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Post by HERO on Jul 15, 2015 9:28:02 GMT -5
Oratus Sermus: Arcane Grad School Project
This is me giving a different kind of try at schooling. Moved it to here to make it easier to post to.
To begin...
It had been a good two and a half weeks since Oratus got his first taste of bounty hunting, and since then, his daily schedule has taken a bit of a change. Having finished up his magical conjuration and handgun training since then, he mostly stuck around the Sh'rutal schooling district, and the Merlinwood School of Magic to carry out research into what exactly he wanted to do next. He was certainly qualified for quite a few positions at his alma mater, but wished to go explore the continent and get a taste of what "real" power might mean, as an opportunistic adventurer. That first bounty he ever did certainly did give him a whole course of it, what with the sense of mystery, danger, reward, and even sorrow. Maybe if he was more powerful, he could've managed to simply subdue the monk he could've swore was his ally, rather than kill him. But alas, he wasn't paying attention to the scale of the charge in his book, and he had to react. He wasn't a thaumaturge, like his old professor, and so he couldn't so easily control the output of all of his spells without placing rigorous constraints on his circles, and it seemed with that circle, he didn't put enough on it. Speaking of which, he actually caught quite a bit of heat for summoning ALL of the Furbals like he did, but at the same time, he got himself a bit of recognition. He defended himself against an unstable monk, but accidentally killed the monk, but allowed for the return of thousands of phi in stolen contraband, but nearly killed one of the thieves, but turned in all of the thieves. In the end, they decided he was in the right just enough to not try performing any legal action. Besides, the publicity actually upped the school's popularity some, somehow. Soon enough, his professor actually offered him by text message, an opportunity for funding and a recommendation in case he ever wanted to try out the school's Grad Student program. As a grad student, it would seem that Oratus would likely end up doing a bit of teaching here and there, though otherwise, he was quite free to do whatever he wanted as long as he continued to make progress on a thesis, or point of research that he'd present much later down the line. Following approval, known geniuses have been known to complete their theses within just as much time as it took them to graduate from post-adept courses. Other normal people seemed to finish in about a few years. The thing about Oratus is that he's kind of arrogant when it comes to what he believes he can do, most of the time, especially when it came to magical power and academics. Pretty amazing he hasn't been hit with a case of insane Lunacy already, despite his show of inadequacy a few weeks ago. He was never tested, but from a young age, it would seem that he picked up on information faster than normal humans, and that he also seemed to recall and process that information blazingly fast when he cared to. It would appear that he could potentially blaze right on through, after getting his thesis approved, and getting with some of the research staff, but if he wouldn't then he could make the time spent worthwhile by perhaps taking up some bounties in between. Earlier in current day, he finally took his professor up on the offer, signed up for the Grad Student program, and shook hands with the admissions officer. He was back in school once again, however this time he had an even freer choice between whether or not he would attend a lecture, or go to the library. Today, the latter was better for him, as he needed to be brainstorming. He checked out several books of many different subjects, titles including but not limited to A Mathematic Approach to Wave Theory, Antimagic Procedures for the Paranoid, Lexicon of Geometric Arcana, Conjuring an Army, Introduction of Algorithms, Thaumaturgic Shenanigans and Gagh! The Dangers and Interesting Uses of Electrokinetic Studies! What Oratus Sermus needed was a night of broadly soaking in everything that seemed interesting to him, though really he knew that one night wouldn't be enough to correctly browse through all of it. And so, he began flipping open pages out of the stack and seeing what interested him. He already knew a great deal about Arcane magic, and he did still consider himself a warlock, so he was inclined to finding something that could be related in a fundamental way. What he wanted was something that changed his spell casting for the better, and could perhaps allow him to really feel more powerful by the end of his project. This tossed out a good bit of the books he brought to his apartment from the selection of books he'd really like to start with, and brought his thoughts to Wave Theory. He only ever covered enough of it in his study to use for crafting spells, and never looked back. But he recalled from back then some of the mumblings of his professor, and how the man explained one of the theories on how magic flows: that it moved similar to energy-transferring waves in mathematics and physics. Advanced mathematics truly was not a very appealing study to Oratus (or a lot of the people he'd associate with), but gosh darn he could do elementary calculus, trigonometry, and algebra when he needed to. Math was useful, he thought. The thought then brought to mind another thought, involving a quick trigonometric equation being solved step-by-step on a note at the corner of his desk, marked by, "From my place to hers, plug in the following into the spell circle..." Maybe tomorrow he could make a trip over to prevent from being scarce. Having someone's opinion on how cool something might be could be of help too. Right now however, he wanted to skim through what he hadn't put through the test in piquing his interest. The next subject to pique him was thaumaturgy, something his old professor actually happened to have figured out at great deal of, and something he new would be incredibly useful for him. Speaking in arcane tongue and crafting complete spell circles out of the space before his palms would definitely be an awesome thing for him to pick up, but at the same time, it was rumored to be an incredibly hard skill to pick up without having to use a catharsis, requiring one's arcane conductor to have nearly no resistance at all. At the same time, it would seem that only people who spoke as fast as a computer could spit out numbers could add truly controlled constraints to their spells, often limiting the use of thaumaturgy to bolt-like magics, runes, and spells which tend to not have to need any spell circle to be cast through the same practical means, like Abjuration. In other words, one could just cast a ward spell by generating the right focus, allowing mana to flow through their arms, and forcibly altering the flow to create the necessary pathways for the repellent construct. And that brought Oratus' mind right back to imagining the study of waves in magic. Waves traveling from place to place, carrying energy to perform work on the matter they come in contact with...A few minutes past midnight, Oratus didn't really feel it was worth it to stay up for a whole lot longer, and so he slide a notecard into the book before closing it, and got up to prepare for a night's rest. The next morning, he'd have to do a whole lot more, and get with the researchers at Merlinwood who might give him an idea on how to better his sense of direction. |
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Post by HERO on Jul 15, 2015 9:33:29 GMT -5
Oratus, as always, enjoyed the fluttering his cape tended to do when he would walk, not extremely fast, not extremely slow, but just at the right speedy pace. As thick and heavy as it was, it had some beautiful aerodynamics to it that made Oratus feel like being less serious than he typically made himself, and today he had another reason to elevate his mood.
