There was this familiar feeling Kanrel got while he stood in a lecture hall for the first time in a week or so. It had been decided that the lectures would resume for all novices within the academy, as most had already awakened from the Ritual.
He had even spent a moment longer looking around the lecture hall, so as to remember what it had felt like before, and what it felt now. Of course, this room wasn't one that he had entered before, but it was practically the same as the ten or so different ones that he had been in during the last seven or so years.
The only thing that truly had any difference wasn't something that was felt, per se, but something that could be clearly observed by anyone: the absence of certain people; faces at least somewhat familiar that were supposed to be there, but weren't.
Empty seats. It could mean only one thing…
Some were yet to awake, and some might have their eyes shut without ever seeing the light again. He thought he would feel worse. He didn't. They were almost strangers. Why should grief come? Yet, when he sat down, he still expected those few seats to be filled.
They remained empty. Perhaps, he didn't really feel bad about their absence, but the emptiness still somewhat bothered him.
Kanrel sat in his usual position, at the front, so that he could see everything in detail; no one would want to sit next to him. It was the only empty seat that didn't bother him. They all knew who he was, and they all knew he was the first to awaken; no one really knew what that meant. Was he just the first to take the leap of faith, or rather, the choice in despair, which is to kill oneself?
Was his lack of resolve to be applauded? Had he known something others did not? His mother was, after all, the Herald.
The others could think what they wanted about him. He was too immersed in the pages of another book that he had borrowed, this one about coding and the use of magic in medicine. It was far more complicated and far more prone to fatal errors, as he would need another person to practice most of these things on.
The human body was so complicated, and they knew far less about it than was ideal. Kanrel would have to find more literature about the subject; perhaps from those books, he could find a common understanding.
He heard someone sit next to him; he could smell this other person. It was the fragrance of pettiness.
"Must you pester me even here? Am I not safe anywhere?" Kanrel mumbled.
"Come now, are we not friends? Wait, don't answer. We aren't." Yviev replied in her naturally erratic manner.
Kanrel let out a long sigh. He had spent too much time with her in the past few days. They would eat together, they would practice coding and magic together, they would discuss such things, and what was worse, they would even talk to each other.
He hoped that he could describe it as fun or any other equivalent word. Instead, it was just the same, and he couldn't really tell if he suffered more or less while spending time with her. It was so hard to discern the amount of emotional fluctuation within or notice if there was any at all.
But at least she had been of great value; she provided a different point of view from his, and through her, he could test his codes and theories. She would, of course, benefit equally, so their relationship was mostly equally beneficial to both parties.
Yviev spread her notebooks and books she had been reading as of late on the table. This mess took a considerable amount of space away from Kanrel, but he didn't mind that too much. He didn't need that much space for himself.
In the middle of turning another page, a loud bang erupted as a door was violently closed.
Everyone peered at the bald woman who had entered the lecture hall, Ewen Oidus, a talented priest who was most definitely insane, or at least ready to cross the border of insanity. Her studies and research were explosive, no less; they were also very interesting, but equally dangerous, especially for the uninitiated.
Twice now, Kanrel had been in the same room when she decided to cause a minor accident in the laboratory. It wasn't a big deal, but he was obliged to help her clean up her own mess. She was his senior after all, and it would've been impolite of him not to help, as she had pointed out... multiple times.
Ewen took her place in front of everyone there and let her gaze study the faces of her new pupils. She then began her speech: "I do think that this is a considerable waste of my time, but it is also an obligation that I have to abide by, mainly to keep up with the pretense of being a teacher."
"If I didn't waste my time here teaching you something as simple as coding, I would not be allowed to continue my research."
"Thus, I will make sure that each of you, my little priestlings, will learn all that there is to learn about coding, so that I might return to much more important matters; anything else, just not this."
She stood straighter, though quite lazily. "I am your professor for this course on Advanced Coding and the Use of Magical Energy in Practice."
She initiated an equally lazy bow. "You may call me Professor Oidus or High Priest Oidus; both are fine as they give due respect to my name... Now, let us begin."
The first hour or so, Professor Oidus spent quickly going over the things that they all should know by now. Such simple questions as: What is magic? What about coding and the logic behind it? And so forth.
And then it was time for things to get much more complicated.
"Recently, I've been observing a couple of novices in their early stages of coding in practice. And what I found out is that lifting a chair can be quite challenging, especially if you overcomplicate it."
She made a slight glance at Kanrel and Yviev and said, "But it did prove beneficial in their ability to approach the idea of lifting a chair through numerous, and sometimes quite creative, ways."
"So my first assignment for you all is to produce a code that you will use to lift a chair. Consider this a test: a test of the knowledge that you have thus far, a test of how you might use that knowledge, and a test of how you might seek more knowledge. This is also a test of your creativity."
"Sure, one can make an easy code to lift a chair."
She then looked at a chair that was on the side of the lecture hall. With her magic, she first moved it near her, then lifted it easily.
"To achieve the goal of lifting this specific chair, I've used the simplest one that I could think of. But what if we got more creative? What if, for example, we did this?"
The chair suddenly disappeared, then appeared again about three feet higher.
