Chapter 1
Roland half-fell into his apartment and flung himself onto the sofa, growling.
His roommate, Andrew, raised an eyebrow. “Rough day?”
Roland groaned. “You remember Mrs. Cavanaugh? The one with all the kids who always lets them run wild? Well, today the youngest decided to stick a shovel into the loo. Of course the safety filters didn’t accept it, so he started twisting it around. Managed to scratch up the glyphs pretty good.”
Andrew winced. “What broke?”
“Flow direction.” Roland grimaced at the memory. “As soon as I pulled that shovel out, the entire contents of the building’s sanitation reservoir started spewing out of the loo. By the time I got the emergency shutdown artifact out of my bag and activated, the entire room was coated. Except for the bits I was protecting with my body, of course.”
“Delightful. She let you clean up, I hope?”
“Yeah, fortunately—or possibly out of necessity, given the size of that family—she’d sprung for a top-class cleaning spell. Detects and removes any sort of bodily waste anywhere in the room. Took half an hour to run, but it got us clean.” He paused. “I still feel disgusting, though.”
“I bet.”
Roland sat up abruptly. “But that’s enough of that. Did I tell you I got my project to work?” With a slightly manic grin, he bounced off the sofa and ran to his room.
Andrew turned back to the dinner he had been attempting to eat, ignoring the thuds and muffled curses from the direction of Roland’s room.
A moment later, Roland emerged again, bearing a tray full of what appeared to be potatoes with metal objects sticking out of them. Balancing the tray on one hand, he slapped the light glyph on the wall with the other, shutting off the overhead lights.
“Hey!”
Ignoring Andrew’s protest, he slid the tray onto the dining room table. Something unseen fell off the far side with a crash.
Andrew sighed. “Is this going to take long? I need to get to bed early tonight. We got some bigwigs from Court coming in tomorrow, and the boss wants everyone looking their best.”
Roland fumbled with something unseen. “Almost…got it… There!”
In the darkness, a short length of fine wire began to glow dimly.
Roland couldn’t help grinning widely. “Look at that! What do you think?”
“Okay, it’s glowing. So what?” The light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate Andrew’s skeptical expression, but Roland knew his roomie well enough to picture it.
“Don’t you see? I made light, without magic!”
There was silence for a moment from Andrew’s end of the table. Then he clapped once. In response, power blazed through the light spell overhead, illuminating the room and washing out the flickering filament Roland was holding.
Andrew crossed his arms. “Mine’s brighter.”
Roland’s shoulders slumped. He carefully put down the wires he was holding. “Yeah. I guess it’s really not that impressive. It’s just… I was hoping to have something to show at this year’s Terracon.”
Andrew sighed. Uncrossing his arms, he leaned forward. “I’m sorry, man. I shouldn’t have done that. All the work you put into this”—he eyed the jumble of wires and vegetables occupying the tray—“this experiment, the least I could have done was listen.” He paused. “So… light without magic, eh? How does it work?”
Roland’s eyes lit up. “Well, you see—”
Andrew chuckled and held up a hand. “Never mind. Let’s try something else. What is Terracon, and why would they be interested in root vegetables?”
“Well… Have you heard of the Terraverse?”
“I don’t think so. Should I have?”
Roland sat up straighter. “Terraverse is the biggest shared literary universe in existence. Thousands of authors have contributed to it over the centuries, expanding and adding details to the setting. Of course every author has their own preferred genres and stories and whatnot, but the Terraverse is so big, you can really do whatever you want, and it will fit in somewhere.”
“So what’s so special about this universe? Why not just write about our own?”
“Because the Terraverse”—Roland lowered his voice—“has no magic.”
Andrew stared at him blankly. “No magic? But how do the people there… you know, do anything?”
“That’s just it! They’ve had to come up with alternate, nonmagical ways to do everything we can do with magic.” Roland gestured at the mess in front of him. “This? This was a demonstration of a thing called ‘electricity’, which they use everywhere to power many of the things we use magic for.” He sobered abruptly. “Of course, they have the infrastructure to create and use it on a large scale, not this… this makeshift kiddie stuff. Here, any specialized components you need have to be custom-designed, which takes money.”
Andrew tilted his head to the side, musing, “No magic…”
Roland rubbed his hands together. “So that’s the Terraverse. And Terracon, of course, is a convention dedicated to all things Terra. You can dress up as your favorite character, go to writing workshops, discuss and debate your favorite stories, go to the vendor hall for Terra-themed artwork, visit the tech hall to see Terra-inspired magicless inventions—that’s what I was hoping to do—get books signed by your favorite authors… oh, basically anything and everything fans could dream of is there. And of course there are panels devoted to all the major genres.”
Andrew had been listening with a rather bewildered expression. “Genres?”
“Yeah, of course all the different authors have different interests, so their works have different flavors depending on what they’re into. One of my favorites is techfic—that’s short for ‘technology fiction’. It focuses on the scientific details of how exactly everything works in a world with no magic. There are more story-focused genres: politific, romancefic, explorefic, spyfic, and my all-time favorite, warfic. The boundaries between them can be fuzzy; for example, there can be a lot of overlap between politific and warfic. Sometimes you have to look carefully at the overarching storyline to distinguish between them. So you see—“
Andrew raised his hands, shaking his head. “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid. I hope you have fun at your con, though.” Shoving the last bite of food in his mouth, he stood and took his plate to the dish cleanser, then turned to go to his room.
Left alone in the dining room, Roland carefully gathered up his project to take back to his own room. Next time. Next time for sure. I’ll be able to afford a real battery and things, and I’ll make… I’ll make… something that will impress them all.
