even engage in ritual cannibalism and have some sort of Green Pact."

"Fucking Bosmer, as big an insult to the title of Mer as the Orismer. Do we really have to deal with these people."

"Even Bosmer can be of some use, when you get them away from the core of their culture. If we take one or two of these magically crippled mer with us then surely they will come to see the light of civilization eventually."

"They don't even understand the religious virtues of Betrayal, Assassination, and Lying. They're worse than Nords in that respect, utter barbarians. How much effort would it take to civilize even one of them?"

"What are they saying do you think?"

"No clue, there seems to be something that blocks out mind reading. They seem very friendly and courteous though, I hope they're nice and will help us."

Omake 4

"Say these words in the Ancient Language and swear yourselves to our cause."

"Ok, no problem"

"And now betrayal is impossible."

"What! You heathen scum, betrayal is a core part of our culture. Die!"

*schluk* "Wha- Inconceivable"

"Oh, look. It seems that we can't use the local magics after all."

AN: Just a short little chapter. One of the first responses was that he should go the primarily fantasy worlds, I wanted to show the issues of just randomly crossing fantasy worlds like that. They immediately ended up in a terrible situation where the only real option was the flee the planet. In fantasy no one has any idea of First Contact, they don't know about all the issues that can arise in meeting new people like that, and the assumption has to be that the cultures will be totally alien. In this case the people from Eragon are actually more similar to modern people than the ones from Nirn are, and the Dunmer have a kind of Blue/Orange mentality in regards to a lot of things, so there would be cultural issues between the groups.

I really do want to approach this in a more realistic way than a lot of stories, they're going to have to face problems, and then find solutions for those. They can't just walk up to the aliens and have everything turn out ok because they're 'nice aliens' and our guys are the protagonists. So this world showed them that landing on a new planet may not be the answer to all their problems, that First Contact is something that they're going to have to deal with in the future, that they need space suits, that radiation needs to be dealt with, and it introduces the first glimmers of an idea of what gravity is as something distinct from mass and weight.

As always, feel free to share your thoughts and impressions. I did feel a bit disappointed that he wouldn't get a chance to screw with the locals, so I wrote a few omake to show what those scenes would have been like.

 

[Monshroud]

I usually use this when regarding multiple and "different" magic systems.

Feel free to use it as you will! If you like, I'll try to come up with a example or two for each of them, but I'm sure you'd be able to come up with a few yourself!

The Laws of Magic

Being a Most Complete and Total Accurate Description of the Currently Known Fundamental Rules that Govern Metaphysical Forces, Practices, Entities and Phenomena Throughout the Multiverse.
​

1. The Law of Knowledge: Understanding brings control; the more you know about a subject, the easier it is to control it. "Knowledge is power."

2. The Law of Self-Knowledge: The most important knowledge is about oneself; familiarity with one's own strengths and weaknesses is vital to the magician. "Know thyself."

3. The Law of Cause & Effect: If exactly the same actions are done under exactly the same conditions, they will produce exactly the same results; similar strings of events produce similar outcomes. "Control every variable and you control every change."

4. The Law of Synchronicity: Two or more events happening at the same time are likely to have more associations in common than the merely temporal; events rarely happen in isolation from nearby events. "There's no such thing as a mere coincidence."

5. The Law of Association: If any two or more patterns have elements in common, the patterns interact through those common elements, and control of one pattern facilitates control over the other(s); the greater the commonality, the greater the influence. "Commonality controls."

6: The Law of Sympathy: Things that have an affinity with each other influence and interact with each other over a distance. "Everything is connected to everything else."

7. The Law of Similarity: Like produces like and an effect resembles its cause; having an accurate image of something facilitates control over it. "Look-alikes are alike."

8. The Law of Contagion: Objects or beings once in contact with each other continue to interact after separation. "Magick is contagious."

9. The Law of Positive Attraction: Like attracts like; to create a particular reality you must put out energy of a similar sort. "That which is sent, returns."

