[OPEN] through telescopes and calculations

[not_a_traitor]

Who: Felix Gaeta (not_a_traitor) & YOU!
What: If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then magic should be translatable to sufficiently advanced technology. Or: Gaeta finally gets a frakking hobby.
When: Throughout July
Where: Mostly on the green in Downtown Hollow
Warning(s): probably lots of scientific + mathematical inaccuracies because I am writing waaaaay outside my wheelhouse, if you're an expert in either pls forgive me. (Will warn for anything else as it comes up!)



0. spellbook [meta]

In the middle of another sleepless night, right before he manages to drift off at a truly indecent hour, Gaeta blearily scribbles in his notebook:

VOICE = SOUND WAVE/VIBRATION
GESTURE = PHYS. FORCE
MATERIAL = INTERACTION W/CHEM. ELEMENTS (RIPLEY'S ROCKS?)

Shockingly, this still makes sense in the morning. Mostly. He'd been thinking about the intersection of science and magic again, rotating different frameworks around his head -- could magic be described as a chemical element like carbon or oxygen? Radiation, or some other energy emitted as an element decays? A force like gravity? -- and his brain combined it with some actual mechanics of spellcasting as he'd observed around Marrow Isle for the last year and change. A chemical element could easily interact with any of those mechanics to produce a new result. A force could act upon those mechanics. Radiation... well, that one's probably better folded under an elemental framework. (He was really tired when he first started sketching everything out, okay.)

The more he thinks about it, the more he leans toward force. Something similar to electromagnetism, maybe. That could open up a whole host of possibilities, ranging from intermediary force carriers to atoms taking on an entirely new kind of charge -- positive, negative, or magical -- if subjected to the right conditions. Too bad half the island hasn't even heard of quantum physics yet, let alone built the proper research equipment, but every major discovery starts with basic observation, right? He can probably build a couple small things. See where it goes.

Looks like Gaeta has a new project to tackle.


1. detect magic

Say magic is a variation on an electromagnetic charge. Simple experiments with everyday objects that demonstrate positive or negative polarity are a cubit a dozen; electroscopes can be slapped together in under an hour with the right supplies. And thanks to a recent purchase at Cukefest, he's even got an item on hand that he knows is holding some version of a magical charge.

Gaeta doesn't have a yard of his own and doesn't want to disturb Mulcahy's garden if something goes awry, so once he thinks he's got a good idea of how to modify an electroscope to detect a (theoretical) magical charge, he sets up the experiment on the green, far enough away from the giant watermelon that he won't have to worry about ants getting into his equipment. Along the center of the table rests his cane. The modified electroscope, rigged with a stone that one of the shopkeepers said would work well as a "focus" (which almost sent Gaeta down an entirely different research rabbit hole before he yanked himself back), rests nearby. All it should take is a tweak here, a shift there, then bringing the focus close to the cane, and...

Two things happen in quick succession.

One, the stone bursts into flame.

Two, Gaeta's cane goes rocketing off the table like it's been yanked by invisible strings.

Gaeta yelps in pain, drops the focus, swears, shakes out his hand, then swears even louder once he realizes his cane's hurtling right toward an unfortunate passerby. "Shit, frak -- LOOK OUT!"


2. spell components

So, yeah, that didn't work. (Or maybe worked too well?) Time to take it back a few steps.

He spotted something interesting in the window of the toy store a while ago: a kit that reminded him of those baking soda and vinegar volcanoes he made while on his geology kick as a kid. Except this one purports to show how different mechanics of spellcasting -- voice, gesture, and material -- can affect the same object. Just the thing he needs to study the basics. So what if it's meant for an eight-year-old? Frankly, that's about where his knowledge base is at.

About a week after the Cane Incident, he's back on the green with a slightly less dangerous-looking setup. Three palm-sized origami boxes labeled V, G, and M. That's it. But with the intense way Gaeta's staring at them, somebody might be forgiven for thinking there's more to it.

Slowly, he hovers a hand over the one labeled G. Curls his fingers. Flares them out in swift mimicry of an explosion.

...

Nothing.

"Godsdammit," he mutters as he slumps back in his chair. Well, apparently his knowledge base is worse than an eight-year-old. Not entirely rhetorical, pressing his hands over his face with a frustrated groan: "What am I doing wrong?"


3. minor illusion

Then he comes across a particular illusion spell that seems ripe for dissection. It's already easy to create a ghostly three-dimensional projection with the right materials, angles, and light sources; Gaeta did it for fun a couple times during his other magic phase at age nine (though that was the rabbits-and-card-tricks kind of magic, not... this). He can jot down the equations and a proper diagram without even thinking about it. So just like he tweaked the electroscope, he should be able to modify the setup to incorporate what he's learned regarding actual magic.