"This we call Instant Material Portation; it is quite useful, but it does require a much longer and more complicated code to achieve. Also, technically, I am not lifting it; I am just switching the positions of two physical entities with each other."
"The location of the chair with the location that does not have a chair."
She then allowed the chair to drop on the floor, causing another loud bang to echo through the lecture hall.
"I want you all to create a code that is as creative as possible and then showcase your code before the class; you have until the end of the week. Oh, and the requirement for success is to lift the chair for at least a centimeter, and the failure to do so will award you the job of observing my much more interesting experimentations and cleaning after my much more interesting mess."
She then looked around, letting her gaze go from student to the next. She nodded to herself, as if pleased with the lack of raised hands, and said: "I am dismissed, and so are the rest of you."
Without another word, Oidus marched out of the lecture hall. Kanrel could easily guess where she might go.
He had gotten used to her fickle nature already, so he got his stuff and left the lecture hall that had been confused to a silence with Yviev right behind his back. He was curious to see the codes that the others might come up with, but he also had to develop one. The basic solution bored him, and if he was going to suffer through using magic, it should at least be interesting and equally complicated so as to further his own abilities and his tolerance toward it. And thus, a word came to his mind: gravity.
His idea might fail, but he could always come up with a new plan just in case. Four days just wasn't a lot of time to mess around, so his feet would take him to the same place where Oidus would find herself. The Laboratory for the Study of Magical Energy.
And because he wouldn't want Oidus to know about his ideas before the evaluation of their creativity, he decided to book another hall for him and Yviev to use, even though they wouldn't really work on the same code together, but it might be useful to help each other out if either of them ran into any issues. A room where he would spend more time in the coming days than anywhere else.
However, the very first question Kanrel would have to tackle and consider was already something complicated: what is gravity, and what are its properties? How does it work?
From the library, he found countless books about this matter, so he did the only thing that he could do other than give up: he began consuming such books as quickly as he could. Truthfully, this didn't help as much as he would've liked, but it did give him some general ideas, which he would have to test.
How the hell does one create a point of gravitational energy? With magic, of course, but how?
A day went by with him just pondering this idea, sometimes throwing his pencil in the air and observing how it fell to the ground. Obviously, the ground had the most gravitational attraction, and it is known that all objects have such a pull.
The ground pulled harder than the pencil could resist. That's why it fell. Simple enough. But creating a gravitational point strong enough to overcome the world itself? That would require an object that had a higher gravitational force than the very ground beneath it? How much does the world even weigh? And wouldn't conjuring a point like that cause some serious issues? Like collapsing the room around it into one specific location, like a ball of clutter.
That wasn't something he wanted to do. And it didn't matter that he would change the weight of a chair to almost zero if the ground would still have a higher amount of gravitational pull than any smaller gravitational 'pool' that he'd make. So he had to discard his initial idea, not because he wouldn't be able to achieve it by making a location that had some gravitational pull to it, but because making one too large would have some unwanted effects, and he doubted that he could make a location that had a far greater pull than the ground below.
So, what about magnets? What if he made a location above the chair magnetic, and then he changed the properties of the chair to become magnetic as well? Wouldn't these two locations then attract each other? He could make the location in the air unmoving so that these 'objects' would always meet at the same location, or height.
Yviev, in the meanwhile, had sat down for a long while on her side of the hall. She seemed to play around with a ball, which she bounced around with her brows furrowed. Then, she jerked from her chair and rushed to the curtains that could be used as a way to divide the hall and pulled them close, all the while holding on to a crazed grin. Kanrel could only shudder at the sight, and soon he shuddered at the commotion of sounds from the other side of the hall. He wanted to take a peek, but decided to give Yviev her privacy. Besides, he didn't want to find himself a test subject for something that sounded loud and possibly dangerous.
Another day went by as he tested magnetism. He had created a highly magnetic area suspended in the air. He managed to change the properties of a given chair to be of the opposite polarity in magnetism.
Pencil in hand, he observed as the two 'objects' met each other; he had succeeded. The chair was now above the floor by six feet or so. In his mind, this is how his first theory would've worked as well. But the problem with gravity is that it pulls all objects toward itself, not just things that have a magnetic pull.
It worked. That was all. It was enough. But it could be better.
He wrote down his observations. All he had found out and all he thought about were now written down in his notebook. He had a day and a half to spare, so he spent the rest of the day perfecting the code that he had created, making it as streamlined as possible while still having the desired effect.
The last day, he spent reviewing his writings, and he pondered the possibility of using gravity the way he had first proposed. For this, he devised a code with less gravitational pull, just that which is equal to the strength of the magnetic pull that he had devised.
He then tried it out, but the chair remained unmoving. He then threw a coin into the pool of gravity, and he observed as its course was slightly altered by this other force. That day, he threw many things into the pool of gravity and wrote down his findings. He also noted how his body reacted to using codes much more complicated than what he had been used to. He seldom found himself vomiting anymore, which was somewhat saddening, since he didn't get to burn it. But it still felt like he would vomit at any given moment.
His own existence made him feel nauseous.