All through the previous day and night, he had somehow forgot completely about asking his friend's opinion on what he should make his thesis about, and the product that should've been set as a goal in the end. When he managed to get her awake early in the next morning he remembered though, and ran off the many details of what he was studying; how the flow of magic seemed to fit that of electromagnetic fields, the Wave Theory functions that seemed to remain consistent with how magic was often manipulated, and how untapped the potential in research was if there was a strong enough connection there. He didn't think much of the strange face she made while she was being turned from a warm friend to a rubber duck, but when he hit the end of it all, the final eureka was clear, and she caught on enough at least to agree that what he was doing might've been really cool.
And so, following his morning training routine (pushups, pullups, running, some punching bag work), and some further skimming of his books, he headed straight for Merlinwood. Soon enough, he would find himself in front of his professor's door, and noticed that it was half-open.
Oratus walked in and greeted, "Prof, I have my thesis ready now!"
The old man twisted his neck to look away from the window, shouting, "Oh, good morning to you too, Orion. You do understand this school will be fine if you wait longer until you find yourself certain of what you want to do."
"I know, but I'm not waiting to get right into planning out how I'm going to conquer this. I want to research the deep link between electromagnetic energies and magic, and develop methods of application in making electromagnetic forces interact with magic."
"Oh, that hasn't been very looked into has it? Do you have a foundation upon which you'll start?"
That's when Oratus swung out the three, now tied together books that best fueled the idea out from under his arm, and slammed them onto the professor's desk. The professor blinked, and loosened his neck tie then while standing up and leaning over the desk while Oratus opened up each one of them and pulled out examples, then spitting out just about all the information he managed to confuse Tyen with merely hours ago. The professor blinked with confusion at times just like she did, but opened his eyes wide just as often. On and on Oratus went, pulling out his drawing tool to write out a couple of equations to work out on a loose sheet of paper that probably had something else important to the professor written on them. Double-checked, and compounded on top of further inquiry, the boy liked where his thesis would take him.
Leaving the building, a plan was being formed. It turned out that some several years ago a student had started off with less understandings than Oratus, and worked on building a wireless application to collect data, of which Oratus would need to collect absolutely massive amounts.
He wasn't a programmer, but he didn't need to know everything there was to know about making code perform powerful arcane magic. He just needed to know how to build the tool he wanted, and that long-gone kid's project would make for a great way to save time. It was all in a dusty computer that was all but forgotten in the corner of one of the lesser used research lab rooms.
The project was labeled "E-Magic." The reference left behind in the documentation files was nothing short of terrible, the organization was practically backwards, and there was clear evidence that Student X had a strange affinity for old movies about radioactive reptiles that vomited violent blue beams. At least it wasn't extremely difficult to figure out that plenty of it at least worked, proven by logs of tests. The portion Oratus knew he could make the best use of was the wireless hardware code, and with some imagination, he knew that the code could be ported to his phone.
Touching that low level would mean he'd probably have to be stuck inside that room for weeks though. Tyen would shiver from the cold of loneliness, his body would deteriorate probably, his apartment would be cleared out and rented to a new tenant, and worst of all, his books would probably be given away with the assumption he was dead. He needed to hire a programmer. Maybe he could find someone from Shystae who would actually be comfortable with working for him. Could pay him too with the grant money he could probably get, after he brings it up to some rich organization who would be interested.