Which means letting his ego take a solid beating for a couple more weeks, but whatever. All in the name of scientific progress, he guesses. If he continues looking like an absolute fool on the green, muttering to himself as he adjusts materials and tests different gestures to see how one angle of attack might affect the stability of this interaction with that material and another -- well, at least nothing explodes this time.

One sweltering afternoon, as he looks so wrung out by the heat alone that it's a miracle he can do anything at all, he tries one more time before packing it in for the day. Knitting his fingers together, he flicks them upward and apart as if swiping an object from one computer screen to another.

Above the table, a translucent, shimmering map of the Twelve Colonies pops into view.

Gaeta stares.

And then he whoops so loudly he accidentally makes the whole illusion collapse, but who the frak cares? "IT WORKED!" he yells, punching the air with both fists, caught in the kind of gleeful excitement nobody on the island -- and maybe not even on Galactica -- has ever seen him display.

Comments

Detect Magic

[ss_buttcrack]

"WHOA!" Crichton dives into the grass at the last second, just narrowly missing the projectile. From his hands and knees he looks up at Gaeta and blurts out, "What was THAT?"

[not_a_traitor]

"Sorry!" yells Gaeta. (Well, half yells and half winces, more like.) He limps across the green as fast as he can, offering his non-burned hand to Crichton as soon as he's next to him. "I'm so sorry, I'm, ah, trying to do some experiments and didn't expect that to..."

Where did his cane even go?

...Oh. There it is, embedded in the giant watermelon and quivering like an arrow that struck the bullseye.

"Are you all right?"

[ss_buttcrack]

"Yeah, I'm fine," Crichton answers, taking the offered hand but not putting much weight into it as he otherwise hauls himself back up to his feet. "Takes more than that to rattle me. What kind of experiment are we talking about, here?"

[not_a_traitor]

"Well."

Gaeta heaves a sigh and rakes his hand through his hair. "I'm trying to figure out if I can approach magic through a scientific framework. I had the idea that it might behave like electromagnetic energy, so I modified an electroscope to see if that'd be useful for detecting an enchantment, and clearly -- " he gestures toward his cane, " -- something got frakked up somewhere. I didn't even know quartz could spontaneously combust at less than a couple thousand degrees, did you?"

[ss_buttcrack]

"What?" Crichton suddenly becomes so very, very animated. "Why didn't you say so sooner, dude? Been there, done that. Watch!" He says a few words and, boom, ball of flame at his fingertips.

"You're on the right track, but you forgot to factor in something. I did too when I was just learning." No, actually, he didn't know that about quartz so that's good to know now. "You aren't in your own universe. Sometimes, the rules of physics actually are a little different depending on which rules we're looking at. Believe me, I already know how insane that sounds."

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta's jaw drops.

"You -- ?" He laughs, in that disbelieving way when you have no other godsdamn idea how to react. "Why didn't you say anything sooner?! You can really -- ?"

Well, obviously, he can really, Felix. Fireballs don't just pop out of thin air like that without an accelerant. Holy shit.

"Right, I'll ask more later -- different how? Like having to finesse the gravity calculations on different planets sometimes?"

[ss_buttcrack]

"It just... never came up," he says sheepishly as he dismisses the flame.

"Close, but more like needing to account for time dilation. Thing of it is, the more you try to make it bend to reason, the more it's going to resist because magic has its own--How do I put this?--personality. It feels like more than energy, there's a will behind it. Your mental state can affect how it interacts with you."

2.

[abhorrently]

"I'd have to know what you're trying to do to answer that question."

Cutting across the green to her destination, Fever's come close enough to hear him, looking at the boxes with a curious tilt of her head.

"Have you caught something in those boxes of yours?"

[not_a_traitor]

"No," he sighs, dragging his hands down his face. "No, all that's in there is confetti, I think. It's..."

Ugh. He pinches the bridge of his nose.

"It's a toy. Basically. A magic toy I'm trying to get to work that's supposed to demonstrate -- spell components, I guess they're called?" He points to each box. "Voice, gesture, material. Do it right and they should pop open the same way even though you've used a different component."

[abhorrently]

"You're trying to do them independently of each other?" She makes a thoughtful sound, coming over to his side of the table, looking at the boxes. This, actually, is more her realm than proper textbooks and lessons.

