The OP Lich is a Returnee, Chapter 32

Before we get into it, if you have any suggestions or questions about magic you want Kaori to answer in her lectures or 'office hours', feel free to mention them in the comments.

Chapter 32 – First Class

I was slightly nervous for my first lecture. After all, I had done many things in my unlife, but teaching was not one of them. Well, organized teaching, that is. I’d taught a few lessons here and there, and had helped my sister with redoing her thesis, but that was different from getting in front of a class and instructing them.

For this first class, I decided to come out in my shrine maiden outfit. There was a reason for it, of course. This first lesson would be about the fundamentals of magic, and one of those fundamentals was ‘belief’.

Waiting in the wings of the stage, I heard Doctor Fletcher introduce me, and stepped out, into the lights. Thankfully, my undead eyes did not need to adjust to the sudden brightness, even if I looked human at the moment. While waiting for the crowd to settle down, I nodded appreciatively to the professor, who slipped off the stage and into the audience.

“Greetings and well met, Students and Faculty of the University of Seattle! And well met to those visiting academics who came to hear me speak. As you know, I am Akagawa Kaori, or Kaori Akagawa, as you would say here in the United States. I am known by many names, and I’m sure you have all heard the news stories about me, by now, so I won’t waste our time here together by recounting them all.”

I took a breath. “Forty years ago, the Awakening happened, as mages from another world abducted a classroom full of high school kids, summoning them against their will and without their consent, to another world, to act as heroes who would save the world from a terrible foe. In these forty years, you have done incredible work coming to understand how magic works, and the different ways it can be used. I understand that Doctor Fletcher, who introduced me, is one of the world’s leading minds when it comes to the science of Thaumaturgy, and have read some of his papers on the subject.”

I smiled down at where Fletcher was sitting. “The conclusions he came to were all well-defined, and supported by the evidence at hand. Any student of science would agree that his methodology was perfect, given the knowledge he had available to him at the start. But it is only correct as far as it goes.

“Simply put, there are things in Doctor Fletcher’s work that are incorrect, or based on faulty data. I do not say this to disparage him, as he, and indeed all your Thaumaturgists, have been stumbling through the dark, learning as you went. Where you are now is at the same point as such intrepid pioneers as Marie Curie were back at the dawn of the twentieth century, when they just began to discover things like ‘radiation’. Many of Curie’s findings have since been disproven or superseded by later experiments by scientists building upon her works, but that does not mean that she was any less of a pioneer for it.”

Focusing my attention back on the class as a whole, I said, “The other world that I was summoned to had been exposed to magic for longer than their recorded history. To them, it was no different than the principles of the lever or wheel. They had spent countless centuries studying magic, and improving upon those studies. Comparing their knowledge of magic to your own would be like comparing the chemistry of the modern day to that of the alchemy of the ancient world. But you shouldn’t be disheartened by that. Indeed, that you have progressed as far as you have in the scant few decades since the Awakening is nothing short of astounding.”

I moved towards the right side of the stage, so that people weren’t just staring at the same place the whole time. “Now, this first class will be about the fundamentals of magic, as the other world knew them, and as they were taught to me. As good Thaumaturgists, I expect you all to take what you learn here, and apply it to your own concepts of magic, testing it to see what works and what does not. So, let me first begin with what was known in the other world as the Three Great Exceptions.

“These Great Exceptions were truths known to all, tested and retested by brilliant minds and desperate madmen both throughout the centuries. In that other world, they are as close to natural laws as concepts of gravity are in this one. They are three areas where, despite the efforts of countless mages over millennia of work, nothing but failure has been the result.

“The Three Great Exceptions are thus: first, through Magick, you cannot bring the dead back to life; second, through Magick, you cannot change the past once it is written; and third, through Magick, you cannot move faster than light.”

There was a ripple of discussion in the audience, and I smiled. “Now, I can already hear some of you questioning this. After all, I am standing here before you, and I died once before, no? But let us look at these Exceptions, and the exceptions to them.

“For the first Exception, the matter of bringing the dead back to life, I can tell you plainly that it is, as far as I am aware, true, as a whole. Undeath brings a soul back to a mockery of life, but not truly living. And there is a difference between ‘dead’ and ‘dead’. After all, even with medical science, someone who is clinically dead might still be revived, sometimes without even much in the way of brain damage, yes?

“So, we must separate those who are fully dead from those who are just mostly dead. Because there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.”

I let the quote hang there for a moment, and said, “Similar grey areas exist for the other Exceptions. It is, theoretically, possible to go back in time and kill Hitler before he started the Reich, changing the course of history. However, in so doing, you would not be changing the history of the world you knew, but rather bringing forward a new timeline. The timeline you left would continue on, just as it had before.

“As for faster than light travel? Well, within time and space such things are impossible. However, you can teleport in an instant across the globe, or even open portals bridging one place and another. This does not violate the Exception because you are not passing through space. Similarly, if you wrapped yourself in a bubble of space-time, and used gravity to cause that bubble to ‘fall’ faster and faster, you could achieve relative speeds faster than light, without actually moving faster than light yourself.