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Post by HERO on Jul 15, 2015 9:34:15 GMT -5
Yet another day in the laboratory had passed, and Oratus was sitting at his extended computer desk, sliding back and forth, left and right in his rolling chair. Rolling chairs were fun, but this rolling had a purpose; the boy needed to hop back and forth between calculating mathematical values by hand and running through data on the computer. He put up an advert for freelance work suiting a mathematician experienced with writing code for research projects. Of course, any knowledge of telecommunications would be a huge plus. Apparently it caught some interest, shown by the number of page views and dedicated watchers it received, but as of that afternoon within that dark research lab, there were yet to be any takers. The listing would be seen most often by those in the big tech cities, but he would've been fine with getting anyone from anywhere, so long as he could afford them on the additional grant money he was getting. Half a grand ought to get someone to help him finish the app, and past that he could totally use the money he received from taking down those pickpockets to hire them for a few weeks, to write up code so he could analyze his data better.
In the meantime though, he was doing the brunt of the work himself, holding out the hardware manual to his phone, a specifications sheet on it's wireless card, a copy of "An Introduction to Advanced Wave Functions" that he borrowed from the library, and a laptop that he figured was less space-expensive than the old tower and monitor he used to work on. It smelled much nicer when it ran too, and didn't sound like a choking monkey when it got warm. It turned out that there existed a program meant for developing for making applications his phone could use, and so bit by bit, he would convert usable parts of the old project into new more easily usable code using it. That's what he was doing when the clock struck halfway between noon and midnight, and so, he knew it was about time to get some mental relaxation, somehow.
He wasn't exactly sure about where he should have headed off to, but he just knew he had to get out of the lab, having been working there for 9 hours. Whether it was from the writing or the typing, he couldn't tell exactly why he felt an aching in his forearm when he the door handle to leave. In the end, the library felt like the best decision on places to go, as he could at least lay out some newspapers to lay his face upon while reading, and he could also look at some lore collections for interesting stories.
Not everyone was hooked on the different numbers of RSS feeds available for news content. Plenty organizations still did the newspaper, but never for profit, but for the sake of daily education. The school paper showed plenty that was going on with the world, the most interesting bits right at the front for people to get excited about what they're getting into. Today, the front had stories on a new political scandal, abductions in the forests of Jerianth, and newly emerging advances made into usable products by the MetalSyn Corporation. The abductions felt like the most interesting bit for him to continue on, and so he flipped over to about halfway into the stack of paper to continue reading about it. This story appealed to his sense of adventure; the dangerous force laughing in the woods, the horrifying sounds of men meeting their dooms, the sweeping mist moving through he mountains obscuring just about everything in sight, something beautiful was hiding there. If only he managed to figure out a way to get there.
He moved onto some lore reading sometime later, and even later he went home for a much needed nap. His phone beeped to alert him that he had gotten a couple of emails, but he figured it'd be fine to brush whoever it was off for tomorrow.
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Post by HERO on Jul 16, 2015 12:11:28 GMT -5
It was a dark and early hour of the morning, the kind that came just before the violet hues of twlight and the destined ascension of the planet's brightest star. Oratus was barely clothed, on the carpeted floor, huffing and puffing out a series of repetitive motions while moving one thumb across the screen of his phone. This up-down motion was his way of keeping strong, and went by the name of the one-handed push-up, requiring for proper form that his feet be fairly close together, and that his chest weighed down heavily upon an arm at a time, switching every five pushes.
His thumb moved quickly through emails he had failed to check the night before, two in particular catching his eye. The first was a reply to his advertisement, coming from a freelance programmer versed in the kind of networking hardware Oratus was working with. His thumb tapped the screen repeatedly and speedily to stamp out a message to shoot back to the guy, to a Mr. Shen Mizuoe.
“You appear to have all the necessary qualifications for getting this kind of work accomplished in the time I'd like it to be. I'm delighted to get you onboard with this project, and I'm sure you may possibly understand the implications that lie in the success of it. You may contact me with the following information to negotiate payment, discuss our meeting, and plan out the gathering of any tools you may need...”
Having someone to make progress on the developing end so soon meant that Oratus may have finally had what he needed to get out of Sh'rutal. The other email of interest was the other component in success that he was waiting for, funding. Definitely no small amount of it either, as it was a representative of the Magitech Corporation that was willing to get him the funds needed for the project. With such a large company backing him, he could actually get more than just one person working through it, maybe hiring other researchers under Shen to keep progress streamlined towards the goal: A handheld device altering the flow of magic through electromagnetic waves for exponential differences in amplitude.
Oratus didn't know why this hadn't been done before, but if he waited around long enough, someone else might've ended up doing it first. Can't have that. He needed to get the project on the right track, and he needed to get out there to start collecting field data. Maybe after getting business out of the way, he could end up finally seeing Tyen again. A farewell was appropriate, since he might only return from his adventure months later, and he had been wanting to hang out anyway.
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