Adele Kyteler (finaldefence) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2009-03-25 17:10:00 |
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Current mood: | determined |
Early Thursday evening, 17 September 1942, at the Royal Academy...
Addie Kyteler was, to put it bluntly, terrified. Most of the student body was hunkering down for the raid or attack that it was now clear was expected that night, and it was hard to stay grounded and avoid panic. Rushing out of the castle into the night with Moruith—at Goyle’s insistence, never mind the children she was responsible for, whom Rachel had said she would handle—hadn’t helped. And now she was staring at Michel Rosenthal—her guildmaster—and Juliana Leffoy—his girlfriend, whether he knew it or not, and one of the brightest people he’d mentored—who were clinging to each other as though they expected the Last Trump to sound. There were many things they might have done that would have been reassuring; this was not one of them.
Michel saw her first, and he let Liane go to wave at her, smiling a little, which helped. Liane was still visibly upset, but she pulled herself away from Michel and ran to meet Addie, pulling pulling notebooks and parchments back out of her bag. “Addie, thank God she found you—we need your help! There’s too much work to be done, Goyle won’t let me finish this, and you’re Michel’s apprentice, you’re the only person I can think of who can understand it!”
Addie nodded, and glanced from Liane to Michel. She took a deep breath. “What are you trying?” She could only hope she would actually understand.
Liane led her over to the staging area, and showed her the modelled array made of old Roman dice. Without preamble, she began to explain, in rapid-fire jargon she clearly expected Addie to be able to follow. “Do you see this? It’s going to surround the whole building by the time they’re done,” she said, swallowing. “They have to do all the crisis points in sevens. This is based in one of those equations I showed you, so we have to stay in spheres lower than seventh, or it will all go wrong. The lightning rain is coming to us through the antiveridical, Q7. That’s apparently von Thorwald’s preferred direction of attack, and we believe he will also be sending reinforcements of some sort through the forest using a Q7 approach.
“We need to turn it back on him using a veridical approach. We can draw in some extra power from the noumenal and the astral, 8 and 9, if we have to, but we must absolutely not have any exit points there or here in 8/9-10-space. These gentlemen, Gardiner and Piccard, they’re using Tesla’s earthquake machine to reverse the polarity of a bastardised Teleforce, which…is something you probably haven’t seen, but they understand it, don’t worry about that. However, the last time they did it, all of their backflow stayed here in the 8/9-10, and there was an earthquake in Londinium.
“If the enemy hits the towers, and we have any earthquakes, the castle will be unsafe. We don’t know how the internal defences will respond, but the lake could flood the dorms. We may have to bring everyone out of doors after that happens, which…is probably what they want.”
Addie blinked. None of it sounded good.
Liane bit her lip. “Um. Was that too fast?”
Addie swallowed. Was that too fast. She’d have liked to ask Michel for help, but he was talking to the men they’d been working with. Explaining who she was.
Liane’s voice went softer, apologetic. “I don’t mean to go on like that, I know I’m an awful teacher—it’s just I don’t know how much time we have, because I know the direction it’s coming, and you can’t know both.”
“Um, maybe a little too fast,” Addie said finally; she didn’t want to confess it, but it was too important not to. At least she had mostly understood. The veridical was the Faerie sphere, the seventh sphere—Netzach—and the lightning rain attack was to come through its shattered mirror of sorts, the antiveridical, the one that Liane was calling ‘Q7’. The Q had to stand for qliphotic, then. And she recalled the equations. “Can I do this work?” she asked. “I’ve trained under Scalara! I can do the numbers, I don’t know that I can work with the energy.” She paused for a moment and wondered if she was leaping to conclusions. “Will I need to? And how do we add to their work?” she added, indicating Gardiner and Piccard. Gardiner’s name she thought she’d heard before, from her mother. Piccard was a new one.
“Of course you can!” said Liane, her eyes wide. “There’s no other choice! Michel and I have to go in and see if we can’t make the castle work for us, too!”
