Appendix • Graviton Tensor Studies

"*He pulls out another case and this time all of you, but especially those with magical abilities, can hear this faint, dull, hum coming from inside. Like something vibrating at high speeds.*"
 ― The Storyteller

## Transcript

### Preliminary Inspection

The case you are given is simple and plain. Just wood, fine wood mind you, but nothing particularly expensive or ornate. It has a simple latch that seems to be made of silver, which you pop open, and begin to pry open the lid of the box. As you do so, the faint noise of humming grows louder, until it’s a low dull droning noise.

The inside of the box is lined with velvet. Nestled in the middle is a cube which, best you can tell, is the source of the humming, though from the looks of it its not vibrating itself. The cube itself is made of very familiar metal, a faint bluish silver akin to the material that held the blue crystal in place in the artefact you had found beneath the chapel. This time the metal does not look dulled and corroded by time, instead it gleams splendidly and reflects the firelight.

The cube’s surface is not smooth. It has a number of channels running across the surface arranged in intricate lines and arcs connecting to six circular holes, one in the very centre of each face. These holes are maybe a centimetre deep and fitted perfectly into them are circles of glass-like crystal, which in itself seems to be engraved with more fine grooves in circles and lines.

You pick up the cube to inspect it more closely. When you do so, you can feel the minute vibrations emanating from inside the cube, and from beneath the glass openings begins emanating this pale amethyst glow, which in turn branches out through all the connected channels and furrows until they’re all lit with the same glow. It’s only now, under this pale glow and from a closer distance, that you can see: the outside of the cube is covered in this tiny, tiny, impossibly small writing.

### Study Session 1

Your preliminary studies into the writings reveal them to be very complicated magical formulae. The language and symbols in play here are completely different from what you’re used to, but by the end of this first session you’ve begun to parse together an idea of what they might contain using your knowledge of the rules of spellcasting and the general structure of arcane formulae. What you find so far excites you immensely.

You’ve only deciphered the very simplest beginnings of these formulae, but best you can tell, they have similar initial hooks (the formula structure that begins the drawing in of arcana) to the magical formulae that you’re most familiar with, those that manipulate gravity and physics. You’re still not sure exactly what purpose this object could have once served, but your current working theory is that it may have been a tool of some kind. Maybe for using gravity manipulation to cause objects to float or to make them easier to handle? You’re not sure.

### Study Session 2

Continuing your studies, you surmise that there’s more complexity to these formulae than you had initially imagined. Not only are there several distinct formulae, but it seems that some of them intermingle and reuse parts of each other to create a sort of branching network of glyphs and lettering. For all you know, everything on the surface of this cube could be connected to each other.

It’s something that you’ve never seen done before. Spells are incredibly complex things that take years of study and research to understand and decipher, let alone to inscribe into objects. The idea that someone, somewhere, at some point of history, was capable of making something along this level of complexity, far beyond anything you’ve seen, is...terrifying, and exciting at the same time.

You still have no idea what the grooves that run along the outside faces do, what purpose they serve. They could be only decoration, but everything else about the tensor is deliberate, precise. You also wonder, would something this complicated be simply a tool? Maybe there’s something you’re missing, but for now you’re unable to solve that particular mystery.

### Study Session 3

You spend your time this session trying to copy down and untangle as much of the writing as possible. Most of the formulae remain beyond your grasp, in that you can’t seem to follow the right paths of the branching structure to create something that seems complete to you.

It doesn’t help that you’re still not very familiar with the style of glyphs and lettering that you’re seeing here, but you’re slowly becoming more comfortable with it, and you think you may be close to deciphering at least one or two of the more basic, shorter formulae, which in turn should hopefully open the doors to understanding the rest.

Amongst the arcane glyphs, you find another curiosity. It seems that not all of the writing here is necessarily a part of the formulae, or perhaps it is and you’re just not seeing how. Regardless, you copy out a few phrases that seem to be simply words, of a similar alphabet to the writing you saw several days ago, along the outsides of that doorway you opened deep beneath the buried chapel. You resolve to try and translate those separately when you have the time.

