If i have a reference antenna that only takes in a powerful signal (jamming signal) and lets say my array configuration is linear placed along z-axis (no azimuth resolution) with 4 elements not including the ref antenna. With this information, the DOA is not known but i have the jamming signal with uncorrelated noise will i be able to place a null in the direction of the interference without compromising much of the gain in other direction?.
Edit: if linear array does not work how does it work if its a 2x2 planar array?

Hi everyone, I want to design a transparent planar antenna for my project and use ITO as the transparent conductor.
I searched up this material in the material library and unfortunately it doesn’t exist there so I need to define it myself and I don’t really know what parameters to define save from the conductivity…I tried to look for some electrical data-sheets for this material and I couldn’t find any.
I would like some help from someone that had to do it before / knows a good source from which I can find this info.
Thanks!

Hi everyone, I want to design a transparent planar antenna for my project and use ITO as the transparent conductor.
I searched up this material in the material library and unfortunately it doesn’t exist there so I need to define it myself and I don’t really know what parameters to define save from the conductivity…I tried to look for some electrical data-sheets for this material and I couldn’t find any.
I would like some help from someone that had to do it before / knows a good source from which I can find this info.
Thanks!

I'm working on a single PCB transmitter (planar disc antenna + circuit on ground plane). This is a battery powered, "floating" system. It works well, as long as I don't have long cables leading to a USB adapter for UART control. But I do need this control for testing and calibration, so my first thought is some kind of an optocoupler.
I have no experience with IrDA and I definitely don't need a high baud rate. I also have very limited real estate on the board, so I may not be able to fit an IrDA encodedecoder and I need to be mindful of the extra BOM cost.
Since the intent is a command interface, I could probably get away with simplex or even one way communication. I'm considering a basic IR (as in "remote control") receiver. The MCU has plenty of cycles in the manufacturing state, so it could be doing decoding via interrupts/timers.
Can you think of a better approach? I'm open to all possibilities as long as there is no galvanic contact with the board and no adverse intermodulation with the transmitter. Operating frequency range is mid-UHF to S-band. The maximum transmitted power is +32dBm.
​
Thanks.

I'm planning on building a planar disk antenna out of a piece of 12" x 5' galvanized steel duct. Due to the length of the duct, I can't make two 3' diameter circles (trying to maximize the lowest frequency the antenna can receive).
As shown in the picture, I'm planning on making two ovals for the antenna instead of two circles. In order to get the most out of this build, should they be arranged as drawn in the lower left or lower right?
Sorry for the rough drawing, any help would be appreciated as I'm a total newbie, also wondering if I'm understanding correctly how the gap size corresponds to lowest frequency received.
Picture

I like to experiment building my own antenna to use with my RTL-SDR Blog V3, but I've found the information out there on the ol' internet to be rather overwhelming in terms of antenna designs, use of baluns, types of coax cables, etc. I'm pretty new to this hobby.
Anyway, I'd be super grateful if I could have some guidance/advice on a few things. My main antennas that I play about with are a DIY planar disk antenna, a DIY yagi tuned to about 400MHz (from what I recall), and a long-wire antenna that's 19 metres long strung across the garden about 15ft off the ground. I'm in the UK, and live within a mile of a busy Royal Air Force base (I'm guessing they transmit a lot of stuff on the airwaves).
I don't have a low noise amplifier, a balun or unun, or high/low/band pass filters. It's just the antenna coax going directly into the RTL-SDR Blog V3. I also don't have a SWR meter.
The frequencies I'm most interested in listening to are between 100-500MHz. Mostly 118-170MHz and 425-470MHz.
For software I'm using Gqrx (I'm on a Mac).
I have a few questions:

• Will a low noise amplifier help?
• Will a balun/unun help? Some articles I've come across say it's a must, others say don't bother.
• Is there a DIY antenna type that's fairly easy to make that will improve what I can listen to?
• Is it worth investing in SMA male connectors that cost a bit more than the ones from Amazon that cost a few pounds? The ones I've got (Sourcingmap Gold Tone Plated SMA Male) don't seem to play nice with the RTL-SDR Blog V3 that I've got. I even replaced the SMA female connector on the V3 (thinking I'd damaged the original connector), but the connection is still temperamental - better, but still temperamental. Loosening the male connector when it's connected to the female one sometimes helps.

