Chapter 36: Chapter 35 – The Depressurizer Demonstration: Breakdown

Cliff dug his fingernail into a deep scratch along the stool, picking away at the already-chipping finish. He was perched off to the side of Paolo – separate from the crowd but well out of the center of attention. Attendence was good, nineteen in total, about half of which were friends of his. The rest were a mix of the Hierophant’s folk and staff from the school, plus Iona and one more member of the engeineering club. It wasn’t exactly a huge crowd, but that didn’t stop him from feeling all sorts of nervous.

Brother Paolo, unsurprisingly, looked a good bit more nervous than Cliff felt. Despite the mounting autumnal cold, there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead, and he was fidgeting with his sleeves and gnawing at his lip as he glanced around the room. With a small nod, Paolo turned towards Cliff, and the two shared a brief, reassuring smile. They’d busted their asses to get things ready for the demonstration, and it was time to reap the rewards of their work.

Taking a deep breath, Paolo shook his head, scanning the room. “Thank you all for coming to our demonstration today – I know the schedule is quite busy, and both my assistant and I appreciate you taking time out of the busyness of the festival to attend.” A few eyes pointed Cliff’s way, and he nodded, flashing a smile. “I’ll try to keep the pace brisk so I don’t take too much of your time,” Paolo continued, “that said – if you have any questions about my explanation as things carry on, the rather small number of people here means that I’d be more than happy to answer them as long as things don’t get too technical or theoretical – we can save the debates for after, I think.” A few of the professors chuckled at that, and Cliff wondered if there was a history of that sort of thing at the academy’s research presentations.

Nodding again, Paolo turned and gestured towards the depressurizer beside him. “What you’ve got before you, we’ve named the magic depressurizer.” He turned back towards the crowd. “A rather straightforward name that belies the complexity of what we built.” Cliff couldn’t help but nod – it was a beast of a magetool with more working parts than he’d ever cobbled together in his own work, that was for sure. “Today, I’ll give you a brief explanation of the motivation behind the research, delve a bit into the theory, and give a short demonstration of the depressurizer’s capabilities.” He took a short sigh, and Cliff could tell he was trying not to show his pessimism about that demonstration.

“The genesis for my research came from the Church’s interest in emulating an artifact of Saint Euphrasia,” Paolo said. There was a groan from one of the professors in the crowd, and Paolo breathed a laugh, “As you might guess when her name gets such a reaction, Saint Euphrasia is rather infamous among the Clergy. She lived about 800 years ago, and her legacy still lives on in the form of hundreds of artifacts buried in Church storage. Her Gift was the ability to embed others’ Gifts into physical tools. Since the advent of magetools, it’s become a sort of running joke among members of the research branch of the clergy – if you’ve got nothing else to research, the Church will toss you one of Saint Euphrasia’s artifacts and have you duplicate its effect – often with frustrating or mixed results.” Cliff saw a few nods around the room – this was the first he was hearing of her reputation, but it didn’t exactly surprise him. Magetools were invented to duplicate the functions of Gifts. Saint Euphrasia was doing basically the same thing, only seven hundred years earlier. With what she left behind, they had, more or less, warehouses full of functional magetool precursors. If you wanted to duplicate them, however, you’d have to figure out the theory behind the function of the Gift. Considering most Gifts didn’t exactly follow rules, it would no doubt be a fustrating, often futile exercise.

Shrugging slightly, Paolo carried on. “By my vestments, you can no doubt recognize that I’m a member of the research branch of the clergy, and while my own story differs from the stereotype, I certainly approached the prospect of researching one of the Saint’s artifacts with – ah, trepidation, we’ll say. Especially when I got my hands on the artifact itself.”

He turned, gently pulling the familiar stone spike from a little table behind him. It looked exactly as it always did – about the size of Cliff’s forearm, rounded at the top and coming to a conical point on the bottom. “On authorization of the Hierophant, I was given a grant to research and duplicate the function of what I’ve come to term the depressurizing spike.” He held it out in font of him, and Cliff’s eyes drifted towards the Hierophant. She was watching with rapt attention, a small smile on her face. The two sentinels beside her looked decidedly less interested, though Cliff knew that was because they were probably focused on the periphery. “The function is simple,” Brother Paolo said, “It lowers the ambient magic pressure. You insert the spike into the ground and twist the top. The depth of insertion corresponds to the area of depressurization, and the amount you twist the top corresponds to how much the pressure will be lowered. Very quickly, I’d like to demonstrate.” He turned towards Cliff. “If you would, Cliff.”