"See, when I cast, it's a mixture. Voice and gesture both - I know some complicated ones need the material, and that's why scrolls are one use only, they get consumed in the process. But if this is your first time casting in general, it's going to take some doing, since...how did I put it to Tayrey..." Fever pauses for a second. "Your world doesn't operate with magic at all, does it?"

[not_a_traitor]

The offhand mention of Tayrey sends a little pang through his chest. Gods, what would she think, seeing him bang his head against this particular wall for weeks on end? Always so adamant magic didn't exist, she'd probably think he lost his mind.

He pushes the thought aside; shakes his head. "Not like this. We have magic tricks, sleight of hand for entertainment, that sort of thing, but not real magic."

As he says that, he grabs his pencil to scribble another line in his notebook: COMPONENTS HARDER TO UTILIZE IF SEPARATED? It seems counterintuitive, but...

[abhorrently]

"Right." She nods, trying to think of how she explained it back then. And she can't help but think of Tayrey, because it had seemed that all she wanted was to understand. Fever admitting the gaps in her own knowledge had brought them closer, because they had both seen it for what it was - not a refusal to explain, but an unknowing that could be mended with time.

"The best way to conceive of it, beyond just things that are impossible, is this. Think of all the things in nature that act upon you, concrete forces that influence you. Gravity, temperature, needing to breathe, all of that. Magic, the way I experience it, is another force inherent to my world and entwined with my life such that while I can still live in its absence, I do about as well as a plant utterly deprived of sunlight. And yet, people like you live full lives and accomplish so much without ever coming near it. So it might help to think of it as an addition to what you know, instead of a replacement."

She's no scientist and never will be. But she's grasped some aspects by listening to Phil tell her about so many wonderful things in the world, letting him talk about the golden ratio and how the winds fly around the world and what a city from his era looks like. And after already teaching Radar how to use some magic, it stands to reason that Gaeta can achieve the same heights. It just takes work to use an unfamiliar tool.

[not_a_traitor]

Before Fever's hardly more than a few sentences in, Gaeta's already nodding along. "That's exactly how I'm trying to analyze it," he agrees. "Like it's just -- another dimension of the physical sciences. The closest match I was able to think up was electromagnetic energy, I guess?" He makes a face. "But it's definitely not a one-to-one match."

As the hole in the giant watermelon where his cane got stuck can attest.

"And trying to translate an equation that describes electromagnetic force into something like, like -- snapping your fingers -- " He turns that disgruntled look back on the boxes. "Not to mention the idea that willpower might be an inherent part of it. Like two plus two'll add up to five unless I really, really want it to add up to four. How can anything consistently work off of that?"

Frustrated as he sounds, it's not a dismissive kind of frustration. It's someone used to being one of the smartest people in the room running headfirst into the wall of his limitations, convinced that if he just hits it a little harder, or from a different angle, he has to break through eventually.

minor illusion

[liesdontfindyou]

"Finally had some success, huh?"

CT hasn't not been paying some attention to Gaeta's various experiments out on the green, even if she hasn't come to bother him much. Her comfort zone when it comes to magic is still squarely in 'using pre-charmed items', but she's still curious and so here she is, grinning as she investigates that excited outburst.

[not_a_traitor]

"Finally," he laughs. He presses both hands to his hair, beaming at the empty space where the map was a second ago. "Thank the gods, I don't think my ego could've taken another month of this."

He tries the gesture again. The map materializes quicker this time, rotating gently like a museum display. Gaeta lets out another giddy, disbelieving laugh. "Look at that! Holy shit. It worked."

[liesdontfindyou]

"Yeah, butting your head up against a brick wall long enough will do things to even the strongest egos," she's flashing back to spending so long trying to work out a way past a standard password prompt (genuinely harder to deal with than powerful encryptions, actually) that she tried 'password' in a fit of desperation, "but hey, look at that! You've got it replicable, not even a fluke."

She slaps his arm with the back of her hand a couple of times in a congratulatory way, carefully bracing her other hand on the table as she looks over the map.

"Based on a map from home, yeah?"

[not_a_traitor]

"Yeah." His grin doesn't fade -- he's way too keyed up for that -- but it does turn more wistful as he watches the slow orbit of the familiar stars and planets. "That's the Cyrannus system."

He points to each of the four stars in turn: two pairs of binary stars, forever spinning in a looping, intricate dance around one another, even when no living planets remain for them to warm. "Helios Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. And that -- " he leans in, poking a blue dot circling Helios Alpha, "is Picon."

[liesdontfindyou]

CT leans enough to look closer at where he's pointing, watches the stars in their almost delicate feeling orbit and the speck of blue that represents a home long gone. "Wow. I've never seen a system like it. I mean, we had our share of binary star systems, but..."