Thanks, and apologies if I seem a bit daft. It's a very enjoyable hobby, but it can also be frustrating for a newcomer.

double Array::sim_el_az(double frequency, double el, double az) { double wavelength = c0 / frequency; double radius = 2 * 1000 * wavelength * wavelength / wavelength; //conservative far field distance approximation //elevation and azimuth here are 0 normal to the xz plane or down boresight double y = radius * cos(el) * cos(az); double x = radius * sin(az) * cos(el); double z = radius * sin(el); double i_sum = 0; double q_sum = 0; for (size_t i = 0; i < antennas.size(); i++) { double a_x = std::get<0>(antenna_positions[i]); double a_y = std::get<1>(antenna_positions[i]); double a_z = std::get<2>(antenna_positions[i]); double dx = x - a_x; double dy = y - a_y; double dz = z - a_z; double distance = sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy + dz * dz); double phase_shift_rad = distance / wavelength * 2 * M_PI + antennas[i]->get_phase(el, az, frequency); //cosine repeats so no need to do % 1 of the division result double i_mag = cos(phase_shift_rad) * antennas[i]->get_gain(el, az, frequency); double q_mag = sin(phase_shift_rad) * antennas[i]->get_gain(el, az, frequency); i_sum += i_mag; q_sum += q_mag; } return sqrt(i_sum * i_sum + q_sum * q_sum); } 

double Array::sim_el_az(double frequency, double el, double az) { double wavelength = c0 / frequency; double radius = 2 * 1000 * wavelength * wavelength / wavelength; //conservative far field distance approximation //elevation and azimuth here are 0 normal to the xz plane or down boresight double y = radius * cos(el) * cos(az); double x = radius * sin(az) * cos(el); double z = radius * sin(el); double i_sum = 0; double q_sum = 0; for (size_t i = 0; i < antennas.size(); i++) { double a_x = std::get<0>(antenna_positions[i]); double a_y = std::get<1>(antenna_positions[i]); double a_z = std::get<2>(antenna_positions[i]); double dx = x - a_x; double dy = y - a_y; double dz = z - a_z; double distance = sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy + dz * dz); double phase_shift_rad = distance / wavelength * 2 * M_PI + antennas[i]->get_phase(el, az, frequency); //cosine repeats so no need to do % 1 of the division result double i_mag = cos(phase_shift_rad) * antennas[i]->get_gain(el, az, frequency); double q_mag = sin(phase_shift_rad) * antennas[i]->get_gain(el, az, frequency); i_sum += i_mag; q_sum += q_mag; } return sqrt(i_sum * i_sum + q_sum * q_sum); } 

Long story short my professor gave me to analyze the Starlink planar array antenna in 24GHz with SLL=30db and single beam at 90 degrees. Since it requires a low SLL i have used Tseng-Cheng array with a 2Mx2M rectangular array antenna, but since the frequency is 24Ghz that means the distance between each element is around 0.00625m (d=wavelength/2) and this raises a problem as it needs a high number of elements to achieve some directivity (which then leads to not practical uses of the antenna in real life). Even if i use 100x100 the antenna radiation pattern is like the omnidirectional ones. Now my question is that is there any solution to design a planar array antenna in 24Ghz with some directivity and SLL=30db ? Now my professor did not say anything about achieving certain level of directivity, but since you need the single beam at 90 degree, you kinda need to show it into the radiation pattern. Or maybe do i analyze it for a high number of elements (even though it is not practical in real life). Thank you in advance!
​

Updated 2024-05-08 for Library 5b

Post List

Pre-Chapter 50 posts

(A little lower quality and outdated compared to later efforts because I was a bit rushed. Some conclusions have since changed.)
Part 1: Thacea, Tainted Mana, Portals, 29+1, Crystal Dragons, Shards, Nexus Underground, Magic Batteries, Eco-terrorism (Original Post Date: 2023-09-28, Ch. 48)
Part 2: Soultrapping, prior library deletion, Ritual of Duplicity & Nulls, Qiv and Uven, Mal’tory’s clone gambit, Thacea’s +1, Systematic species alteration, the Bombshell realm. (Original Post Date: 2023-09-30, Ch. 48)
Part 3: Transgracian Academy, Academy’s Dramatis personae, Vanavan’s anime romance movie plotline, extracurriculars, espionage. (Original Post Date: 2023-10-03, Ch. 49)
Part 4b: EVI updates, True AIs, The Library imprisoning EVI, WMDs at school. (Original Post Date: 2023-10-06, Ch. 49)