“Now, with that groundwork out of the way, let us get into magic itself.” I walked back to the center of the stage. “Some of you, no doubt, recognize my outfit, that of a Shinto priestess. Don’t worry, my weebs and otakus, I’m not here to expose you to your friends.” That got a chuckle from the audience. “Instead, I chose this outfit because it relates to one of the core tenets of magic.

“Belief is essential to magic. You are imposing your will upon the universe, and the universe listens to you because you believe that it ought to. What form that belief takes shapes your magic. Having a belief system helps strengthen your magic, because you have clear ideas about what should happen with the spell. However, it also limits you, because things outside your belief structure are as foreign to you as a language you’ve never heard before.

“The Science of Thaumaturgy is one such belief structure. The Shinto faith, or the philosophy of Buddhism, are others. Each is no more valid or invalid than the next. Belief is the prism through which you blend magic and your will, and then focus that energy upon the universe, producing the spells you desire. Remember that.”

I paused, to let it sink in, and then said, “Any of you who’ve completed high school Physics should know of Newton, and his Three Laws. Law One: barring outside forces, an object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will remain in motion. Law Two: Force equals Mass times Acceleration. Law Three: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Is anyone not familiar with at least the basics of these three laws?”

Seeing no one claiming they didn’t know basic physics, I continued on. “In the other world, there was a great thinker, similar to Newton, who sought to create rules of magic through observation and logic. His name was Thangvald, and he, too, created three laws, or rules, as he called them. Rule One: Magic is Mana shaped by the Mind. The Mind is Knowledge, Perceptions, and Intent. Therefore, each facet of the Mind influences the shape of the Magic. Rule Two: The sum of Mana, Energy, and Mass cannot be created or destroyed, it merely changes form. Rule Three: For every Magic, there is an equal and opposite Magic.”

I paused again, letting those laws sink in. “Let us start with the first rule. This is the simplest of the three to explain. If I were to cast a spell, I would take the mana, or the magicules, if you will, and shape it. So, how does that work? Let us go with a simple fireball.

“Intent is first. I want to hurt those guys, but they’re all the way on the other side of the room. That is the intent of the spell.

“Knowledge is second. I want to make an explosion of flame, yes? So, I need to know about fire to make that happen. Not just fire itself, but different kinds of fire. A match flame that fills a room would not do the same damage as a more violent flame, after all.

“Perception is third. You have to perceive the target to accurately hit it. If you do not perceive conditions correctly, the spell might misfire, fizzle out, or do something unexpected. Launching our fireball into a vacuum or under water would cause it to do nothing but waste our energy, unless we had knowledge that allowed us to burn things underwater. Launching that fireball into a room filled with explosives that we didn’t see might set those explosives off, possibly killing our allies along with our enemies. A close analogue would be one of the rules of gun safety you Americans have: always be aware of your target, and what is behind it.”

I paused to give them a second to consider that. “For the second rule, this is a close analogue to Einstein’s law of E=mc2. Only, instead of just Energy and Mass, Mana is added into the equation as well. I mention this now, for the sake of completeness. Unless you get into the furthest reaches of experimental Magicks, or take up the study of Ritual Magicks, then all you need to understand is that magic is not free. The power for your spells has to come from somewhere. Thus, how powerful a spell you can create depends on the amount of power you can access.

“Which brings us to the third rule. There are many ways that this rule can be interpreted. A fire spell might be canceled by a water spell of equal strength, for instance. A spell that renders one invisible could be countered, if you knew how. It also means that, if there is a spell to summon someone from another world, then there would be a spell to send them back.

“In basic terms, all of that is true. However, the skill and spellwork to reverse a spell is not necessarily the same as is needed to enact it. This is especially true for effects that have run their course. Undoing the effects of a fireball after it has exploded is not the same task as preventing the explosion in the first place, naturally. A spell that actively manipulates another’s mind is relatively simple to counter, but one that effectively brainwashes someone into a loyal servant, and then lets them go can be as difficult to undo as mental conditioning from more mundane means. There is no active spellwork to unravel, after all.

“Thus, changes that have been set, and their spellwork run its course, are considered to be far more difficult to deal with than a spell that is actively at work. So, what if a man were changed into a rat by a spell? If the spell was such that it changed his form and held it in that new shape until it was released, then turning him back is an easy enough spell. On the other hand, if it was a spell that simply turned the man’s body to that of a rat, rather than holding it in that shape, then reversing the spell would be incredibly difficult, especially if you didn’t know the specifics of the original spell.”

The room was quiet, as people digested that information. “This is why, in the other world, transmutations or enchantments that affected the body or mind of a person were considered some of the potentially most dangerous magicks in existence, next only to those spells which directly manipulated the souls of creatures. If this were not the United States, I would say that you should treat such spells as you would guns, but I would hope that you take a great deal more care with them than you do with guns, as some of them can be far more dangerous than any gun, if left in the hands of those who do not have the knowledge to use them properly, or those who have malicious intent.”

Doctor Fletcher caught my eye, and pointed to his watch, before raising his hand to indicate five minutes. Looking back at the crowd, I said, “I am afraid my time for this first class is almost up, so, I think we will end it there. If you have further questions, about today’s lesson, I will be spending the next two hours out in one of the common areas, but I urge all of you not to forsake your other classes just to talk to me. I’ll be here all week, after all.”