10. The Law of Negative Attraction: Like attracts unlike; energy and actions often attract their complimentary "opposites." "Opposites attract."

11. The Law of Names: Knowing the name, you know that which is named; knowing the complete and true name of an object, being or process gives one complete control over it."What's in a name?—Everything!"

12. The Law of Words of Power: Certain words are able to alter the internal and external realities of those uttering them, and their power may rest in the very sounds as much as in their meanings. "A word to the wise is sufficient."

13. The Law of Personification: Any phenomenon may be considered to be alive and to have a personality, that is, to "be" an entity or being, and may be effectively dealt with thusly. "Anything can be a person."

14. The Law of Invocation: It is possible to establish internal communication with entities from either inside or outside of oneself, said entitiesnseeming to be inside of oneself during the communication process. "Beings within…"

15. The Law of Evocation: It is possible to establish external communication with entities from either inside or outside of oneself, said entities seeming to be outside of oneself during the communication process. "…Beings without."

16. The Law of Identification: It is possible through maximum association between the elements of oneself and those of another being to actually become that being to the point of sharing its knowledge and wielding its power. "You can become another."

17. The Law of Infinite Data: The number of phenomena to be known is infinite; we will never run out of things to learn! "There's always something new."

18. The Law of Finite Senses: Every sense mechanism of every entity is limited by both range and type of data perceived. "Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there."

19. The Law of Personal Universes: Everyone lives in and quite possibly creates a unique universe which can never be 100% identical to that lived in by another; so-called "reality" is in fact a matter of a consensus of opinions. "You live in your cosmos and I'll live in mine."

20. The Law of Infinite Universes: The total number of universes into which all possible combinations of existing phenomena could be organized is infinite. "All things are possible, though some are more probable than others."

21. The Law of Pragmatism: If a pattern of belief or behavior enables you to survive and to accomplish chosen goals, then that belief or behavior is "true" or "real" or "sensible" on whatever levels of reality are involved. "If it works, it's true."

22. The Law of True Falsehoods: A concept or act may seem nonsensical and yet still be "true," provided that it "works" in a specific context. "If it's a paradox it's probably true."

23. The Law of Polarity: Any pattern of data can be split into at least two patterns with "opposing" characteristics, and each will contain the essence of the other within itself. "Everything contains its opposite."

24. The Law of Synthesis: The synthesis of two or more "opposing" patterns of data will produce a new pattern that will be "truer" than either of the first ones were; that is, it will be applicable to more realities. "Synthesis reconciles."

25. The Law of Dynamic Balance: To survive and become powerful, one must keep every aspect of one's universe(s) in a state of dynamic balance with every other one; extremism is dangerous on all levels of reality. "Dance to the music."

26. The Law of Perversity: Also known as "Murphy's Law:" If anything can go wrong, it will, and in the most annoying manner possible. "If anything can go wrong, it will."

27. The Law of Unity: Every phenomenon in existence is linked directly or indirectly to every other one, past, present or future; perceived separations between phenomena are based on incomplete sensing and/or thinking. "All is One."

28. The Law of Unintended Consequences: Whether or not what you do has the effect you want, it will have at least three you never expected, and one of those usually unpleasant. "There's always something else."

 

[yinko]

I usually use this when regarding multiple and "different" magic systems.

Click to shrink...

A lot of those are excellent points, things that show up frequently, and I may use some of them in the future to help explain things. If they had delved into the Inheritance magic system more they would have attributed the use of 'effort' to power spells as replacing magicka with fatigue and health, due to the disability of their souls.

A lot of multicrosses deal with collecting things, they collect tech, they collect magic, stuff like that. Part of what I wanted to say with this story though was that using magic doesn't have to make you uncreative, it doesn't have to stunt your progress. That's why I want to show them solving problems by being creative with what they have rather than just slapping a new coat of pain on stolen technology and calling it theirs. The TES magic system is enormously versatile, and given the acknowledgement of the dangers of space travel, it could be developed to counter every one of them with some relative ease.