Later Posts

Part 4a: Emma's gadgets, Overview of human space, characters, timeline, UN military, and wars, Rebuilding the ECS, Quintessence and punctures vs portals, magic food fraud, EVI the robomaid. (Original Post Date: 2023-10-23, Ch. 53)
Part 5a: The Library: Rules and Operation. (Original Post Date: 2024-05-01, Ch. 77)
Part 5b: The Library, Evil God. (Original Post Date: 2024-05-08, Ch. 78)
Part 6: Mal'tory and Lartia and Rila. (Not posted. On hold because it got derailed by the Null'tory theory)
Part 7a: Glossary of Nexian Lingo and Conceits. (Original Post Date: 2023-11-28, Ch. 57)
Part 7b: Nexus: size, history, social exploits, and gravity fricking hates the Nexus. (Original Post Date: 2023-11-29, Ch. 57)
Part 7c: Nexus-Earth War, casus belli, mana floods, & genociding those pesky humans. (Original Post Date: 2023-12-02, Ch. 57)
Part 8a: Magic Catalog. (Original Post Date: 2023-12-11, Ch. 59)
Part 8b: Magic: manafields, soulvision, secret manatypes, human soul oddities, what happens when an unshielded Nexian goes to Earth, artifices, Lovecraft Mythos. (Original Post Date: 2023-12-14, Ch. 59)
Part 9a: The Yearbook (Original Post Date: 2023-12-18, Ch. 60)
Part 9b: Emma’s and EVI’s Nulls, Mal'tory’s terrible fate? (Original Post Date: 2023-12-21, Ch. 60)
Part 10a: Portals, Transportium, Life Vaults, Dreams. (Original Post Date: 2023-12-27, Ch. 60)
Part 10b: The mystery of the 4 hours added to the countdown of the ECS crate. (Original Post Date: 2023-12-30, Ch. 60)
Part 10c: Taint, Miasma, Unstable surges, 30th Mana-type. (Original Post Date: 2024-01-03, Ch. 60)
Part 10d: Crystal Dragons, dragon's breath, shards of impart, dragon-kin, kobolds & drakes, Ilunor's homeland (Original Post Date: 2024-01-10, Ch. 61)
Part 10e: Divine dragon bound in the abyss, primordial war of the gods, putting it all together into one hypothesis... (Original Post Date: 2024-01-17, Ch. 62)
Part 11: Timeline (Original Post Date: 2024-01-24, Ch. 63)
The Eternal King of Nexus (Original Post Date: 2024-04-10, Ch. 74) and amendment comment for 75

Random Theory Threads

[1: The Next Generation]
[2: Mobile Suit Armorer]
[2.5 Bingo Card]

Fanfic

The Tainted God’s Pantry (Google doc)

[1: Trouble for Dessert], [2: Poison and Potash], [3: And the Devil Deals the Cards], [4: Crownlands Pride]
This is a completed, four-part fanfiction loosely based on StopDownloadin's Eat Well, Live Free. It was drafted after chapters 65/66 and finished just after chapter 68, so after the sightseer but before classes got into full swing. Thank you to StopDownloadin for beta reading.

Downloads

You too may use the power of searching the text in your favorite document editor (or ctrl-H to remove all 169 'whilst's).
WPAtaMS Chapters 01-42 The Crate.rtf
WPAtaMS Chapters 43-67 The Library and Sightseer.rtf
And here are the (free from google) fonts to make the files display as intended: Crimson Pro, Alegreya SC
WPAtaMS custom dictionary. Append the words to your spellchecker

To avoid the tedious process of adding words one-by-one if using MS Word in Windows, navigate to File > Word Options > Proofing > "Custom Dictionaries" button. Select New, title the dictionary WPAtaMS.dic. Then navigate to C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof (or wherever the dictionaries are stored on your computer, it says on the screen where you made the new dictionary where they are saved), right-click the dictionary file, open with... notepad.exe (or open notepad, select open all files, and navigate to the dictionary's directory from there). Paste the word list in and save. Done!

