The Heat

I heard the ricochet and paused a moment before realized what that sound was. "A rifle! They fired a rifle at me!"

"Why are you acting thrilled at a sniper shooting at you?" Geff asked. Unlike me, he was behind the cover of the crawler's steel cab, using the binocular periscope to view the battle.

"Because if they are using guns on us, we've won! The only way for them to win is to start using our tactics and methods with their superior numbers. And they have begun using rifles!"

"You are still talking like that is a good thing. Them winning is a death sentence for you." Geff reached up and pulled me down below the edge of the cab's window.

"They aren't going to win. They can't, not really. They have to figure out all the tactics and strategy from scratch, they don't know what works and what doesn't yet. And they have to make too many changes to keep up with the trains for their logistics to beat ours. Remember, I went pro on Merlin. I studied logistics. We own The Waste, they can't operate there at all. We've got Caithness almost converted to a Constitutional Monarchy. Too many people know now. Even if they do manage to snuff me, we win."

"You're monologuing again."

"I know. There's something about myth parallels that forces leaders to do that, I think. We should ask those guys from Infinity about it sometime."

Resolve

Geff, "There's nothing that is forcing you to return."
Me, "Yes there is. You were all my guests when it happened."
"You couldn't have known what was going to happen."
"But it happened in my house. To my guests. I have to try."
"What will you do?"
"To find them? Start killing the primitive pinheads until I find them. If I run out of pinheads before I find them it will be just too damn bad!"
"Can you limit yourself to the Ministry of Serendipity and those who support them directly?"
"Sure."
"I'm in.

Day One

OK, roll against ST to open the door," I instructed Tim.

"13, missed," he answered.

CRACK!

"Wow! That storm is getting bad! If this was hurricane season I would say it was a hurricane," I said.

"In December it's very unlikely for temperatures to get warm enough for a hurricane to form," Geff intoned, "Besides," he grinned wryly, "I checked the web page, I have it on good authority that it is a clear star filled night. No iridium flare though."

"Let's just game, if the roof comes off I have insurance!" I state with false bravado.

CRACK! BOOM!
Silence.

For a moment, nobody moves. The music is still coming from the computer, but the light is wrong.

It takes us a second to notice, except for the computers everything electric has stopped. I almost say "blackout" until I notice the sun is shining brightly through the windows. At two AM. Um, something is definitely wrong.

More Yrth

"You have GOT to see this!" I exclaimed to my friend.
"What now?" He replied irritatedly, it being the hundredth time I had bothered him in the last hour with my project.
"They work now."
"Really?"

"They" being what I taken to calling a gun golem. A four legged self deploying maxim machinegun. Our round might even be interchangable with .308 Winchester, but I don't have any to compare it with. Heck, calling the gun a Maxim is stretching the truth, but it's water-cooled and long recoil actioned with a toggle style lock. I never could figure out Browning's bolt accelerator.

"Shoot the target with a two second burst!"

The animated steel creature pivoted slightly and twitched it's "finger" on the trigger. A short burst emanated from the gun and a promising number of the rounds hit the wood.

"Not exactly a sniper, is it?" Geff asked.
"Nope, but it doesn't have to be. But it's not afraid of taking fire and a reverse missle or two doesn't really phase it." I rapped the hard metal of its leg, "Isn't having tons of steel fun?"

"Yes, if you say. Want to see what I have been doing?"
"Sure"
"We now have an answer about using illusions to make a computer. It works and they are FAST. I think that I can even get them talking to each other in a network. And magic communication seems to be instantaneous too, there is no lag sending a message to the moon and back."
"Cool!"


Meanwhile, on the moon...


The outworlders could not escape this time!

The ministry had finally located their gate in Tredroy.

"Odd," the ministry mage thought as he stepped through, "I feel very light, as if I was in water." But he was clearly in a small room with two heavy steel doors, one to each side, and with a small sign hanging on the wall in front of him. The door to the left had a small green light coming from a glass sphere above it, the right side door had a red light. Both doors had a small round window in it, the green lighted door had a warm light shining through it and the red lit door was black.

"Please listen to the message and finish the sentence. WARNING! Do not speak until you are ready to finish the sentence. WARNING! Spell use is forbidden in the entrance, use of lethal force has been authorized by the base commander." the sign said in red letters on a white background in the outsider's "English". "They don't expect me to be able to read their sign! Fools!"

A voice began to speak, coming from all around him, "My baloney has a first name, it's..." in English.
"What in the name of the Emperor is 'bah loan ee'," he thought. Turning to his left, the mage noticed that neither door had any form of knob or handle.

"My baloney has a first name, it's..."

Touching the doors and walls revealed that the door with the green light was far warmer than the walls or door with the red light.

"My baloney has a first name, it's..."

What could the trick be? It would have to be simple, something trivial to them. What had the contents of that house had in it?