 

[Monshroud]

A lot of those are excellent points, things that show up frequently, and I may use some of them in the future to help explain things. If they had delved into the Inheritance magic system more they would have attributed the use of 'effort' to power spells as replacing magicka with fatigue and health, due to the disability of their souls.

A lot of multicrosses deal with collecting things, they collect tech, they collect magic, stuff like that. Part of what I wanted to say with this story though was that using magic doesn't have to make you uncreative, it doesn't have to stunt your progress. That's why I want to show them solving problems by being creative with what they have rather than just slapping a new coat of pain on stolen technology and calling it theirs. The TES magic system is enormously versatile, and given the acknowledgement of the dangers of space travel, it could be developed to counter every one of them with some relative ease.

Click to shrink...

Indeed!

Taking the "lore" from Elder Scrolls into account, the different magic schools are nothing but labels the Mage's Guild puts on the different effects the use of magic has.

Apart from Alchemy there is no limit at all to magic, and many cultures created their own kind of magic "styles" which don't fit in with the Imperial Schools at all.

I find myself usually applying the statements regarding magic in the Fables comic book series, as it has such an extraordinary amount of richness and profound versatility and subtlety when utilized properly!

 

[yinko]

I kind of really want to re-write the last two chapters. I like the first chapter, it's awesome, yet when I wrote it I thought it had too little dialogue. The next two chapters were mostly dialogue but didn't have the same sense of scale to them.
The protagonists isn't a dialogue type of person, the first chapter was all essentially just his own internal monologue being reported, his mental commentary of events that he has running all the time. It's "some guy paraphrased this" not "this is a direct quote of what Sauron said" because he doesn't care about individuals or what they say precisely.
On the other hand, even if I skipped rewriting those, or skipped the main fantasy world all together, he would still have to come to the exact same conclusions in order to deal with larger problems in the future. So it wouldn't have any real impact on the story for readers, except any new ones.

Do any of you care one way or the other?

 

[megamiaouh]

Rewrites have a tendancy to kill stories.

 

[Travisplo]

I kind of really want to re-write the last two chapters. I like the first chapter, it's awesome, yet when I wrote it I thought it had too little dialogue. The next two chapters were mostly dialogue but didn't have the same sense of scale to them.
The protagonists isn't a dialogue type of person, the first chapter was all essentially just his own internal monologue being reported, his mental commentary of events that he has running all the time. It's "some guy paraphrased this" not "this is a direct quote of what Sauron said" because he doesn't care about individuals or what they say precisely.
On the other hand, even if I skipped rewriting those, or skipped the main fantasy world all together, he would still have to come to the exact same conclusions in order to deal with larger problems in the future. So it wouldn't have any real impact on the story for readers, except any new ones.

Do any of you care one way or the other?

Click to shrink...

It was good before, don't worry about it. You're writing an awesome story, and you're awesome for it.

 

[yinko]

What are these stars? I'm forced to wonder it. Stars in Mundus were holes into the realm of the spirit, great lanterns of pure energy that lit up the sky in pale imitation of Magnus itself. Yet there is no Aetherius here to shine through.

These can not be true stars, but all a star is, all it looks like from the ground, is a bright point of light. If these are just bright points of light then something must be giving off that light. If not holes in the fabric of reality itself then something else, perhaps inexplicable in nature, perhaps mundane.

I must discover it for myself.

If I used Mundus as an example then all the stars were a uniform distance from Nirn, but could I really assume that such was the case here? This was not creation, this place followed alien laws, was there any way to tell the distance of the stars we could see?

I didn't particularly think so. Perspective might work, but the distances were far too long. Looking into magic, what was there that could help? Teleportation only worked for places you've been or places you could see, line of sight. You could never teleport such a ridiculous distance, but you might be able to use the line of sight to the various stars to begin the initialization of a teleportation spell and then calculate distances by the required magicka rates.

There were too many stars, far more than there had ever been in Mundus. Was there even a word to accurately describe the number of stars in Dunmeri? Picking stars at random would be meaningless, you'd never know if you had gotten a good selection of possible stars.