Meta-Content

The Adjacent Realms are Terraformed Worlds

[Original Post 2024-01-19, Ch. 62]
The Adjacent Realms exhibit carbonate deficiency. Most (but not all) limestone deposits, and the minerals derived from it, are biologic; the corpses of coral and shelled carbonate micro-organisms that died in mats over a billion+ years to the point new rock was formed from their compressed remains. And from high-quality concentrated limestone, you get two very important chemicals that helped the early world industrialize. Lime and soda. They are needed for building at scale all of the following: the mortar of brick and mortar, concrete, soda-lime glass, mordants to fix vibrant dyes cheaply... ...and the baking powder and soda used to leaven bread and pancakes without fermentation so it doesn't cook flat like a baton or frisbee. Without lime and soda derived from limestone and coal-based processes, your civilization is stuck burning specifically-grown plants for their ash and making charcoal for blast furnaces.
Concrete-formament and glass Thalmin and Thacea said were mana intensive to make. But these were things the Romans had figured out how to do at scale: the concrete revolution and their glass were renowned. Most adjacent realms are well past that tech level, and certainly past the social discipline organization level to see great works through ... So what gives?
It's like the adjacent realms don't have access to large, pure carbonate rock deposits and the dense energy sources that make extracting soda and lime from them convenient. It is very much like they have rationed their lime and soda, and routed around their worlds' natural deficiency using mana-glass blowers, and mana-concrete, and even mana-bread leavening. Emma thinks Thalmin's buildings are grim because she is used to seeing the roman architecture style paired with abundant white carbonate-derived marble instead of some other darker igneous mineral.
❧
But the real million dollar question is... what would cause a world to "lose its marbles", and be missing its coal and abundant outcroppings of biomineralized-limestone?
The adjacent realms are all terraformed worlds.
...
They don't have a billion years of microbial death to enrich their crust with nifty sedimentary deposits.
And all of a sudden, many little, disconnected, throwaway lines and loose plot threads start to weave into place. Thacea gave a very strange testimony about the typical anthropological trajectory of an adjacent realm: “[Aetheron] had always been an outlier prior to the Nexian reformations, as it defied all known Nexian expectations on what an Adjacent Realm should have been. For instead of a series of disconnected fiefdoms trapped within a single continent, the Nexus discovered my kind spanning the breadth of our entire world.”
Most newrealm civilizations aren’t even around long enough to manage serious migration waves before they reach Nexus. Aetheron was an outlier because they could fly. Humanity is an extreme outlier, having an evolutionary history with waves of archaic-hominids going outwards and thousands and thousands of years finding and occupying all the major landmasses and islands.
Even little things, like why the adjacent realms don't seem to have mastered electricity fall into place. Humanity also had the benefit of fossil amber, which is ideal for the earliest triboelectric experiments to understand the nature of electricity. As a fossil that takes a few million years to bake, amber won't be found on any terraformed adjacent realm. Same with chalk, although gypsum might substitute for many of the uses.
❧
So someone, probably the advanced primordial alien gods, terraformed suitable worlds with life collected from early-human Earth in preparation to drop one customized human-animal species on each. They got some mana to make up for their world's natural deficiencies of not having a billion years of dead bodies that would impede development, but otherwise were left to their natural devices to try to learn about the world and find their way up and out.
Nexus... is weird. It seems flatland too has the carbonate deficiency because glass is still prestige and they leaven with mana, so it is likely another terraformed world, I guess (not super firm on that). The Academy can afford to acquire some of the uncommon marble that exists, just like how they are gaudy with gold and silver.

List to date

• MREDD bread. The bread went rock hard when the magic was removed because there is no baking soda leavening. It is leavened with magic. Why skip that ingredient? No easy carbonates so they got used to sweet bread without it.
  
• Most adjacent realmers not existing on their world long enough to have migration waves and spread across their worlds completely.
  
• Thalmin's architecture: the fortress stone is igneous dark rather than a preferable marble/limestone white because lighter colored construction-pliable rocks are usually derived from biologic carbonates.
  
• Concrete/"formament" being hard to make when that was available at scale in the Roman era
  
• Glass being hard to make when that was available at scale soon after the Roman era.
  
• Thalmin being impressed Emma's family could afford a brick house with real carbonate-derived mortar
  
• Thalmin being impressed at all the clothes dyes, early mordants to fix them are often carbonate derived.
  
• Articord. No mention of a fossil record in the creation story. Only mentions archeology.
  

∙☙◦❁◦❧∙

Soulvision

Q: TLDR, what is "Soulvision"?

A: Soulvision is a term I invented to explain the ability to vibe information at a distance without mana or conventional senses.