With a nod, Cliff jumped to his feet, walking quickly over to the display he’d built for the occasion and dragging it front and center. After checking a couple of the more precarious connections, he flipped the magetool on and the needle shot up, bouncing for a moment before it stabilized. He breathed a small sigh when he saw it was working normally – this was his only real part in the demonstration, and it’d be pretty embarrassing if his one responsibility fell flat. He nodded towards Paolo, and the clergyman continued. “The magetool my research assistant just switched on displays the ambient magical pressure. You’ll have to forgive the imprecision, but it should serve our purposes.” The display was originally from a thermometer, but Cliff had painted over the temperature marks, replacing them with a series of sloppy notches. He felt a sudden flush of embarrassment at his lack of effort, but at the time, he’d been too consumed with sleep deprivation and the depressurizer to worry about artistry. “And now-” Paolo said, dropping to his knees gently. He reached down, pulling a plug they’d carved into the ground, a conical shaped notch that the slotted the spike into. “I’ll drop the spike in here and-” Cliff frowned as the needle actually bounced up for an instant before Paolo got to twisting the top of the spike, and the needle quickly dropped until it settled at about half the initial pressure. “Easy as that,” Paolo said from his knees. There was a murmur from the audience – mostly the professors. The researchers might understand the significance of such a machine, but Cliff didn’t expect that his classmates – aside from maybe Thalos, who’d been victim to long discussions with him – would understand the implications of such a fucntion. Paolo paused for a moment, fumbling with the knob on the top to demonstrate its different settings before pulling it out, climbing to his feet and gently replacing it on the table behind him.

“Easy enough, right?” Paolo said with a little chuckle as he dusted off his knees. “Well, not exactly. As anyone versed with Gifts know, they tend to gloss over how something works in favor of just doing it. So, my research began with trying to isolate the combination of phenomena that would lead to a result that matched the depressurizing spike.” From there, he launched into an explanation of the theory, and Cliff felt his eyes glaze over almost immediately. He’d heard most of it before, of course, and now that Paolo had a captive audience of other researchers, he was free to go into details that Cliff couldn’t be bothered to care about.

He took a moment to take stock of his friends. Nym seemed to be struggling to stop her fidgeting, while Loria had a stony face on that might be interest and might be boredom. Thalos was as expressionless as ever, but there was a look to his eyes that Cliff recognized from when he went on too long a ramble, and he figured his roommate was only halfway paying attention. Jenna seemed interested enough, though her mother was quite obviously not paying attention. On the contrary, though, her father was wide eyed and nodding along to Paolo’s explanation – he was, after all, the engineer of the family. For a moment, he caught Jenna’s eye, offering her a wink that caused her to suppress a snicker.

Eventually, though, Paolo’s explanation came to and end and it was time to get to the meat of the demonstration. “Now,” he said, “with all of that theory in mind, I spent about a year and a half laboring after a design that might satisfy all the requirements for a prototype. Six months ago, I had my first design, and after about four months of iterating on that, I came up with this.” As a group, everyone in the room directed their attention towards the huge magetool in the middle of the room. There wasn’t much impressive about it besides its size – it was mostly a skeletal frame of metal and magetool components. “The key breakthrough,” he continued, “was the recent invention of a flutterling based clock circuit. For those of you that don’t know, a flutterling is an insectoid monster that builds its nest out of a wax it secretes – to melt this wax, it vibrates at a very high frequency. Last year, Church researchers were able to standardize a design for a clock circuit that can duplicate that high frequency vibration. It’s the highest frequency clock circuit on the market right now, and it’s just fast enough to satisfy the three-hundred pulses-per-second requirement.” Cliff knew that was only half-true. Officially, the flutterling clock circuit was capable maintaining a frequency of 275 ticks per second, but they’d stripped out the limiter and cranked it up higher for their purposes. That twenty-five difference was the main source of their stress. “I’d like to offer another thanks to the Church for funding my research – flutterlings have a limited habitat, and at the moment, magetool parts derived from flutterlings are almost prohibitively expensive.” Cliff blinked – that was something he didn’t know, though it explained some of Paolo’s hesitance to muck with their settings.

“The depressurizer functions by sending out high-frequency pulses of magic, isolating a variable area – for today, we’ve configured it to about the size of this workshop – and absorbing the ambient magic in the air. In function, this should duplicate the effect of Saint Euphrasia’s spike.” Cliff hissed a breath into his teeth – that was a big ‘should’.