The only decent choice would be to separate the surrounding sphere of the visible starfield into segments, small enough so that a single ping from a teleportation spell would lock onto the nearest location, repeat for the whole field until the most optimum segment was found and then narrow it down from there.

Ahh, such exhausting work, good thing I'm a master in the magickal school of Delegation.


It takes a while, a lot of charting, recording data, some of the retainers get migraines from the tests at times, but we get it done. Go team!

The closest star is far enough that for an individual to teleport to it would cost about thirty-six million MP, using the standard Pinprick spell as a base measurement unit of magicka.

Converting that into common distance units (after subtracting the base-costs) and it was somewhere in the low trillions. This, could take a while, fortunately Mer live a long time.

Getting from Nirn to Aetherius took a week, getting from this last realm to the closest star took three months, and the Tel Thaga was moving incomparable faster as well. It was an extreme distance to be sure.

Over the months some problems started to show up, new ones that seemed to result from living without weight. Sure it was nice that our clothing didn't need to be cleaned as much, but basic hygiene was incomparably more difficult, minor trash floated aimlessly. Sleep was easy, just floating in the middle of a room or hallway, but people hadn't yet gotten used to the habitual use of levitation to move in three directions at once as combined with the lack of an up or down.

Then there were the health issues. Things like strength, speed and endurance suffered, people became more fragile to impacts, started to experience something akin to growing pains. We tried to offset these with Restoration at first, healing spells and then buffs, but the problem was too different from merely fixing something damaged and eventually we had to shift to Alteration spells.

Having your internal skeleton changed back to form is excruciating, we learned that immediately. The retainers with some experience in Illusion spells now had incredible amounts of motivation to develop a numbing spell, otherwise we would have to Drain Fatigue to knock the people out before opperating.



When we arrived at the star we saw Magnus, or something very nearly similar to it. A great ball of light, too bright to look at, in the center of orbital spatial distortions that could only be planetary bodies. It was almost a mockery of Mundus itself.

There was a single planet that looked decent, blue like oceans, spots that seemed like islands all over it, two moons. Where to land was the question though, there were no major land masses, no visible structures, it was just a place. Picking randomly, somewhere near the middle I guess.

Spoiler: Planet

At first glance this place is just like the last contained realm we had visited, a habitable world, a pale imitation of Nirn. Yet this was not within the confines of a creation, this was something different. Swooping low over the water I saw tens of metal structures, some sparkling in the sun, some dingy, most of them broken. Who would building things like that in the middle of the ocean, was it like some of the Daedric Shrines where they just sank beneath the waves?

I wanted to start with the same basic set up as before, but the tropical nature of the landing spot made that a bit pointless. We could all see the full extent of the island, so unless some sea monsters rose up from the deep there wasn't much risk. Still I ensured that there were paralysis traps along the beach just in case, as well as safeguards for tidal flooding and storms.

Here, I wouldn't say was as bad as the last world. True there was no magicka, but when I picked up the soil the senses attuned to Mysticism detected something else. Not sure what exactly, but if there is something similar to magic then that beats the peculiarity of where we were before.

Some civilization must have built those metal ruins, I didn't know who but I did want to take a look at them. Are they as dangerous as the ruins on Nirn, who built them, what is their purpose, what are they built of? I wanted to take a look for myself.

Levitating over the water we see more structures and shards of metal under the waves, too small to poke above the surface, we pass them by in favor of the more convenient structures.

Spoiler: Structures

Approaching one of the largest, there doesn't seem to be any external entrance, perhaps it is underwater. Looks like we'll be going in with magic. Let's start with Conjuration, one of the retainers uses a summoned battleax to hack at the metal wall, but the energy blade is not quite sharp enough to penetrate fully. I instead have a Destruction user cast Disintegrate on the newly damaged portion, even that takes a few repetitions before a large enough hole is formed.