A being/artifact with soulvision can collect information from the environment or someone else that is not visible or detectable by other means, especially by mana-senses. It is a power completely independent of mana-wielding or magical acumen. I defined soulvision to explain observed powers that act outside the known rules of magic.
Window to the soul. Soulvision lets the user identify a creature with a soul but no manafield even when magic is blocked. Soulvision also lets the user differentiate that nullfielder apart from an identical but unintelligent programmatic robot with no sapience, no soul, and no manafield.
Visions across the planes and time. The umbrella concept of soulvision also covers usages where a creature's soul functions as an antenna to collect anomalous information, like dreams, visions, or inspiration. This is important to the creatures who don't have manafields to receive signals and where there is no mana radiation being used as a signal. Depending on the being, soulvision might have to be consciously invoked, like opening a third eye. For others, soulvision might be on all the time as a sixth sense of sorts. Certain conditions, like dreaming or traveling at FTL speeds, may enhance a creature's reception because the signal is better or they are more sensitive.
Unrelated to taint. Soulvision has no relation to taint because soulvision 1) works in places with no mana-radiation (or pockets of it) and 2) appears in nullfielders who cannot be tainted because the tainted are defined by an abnormal manafield interface between soul and manastreams, and the nullfielders have no manafield to taint. That said, taint or the 30th manatype may be the magical method and manatype best suited for signal-boosting the information that soulvision detects which is why there appears to be overlap. Taint is related to betwixts, planar fabrics, and interfaces and soulvision is contacting or crossing these spaces to work, so the two independent powers have a high likelihood of collision.
The soul is information-related. The nature of the soul has not been clarified, but we know several adjacencies: names, identity, memories, and sapience. The overlap between these is information, data, and organized low entropy. Because the soul is a type of energy that is found in beings not bound to biology or mana, it does not conform to matter or mana-auras. There is no guarantee that observing someone or something via soulvision won't be a phantasmagoric experience.
Espers vs. mages. Soulvision can be categorized as a pure psychic / psionic power as opposed to a magic power following the wizard/mentalist divide you see in a lot of fantasy settings. I chose to invent the term "soulvision" because psychics comes preloaded with expectations about other adjacent powers and brains that I simply don't want to assume.

Why hypothesize a whole new branch of magic?

Because there exists several instances where creatures and artifacts either find or extract information from people when magic is blocked, there are no manafields to read, and there are no mana spikes to indicate a signal being sent. The only physiology that remains is the soul, either envisioning a soul directly or using the soul's architecture to collect visions, hence "soulvision". The following qualify as instances where the known powers of mana cannot explain the anomalous outcome.

Instance 1: Naturally gifted humans peering across the veil to the magic realms

Humanity's neighborhood within the sea of stars is locally mana-free. Mana was not detected until the first portals were opened. It is true that humans were not looking for mana radiation before then, but even if we assume the non-lethal 30th manatype does sometimes manifest local to Earth via a means that somehow does not cause a mana flood, it has curiously gone unrecognized despite being obvious to the armor's sensors.
Rather than supposing all the visions are from mana (or the 30th manatype) occasionally crossing into human space and scientists have been overlooking it, it makes more sense to assume that humans have a weak, rare, but innate means of snuggling up to the planar fabric that divides realities and picking up signals through it - the equivalent of putting one's ear to the wall to listen to a conversation on the other side without actually touching that other-side space. These are the "inspired" that get visions or notice strange phenomena during FTL trips.

Instance 2: The Yearbook could tell apart Emma from an empty, soulless suit.

The soul stealing spell of the Yearbook targets creatures with souls and the ritual of duplicity attempts to evoke the likeness of ensouled beings. The ritual can fail and produce a null. Very specifically "a soul that has not been bound whatsoever, will result in a null". Not a name. A soul. There is probably more than one way to make a null (e.g. the mass null crisis), but the known and most relevant method is an ensouled person fully resisting the signing procedure. My assumption is that a Book of Souls, which is what the Yearbook is (17, 18), would reject the attempt of a soulless construct being trying to sign, or the duplicity ritual would not even produce a null because it would have no identity to embody and soul to seek.
Even though conventional Nexian thinking is that mana and a manafield is a prerequisite for having a soul, I note the professors don’t accuse Emma of being a soulless golem construct in public or private after the signing and ritual unlike the students who aren’t privy to the ritual of duplicity and what it represents. (4, 25) (Passive aggressively comparing her to a construct because elves are jerks, sure. But not calling her one.) If the professors thought a null could be produced from a soulless being, they almost certainly would have raised the idea in the aftermath.

