Fiction: 8.3 Minutes
"8.3 Minutes"
8.3 minutes... It doesn't sound like anything, really... Just a measure of time... Could be anything...
Not to me.
I should start with my family. My mom was a paladin. I know, you think of a woman in shining armor and on a white steed. Actually, in the old days, that was what it was like. Huh... I bet it was no more glorious than what my mom does... Did... back home. She didn't have a steed, but the council gave her a private HoverBike. She used to take my sister and me on rides on it across the city when she was not on duty. Actually, she was always on duty. She never wore shining metal armor, just an armored bike jacket and really cool helmet. She was a field paladin. She enforced laws and protected people. With her life, if need be. She was real careful never to let us see her hurt. More than once she was "Staying at the Guardhouse to work late" when she was really getting patched up at Talon's Memorial Hospital. I think she fooled my sister, maybe.
Dad was a factory technical wizard, and worked on the assembly line building Crystal Vids. I loved to watch Pro Adventuring on the C.V. Mom always said I shouldn't watch "that trash", and that the show was a waste of the lives of the poor fools that played it. Dad let me watch when mom was out. He always let me do stuff like that. Dad was cool. He even watched with me on some nights when mom worked later than usual. He tried to warn me that they were really dying, and that they were doing it for money and fame. I thought that was what heroes were. And it always looked so glorious... To me, they were heroes with a capital 'H'. Now I know what heroes are.
The Gates were the crowning achievement of magic. They allowed transport from anywhere to anywhere. They allowed a man to live in one city, and work in any other in the world. Just stroll down from your apartment to the sector Gatehouse, pay the toll, and just walk through a designated Gate to the part of the city you want to be in. If you want to go somewhere else, just pay a little more and go to the Crossroads of the city. From here, you can travel to any city in the country. Another gate also allows you to travel to the Bordergates, which allow you to travel to other countries and roam the world at large. They guard the Bordergates a lot heavier than the others. I never really understood why back then. I do now.
The Gates took a lot of wizards, or a really powerful one, to open them. And they ate tons of power from the city power weave. Power was cheap, though, and no one complained about it. One wizard that taught at MN&T said that the Gates took less power overall than trying to make private transportation for everyone. He went on about how much safer Gates were in comparison with other modes of transportation: horses are dirty, powered vehicles are dangerous, teleport spells can end you up in a wall if you make a mistake... The list went on and on. Gods above and below, how I hate him for being such a fool. It's not fair, really. He couldn't picture how dangerous a Gate is.
The first gates were developed in the Era of Power, over 20,000 years ago. They made a lot of things back then. Well, these first Gates were better than the ones we have now. The Emperor, a man whose name is lost to time, used them to travel across the world and beyond. No, not the moon. We can do that now. I wish we couldn't. No, what I mean is that he could go to other dimensions beyond this one. He traveled to places and learned things we cannot imagine.
Then, one day, he opened a gate to someplace bad; I mean really bad; with a capital 'B'. He found a place that was cold, and dark, and filled with endless seas of acid... And he found the BioWraiths. Oh? You've heard of them? I can see why. The governments of Creation have tried for centuries to kill them all off. No matter what they did, there were always more. Well, back then, they were pretty primitive in some ways. They had great magic, but only for a select few. The common armies only had swords and thin metal armors to wage wars with. Needless to say, the BioWraiths slaughtered thousands with their advanced weapons.
"And the city was razed by dark fire, and the Empire undone." That was the quote they taught me in school. Then they told us how it could never happen again. They told us of the great Magus May. She was the one who discovered the old gates, and forever closed and destroyed the WorldGates. She was the one who understood them, better than any who have ever lived. Even now, we just use the formulas she provided, not really understanding how or why they work. We use them like we use gravity, to get around.
She was smart, and removed the part of the formula that allowed travel to other worlds. History says she knew how, but no one ever figured it out. She was real smart. Problem is, she was not smart enough.