Paolo swallowed, and from where Cliff sat he saw that his advisor was clenching his fists. “Now,” the magepriest continued, “I’m going to switch it on.” He moved slowly to one corner of the machine, and there was a tense moment of silence as he reached out and grabbed the switch. With an ounce of effort, he flipped the switch up. An audible click rang out followed by a low, distinct hum.

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For a moment, everyone stared silently at the magetool before, all together, attention shifted to the display. Cliff clutched at the edges of his stool, his nails digging into the soft wood as his breaths started coming out choppy and faster. His heart was racing in his chest as he stared at the needle, and for a moment dread pooled in his belly until the needle started to drift slowly downwards.

Immediately he let out a long, slow sigh. His heart was still racing, but with something closer to excitement now. He turned, and made eye contact with Brother Paolo. His research advisor was shaking and grinning, and they shared a satisfied nod before turning back to the display. The needle continued its casual drift downward, the result of their endless hours of work.

“As you can see,” Brother Paolo started, his voice only barely shaking, “much like the spike the ambient magic in the air has-” He cut off when there was an audible pop from the depressurizer, and the needle jerked back to its old position.

Cliff swore darkly under his breath, a momentary surge of nausea welling in his stomach. His eyes clenched shut as Brother Paolo stumbled over his words, mutters rising in the crowd as his presentation started to crumble. “That is – ah – what happened-” The magepriest fumbled out words, and Cliff could hear echoes of his own dismay in his advisor’s voice – though the priest’s feelings were probably much more severe.

The pop was almost certainly the clock circuit blowing out – it had happened once or twice in their tests, though that it had failed in the actual demonstration was a different sort of punch in the gut. Though, strangely, unlike the tests, the depressurizer was still letting out it’s low moan. In fact – Cliff frowned, turning to the magetool. It was difficult to notice over the sound of the audience’s increasing volume, but – was the magetool’s whine getting louder?

Eyes narrowed, Cliff stared at the depressurizer for a moment, turning the schematic over in his brain. He felt his Gift working, tumbling towards a conclusion, until – it clicked. Cliff’s eyes widened, and he jumped to his feet. “Paolo,” he snapped, darting over to one machine and flipping the power switch off. The humming didn’t stop. The magepriest cut off his ramble and turned to Cliff. “The depressurizer, it’s shorted, and-” He cut off when he saw Paolo’s distressed, vacant look. He was still probably processing the shock of the demonstration going sideways – Cliff couldn’t count on him right now.

Swallowing down his panic, Cliff dashed back across the workshop, scooping up a pair of snippers before he returned to the depressurizer. The audience’s attention was fixed on him, now

"Cliff,” Iona called out, “what’s going on?”

Cliff bent over the machine, grimacing at its state – the clock circuit had burnt out, fusing a handful of filaments and shorting out half a dozen circuits, circumventing the power switch. At the moment, it was endlessly circulating power. On top of that, the absorber was still running, and considering they’d failed to isolate the magic in the area – things were going go get hot, and fast. “Nothing good,” he said, turning to Iona. “The absorber is shorted, and the prime stone isn’t graded for much more magic. I’d reckon it’ll take about forty five seconds until the whole thing blows up. If everyone could please get out of the workshop in case I can’t stop it, I’d appreciate it.”

There was a beat of stunned silence until one of the Sentinels leapt up from her seat, seizing the Hierophant by the arm and dragging her out of the room. The rest of the audience was only half a second behind them. Cliff spared a moment to give a reassuring nod to Jenna, who was being escorted by her parents outside – Cliff appreciated that they each gave him a concerned look on their way out.

But that was all the attention he could spare. He was just estimating the time table, and in reality the thing could blow up at any moment. Quickly as he could, he started rummaging through the magetool’s many filaments, cutting where he could to stop the prime stones from accumulating any more magic. He was afraid he might be too late.

While he was working, he felt some movement behind him. “Anything we can do to help?” His eyes flicked over his shoulder to see Loria in front of Thalos and Nym, and Cliff couldn’t help but smirk.

“Not really, no,” Cliff said as he continued to cut. His eyebrows came down. “Actually, Nym – I need you to make a hole in the ground, about the size of your fist, as deep as you can. Then get outside with the rest.”

“I – ah – okay, I’ll make it right behind you,” Nym said, and shortly after there was the crunch of earth being compressed before they moved away. Cliff swallowed as his mental countdown got to fifteen. He tossed the snippers to the side – the power was cut off, but the hum was still increasing in pitch.

Shoving his hand into the wiring, he reached out and brushed his fingers along the prime stone. His hand flinched back – it was radiating some pretty intense heat, and he knew it was only getting hotter. With clench of his jaw, he wrapped his hand around the stone, suppressing a cry of pain. He thought he heard his flesh sizzling against the rock, though that might have been a trick of his mind.