Instance 3: The Transportium entity could find Emma in the dark to hit her with a mystic telepathy spell.

The transportium network is an absolutely no-light, endless-seeming void that succeeded in causing enough system failures that the whole armor's external data-suite turned off except the mana detector. (37) That meant Emma was not broadcasting, just receiving data. On top of that, Emma is invisible to creatures who navigate by sensing flows and distortions in the manastreams (57) which happen to be massive raging torrents in the transportium network. It's the worst environmental scenario for trying to target someone with a spell; no visual, no aural, and no mana-sense, and yet the entity somehow could find Emma.
And rather than the spell being an AoE that Emma happened to fall into, it was probably deliberately targeted. The entity called again to Emma in a dream, which took place in the mana vacuum of her tent without spiking a 30th manatype warning. So not only did the entity find Emma, it could somehow see something through her suit in order to "get her number" for future contact attempts.

Instance 4: Emma receiving what appears to be prescient dreams in her mana-free tent

This one is slightly doubtful compared to the above examples because it hasn't been decisively proven Emma's dreams are prescient, but EVI isn't detecting the 30th manatype or any mana-anomalies while Emma has night terrors. Some eldritch being might be using mana to generate local disturbances specifically for Emma to receive, but this data to dream about isn't reaching Emma as mana. Rather Emma is tuning into some other energy field she and EVI cannot measure. Mana radiation is well identified. Soulstuff is still an undetectable question for humanity, so "soul energies" of vibrations in the local planar fabric are good candidates for what Emma is transceiving.

Instance 5(?): Vanavan being able to visualize into Earth-space

This is doubtful because Vanavan's backstory is unknown, but it is clear though he has some unusual connection to Earth that he is being cagey about. Vanavan declared a vow with a seriousness near-equivalent to a life debt to protect Emma which is a bit strange because he knew her for all of 15 seconds. Vanavan probably was still a student or low apprentice 20 years ago when the first crossing happened. Vanavan would have only met Pilot 1 in person as a dead, goopy body. I think if Vanavan was making friends with the IAS via crystal chitchat, Emma would have been told she had a friend on that side.
Conventional communication doesn't explain his (lack of) attitude, but mana-based spells to peer in on or interact with Earth also don't compute. Vanavan does not appear to be a secretly tainted teacher, nor would he have been able to easily hide a miasmatic condition during his undergraduate school tenure.
With those two options out, that leaves some other unconventional mana-less method that Vanavan can use to cross the veil, likely how humans do or some sort of manaless astral projection. The evidence for Vanavan's extra-special power is 1) his sudden rise to third most powerful chair in the Academy behind white-robed dean and black-robed commissar despite being barely not a kid, and 2) his humility and willingness to treat nullfielder Emma and the Earth behind her with the gravity they deserve.
Thacea said three criteria determine who gets tenure in the Academy: agile political maneuvering, previous high titles, and merit and skill. Vanavan is meek and not politically adroit. Everyone feels comfortable walking all over Vanavan, including his peers who would have known him before he surrendered his connections, so the shadow of former high titles isn't there. That leaves sheer talent to explain why he leapfrogged over other apprentice candidates. Vanavan is so powerful and so unique at something no one could raise an objection or risk losing him to another institution.
Vanavan is uniquely forward-thinking about Earthrealm and its capabilities. Elves are usually so far up their own butts that they can give themselves dental exams and only trauma seems to humble them, so Vanavan’s off-brand behavior originates from exceptional circumstance. Some sort of involvement with Earth overturned Vanavan's previous worldview with an abundance of evidence and experience. Whatever he was doing was certainly time consuming; Sorecar mentioned Vanavan's "lost youth" at the Academy. But just because he cleansed the cataracts from his own eyes doesn't mean Vanavan isn't still mired by fundamental system incongruity: he can't convince his peers, much less the Nexian system, that Earthrealm is a civilized place and near-peer power. At best he can warn a free thinker like Sorecar to be mindful of the Earthrealm tech he knows to be dangerous and try to be someone Emma knows will take her seriously with the respect she deserves.

