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==Chapter 3 - A Toreel Wizard in Prince Davion's Court==
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===A Frustrated Active Captain===
-from the Acting Captain's log, March 27 3025 (presumptive)~
Astronomical survey appears to confirm that we have successfully left the California Nebula, based on relative position of observed stars and projections from the astronomical database.
Captain Patrick Heard and five crew remain unaccounted for after a shipwide search. We even went to far as to send people outside the hull to look. No luck, they're currently listed as lost. Most of the crew sustained superficial to minor injuries during the jump.
That's the problem, right? During the jump? You know what they tell you in school, what you see in a jump, assuming you see anything, isn't real, it's a hallucination. Your mind is playing tricks on you because it's being bombarded by sensory data that doesn't make any sense.
But that happened, and we've got the wounds to prove it. Well, most of us. One of our passengers, the (audible sigh) "elf girl" in the impractically form fitting plate armor (something you'd see in some of the more roleplay oriented pleasure circuses), she can heal with a touch. I admit, it's cool to see, and apparently it doesn't hurt, even when it's snapping bones back into place. I... passed on it when offered. "Save it for the rest of the crew" I said, but really it gives me the willies. 
There's a limit to how much she can do it without resting to recover the ability. So only a few with the most significant injuries got the treatment. Gotta wonder how that works. Can she store up healing juju over time to use it more when she needs it? Is it some sort of energy she can store somewhere else? Bottle it? Put it in a magic healing... battery or something?
''
Their cat can do it too, though not as much as the Elf Girl (nope, that will never sound right). Nobody wanted to volunteer for that. Can't blame them. I can still hear something like hungry, angry cats crying at me in the back of my head, and, well, the scratches are distinctive. ''
I think I've calmed down enough to not specifically blame their cat for any of this, even though it talks, and it flies, and it's magic, and it's clearly NOT NORMAL. But hey, maybe it is for them. Who knows how many potentially murderous magical cat monsters there are where they come from? 
Still, I told the tiny wizard to keep her cat away from the crew for now. Apparently the cat's being a brat about the whole thing. I offended his honor or some nonsense. 
Pat was so excited about these people. Not just finally getting out of the nebula, but what they could mean for the people back home. The wonders, the discoveries, the PROFIT if we could be the first to monetize actual magic. "Change the universe" he said. "Forget scrounging old star league relics. When they get a load of this girl..."
Looks like you get your wish, Pat. We're going home, and she's going with us. I just hope we all don't regret it.
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===Recounting old stories and fretting for adventures to come===
April 4, 3025?
L'heo found Chim in their quarters at the desk, sitting on a couple pillows to give her the elevation she needed to actually see what was on the desk.
"They said they're turning off the gravity to get ready to jump," he told her. 
"I can tell," Chim said, tapping one of her ears. "The spinning is slowing down. It's actually kind of a relief. I always feel a little queezy in here."
The crew had called it "spin gravity". They spun a whole section of the ship to simulate the sensation of being on a planet. L'heo found the actual why and how (and this whole field of "Newtonian physics" related to it) quite fascinating. Though both Chim and Celia were particularly sensitive to the "spin" part of things. 
"I wasn't sure I'd find you in here," L'heo said. "Staying inside for this one?"
Chim didn't look up from her work, but she did slightly shake her head. "No, never again," she said. "They were right to tell me it was a bad idea."
L'heo looked over the desk. It was covered with parchments and papers covered in writing, magical symbols and formulae. Chim had apparently been aware enough to take precautions against losing "gravity", each sheet was held in place by those little lodestones the crew used to fix things to the metal walls. 
"What are you working on so intently," L'heo asked. 
"Something I've been thinking about since we met these people," Chim said. "You remember that old story, 'Thither and Then Returning?'"
"That old children's story, you mean?" L'heo said as he sat down on the bed closest to the desk.
"If you must call it that," Chim said. "It carries the validation of Archmage Grando the Golden. We can assume at least some of it happened."
"Grando was always a bit of a blowhard in my experience," L'heo said. "But sure."
"In the story of the Death of Beanomir, Grando talks about how he was able to eventually return the Beast of Iron and Fire to his own land, though it lay beyond the reach of normal magic."
"He liked to boast like that." L'heo said. "If he didn't make the whole thing up he probably waited for a flock of eagles to take care of the beast." 
"I thought so too." Chim said. "But meeting these people made me wonder. I tried teleportation first, you know. Their captain, Patrick, gave me a description of his home on some world called New Avalon and I tried teleporting there directly. It didn't work."
"Well it wouldn't have," L'heo said. "They live in a different plane of existence."
"Yes, but we didn't know that at the time." Chim said. "I also tried to teleport one of the places they'd visited after they were trapped, some sort of tiny ice world they got water from for some reason. Again, it didn't work."
She looked a little bit sheepish. "That was before I'd learned about space suits and vacuums and there not being air to breath out there. So that was probably a good thing."
"I tried a few more experiments and done more research since then," she said, then held up a hand to forestall complaint. "Safely, mind you. After we crossed the planar boundary I tried New Avalon again. It still didn't work. The root structure of the spell simply wasn't designed to handle distances so vast we don't even have numbers to express them. Why would it? No wizard in our lives has probably ever considered the need to travel to other worlds."
She tapped the pile of papers on the desk before her. "At least not yet," she said with a smile.
L'heo looked down at the apparently disorganized mess of papers. "So you're going to fix it?"
"I really, really, really didn't enjoy the last jump." Chim said. "It might take me months to work out the rest of the details, but Captain Doug says we'll have all that time or more before we reach where we're going." She smiled again. "Besides. Imagine what we can do when we return home? There are so many worlds around us just in our home plane, just waiting to be explored. Who knows what we could find?"
L'heo frowned. "That's usually what a young adventurer says shortly before he and all of his friends die."
== Author's Chapter Notes ==
*; Author's Note : Interplanetary Teleport actually. It's effectively a ninth level version of greater teleport.Plane shift or gate could work in theory. You plane shift to another plane and plane shift again to your destination (or within several miles of it with plane shift). There are... complications to that which I'll be going into, however.Structurally, the planets of the Battletech universe would be all on the same plane, since you can (mostly theoretically) cross between them by slow boating without hitting a planar boundary. But Gate spells (or magical equivalents to stargates) would still be necessary in some cases. Teleport has a fairly harsh upper limit to how much you can bring with you, while a gate spell will take anything that can fit through it.
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