The interior is strange, dark to be sure but that is solved with a few magelights, no the problem is that the walls and floors are skewed, twisted at an angle. It wouldn't make any sense for it to have been constructed this way, more likely the foundation wasn't strong and it sank into the sandy soil. Yet the internal doors appear on what would seem to be the floor and ceiling, they're made of metal as well but can be pried open with some effort. Perhaps these people were like Telvanni and used levitation to move up and down their towers.

If it really is like a Telvanni tower then the services will be at the bottom and the lord's quarters at the top. Given that the bottom would no doubt be heavily flooded we headed upwards. We had plenty of time so I had each floor searched as we went.

Whomever these people were they built like Dwemer, the whole place seems to have been constructed of metal for no apparent reason.

There are a few skeletons here and there, most of them have clear signs of trauma, either burns like you'd see from Destruction magic or broken bones. The skeletons have some similarities to Men and Mer, but it's impossible to tell more about them from just this much.

It seems that the similarities to the Dwemer are not as superficial as I had believed. Near the top of the tower we find the unmistakable remnants of automaton parts. The difference being that these are clearly more complex, though perhaps not more skillfully created. The Dwemer automatons were elegant in their simplicity, using arcane knowledge that still escapes even the wisest of Telvanni lords, these automatons were nothing like that, covered in wires (like you'd see in fine jewelry!) and lacking any of the elegant enchantment work.

Would any of these still work? I take the bits and pieces of one of the less combat capable models, never sure of just how dangerous it might be, and had the breaks repaired with Alteration. The major damage seemingly repaired, the erosion undone, the head shoved back on I stepped back to see what would happen.

Ah! The eyes flickered. It's saying something? I've never heard of an automaton that could communicate, how peculiar. The retainers start muttering amongst themselves behind me, which cases the automaton to quiet down. It then starts to act almost like someone trying to make themselves understood, self-introductions, asking for reciprocation, pointing for the names of various items. There's no reason I can think of not to play along for now.

After about two hours the conversation could begin, though a few of the terms are difficult to get across I learned a great deal.

The automatons were made by a foundry known as Czerka, and was what translated as a 'manners automaton'. It told me that this was not a tower at all but rather a ship much like the Tel Thaga, in fact, all the metal structures were such ships. Upon inquiry it resulted that the apparent reason that the Tel Thaga did not result in a similar crash is that it is piloted manually. All these ships had something similar to an automaton's intelligence operating them, and were thus incapacitated.

I naturally asked why the crew didn't use the local equivalent of Slow Fall or Levitation on their ships, or if none of them were mages. After some explanations it seems that magic users are rather rare where this automaton comes from. In fact, it seems likely that Great House Telvanni probably has more magic users than the entire star field beyond creation, the entire galaxy. If the Empire ever decided to explore out here then these people would have little choice but to immediately kneel down and capitulate.

The galaxy had its Republic, some knockoff Empire that lacked even a basic sense of control, but we Telvanni had our skills, our culture. Who can stand in the face of that? It took Tiber Septim shattering time itself with the fist of a pedestrian god to conquer the Telvanni. What could the Republic bring to bear that could compare to that?

 

[Arafell]

What could the Republic bring to bear that could compare to that?

Click to shrink...

Death Star, depending on the time period. Jedi. Turbolaser fire from orbit if you're on the ground, massive fleets just plain blasting you out of space if you're not.

Yeah, he might be eating a large serving of humble pie soon.

 

[Travisplo]

but rather a shit much like the Tel Thaga,

Click to shrink...

Oh really, it's a shit?

 

[yinko]

Oh really, it's a shit?

Click to shrink...

Missed that one. Thanks.

 

[yinko]

I spent the next few days trying to go through all the possible questions I could ask the automaton, had it give a group interview to the crew as well, just in case. That turned out to be a good idea.

The world we were on was remote, distanced from the rest of the galaxy by the vast hyperspace boundary. We originally arrived here so quickly because we were extremely close by, but to get to any of the other known groups would take centuries or millennium at our current maximum rate. When asked about how the automaton's own ship arrived here it replied that the local populations use something called hyperspace to travel much more quickly.