*Upon translation, you realise that most of the phrases you have found here are incomplete. Almost like footnotes jotted down in the corners of pages. Inconsequential maybe, but some of the ramblings do draw your attention. You see talk of stars other than your own. Talk of a journey, a long pilgrimage, or maybe an escape, and in multiple places you see talk of three things: The Lie. The Truth. The Test. Capitalised, you note, so talking about something specific. But what?*

### Study Session 4

You focus your efforts on the writing you’ve copied, continuing to try and put the hundreds of little pieces together in different combinations, hoping to find something that makes sense. It’s strange, because the parts that make sense to you seem to have no connection on the surface of the cube. For example, you see what could be a middle part of an arcane formula, and an end part that seems to match it, but they’re completely disconnected from each other, and by conventional enchantment that would simply render the spell null.

Still, using the knowledge you have of magical formulae, and the small coherent piece you’ve already deciphered (the cantrip), you begin to reverse engineer a basic spell out of the translated components. It’s still missing some parts, but you make good progress, expanding your overall knowledge of this new paradigm of arcane theory and branching out to test the waters with the rest of these components which thus far remain beyond your understanding.

With progress on this front, you further cement your belief that most of the formulae inscribed into the tensor are connected in some way. There’s a running backbone, repeated parts with small variations, hooks that tie into each other, forming a part of a greater whole. You can’t quite piece together what that whole is, so far, which would be frustrating if you weren’t so fascinated by this whole puzzle laid out before you.

### Study Session 5

You decide take a break from the writings, and turn your attention back to the cube itself. You start by inspecting it at a material level. The metal is familiar, in that you’ve seen it before at least. It’s cool to the touch, slightly reflective, and light. Very light. A metal cube of this size would probably be quite heavy to carry if the metal were dense, but as it stands you’re able to hold it without much issue.

There’s plenty of metals familiar to you that would be able to accomplish this sort of thing, of course. Mithral and mithral alloys in particular come to mind. This doesn’t seem to match what you know of those materials, although you’re not a materials expert.

As for the crystal panels embedded into the six holes of the tensor, those are something else. From your studies, you would know that gemstones an other crystalline structures have a tendency of being good at the stable storage arcana, so it stands to reason that there would be some amount of gemstone *inside* this cube, to serve as a storage for arcana and power up what it does.

By extension of that logic, it would then maybe be the case that the grooves running along the surface are similar to the glyph chains used to channel arcana from Dellian cores. Wires, of sorts, that transfer energy from one point to another. An intriguing possibility, one that bears further study.

### Study Session 6

You continue your study on the grooves that run around the entire outside surface of the tensor. After taking some time to inspect them more closely, you discover that there’s even more writing on the insides of each channel, even smaller and more delicate than the rest. How anyone would have managed to make something that delicate and that small without error is beyond you.

That being said, the glyphs in play here seem to be much simpler than the ones that make up the formulae on the outside. You see glyphs of holding, glyphs of stabilisation, and glyphs of transference. The same kind of glyphs you would expect to find on glyph chains, proving your initial hypothesis correct. The grooves do serve a purpose of moving arcana around, or at least the majority of them do.

You note that some of the grooves have no writing in them, indicating a different purpose. Closer inspection reveals hairline fractures running through the bottom of each of these grooves, very precise lines that fit together almost imperceptibly. Pushing carefully against one side of a groove, it seems to jiggle just slightly, and you realise that maybe the tensor wasn’t one fixed whole structure as you had initially believed.

It seems that the different sections, separated seemingly randomly by the transference channels, could feasibly slide around, rearranging the surface of the cube into different configurations. With this, a previous conundrum falls into place.

The varying components on the surface *are* disconnected from each other, but only because the tensor is in the wrong combination. Feasibly, if you can figure out how to rearrange the puzzle on the surface of this object, you can bring those separate components together to form entire formulae, and then rearrange the puzzle again to form different formulae, and so on.