Not like this, two of them spinning together.

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta nods. "As far as anyone knows, it's one of only four double-binary systems in our whole galaxy," he says, then laughs a little. "Apparently some early scientists theorized life could only survive in double-binary systems, and that's why we never made contact with any aliens. Something about the way the different kinds of radiation interact with each other, I don't know, it was ridiculous."

But it does mean there are a lot of fun, extremely inaccurate maps of Kobol where it's part of a double-binary system, too. Sort of like ocean maps that just kind of shrug and say Here There Be Dragons when they run out of coastline.

"But... yeah." The wistfulness grows. "Hope if some alien does find us -- where we used to live -- they know how lucky they are to see it."

minor illusion

[lovethyneighb_or]

Mulcahy's been happily tailing Gaeta's journey with magic. He's offered what commentary he can, from all that he's learned from Neil's lectures, though he never seemed to pick up the skill himself; nevertheless he makes for as pleasant a companion as he can, and a sounding board for Gaeta to work his hypotheses and frustrations off of.

So when he hears that whoop over the green from the Temple yard (which is basically a block away, to be fair), of course he comes running.

"Gaeta?? Gaeta, have you--oh! Oh, my."

Planets.

[not_a_traitor]

Too giddy and overwhelmed to say much else, all Gaeta can do is repeat, "It worked."

He presses his hands to his mouth, laughing, breathless, as he watches the map revolve in midair. It collapses and vanishes only a couple seconds later; quickly, he makes the same gesture as before, and it rematerializes as if it never faded. "All I had to do was adjust the somatic variable a little more and -- look."

The three-dimensional render isn't very big. From any one edge of the double-binary star system to the other, it only spans about five feet. But with how it's situated in midair, it's big enough for Gaeta to grab Mulcahy's hand and tug him forward until they're both inside the map, stars and planets gently rotating all around them.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Planetariums are certainly not unheard of where and when Mulcahy’s from; he is far beyond the advent of their invention, and in fact right at the dawn of their peak popularity as the American public is dragged through the Space Race and Cold War. But: to be at the dawn of their popularity is not for them to be quite so popular yet, and even when he had been home, the last time his feet were on civilian soil of any sort was 1951. Before that, he had either been too poor, or too busy.

He grips Gaeta’s arm, words failing. He reaches out towards a star, hesitant, not touching.

“Why, I… incredible.”

[not_a_traitor]

The map doesn't react to Mulcahy's gesture; any touch would go right through the images just like they did. Already, some of Gaeta's thoughts break away to consider how he could alter the spell to make it behave more like a properly interactive projection. Maybe enlarge the image, while he's at it. Definitely make it last for more than a minute or so.

But as those ideas busy themselves in their own little corner, he keeps watching Mulcahy, as caught by the sight of him as Mulcahy is by the stars. To see someone you love look upon a piece of your life with such wonder -- how could Gaeta look anywhere else?

"This is the Cyrannus system," he murmurs, trying not to interrupt the moment too much. "It's... it was home." (Even that slip-up can't bring his heart down too far, with how buoyed it is by accomplishment and affection.) "You see how those four stars move?"

He points them out.

"It's called a double-binary system. Stable ones like Cyrannus are pretty rare. Two stars orbit each other, like this, at the same time they're orbiting a central point shared by another pair of stars."

[lovethyneighb_or]

Home.

"Stars and planets, held in a... a rare and complicated dance," he says reverently, still just barely brushing the image with his fingertips as he attempts to trace the complicated orbits. Gaeta may as well be talking to him about his suppositions of a heaven.

"What was it like? Having four stars in the sky? Your seasons, your days...? Or your moons?"

[not_a_traitor]

"Only one of them was close enough to act as our sun, so the days weren't too different from here. But... at night, the other three were the brightest objects in the sky. We didn't have any moons like here or your Earth. The other stars were the next best thing."

The image flickers and extinguishes. Gaeta makes another gesture to restart the spell; this time, instead of the full complexity of the Cyrannus system, it only shows one of the stars up close, its planets drifting in their slow orbits.

"Here. Helios Alpha. And..." He points to the second planet, a blue dot roughly the size of Earth circling the star at a slight incline. "That's Picon. Being on an inclined orbit like that means when it got cold, it got really frakking cold, even though we were closer to the sun. And our summers weren't as hot as most of the other Colonies either."

He smiles, wistful.

"It's kind of hard to see from here, but I was on the biggest continent. Which wasn't that big since most of Picon's landmass was islands, but..."