Riana Maren
Onwards, Upwards
In the bowels of the castle situated atop Mount Hakobe, a woman was hard at work developing the next big piece of high-tech weaponry that she fully planned on deploying in the wake of the madness of Joya. The Tragedy, as it was coming to be known, was going to come with very severe repercussions for just about everyone that had attended; in the case of Riana Maren, she had worked incredibly hard so that her presence there would not have been detected by anyone such as the Rune Knights, whose inevitable investigation that would soon be following on from the chaos would be incredibly thorough. They would likely peruse all of the members of all of the dark guilds now that someone was beginning to claim credit for the Tragedy, and now that Plumed Serpent had put themselves on the map, there was a high probability that the ensuing crackdown on dark mages would be swift, brutal and relentless. In hindsight, the repercussion for just about anyone who had been stuck in Felidae City at the end of the Tragedy was death, so the fact that Riana would be mildly inconvenienced by the police action seemed a reasonable trade-off for her life.
All of this brought out a number of most interesting points. First, that the guild she had sworn membership to– Errings Rising– placed its value in the counter-culture of disobeying and dismantling old, outdated and corrupt systems of power. If nothing else, a police action designed to cause fear and intimidate those who sought to pledge allegiance to the darker side of the world of magic was one of the very things that Saraphina and her minions had promised to destroy. Plumed Serpent, that strange guild of… whatever it was, probably ancient god worship, had placed a gigantic target on their backs by not only causing the bombing but by its guild leader accepting that they had in fact done the bombing; the attention they’d drawn to themselves would entirely likely be their absolute undoing for their hubris. By the same token, the scientist could see the value in causing that intimidation. While Riana herself did not have the same moral quandary as certain others, she understood why such was necessary. In all honesty, given the same amount of destructive power– power which she sought, to be clear– Riana might have been convinced to pull the trigger on the city given half a reason to. Perhaps the twin assassins had their reasons, whatever they might have been. As far as she cared, Riana had none. It was simply an issue of finding a reason to eradicate millions of lives in a second, wishing them away in an ash cloud of annihilation.
Goddess, what she would have given for that level of destructive power. She knew she was not one of the strongest mages on the planet by any stretch of the imagination. Heck, she wasn’t even top ten in her own guild– more like bottom five, she mused. And even then the top five of every guild were so many leagues above her that a hundred Riana Marens would have still paled in comparison to the wizard saints and their equivalents across the world. There was no way any time soon that she would have been able to bring to bear the same levels of power that any of these powerful mages could. This particular thought stung, particularly for someone that styled themselves as a weapons designer. Her whole deal was that she produced technology that could harness both the power of magic and sheer technological force; in fact, given that the peace treaty that was supposed to have been signed between Bellum and Pergrande had gone absolutely south, Riana had more than half a mind to offer her services to both sides and profit off the horrors of warfare. She could have abused both sides’ need for either technological marvels or magical destruction, and sold both nations weaponry that would have amplified the destruction that the world would see a hundredfold.
Assuming, that was, that in the wake of the Tragedy, both nations did not see that Fiore was the greater threat and swear to eradicate the rogue nation of guilds. Riana probably would have, just to remove the threat.
Speculation aside, Riana knew that with all of these events, and sufficient motivation, the inevitable outcome was that there was going to be open warfare sooner rather than later. It was just the way of the world now, with destruction its sole motivator; the trajectory of politics was taking everything and everyone away such that they would be swept up with the broken tides of vengeance. Every nation involved in this chaos would soon find that they would be left with little more than bitterness, a broken home and the sadness that followed it. Riana cared not for what would be taken away from this conflict. She planned on contributing to it, in her own way - not by fighting in it, if she could absolutely help it. She was going to help the people who fought it be better for their annihilation.
First, however, that required her technological prowess to improve. With the realisation and cognitive understanding that her weapons were useless in the face of a God, she was going to have to drastically improve the way she approached weapons production, and even then she was going to have to improve the way her technology operated. Her personal marvels and creations were still not up to scratch when it came to their levels of power. If her own battlesuits and drones did not meet the criteria of individual power levels, how could she possibly expect mass-produced technology to come even close? It was an impossible situation, made even more horrendously unfair by the fact that she had witnessed power in magic and found herself lacking. No, there was only one true solution to making sure that she could keep up - she was going to have to return to basics and improve the core concepts that her armour and her battlesuits and her drones all operated on. There would be a reckoning lest she prove herself unable to keep up for the sake of her guild.