The jumbled mess of components in your head slowly but surely begins to fall into place, all you have to do now is find the means to physically piece it together.

### Study Session 7

The next step in your study is to understand how to reconfigure the tensor’s surface. It’s like one of those puzzles you would do as a child, where you had 8 sliding panels in a 3x3 grid, and you could only move an adjacent panel into the empty space, sliding the panels around one move at a time to try and form a whole picture, having to carefully plot your next move in the puzzle to make sure it led you in the right direction.

This puzzle is just like that, except there’s no helpful grid, and the panels in question are far less distinct and far more complex. You have different shapes, panels that move separately, others that move separately at first then after a certain move seem to slot into each other and move together, and so on.

You start at the crystals at the centre of each face of the cube. The circular section around them seems to be fixed, like the corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle. From there, you work outwards, trying to combine your knowledge of the arcane components you had previously studied and bring together relevant parts.

Slowly but surely, you begin to get the hang of it, to get a feel for how the parts of the cube move, and more importantly when and where they should move. The pieces of the puzzle begin to come together, grooves connecting to other grooves, the faint amethyst glow from the crystal faces immediately running down the new channels, lighting up different sectors of glyphs.

It’s exhausting work, and by the end of the evening you’ve barely made a dent in bringing together the overall set of separate components, but regardless you feel a deep sense of accomplishment. The thrill that often came with finally seeing the solution to a logical problem, the adrenaline spike that drove you to rush towards the conclusion. But, for now, you push that down. You don’t want to be too hasty and make stupid mistakes, not now that you’ve come this far.

### Study Session 8

With practice comes familiarity, and with familiarity comes skill; you’ve always told yourself, and you apply that mantra to the problem now at hand. Over and over, you reset the puzzle to the starting configuration, and over and over you explore new ways to branch out from that. What was once careful handling of small intricate panels of metal becomes an almost instinctual process.

Your fingers run nimbly over every surface, pushing and pulling and twisting, manipulating the tensor with greater confidence. You’re close, you can feel it. With every small movement, the vibrations at the centre of the cube seem to grow smoother, turning from a grating rumbling to almost a purr.

You’ve managed thus far to piece together two different configurations that seem stable and coherent. One is a basic spell that you’re already familiar with, one for the detection of magic. The other is new, something that should in theory grant you some momentary manipulation of gravitational forces on others, allowing you to fling objects and creatures in a direction. Those discoveries alone are already intriguing, enough to keep your studies occupied for some time, but you’re close to something else you think. Closer to finding out what the backbone of this cube is, that running structure that seems to pervade the whole thing.

You’re so engrossed in the work, acting on a nearly subconscious level, you almost miss the solution. Your fingers falter, and your eyes dart from one piece to the next, working three to four steps ahead in your mind, making sure you’re not missing something, a reason that this shouldn’t work. You can’t find it.

With bathed breath, you slide the pieces into place, and feel a faint click. At once, the humming of the tensor grows faster, into a low whine, and you watch a strange bubble of translucent amethyst begin to expand outward from the cube. It wraps around you, encasing you head to toe in this vague oval-shaped sphere clinging close to your skin.

It tingles, the hairs on your arms and neck stand at attention, and you can feel the occasional sparks of static jumping between you and the bubble.  You can smell the ozone on the air, and a broad smile begins to spread on your face. You turn, excited, to show the others, and with the motion twist the cube sideways...and shoot in that direction with a jolt and a yelp. Your stomach leaps into your chest, the sensation of falling hitting you like a truck, and your brain going into overdrive as up becomes left, and left becomes down, and down becomes right.

The world re-orients, and you plummet sideways, dragging across the ground scrambling for purchase, for a mere few seconds before there’s another wrench and your acceleration grinds suddenly to a halt, as though you had slammed into a wall, completely knocking the breath out of you.