Paging Arthur C. Clarke... [Video]

[trustycrowbar]

[Gordon fidgets when he first sits down in front of the camera, fiddling with his glasses.]

So... for those of you who don't know me, my name is Doctor Gordon Freeman. I'm a scientist and a Transport just like all of you, and there's something that I've observed for the longest time that intrigues me.

Magic. Some of us use it here, or at least have powers that are worthy of the term... Now, I'm not looking to start any sort of science-versus-magic debate here. On the contrary; I'd like to ask those of you who use such powers a few questions about them so that we can gain a better idea of what kinds of powers we've got around here.

Where do you draw your power from? How is it focused? Do you use spells, words, gestures, symbols? Or something else? Are there any dangers to you when you use it? Things like this. I realize some of this might be personal, but anything you can volunteer would be useful; hell, it's still better than nothing.

Comments

[trustycrowbar]

[Aaaaand they probably worked outside the law and reasonable ethics, under mountains of paperwork held together with red tape. Unfortunately, he's already seen all that before.]

So what are they? Materia? The lifestream? This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I was asking about.

Man, I hope I am getting my made up final fantasy science right.

[shelkethetransparent]

[Well, outside the law until they took over the world, anyway.]

The lifestream is the energy that drives all life on Gaia. Everything there is made of it. Our science assumes that every planet has one, but so far people I have spoken to have...disagreed.

[Her science wasn't weird, damn it.]

When the lifestream turns into a liquid it's called mako, which is what Shinra powered the world on. When that liquid crystalizes, it's called Materia.

[trustycrowbar]

[Oh god, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT EVIL RESEARCH COMPANIES TAKING OVER THE WORLD.]

Sounds a little like the petroleum industry. Only plastic doesn't normally give you superpowers. Y'know, there's something called the Gaia Hypothesis that models a life-sustaining planet as a single organism as a simplification for its complicated internal homeostasis mechanisms. It's not a popular paradigm to teach, frankly I see it as a fanciful notion more than a model, but I can see this "lifestream" could be a logical component of it. Problem is, I've never come into contact with anything that verified it.

[He stops.]

...Then again, there WAS that weird blue gel on Xen that healed everything it touched. A-and then there were the crystals that seemed to form around it...

[shelkethetransparent]

[Another world with a theory that sounded like how her own world actually functions. Fascinating. She shifts a bit in her seat as she considers it.] On my own world the lifestream is unavoidable. There are places where it bubbles to the surface and creates mako fountains. If it were deep enough, conceivably few people would know about it, allowing a hypothesis with little evidence but...

[It still seems unlikely. Do other worlds really not have a lifestream? Hmm.]

What is Xen?

[trustycrowbar]

Xen is a borderworld, kind of the next dimension over from my world. We'd been making expeditions there for years, but I didn't know about them at the time, I wasn't in that division. I became very familiar with it later, after an analysis on one of the crystals they'd given us went... wrong.

[The word falls flat, but only because there is no word to describe just how dramatically and horribly it changed everyone's lives the moment he shoved that crystal into the spectroscopy beam...]

[shelkethetransparent]

Hmm. Perhaps it had a lifestream. Experimentation on Materia has caused some remarkable accidents.

[And at least one reactor meltdown.]

[trustycrowbar]

I think the landmasses were genuinely alive, or at least had a biological component permeating them. Spikes the size of skyscrapers would extend out of the rock, parts would shift and move, I swear to god the tunnels would dilate as I got near them... Unfortunately I didn't have much time to take samples, or do any testing.

[shelkethetransparent]

Hmm. Gaia itself wasn't...well, it was alive, but not in that sense, it wasn't a creature.

[She isn't certain how to classify this.]

[trustycrowbar]

[This is something he can't hope to hazard through, so he waits for her to better explain...]

[shelkethetransparent]

[Think think think.]

While the lifestream provided life to every creature on the planet, it did not give life to the planet itself. Just the things that occupied it. Gaia was still made of rock.