Addie nodded. “I haven’t done much energy work…I haven’t taken artificery…”
“Michel’s not an artificer either,” said Liane, but her voice softened a little as she indicated something she’d done on the table with Roman polyhedral dice. It looked very strange, but when Addie forced herself to look at the geometric solids and the patterns she’d made, she could see the arcane geometries there. She was going to have to study geomancy, wasn’t she? In addition to everything else. “Look, I built a model of the array right here, it’s not real crystal of course, I don’t want it to draw anything down. See how the lines of force spread out and away from the castle?”
Addie nodded; Liane’s words echoed her own thoughts.
“Now these are Gardiner’s blueprints under them,” Liane continued, “but look, the originals vent everything right here into the ground, into Malkuth, here and here, which would shake the school and the mountains and forests and flood the dorms and…God only knows what else, and I don’t want to find out. There’d be mundane involvement too. I don’t even know what’s near here in terms of mundane settlements. Piccard’s amendments send it all back, but still going up through 9 and 8 before turning through 7 into Q-space. This needs to go right back up into the antiveridical, up not down. Down will vent right into 7, Netzach, itself and possibly into Leffoy or Frealaf ground, not Q7, and down will also likely cause an earthquake, which would, I repeat, be a fucking disaster. Now we’ve done the equations, here, those are my notes and this is the thing Michel did that fixes it here, where it wanted to go infinite out at the cardinals—I hate that bloody delta-t problem, just so you know. Anyhow, you just need to help them set up the arrays and make sure that everything balances, because I’ve not had very much time to apply this transformation and it needs more fault tolerance than we’ve had time to build into it. I know you can do it. I’ve seen what you did, and he was impressed as well…” She glanced back at Michel.
“All right,” Addie said, and moved to look at the array and the pages of notes and—had Liane really written this part on a piece from a dress pattern?
Addie hated to rush over maths and equations, preferring to check everything several times and get it right before showing anyone. But that choice clearly wasn’t available. And this did make sense—it wasn’t even hard really, not the maths. The most difficult part of it was going to be figuring out all the handwriting, and who was who and who was correcting whom. The shapes the numbers made—and the patterns of force the array made—were so simple that she wondered, now, how she had not known them before, and she grinned with the joy of discovery. “I know how to make it balance. Here—”
“Good!” said Liane, without waiting for the explanation, and hugged her hard, with a kiss on each cheek, which was something that Addie hadn’t expected at all. “I trust you. I saw what you did this morning, and Michel trusts you too,” she said, holding her out at arm’s length for a moment. “We’re going to be such great friends, you and I! If we can just all live through this.”
“If,” Addie mused. But they would. The alternative didn’t bear consideration. Michel was grinning at her, even as he held out his arm to Liane. Addie smiled at them—they were ridiculous—and then went to work. The equations seemed fine, but she did her best to ground herself and then review them so that she could get the array right. Up, not down, she thought to herself, as she reviewed all of the lines of energy. It was balancing that was crucial, and difficult, but she could see a way to check it that made a certain kind of sense. A veridical kind of sense, which was the important thing.
“I’m Piccard,” said the man who had been talking to Michel. “You’re taking over from Miss Leffoy de Marigny?” He smiled at Addie, then glanced at Michel and Liane, who were heading back to the castle. “They didn’t even introduce us. I think somebody feels guilty for leaving his girlfriend in a war zone,” he said conspiratorially to Addie. “It isn’t even raining out here yet and he’s acting like she’s going to be the first thing hit. When the whole point of this exercise is to send it all back if it does.”
Addie nodded, but didn’t feel able to freely gossip with someone she’d never met. “Miss Leffoy said I was to help set the array up and check that it balances,” she said. “I know the equations she is working from.”
Piccard nodded back. “I’ll introduce you to Eliot—and Phil, he just got here, and Viresh, and the others—and we can get down to work.”
“I’m ready,” said Addie, and felt it. It even felt good.
madwatchmaker, michelrosenthal, moruith, standingwave and finaldefence