"My baloney has a first name, it's..."

The meat! That was it! 'Bah loan ee' must be how they pronounced 'bologna'! This must refer to the name on the package!

"My baloney has a first name, it's..."
"Oscar!" the mage shouted triumphantly.

"Now opening outer door." The door with the red light opened with almost a snap, all of the air in the small chamber going with it. The wind was furious, pulling at the mage's robes, but only for a moment, then nothing. No sound and a terrible pain in his eyes, ears and chest. Desperately attempting to cast a spell to transport him home as...blackness.

"HA! I really love this thing!" Geff was nearly choking on his laughter as I entered the entrance room. He was looking out the port hole in the outer door that led to the surface of the moon, "We got another one in the trap!"

"My baloney has a first name, it's..."
"Oh Es See Ay Arr," I say.

A Fine Morning In Tredroy

The House of the White Star. Typical of the businesses in East Tredroy the sign was symbolic rather than written, a white star on a dark blue background with the gold and blue trim of the merchant's guild. "Damn this planet needs printing presses," I muttered under my breath.

Taking a deep breath, I enter the shop. "Is Master McCool available?" I ask in my best, poor, Anglish. "JOURNEYMAN, McCool," a well dressed man replied a little cooly, "and I am available."

"Excellent!, I need something special."

"Of course, how can we be of service?"

In English, "I'm looking for something in 230 grain depleted necronium hollowpoint, .45 ACP."

"I'm afraid I don't speak that language, SIR!" McCool said, looking nervous.

"Of course you do. I know all about it. And I am desperate enough to be bold about it. I need things that only you can obtain and would much rather your secret be safe. But my secrets are almost out, I want to keep my mind, and given the choices I have; the risk of being open with you is very small."

"But you are a mage!"

"An untrained mage in his thirties. There is no way I can seek an apprenticeship. I don't speak Anglish very well and having 'the gift' without training at my age marks me for what I am. Can you assist me?"

"What can you possibly have to offer me to take such a risk?"

"There are people who are on to you, people who are not from Yttara, or even this plane. They have an interest in seeing that people who know magic don't gain access to what they call 'parachronic' conveyences. They have stuff that makes what happened in your version of the Trinity event seem like a fart."

"Maybe I can help...Let's go to my office. But be warned, if this is a trick, you will be dead bef..."

"It's not a trick, and that would be better than getting caught by the guild!"

Live From Yrth

“What magic is this?” he asked with more than a little awe in his voice.
“No magic at all,” I replied, “it's a Bessamer Process Furnace. It makes steel. Makes more steel in an hour than all the smiths of Megalos make in a year.”
“But I thought you were a mage.”
“I am a mage, but not here in the Great Desert. Nobody is a mage here, there's no mana.”
“There's some mana, where we imported it,” Geff chimed in, not mentioning how.
“Imported?” he asked, “To restore the mana to the interior you would have had to start at the edge and create a path to where you wanted magic, and to erase that path with destroy mana would have risked losing your magery.”
“True,” I said, “but we didn't do that. What we kept in our minds, that the Ministry of Secrets wanted erased, allowed us to do things with magic that are beyond their limited imagination. And what we can do without magic is staggering! You'll notice that we have water here, we make it rain.”
“What I intend is nothing short of a revolution. A revolution in technology. A revolution in sociology. A revolution in politics. Without these, I don't get my train set.”
Geff rolled his eyes in response, "1:1 scale train set..."

Explanation of the above:

In a world of Tim's, where the players made themselves as characters, I supposed that I had become a Great Mage on a ringworld and ran a railroad all the way around it.

Not that I am a bold and intrepid maker and shaper of events large and small in real life.

If Geff and I were dumped into Yrth two things would confront us immediately. First is the Ministry of Secrets attempting to erase our minds of anything that upsets the medieval apple cart. Second is Geff's health. His asthma will require either tech for medicine that doesn't exist there or learning enough magic to just cure him. The process of two thirty somethings learning to use magic in a guild ruled setting and not being revealed as outsiders would make us a lot leaner and meaner than we are today. I am supposing that we succeeded and are now getting bitter about the whole nobility and commoner deal.

Naturally we have both read the books that spell out the setting and have a huge advantage over other outsiders that would have been pulled into the world.

I know just enough about the tools to make the tools to bootstrap some of the tech. There is going to be a learning curve as we translate the things that we have read about into things we are building.

We also think from reading about the cosmology of the Yrth system that going out and getting a small meteorite would create a high mana zone centered on it. Knowing how to use magic and knowing about general conditions on the moon would allow us to go there and gather some of this mana-rich material. This would allow us to make a small area in the no-mana Great Desert where magic works.

The next bug hurdle would be the lizard men of the Great Desert. I know more than enough to make a Maxim and gun powder. That should secure us against them. And with no magic, we don't need to worry about scrys or reverse missile.