Book| The Diary of Ernen Kebble
Ernen Kebble appears to have been a pre-disaster wizard or sorcerer who became an oddly prepared mummy. His remains were found in 1412 in a pre-disaster lighthouse which was discovered in the mountains east of Wolsnium in Jorlinum. The diary was is in poor condition when found, but described some of Kebble's work into what he called the Von Valden effect, after one of the magical masters he was studying under.
The book is a leather-bound notebook, about 14 inches tall and 8 inches wide. Inside there may have been fifty or sixty pages, but the process by which Kebble was embalmed seems to have glued many of the pages together. A yellowish bile has soaked into all of the paper in the book, but the last few pages are free and some of the writing can be read. The book also has an odd aroma, whether it is the bile or something used in the ink, or even the paper used in the book is impossible to tell.
The contents of the diary use a calendar which is no longer recognised in the post-Disaster world, this makes it difficult to to put a date to Kebble's work, although the time line of the work is clear to see.
Perhaps there are experts who could free up the stuck pages without destroying the writing and gain a greater insight into the magic user's work. Here are the contents of the diary that can be deciphered|
... from the dates in von Valden's notes. We had a hard time decoding the number sequences but Aldric came to our aid again. It turned out (as I'd suspected and I'd told Aldric privately) to be a way that the energy sources could be held open. We have now some mathematics that support these theories, and now Walter and I need to spend some time in the laboratory investigating testing these results in practice. Aldric shall be busy for the next few days continuing this work as there are aspects of this that need to be analysed further. The energy calculations do not match what we had for the other channels we'd opened last month, and it's all very confusing. At times I wish that Master Otmar and I had spent more time looking at this while he was still with us.
Essaris 12.
Aldric has provided some more data that keeps driving our research. Last week I spent time in the laboratory trying to prove or disprove von Valden's power and energy volume sequences for open energy channels. I did neither in the end as the information I was using to propel my research was incomplete. This only arose because the Aldric had called for more time with the equivalence equations for these energy sources. As his work was not complete, I encouraged him to work harder and complete it as quickly as he may, but I tried also to press ahead and test those theories. I could not achieve my goal, however. There seemed to be no sequences that would work for this energy source, and I struggled at times to contain the power that was trying to squeeze through from this source. It was yesterday that Aldric completed working with his numbers, and we discussed them at great length yesterday evening over our shared meal with Cabrin and his crew in the tower above. We began working with this new information only this morning. This afternoon Walter and I showed that for low values of e that the sequence suggested, all the power levels remained as predicted. As the values of e rise, though, Aldric predicted that the energy levels would deviate; and they did. Master Otmar's research did not predict this, we are extremely proud of Aldric for his foresight.
This evening we dined in the laboratory as we completed more of our last experiments. It was late in the evening when we ended today's work, yet we ended with some joy at the accomplishment. Walter is bringing our research log up to date as I compile this note. We have more of this to do tomorrow.
Essaris 18
We have barely completed this step of our work with this energy source, and its presence here on the material plane as plasma, yet Walter requested that we harness that power and trap it into a wand or a rod of some kind. We know that this work is far from complete, but that suggestion seemed like a sensible line of investigation. It does break from the theories of von Valden, though, and so I am reluctant to pursue this for long, but we have a clear understanding of what we're doing with this energy source now - and the manipulation of it is so different to the magic I have used before. Perhaps it could be that it does not diminish the spell proponent when preparing magic stores in this way. It was one of the persuading arguments presented by Walter when he requested that we try this.
I have agreed on this basis to spent just two weeks looking into this issue. I'm not sure what master Otmar would have said if I'd have looked at this during my studies with him. He always planned our research for many months in advance, so would never be able to entertain such frivolous sidelines as this. If all goes well, maybe we can produce item or artefact of power and raise extra money for our research.
Essaris 29
Our research went poorly following Walter's suggestion that capturing this new energy into a device might be useful. We assembled several sticks of wood of which there is an abundant supply for the fires of the tower above, and we systematically destroyed them. At first we tried to channel the energy and capture it using traditional methods. But the magic would not hold, the device seemed incapable of containing this energy, despite our experiments with the preparation of the device. Even when we increased the power levels of the spells, we could not trap the energy source in the wood. In this laboratory we did measure fluctuations in the energy levels from our energy source again, and we wrapped that information back into our experiment to try and stabilise the nature of the storage.