Hyperspace sounds a bit like Oblivion, or perhaps the stream that lies between Oblivion and Mundus, a different layer of reality that allows for altered distance, time and logic to exist. The automaton was apparently not designed for dealing with devices or their repair, but it had to know the basic terminology in order to describe and negotiate things relating to them, that was how we learned that to enter this higher plane required that a ship be flung by ripples in space to speeds exceeding light, an act that would be suicidal if not for inertial dampeners.

I could probably figure out a way to shoot a craft into hyperspace, but one of the issues was that we were in the single most treacherous location of the hyperspace boundary, without a safe test route it'd just explode anyway.

The need for a safe route led us to the discussion of the navigational computers. Normally we would have been able to dig them out of the fallen ships and strip out whatever routes they have come through, but the method the planet used to disable the ships attacked the navigational computers to bring them down. That meant that such a method was impossible at this time.

I did consider trying to use Mysticism to work out the causes of the hyperspace barrier and then use that to chart my own path through, but the sheer distances involves were prohibitive.

We may well be stuck in this little sector of the galaxy then.

That was when one of my retainers suggested looking for whatever it was that was dropping ships. If they could attack navigational computers directly then they must surely have a good understanding of them, which implied navigational charts of their own.

So, with no better plan in mind, we set about trying to execute that.

To start with we tried investigating how the ships were brought down in the first place. The automaton reported that its ship had been attacked through its communication device. We didn't have a local equivalent that could be used to lure the attacker. The droid tried explaining the method in which it worked, with waves moving through space and contained lighting, but it was very odd and none of us had the confidence to try and make something like that work.

While I had some other people working on trying to figure out a way to replicate these wave thingies, I wanted to explore the local semi-magickal signature I had discovered. On Nirn, if you used Mysticism to track down the largest concentrations of magicka, then you would be drawn to major cities, artifacts, labs. I was betting that something similar was true here as well.

To start with though I would definitely need a firmer grasp of what that energy was. When I started to poke at it, it seemed almost symbiotic, tied to the local life and emotions of the place. It would concentrate on the trees and radiate from them, but there were also outliers, locations where there were high concentrations without anything large living there at all.

Archeology isn't that big of a thing on Nirn, it's hard to gain credibility when every once in a while linear Time decides to take a vacation. The oldest building around has to be the Adamantine Tower, as old as Mundus itself, but that cheats by being outside of time. The oldest buildings anyone might actually run into would probably be the Ayleid ruins, which are about four and a half thousand years old. What I discovered was over five times as old.

It's a bit of a shock to find something that's probably older than the existence of the Daedric Princes (hard to tell exactly since time didn't exist at the start of creation).

Digging down that far took a bit, it was actually far easier to use frost magic to freeze a stable tunnel down to the sea floor and then excavate in from the side. No risk of flooding that way. After we had accomplished that much it was relatively easy to levitate it up to the surface.

The ruin was a ship, similar to the others, yet different in style and material. It was even more distinct from the ships found on the surface in that it seemed to run off of the local corollary of magic, which made it a fair bit easier to understand. In a few ways, mainly the sub-light propulsions and shields, it was quite inferior, but it had some quite immediately apparent superiorities as well.

Spoiler: Ship

The ship had a working hyperdrive system, navigations system, a system to maintain weight (the droid called it artificial gravity) and quite a few others. The whole thing seemed to self-repair, much like the Tel Thaga could, which is the only reason that it was still recognizable for what it was.

Frankly, finding a way to translate the local equivalent of magical enchanting into our form was a pain, but it was infinitely simpler than trying to grasp how the non-magical methods worked. At least with this approach we could use our own methods to see for ourselves how the whole thing worked.

That's when the next problem reared its ugly head. The Tel Thaga wouldn't handle the alterations. The changes were far too extensive, it'd never make it into hyperspace. Shit.

When I was on Nirn I wanted to try to make a ship from metal at first. At the time metal was too costly, here where metal is the cheapest thing in existence it's the lack of labor that stops me from adopting the approach. In addition, the style of the Tel Thaga has somewhat grown on me, a reminder of Nirn, a bastion of Dunmer culture, a home of my own.


