Sebastien

Month 2, Day 3, Wednesday 10:40 a.m.

That Wednesday, Sebastien arrived at the Natural Science classroom a few minutes early, hoping to squeeze in some of her History reading before class started. She had a new schedule to optimize her productivity. It wasn’t much different from the old one, just more rigid and regimented, with less room for breaks, side projects, or aimlessness. It—along with the beamshell tincture—was allowing her to keep up with all her classes and projects, but afforded her barely any leeway. She hoped that a few stolen moments of extra work here and there would allow her to get enough ahead that she could occasionally take an hour or two to herself.

Ironically, despite her underlying fatigue, the hardest part of the plan was making herself get a full eight hours of sleep every night, in two four-hour chunks with only an hour of homework slipped between them. She had to force herself to cast her dreamless sleep spell and actually attempt to rest.

Sebastien stopped before the closed door to Professor Gnorrish’s classroom, frowning at the paper stuck to the door. “CLASS MOVED TO LIBRARY TUNNEL,” it read in big block letters. With a quick check of her pocket watch and a put-upon sigh, Sebastien spun around and hurried to the northern edge of the Citadel.

The crystalline tunnel between the Citadel and the library was dark, letting none of the outside light through with its normal shattered rainbows of color. A couple people at either end of the tunnel had opened a part of the wall that she’d never noticed before and were messing with something inside. Sebastien stepped into the tunnel warily, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom.

Gnorrish stood in discussion with a handful of other men and women at the center of the tunnel, though beyond the glint of a faculty token, it was too dim to make most of them out.

Sebastien sat cross-legged against the wall, imitating the handful of other students who had arrived before her. Her eyes slowly adjusted, but it was far too dim to read, so she tried to let her mind relax. She was still buzzing with energy from her morning dose of beamshell tincture, which tended to give her a feeling of bottled-up energy that needed to be released somewhere.

One of the men who had been talking with Gnorrish turned in her direction, his familiar silhouette attracting her attention.

“What are you doing here?” Sebastien blurted out to Professor Lacer, drawing the attention of the other professors and students.

He sent her a scathing look, and she ducked her head in an apologetic bow. “I meant, I’m surprised to see you, Professor Lacer,” she amended in a much softer tone.

“I am here to do a favor for a fellow professor, and, not incidentally, for my apprentice as well,” he drawled.

She wondered what kind of favor would require so many of the faculty.

Reading the curiosity on her face, Lacer simply said, “You will see,” and moved to stand nearby, his expression clearly stating that the conversation was over and anyone who disturbed him with idle chitchat would feel his wrath.

The other professors split up as well, at equidistant points along the length of the tunnel.

When Damien and Ana arrived, they looked around with curiosity. “What are we doing here?” Damien asked, the question aimed toward no one in particular.

“The whole tunnel is a simulation chamber focused on visual illusions,” Ana said. “I imagine there will be some sort of demonstration.”

Gnorrish loudly instructed the students to arrange themselves into groups and join a professor. A handful of other random students quickly joined Sebastien’s trio.

Sebastien rapidly tapped her fingers against her knee, letting Damien and Ana’s light chatter flow over her head.

Gnorrish walked slowly between the groups of students along the length of the tunnel, a ball of light floating above his head. His booming voice carried easily. “The next few weeks of this class will be an exploration of light. Or, more correctly, an exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes visible light. It is an important research area in modern natural science for multiple reasons. Not only is light a freely available energy source for your spells—in some cases even more abundant or useful than heat—it is both versatile and powerful. I believe it has the potential to do so much more, and as it is considered one of the more difficult energy sources to channel, we will be spending extra time learning about it.”

Sebastien tracked Gnorrish’s slow pace with her eyes, unblinking, as if she could suck the knowledge out of the man with her eagerness alone. ‘The more I understand the subject through the concepts of natural science, the better control I’ll have with all magical applications that use light.’

Lifting his hands to the sky, Gnorrish paused, and then, with a dramatic flourish like a conductor before an orchestra, he dropped them.

An illusion sprang to life in front of each student group, not unlike what they were learning to do in Practical Casting, but somehow, perhaps because of the surrounding darkness, seeming more tangible. “Behold! One of the many utilizations of light magic,” Gnorrish trumpeted, throwing his arms wide with a grin.

The illusion spell displayed a stack of waving lines. They all seemed to move, flowing from left to right, with the ones at the top at such a gentle slope they barely rose or fell at all, and the ones at the bottom in a zig-zagging frenzy.

Sebastien peeked toward Professor Lacer, who had one hand pressed against a section of the tunnel wall and the other curled around his Conduit, his focus on the illusion hanging in the air before them. The other professors seemed to be doing the same, and, though the image in front of each group was almost identical, Sebastien thought theirs seemed more tangible than most. As if she would feel the lines if she reached out to touch them.

“Light is a form of energy, and it travels in waves like these,” Gnorrish said. “We can tell how much energy an electromagnetic wave has by the frequency—how many waves, from peak to trough, pass through a point in a set period of time. As long as light isn’t passing through substances with different densities, that means light with a shorter wavelength has more energy, while light with a longer wavelength has less. Light doesn’t have mass, so it’s not like water, but water can still be a good analogy. Imagine you’re in a boat on the ocean. Your boat is anchored, a single immobile point, while the water moves under and around you.” The illusion changed to show the side view of a cute little boat, floating atop deep water. “The peaks and troughs of each wave are always the same height. If each wave is so far apart that you rise and fall over them so gently it’s barely noticeable, with one wave passing underneath your ship every minute, you might say the waves were low-energy. Now, suddenly the waves get closer together, and as they pass under you, ten every minute, your boat pitches and sways so steeply you need to grab onto something to keep from being thrown off the side.” Gnorrish mimed a wild scramble for purchase against the pitching deck of a boat, to the laughter of many of his students. “Those are high-energy.”

Gnorrish stopped his wild flailing, grinning at their response. Professor Lacer switched the illusion from a boat back to the stack of waving lines, and Gnorrish pointed to a very small section of light waves in the middle of the nearest group’s illusion, which took on the appearance of a section of a rainbow. “Our eyes and brains are adapted to perceive this particular range of wavelengths, which we call ‘light.’ Can anyone tell me what’s special about light?”

Students shifted uncomfortably as his eyes roved over them, but no one spoke.

He looked to Sebastien. “Mr. Siverling! What do you think?”

She was confused for a moment, then realized it was a trick question. “The only thing special about it is that we can all see it, and we gave it a label called ‘light.’”

Gnorrish lifted his hands, bobbing them back and forth as if weighing something on an invisible scale. “That’s not entirely wrong, but not entirely right, either. The leading theory is that we see this part of the spectrum because it’s the most relevant for us. The majority of our sun’s radiation happens to fall within this range, and it manages to pass through our atmosphere without being absorbed or scattered. It could also be because visible light is the only set of electromagnetic radiation that propagates well in water, where it is theorized all the mortal species rose from. Yet another theory is that radiation in that part of the spectrum is easily stopped by matter. If we had evolved to ‘see’ using super-long wavelength radiation, for instance, which can pass through matter, we’d be bumping into trees and falling into holes because they’d be invisible to us! Or perhaps we wouldn’t be able to see at all, because the radiation would pass right through our eyes and out the back of our skulls.”