We moved on from traditional methods to try other ways of capturing and holding the energy. There were some minor successes here, but once we started expanding the energy levels we tried to store we began experiencing odd effects. The simplest effects saw the wood being changed to a different state, we saw the wood changed to a shiny metallic substance, and we saw them become watery and sticky, like a bread pudding several times. We managed to incinerate a couple of the sticks, we changed their size and their temperature, and we even dropped one of the sticks that was frozen and it shattered into the tiniest fragments. With some of the experiments we produced exceptionally hot and bright flames from the stick; far more than we would have seen with normal burning of the wood. We took that experiment upstairs to the roof, and we borrowed the large brazier to examine the fire.
The oddest effect we recorded was the total disappearance of the wand. We are taught in the earliest days of our journey into magic that items cannot be unmade; magic can change things but the matter it manipulates cannot be uncreated, and we've all seen the experiments that prove this to be so. As a result we have only speculation about what has happened to the stick - and we are at a loss for plausible ideas. In all we have had two sticks completely disappear, with no trace of their matter and no trace of any excess energy created by the matter. We do not know what has happened to them. Our discussions on this subject have exposed a growing concern for what we have done. Either the items have become an energy stream the like of which we cannot detect, or they have been moved outside of this reality. We know they haven't been moved inside this plane, such magic leaves a residue that acts as a marker, and that is especially easy to detect in our laboratory.
Personally, I think these items have been moved either through a dimension jump or through inter-planar travel involving the energy source that we have been using. How powerful would it be, and how celebrated would my team become, if we had truly found a way to unmake matter and cause it to cease to exist.
We will consider this problem with new theories as we progress our research, but for this time we are abandoning our work with magical devices, and are returning to our core research.
Vessar 3
Walter had been going back over some of von Valden's research notes, and he spotted some inconsistencies with his results and the results we've had over the last few days. We took the two records and tried to match the tests. We also tried to reproduce a sample of both sets of experiments, and it seems that both hold up to this scrutiny. This is an odd situation, one which we cannot explain easily. I have asked Aldric to investigate the findings and see if we can explain any of this through the equations that are being used. It is likely we have missed something either during our experiments or when we analysed the results; it is also possible that von Valden's work included flaws, not in the way the experiments were carried out (we have repeated some of those) but in the way the analysis was done afterwards. We will consider repeating all the analysis for both sets of experiments. It is inconceivable that both us and von Valden carried out similar experiments intended to analyse the same result and have produced different outcomes.
One unintended effect was logged, however. We saw the return of both of the sticks that had gone missing late last month. This was experienced yesterday morning during simple tests using our standard energy source. When the first one returned, it merely drew gasps of surprise from us, as it was red hot and had to be cooled with water to prevent it bursting into flame. It interrupted our experiment (which we then repeated), arriving as soon as we opened the energy source. This stick carried the markings we'd put on the first stick that disappeared, it drew some relief from the team as it became clear that we hadn't been able to inadvertently unmake something and cause a paradox in the universe. It didn't prepare us for the problems of the other returning stick, however. This occurred later yesterday, some hours after the first stick returned, and as we were preparing to end our work for the day. We carried out a different experiment repeating one of von Valden's tests using our own energy source. This time we were halfway through when there was a quiet 'pop' sound and the second stick returned, travelling at high speed. It struck Walter on the thigh, fortunately it landed side first, if it had hit end-on it would have stuck in him like an arrow. He has a huge bruise on the leg and I am surprised that he has no broken bones. Aldric and I will carry on with the experiments tomorrow. Walter is to stay upstairs with Cabrin, who will ensure he rests his leg.
This book carries on like this for the next couple of months of entries. The research appears to be painfully slow, but Kebble has a small but able team with him, and he seems to trust them and appears happy with the progress. As time progresses and as they learn some new information and begin assembling their notes into a formal text. It appears that Aldric is tasked with assembling the majority of the notes - he seems to be the member of the team that is most comfortable with the complex mathematics that they have produced.
As more time passes the tempo of the notes changes. Strife breaks out among the team, and their working relationship is strained. Kebble begins acting oddly, he starts to rule the group rather than lead them, tempers start to flare and the pace of the research slows. The trigger for this seems to have been a health scare for Kebble. He never addresses his health problem directly in the diary, but he does say that he is unwell and summons a cleric from the town nearby to help. This cleric arrives within a couple of days and cures the physical problem that is being suffered which, from the way the notes are put, could be some kind of disease, and then departs. Kebble is badly affected by the illness, and he tries to speed the research up with disastrous consequences. Whether he was hoping to find a cure through this new magic to an illness that the cleric couldn't deal with, or whether he thought he did not have long to live is not clear - but he pushed harder and harder in his research. As any sane wizard will tell you, that is a recipe for madness and and early death.