I remember the night that I first heard about 8.3 minutes. The news-being was Delihla Silverhair, an elven reporter for the Bardic News Network. The first they spoke of it, all of the Gates to Laughfield city had stopped working, and several Crossroads in other cities exploded. We thought that a shadowcult had finally done the impossible and bombed several Crossroads at once. The truth was worse. BNN transports began scrying the area with Crystal Senders. Even Delihla was silent as the scry showed the sky on fire above where the city should have been. The trees were burned bare nearly 20 miles from the edge of the city. As they got closer, there were no trees, just ash. The pilot said the heat outside could have rivaled the hells themselves. I think the sight of the city alone beat any hell I could picture. My dad cried as he looked on at the ruins of the city proper. The metal and glass buildings were on fire. Stone and bricks were melted into a twisted landscape that made it hard for me to understand it was a city, and not some kind of twisted art. The BNN reporters could not leave the transport due to the heat and poisons in the air outside. Even then, they stayed and attempted to look for survivors in the horror. They never even found bodies.
Oh, there were survivors. They were the ones who were not there when it happened. Everyone within 10 miles died instantly. Farther out, and you had a chance. At about 30 miles, it was survivable... But that didn't mean they were in good shape. My mom did not come back that night. I saw her again about a week later, dirty, tired, and utterly heartbroken. She cried on dad, and me, and holding Xinla, my sister. She told us what the news services had not figured out: What happened.
Did you know that Gates, while instantaneous travel for anyone passing thought them, take time to open the other side? Wizards and Druids long ago found out that magic, like light, take time to move from one place to another. It's really fast, about 125,000 miles per second. That means that a spell cast on one side of the world could effect someone on the other side in less than a tenth of a second. Guess that's why no one noticed for so long. The first gates to the moon taught them that something was up. They nearly had a panic at the facility when the wizards opened the Gate. Nothing happened. Then, three seconds later, the Gate opened and everything was fine. That was nearly 100 years ago. Now we have colonies on the moon. The point is, it takes time from the time the spells are completed, to when the gate opens to the other side.
Mom told us that it took 8.3 minutes for the gate to open from the time the blackops wizards activated the PowerGate. About an hour before, they had hooked up the Gate to the local power weave. They knew someone was opening an illegal Gate, but it took time to find it. Mom told us about the support wizard that had been partnered with a Laughfield paladin named Taldwin. I think mom knew him, his name was Vinnik Tumbers. He had arrived just as the ritual had been finished. He thought that an army would come running out of the gate, or that the gate would explode with pressurized seawater or lava, but nothing appeared but a circle of inky blackness. The wizards that opened the gate teleported away in groups, leaving only one. He told Vinnik that it was too late, and that he had about 8 minutes to get away. When the force arrived on the scene about 2 minutes later, they found Vinnik staring at the Gate.
It still had not opened.
Having no idea what was going on, and knowing that whatever was going to happen would take about 5 minutes, they began scrying to find where it was going, and why it was seemingly refusing to open. After about 2 more minutes of tinkering, mom said that Vinnik figured it out, and he screamed.
They knew they couldn't shut the PowerGate; it was already opening, and they didn't have enough time or power to reverse it. They only had time to teleport to the city Crossroads and try to shut them down. They got about half of them offline, some by ritual, others by violence. Vinnik destroyed three of them himself before time ran out. Mom said he cursed himself as a coward when he teleported away with 5 children that just happened to be nearby. He cried as mom told him the level of devastation. Even as he understood what happened, he had failed to understand how destructive was. He had left his family in the Jameswitch suburb, 17 miles from the blast center. Vinnik told them all he knew, gave times and faces. But in the end, it was too much for him. Before he could be stopped, he teleported home to his family. I don't think they ever even found his house. Mom was never the same after that. Dad either.
You see, Vinnik figured it out from basic astronomy and physics. It takes light 8.3 minutes to reach Creation from the sun.
It was only open for a moment before the energy released by the Gate disrupted the spell, but it didn't need to be open long. In an instant, all of the force of the sun exploded into the city of Laughfield, and wiped it from the map. The Crossroad Gates that didn't shut in time allowed the hellstorm into other cities, destroying the Gates, and everyone near the Crossroad building before they were snuffed shut. It was a weapon of absolute destruction. Delihla Silverhair named it well on the news: The HellFire Gate.
No one knows how they gained the coordinate for the HellFire Gate. Nothing could survive that close to the sun, and you have to know the place to open a gate to it. Of course, it happened, so it is possible. The formula somehow became public, uploaded to the InfoWeave. Now anyone can know the formula. It's taught in advanced Thaumaturgy classed dealing with teleportation and gate technology. Sure, it takes an archmage and tons of power to use it, but he can use it repeatedly. Once the gate is opened, he has 8.3 minutes to leave.