The relation between soulvision and taint and the 29+1=30th manatype

Soulvision works without mana, including the 30th manatype.
In the Part 10X: Taint series of writeups, I pointed out many times that taint is conceptually attached to interfaces and linkages - this includes the boundary between the soul and manastreams and portals and the fabric between worlds. Tainted powers associated with the 30th manatype are especially good at manipulating these interfaces which in turn is good for inducing soulvision related episodes.
Direct mana-to-soul spells. A skilled creature can cast spells that directly interact with a target's soul via the soul-physiology-architecture of soulvision rather than the manafield, e.g. to send a psychic message or a dream. This is what happened to Emma in the transportium; she got pinged with the 30th manatype. Keep in mind exposure to regular 29 manatypes can achieve the same psychic effects (and this is why magicrealmers can also receive prescient dreams and visions), but those manatypes interact with manafields and are not-direct-on-soul like the 30th. I think this explains why Ilunor says true telepathy is a hard and impressive spell: regular manatypes aren't the optimal tool for the job because they have to vibrate a user's manafield so that their soul picks up the signal instead of bypassing the intermediate mana-interface and going directly to the target soul for a clearer, crisper experience.
Indirect messaging. I also believe a sufficiently skilled tainted creature can use their miasmatic powers to vibrate the fabrics that divide realities and spacetimes, filling them with information. Soulvision passes through these planar fabrics to see across time, space, and dimensions. Taint boosts the embedded signal so even those who have poor soulvision reception get the picture without having to directly touch or see any mana. Boosted signals might explain why Earth-space is so especially rich with the gifted who could "peer across the veil": humans are naturally better at soulvision because they are not using their souls to build noisy manafields, but also because some powerful tainted entity is deliberately leaving visions in the planar fabric for humans to dial into. When ripping through spacetime fabrics at superluminal warp speeds, FTL-going humans collect even more signal than normal, leading to extra-clear anomalous phenomena.

This is part of a collection of notes I have made so far. Terms [in brackets] are invented by me, for lack of an official name. Comment-exclusive material is marked with spoilers, which will be my policy as the author may choose to decanonize anything said only in comments. ([MAIN DIRECTORY]: [1 taint dragons], [2 nulls souls], [3 academy Vanavan], [4a gadgets humans], [4b EVI], [5 Library-TBA], [6 Mal'tory-on hold], [7a Nexus glossary], [7b Nexus detail], [7c Nexus-earth war], [8a magic catalog], [8b magic], [9a Yearbook], [9b Emma’s Null, Mal'tory’s fate], [10a portals], [10b ECS crate], [10c taint], [10d dragons], [10e tainted dragon god], [11 timeline].)

Theory: Taint is related to interfaces and betwixts. Whenever mana starts connecting things, be they different spaces with portals, personal manafields where souls connect with manastreams, or the cross of the planar fabric with shards of impart, the Taint can intervene. Taint and miasma, portals, transportium, life vaults, unstable surges, the 30th Mana-type, dragons and shards of impart, dreams, and black-colored magic all seem to be linked.

Portals and Transportium Terminology

Confusing Terminology Disclaimer. Portals connect spaces within realms and between realms, can be opened anywhere, and travel is apparently instantaneous. Transportiums (1st noun), confusingly also called portals, are on specific locations called transportium routes and their entrances are where transportium (2nd noun) is stored in holding facilities. Transportium (1st noun) connects spaces long distance within the Nexus. Failing to use a portal properly drops you into a lightless subspace called the transportium (3rd noun). I do not know if use of a transportium (1st noun) briefly sends you through the transportium (3rd noun). The differences in practical usage of portals vs. transportium are not clear at this stage.