So, down in her basement scientific laboratory, cleaned up and cleaned out by her guild to operate a gigantic research and development facility just for her own sake, Riana worked as if her life depended on it in order to produce the greatest feat of engineering that she had produced. The room, dimly lit to begin with by its own installed lighting, glowed a fantastic blue as hardlight screens provided their own illumination, casting an azure hue against every surface in the chiselled stone lab. Her fingers operated keys that were only truly cast out of photons, soundlessly tapping away to compare and contrast data that projected in front of her eyes in ways that only she could properly read and understand. So much of this was collated information based not only on her highly unique magical abilities but about such high-tech equipment that very few people in the guild would have been able to keep up with the knowledge bombs that were dropping.
Even still, to keep up with the processing power required for hardware modelling simulations, Riana was employing every piece of computing power and automation that she could bring to bear. The model, which was also cast out of the same light as it floated over a holographic display unit, was able to be interacted with using her fingers and the intuitive nature of the system she operated, allowing her total freedom to develop and redesign individual pieces as she so desired. All the while, there was a voice in her ear, running through potential calculations and acting as her advisor. SOFI did a perfect job of that.
”Bring up the energy multi-manifold projection for me, SOFI,” the scientist commanded as she leaned against her plush seat. As bidden, the display in front of her field of view changed to a multi-chamber energy dispersal unit, with tubes and pipes leading both into and out of the unit. One of the problems with the projected power levels she could bring to bear– which, in a perfect world given the fact that her lacrima allowed her to create almost infinite energy so long as she had the magical power to harness it, was a lot– was that the actual physical equipment that was required to support this technology simply could not handle the strain. Therefore, throttled by the necessity of equipment that had to obey modern physics, Riana’s designs could only go so far towards the projection, manipulation and management of power outputs. Too much power and the real-world materials she used would react and break down. There was no use exceeding the output of a nuclear reactor when the metals she employed would simply break down upon the first moment of output.
The scientist leaned back in her chair, thinking deeply. This chamber could only handle so much energy output, even when the design could change at a whim. Previously it had been simple electricity, with capacitor banks inside leading out to a series of power cells to store the energy before it went out to the rest of the unit. Now that she had the ability to excite photons and by extension the crimson magiparticles that she employed as an energy stream, it was therefore limited to the amount of particles that it could store, versus the resistant strength of the material before the excited particles began to break down the walls of the manifold. Too much particle density and the entire thing came crashing down around her. Strengthening the walls and making them thicker reduced the amount of particles that the device could take. It really was a total conundrum.
In reality, Riana had yet to see a solution. Energy throttling was one of the biggest issues she faced and as of yet she had been unable to solve the problem. This piece of equipment was one of many that required drastic re-designs in order to be a viable piece of technology that could operate at higher power outputs; if she could solve this problem, it was incredibly likely that she could solve other problems as well. One successful re-design would cascade into multiple when the secret of that piece of technology revealed itself to her. However, that required a deeper understanding of the magic that she employed, as well as a greater understanding of metallurgy in order for her to be able to make some form of alloy with superior weight, tensile strength and energy resistance that she would be able to employ in the design such that she could utilize it across all of her designs. The titanium alloy that was currently in use did a fantastic job, so far, of handling those needs. However, it had also unwittingly put an upper bounding box on the level of power that she could deploy with her equipment. Her knowledge of metals being what it was, it was rapidly coming to he point that she was realising that perhaps the answer, much like the magic she used, was not to look at something that Earthland employed - she would inevitably need to start looking farther afield in order to be able to reach higher limits of her power.
In short, there was a greater than zero chance that she was going to have to start looking to interstellar metals, things that could not be found here, in order to increase her power. The red-headed scientist frowned. It was not the conclusion that she wished to draw from all of these endeavors. However, it also seemed like an incredibly practical decision on her part to come to that idea. She was dealing with magics and powers beyond mortal ken. She was attempting to harness and employ a magic from a far-off place that she would inevitably have to investigate for herself, particularly when the knowledge in question would have to come likely not only with an incredibly high price but also with the understanding that she would need to be prepared to venture far outside her comfort zone in order to attain that which she required.
A sigh. Next stop, space. She was going to need help for that. Help was something that Riana was incredibly loath to call on, but personal development demanded that she ask others for assistance in the inky void.
Where the heck was she going to get a starship? Oh, wait. She could build one.
Never mind.
MEL @ WW