HellFire Gates destroyed three more cities before Gregory Asklin figured out how to stop one once it was opened. One of them was Steel city, my home.
Most of it was a jumble. I heard the horns, and dad grabbed up both Xinla and me and ran. We rushed by people as dad ran faster than I had ever seen him move before. I'm pretty sure he used a spell, but I was young, and he just may have been that fast. "Fear gives you wings.", Ya' know? Anyway, people started shoving us, and one even stepped on me when I fell down. Dad just picked the one guy up and threw him. Hard. I don't think he made it out of the city. When we got to the Crossroads, armed guards were stopping people from passing through the Gates. When dad asked why, he was told to go back home, and that the situation was under control. He told the guard that if the situation was under control, then there should be no problem with anyone going through the gate.
The guard pulled his blaster on dad.
Dad killed them. All of them.
I don't know if he really knew, or if he was just desperate. But he shoved Xinla into my arms and slung me through the gate. I hit the ground hard, and rolled to keep from hurting my sister. I broke my elbow, but Xinla seemed OK. When I turned around to ask dad why he did it, I was looking at a blank wall. The Gate was shut. His last act was both the most selfish, and the most giving, thing I have ever witnessed. I never saw my mom or dad again.
At the hospital, I saw the news report about Steel city being gone. I couldn't cry with my sister in the room. The doctors were nice, but had no time to deal with one of dozens of new orphans in the place. I swore right then, that I would die before I would let another HellFire Gate destroy anyone else's life.
Now you know why I do this, now you know why I trained to be a wizard, like my dad. Now you know why, when the 8.3 minute horn goes off, I'm on the site within the " point - 3" part. And now you know why I'm a GateKeeper. It's what I am. It's what I do. And I always finish within 8.3 minutes.
From the records of:
Johnny Arameal
GateKeeper of HighRage
21-5-9894
Foolish Frost
"Oh, there were survivors. They were the ones who were not there when it happened."
8.3 minutes... It doesn't sound like anything, really... Just a measure of time... Could be anything...
Not to me.
I should start with my family. My mom was a paladin. I know, you think of a woman in shining armor and on a white steed. Actually, in the old days, that was what it was like. Huh... I bet it was no more glorious than what my mom does... Did... back home. She didn't have a steed, but the council gave her a private HoverBike. She used to take my sister and me on rides on it across the city when she was not on duty. Actually, she was always on duty. She never wore shining metal armor, just an armored bike jacket and really cool helmet. She was a field paladin. She enforced laws and protected people. With her life, if need be. She was real careful never to let us see her hurt. More than once she was "Staying at the Guardhouse to work late" when she was really getting patched up at Talon's Memorial Hospital. I think she fooled my sister, maybe.
Dad was a factory technical wizard, and worked on the assembly line building Crystal Vids. I loved to watch Pro Adventuring on the C.V. Mom always said I shouldn't watch "that trash", and that the show was a waste of the lives of the poor fools that played it. Dad let me watch when mom was out. He always let me do stuff like that. Dad was cool. He even watched with me on some nights when mom worked later than usual. He tried to warn me that they were really dying, and that they were doing it for money and fame. I thought that was what heroes were. And it always looked so glorious... To me, they were heroes with a capital 'H'. Now I know what heroes are.
The Gates were the crowning achievement of magic. They allowed transport from anywhere to anywhere. They allowed a man to live in one city, and work in any other in the world. Just stroll down from your apartment to the sector Gatehouse, pay the toll, and just walk through a designated Gate to the part of the city you want to be in. If you want to go somewhere else, just pay a little more and go to the Crossroads of the city. From here, you can travel to any city in the country. Another gate also allows you to travel to the Bordergates, which allow you to travel to other countries and roam the world at large. They guard the Bordergates a lot heavier than the others. I never really understood why back then. I do now.