Heaving roughly, he tugged the rock from its slot. For a moment, it didn’t want to move, then he felt metal start to bend, and it suddenly wrenched free so quickly he nearly lost his grip. As he tore his hand from the machine, he felt the back of his hand catch on a sharp bit of metal, slicing into the his skin. By his count there were five seconds left – no time to care.

Falling onto his rear, he spun around, searching for Nym’s promised hole. Quick enough, he found it, slamming the stone into the hole. It’s awkward, rectancular shape refused to go in, though, and he fumbled for an endless second until he managed to get the searing hot piece of rock upright. He dropped it away, curling into the fetal position, shutting his eyes, and pressing his hands against his ears.

Almost as soon as he had his hands over his ears, he felt a ripple of force through the ground. At the same instant, a low noise, like a single sharp crack of thunder, rang through the room. He felt a rush of hot air beside him, and, after a moment, another, larger ripple of force rang out from above the workshop. Another moment, and rubble started to rain down on him.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Cliff opened his eyes. The hole was lined with cracks by the opening, and a ring of black char ringed the opening. Cliff rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. A hole had been torn in the roof of the workshop, and scattered bits of metal, wood, and stone continued to rain down on him.

Heaving himself upward until he was seated, Cliff glanced around the workshop. He was surprised to find Paolo blinking rapidly at him – though maybe he shouldn’t have been. The magepriest had seemed in too much of a stupor to react to anything smaller than an acual explosion, which, incidentally, Cliff had been able to provide. He didn’t really blame his advisor – Cliff had only been working on the depressurizer for a month, and the only thing that had stopped him from losing himself to a depressed stupor was the thought of all their hard work going up in flames – literally. Brother Paolo had been working on the magetool for the better part of five years – Cliff could hardly imagine what he felt like, right about now.

Shifting his weight, Cliff winced, the pain finally catching up. His palm was a mess of blistery, red flesh, though he couldn’t see much skin because most of it was covered in a sheen of wet blood from the deep, long cut along the back of his hand. He hissed a breath, turning over his hand and swallowing queasily at the ugly, wide gash. He looked back up at Paolo. “You awake yet? Might need a hand getting up.”

The magepriest blinked. “What – what happened? I mean, I know it failed, but-”

“Bad luck,” Cliff said, “The flutterling circuit didn’t just blow, it shorted a few things on the way out. Had to extract the prime stone before the whole thing turned to shrapnel.” He shuddered at the thought – now that the explosion was just a soft ringing in his ears, he realized that, really, he probably should have just evacuated with everyone else. Still, he’d saved most of the building and most of their work.

Paolo let out a thin laugh. “Well, I suppose this couldn’t have gone much worse.”

Cliff snorted. “At least no one was hurt.” He glanced down at his hand, still weeping blood, and winced. “Well, no one else.”

“Oh,” Brother Paolo yelped, jumping to his feet and coming over to Cliff, helping him gingerly to his feet. “Are you alright? Besides the hand I mean.”

“A little panicked,” Cliff admitted, “and my heart’s stomping in my chest – but I’ll be right as rain after a visit to the clinic. How about you?”

“I’m-” he started, “I have to – well, my research presentation just failed spectacularly.” He dragged a hand over his face. “And I’m not sure where that leaves me. But physically, at least, I’m fine.” Cliff nodded. That was about all they could ask for at the moment.

There was a noise from the entrance, and the pair turned to see the rest of Cliff’s team poking their heads back into the workshop. When they saw him and Paolo standing there, Nym let out an audible yelp, dashing into the room and wrapping Cliff in a quick, firm hug that he returned with his good arm. “I was afraid we’d find a charred body here.” She said as she released him. “What happened – I mean, there was a small explosion, inside, then something shot through the roof, and then there was a big explosion in the air.”

Loria gave him a firm pat on the shoulder, and Cliff nodded towards her. “Best guess – when I dropped the prime stone into the hole, the part that hit the bottom of the hole blew up, launching the rest of it through the roof. A moment later the rest of it detonated in the air.” He clicked his tongue. “Bang bang.”

“You know Cliff,” Thalos said in a voice thick with relief, “that’s the second time in a month that something you’ve worked on has ended in an explosion.” His roommate walked over and took him by the wrist to get a better look at his injured hand before he paid Cliff a severe look. “I’d rather not spend the second half of the year mourning a roommate, so try to be careful, yeah?”

Cliff breathed a shaky sigh, realizing again how close that had been. “I’ll try not to make a habit of it.”