I ended up splitting the teams into a few different projects. One group was tasked with trying to figure out how to grow Telvanni mushroom towers, they started with small pod houses and then working their way up. Another team was tasked with finding a way to translate the local magical energy directly into magicka, or else it'd cost at least seventy five black-souls worth of magicka for every hyperjump we wanted to power, more if we wanted to go anywhere very far away. The third group was tasked with looking through the various wrecks in the area to strip them for what the droid assured us were valuable materials.

Team Shroom had the happy discovery that the mushrooms were actually very easy shape… that Daedra damned bitch was extorting everyone!

Meanwhile the team in charge of the power issue joined together with the shroom team, they figured that since the local magical energy congregated around living things, and magicka most often came out of souls, then the easiest thing to do would be to have a living thing harvest the region's energy and translate it via a soul, the only way that didn't involve the sacrifice of sentient (where are some slaves when you need them?) was to use the new ship itself.

Amusingly it was actually the recycling team that had the least progress. They would go through to the engineering rooms of various ships with conjured axes, hack the machinery apart to haul back to an Alteration expert to separate into various purified materials. The problem was that it was extremely magicka inefficient. It might have been simpler to use high powered and constant Disintegration effects on the materials, but the droid told us that several of the more costly materials were actually complex compounds, which would be destroyed if exposed to the effects of flame or acid.

Probably for the best, I hadn't planned much cargo space for trade goods. In volume, we had gained only about two dozen crates worth of ingots. Measuring in weight is kind of pointless when weight is a flexible concept.

With all the experimental mushroom towers and the extra work needed to complete the power translation method, as well as the enchanting that then needed to be added onto the exterior and the weapons systems that needed to be invented, the whole thing took a good half a year.

The nice thing about this planet, no major storms. I was seriously worried that the climate would be more similar to Pyandonea, with the winds and flooding. But if that were going to be the case then surely we would have experienced such things in the period we'd been here.


We'd probably return in the future, this time with an army of slaves to mine all the ruins and excavate the lost civilization under the dirt and sea. It's been a nice time planet, don't feel too bad, it's not you, it's us. We're too good for you.

I had a fierce smile on my face when I gave the order to punch our way into hyperspace, we had a galaxy to introduce to the power of the Telvanni. I almost pitied them. My new citadel of power, the Tel Velas, shifted into the higher realm without pause, itself eager to demonstrate its indomitable might.

 

[Monshroud]

Convert the energy of the Force into Magicka?

Rather than "fighting" against the flow of this new cosmos, why not allow or enable the separate powers to become as one?

The Captain Protagonist seems clearly to be the type who perceives Magic mostly as a mechanism or tool.

While a practitioner of Mysticism however, (possibly one of the overlooked crew-members), would be able to divine what needs to be done.

If the Force is alive, then surely it can adapt and evolve, after all! And so too must Magicka!

 

[yinko]

Rather than "fighting" against the flow of this new cosmos, why not allow or enable the separate powers to become as one?

Click to shrink...

Because then they'd have to unlearn what they had learned. Using the Force is rather unlike using Magicka, their methods rely heavily on using the magicka they already know. Besides which, so far, everything they've done has been things which are actually within he possibility of the Elder Scrolls magic system, if I start hybridizing a couple of system directly together then I'll just be playing by my own rules, and then they'll just get OP quickly. The whole reverse engineering thing already kind of irritates me, since there's so little information on how the hyperdrives and Rakatan tech work that I just skiped explaining much of anything to do with them.

 

[Valor]

This story is fantastic.
Thank you for bringing it to our measly minds. It's a treasure to read, truly. And I really enjoy those off-handed racist comments about the superiority of Telvanni and how there should be more slaves around to do the work.

Beautiful.

 

[Zap Rowsdower]

...speaking of the Rakata, one must wonder if there are any samples of the plague that cut off their access to the Force in those ships the dunmer are salvaging. Wouldn't that be a pleasant surprise for them.