The Gates took a lot of wizards, or a really powerful one, to open them. And they ate tons of power from the city power weave. Power was cheap, though, and no one complained about it. One wizard that taught at MN&T said that the Gates took less power overall than trying to make private transportation for everyone. He went on about how much safer Gates were in comparison with other modes of transportation: horses are dirty, powered vehicles are dangerous, teleport spells can end you up in a wall if you make a mistake... The list went on and on. Gods above and below, how I hate him for being such a fool. It's not fair, really. He couldn't picture how dangerous a Gate is.
The first gates were developed in the Era of Power, over 20,000 years ago. They made a lot of things back then. Well, these first Gates were better than the ones we have now. The Emperor, a man whose name is lost to time, used them to travel across the world and beyond. No, not the moon. We can do that now. I wish we couldn't. No, what I mean is that he could go to other dimensions beyond this one. He traveled to places and learned things we cannot imagine.
Then, one day, he opened a gate to someplace bad; I mean really bad; with a capital 'B'. He found a place that was cold, and dark, and filled with endless seas of acid... And he found the BioWraiths. Oh? You've heard of them? I can see why. The governments of Creation have tried for centuries to kill them all off. No matter what they did, there were always more. Well, back then, they were pretty primitive in some ways. They had great magic, but only for a select few. The common armies only had swords and thin metal armors to wage wars with. Needless to say, the BioWraiths slaughtered thousands with their advanced weapons.
"And the city was razed by dark fire, and the Empire undone." That was the quote they taught me in school. Then they told us how it could never happen again. They told us of the great Magus May. She was the one who discovered the old gates, and forever closed and destroyed the WorldGates. She was the one who understood them, better than any who have ever lived. Even now, we just use the formulas she provided, not really understanding how or why they work. We use them like we use gravity, to get around.
She was smart, and removed the part of the formula that allowed travel to other worlds. History says she knew how, but no one ever figured it out. She was real smart. Problem is, she was not smart enough.
I remember the night that I first heard about 8.3 minutes. The news-being was Delihla Silverhair, an elven reporter for the Bardic News Network. The first they spoke of it, all of the Gates to Laughfield city had stopped working, and several Crossroads in other cities exploded. We thought that a shadowcult had finally done the impossible and bombed several Crossroads at once. The truth was worse. BNN transports began scrying the area with Crystal Senders. Even Delihla was silent as the scry showed the sky on fire above where the city should have been. The trees were burned bare nearly 20 miles from the edge of the city. As they got closer, there were no trees, just ash. The pilot said the heat outside could have rivaled the hells themselves. I think the sight of the city alone beat any hell I could picture. My dad cried as he looked on at the ruins of the city proper. The metal and glass buildings were on fire. Stone and bricks were melted into a twisted landscape that made it hard for me to understand it was a city, and not some kind of twisted art. The BNN reporters could not leave the transport due to the heat and poisons in the air outside. Even then, they stayed and attempted to look for survivors in the horror. They never even found bodies.
Oh, there were survivors. They were the ones who were not there when it happened. Everyone within 10 miles died instantly. Farther out, and you had a chance. At about 30 miles, it was survivable... But that didn't mean they were in good shape. My mom did not come back that night. I saw her again about a week later, dirty, tired, and utterly heartbroken. She cried on dad, and me, and holding Xinla, my sister. She told us what the news services had not figured out: What happened.
Did you know that Gates, while instantaneous travel for anyone passing thought them, take time to open the other side? Wizards and Druids long ago found out that magic, like light, take time to move from one place to another. It's really fast, about 125,000 miles per second. That means that a spell cast on one side of the world could effect someone on the other side in less than a tenth of a second. Guess that's why no one noticed for so long. The first gates to the moon taught them that something was up. They nearly had a panic at the facility when the wizards opened the Gate. Nothing happened. Then, three seconds later, the Gate opened and everything was fine. That was nearly 100 years ago. Now we have colonies on the moon. The point is, it takes time from the time the spells are completed, to when the gate opens to the other side.
Mom told us that it took 8.3 minutes for the gate to open from the time the blackops wizards activated the PowerGate. About an hour before, they had hooked up the Gate to the local power weave. They knew someone was opening an illegal Gate, but it took time to find it. Mom told us about the support wizard that had been partnered with a Laughfield paladin named Taldwin. I think mom knew him, his name was Vinnik Tumbers. He had arrived just as the ritual had been finished. He thought that an army would come running out of the gate, or that the gate would explode with pressurized seawater or lava, but nothing appeared but a circle of inky blackness. The wizards that opened the gate teleported away in groups, leaving only one. He told Vinnik that it was too late, and that he had about 8 minutes to get away. When the force arrived on the scene about 2 minutes later, they found Vinnik staring at the Gate.
It still had not opened.
Having no idea what was going on, and knowing that whatever was going to happen would take about 5 minutes, they began scrying to find where it was going, and why it was seemingly refusing to open. After about 2 more minutes of tinkering, mom said that Vinnik figured it out, and he screamed.
They knew they couldn't shut the PowerGate; it was already opening, and they didn't have enough time or power to reverse it. They only had time to teleport to the city Crossroads and try to shut them down. They got about half of them offline, some by ritual, others by violence. Vinnik destroyed three of them himself before time ran out. Mom said he cursed himself as a coward when he teleported away with 5 children that just happened to be nearby. He cried as mom told him the level of devastation. Even as he understood what happened, he had failed to understand how destructive was. He had left his family in the Jameswitch suburb, 17 miles from the blast center. Vinnik told them all he knew, gave times and faces. But in the end, it was too much for him. Before he could be stopped, he teleported home to his family. I don't think they ever even found his house. Mom was never the same after that. Dad either.
You see, Vinnik figured it out from basic astronomy and physics. It takes light 8.3 minutes to reach Creation from the sun.
It was only open for a moment before the energy released by the Gate disrupted the spell, but it didn't need to be open long. In an instant, all of the force of the sun exploded into the city of Laughfield, and wiped it from the map. The Crossroad Gates that didn't shut in time allowed the hellstorm into other cities, destroying the Gates, and everyone near the Crossroad building before they were snuffed shut. It was a weapon of absolute destruction. Delihla Silverhair named it well on the news: The HellFire Gate.
No one knows how they gained the coordinate for the HellFire Gate. Nothing could survive that close to the sun, and you have to know the place to open a gate to it. Of course, it happened, so it is possible. The formula somehow became public, uploaded to the InfoWeave. Now anyone can know the formula. It's taught in advanced Thaumaturgy classed dealing with teleportation and gate technology. Sure, it takes an archmage and tons of power to use it, but he can use it repeatedly. Once the gate is opened, he has 8.3 minutes to leave.
HellFire Gates destroyed three more cities before Gregory Asklin figured out how to stop one once it was opened. One of them was Steel city, my home.
Most of it was a jumble. I heard the horns, and dad grabbed up both Xinla and me and ran. We rushed by people as dad ran faster than I had ever seen him move before. I'm pretty sure he used a spell, but I was young, and he just may have been that fast. "Fear gives you wings.", Ya' know? Anyway, people started shoving us, and one even stepped on me when I fell down. Dad just picked the one guy up and threw him. Hard. I don't think he made it out of the city. When we got to the Crossroads, armed guards were stopping people from passing through the Gates. When dad asked why, he was told to go back home, and that the situation was under control. He told the guard that if the situation was under control, then there should be no problem with anyone going through the gate.
The guard pulled his blaster on dad.
Dad killed them. All of them.
I don't know if he really knew, or if he was just desperate. But he shoved Xinla into my arms and slung me through the gate. I hit the ground hard, and rolled to keep from hurting my sister. I broke my elbow, but Xinla seemed OK. When I turned around to ask dad why he did it, I was looking at a blank wall. The Gate was shut. His last act was both the most selfish, and the most giving, thing I have ever witnessed. I never saw my mom or dad again.
At the hospital, I saw the news report about Steel city being gone. I couldn't cry with my sister in the room. The doctors were nice, but had no time to deal with one of dozens of new orphans in the place. I swore right then, that I would die before I would let another HellFire Gate destroy anyone else's life.
Now you know why I do this, now you know why I trained to be a wizard, like my dad. Now you know why, when the 8.3 minute horn goes off, I'm on the site within the " point - 3" part. And now you know why I'm a GateKeeper. It's what I am. It's what I do. And I always finish within 8.3 minutes.
From the records of:
Johnny Arameal
GateKeeper of HighRage
21-5-9894
Foolish Frost
"Oh, there were survivors. They were the ones who were not there when it happened."
posted by Unknown at 4:57 PM
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