Definitions, as best as I can sort them

So, given the fubar state of portal terminology, here is how I have figured it until corrected:
Portal. A floating 2D window like the ones professors can open anywhere where the other side is visible and stepping through seems nearly instantaneous. If a portal goes between realms, I specify and I assume those have special handling rules that in-Nexus portals do not. The end-to-end distance of snap-conjured portals may be limited somehow. Transportium gates and portals may be the same thing, but the former is for in-Nexus long distance.
Transportium. (1st noun) The method of traveling long distance over Nexus.
Transportium Network. (3rd noun) The lightless dimensional subspace filled with intense currents of violent mana equal to Tier 21+ spells. Getting caught in its currents can displace you in space and time. There are nodes and confluences where mana currents cross, join, and split - these high-traffic regions correspond to overworld spots that are ideal for opening transportium gates and places where lost items in the transportium network get ejected and found. They may also mark areas of high mystic power, like Elaseer forest.
Transportium Gate. An entrance to a transportium route. Best opened near life vaults and nodes of currents in the transportium network. Portals and transportium gates might be the same thing, but transportium gates have to take into account the side effects of long distance travel.
Transportium Route. A path between transportium gates. The transportium network’s violent internal currents probably influence the topography and efficiency of transportium routes.
Life Vault. (2nd noun) A holding facility containing imprisoned, bizarre and potentially tainted creatures below certain geographic points where transportium gates are opened. The Elaseer life vault also imprisoned an amethyst dragon harvested for shards of impart. “Life archives” (44), “transportium holding facilities” (44), and “vaults for the tainted” (6) seem to be subdivisions of an overall class of magic prisons for living creatures or their preserved souls to utilize their powers.
Planar fabric. Each dimensional reality is wrapped in its own fabric, so two layers must be breached to portal onto another plane of existence. (43) Humanity relies on Quintessence, a boatload of electricity, and perhaps other energies to apply organized force to planar fabrics. Nexus uses mana. (44)
Ether. The betwixt between the planar fabrics of realities. (10) Space may be undefined in some manner. Unclear if ether is related to the transportium network. The Library claims to have ethereal wisdom, but if the ether also existed outside time, the Library could simply go back and remember what was destroyed, unless it is locally prohibited from doing so to prevent a causality violation.
Plane of Existence. A dimension bounded by planar fabric and separated from other planes by ether. A plane of existence may contain a realm. Planes of existence are implied to be relatively “close” so that visions and inspiration can cross the gap, but are in an unintuitive direction of travel through planar fabric.
Realm. A fundamentally Nexian, and thus limited, definition of a planet/habitable mass. A realm is both a plane of existence and a mass bounded by earth and sky. There is not much guidance about the shape. Magicrealmers don’t seem to conceive of other astral bodies as potentially habitable, the possibility of space-travel between them, and especially not the fantasy of constructing new ones and gardening them with life. (Nexus especially is an odd dimension for reasons explained in 7B) A plane of existence may have multiple realms within it, but Nexus doesn’t think there is any method outside portaling to reach them.
Adjacent Realm. A realm only reachable from Nexus by portal.
Higher and mortal planes. A collective for the realities that mortals and divines occupy. Unclear what differentiates these planes; rules of physics? Supposedly, getting liquefacted by mana allows one’s soul to commune with higher planes.

Portals

Nexian mana-powered portals appear like windows in space showing the destination beyond. Most are personal sized. Overuse of portals causes an “uncontrolled expansion of taint, leading to the destabilization of manafields over time,” which was a motive in the Great War where many adjacent realms broke their shards of impart in half and contacted each-other as they pleased rather than on Nexus’ schedule. It is very likely portal magic is restricted to registered couriers and high-caste aristocrats because of the taint risk and to control trans-Realm communication.
Opening portals is nearly a seventh tier spell even when cast by a professional. Mal'tory had some sort of crystal ball - a potential material component crutch to help him visualize (or it simply could be a camera monitor to watch, which itself is a portal-like application for light and mana-radiation). Transgracian students don’t normally learn about portals until their 2nd year at earliest. Although it seemed casual, Vanavan being able to send Emma directly back to her tower without an anchor on the receiving end (unless Thacea counts) is probably a very impressive feat. End-to-end, we know portals can cross at least a couple miles without compromising their integrity.
Portal mishaps. Using a portal correctly requires maintaining concentration on your intended destination, interfacing one’s manafield with the portal. If a traveler loses control over their ability to dictate their destination for any reason, they fall into the transportium network and both their destination and the time elapsed to reach it are at the whims of the currents. So far we only know of time advancing from a portal mishap and none of time reversing. Uncontrolled travelers usually exit at “high-traffic convergences”.
Emma fell into the betwixt when she tried to tailgate Mal'tory’s portal because she didn’t -couldn’t- interface magically with it. Vanavan specifically targeted Emma to ensure she got brought along when he cast a portal later.
Pilot 1 mystery. Although humans do their portals differently, the interface requirement does call into question how Pilot 1 successfully made it across when the Nexus-side didn’t yet know humans couldn’t interface with the puncture/portal. That suggests to me humans somehow got some help they and the Nexians are both unaware of for now.
Portals to other worlds. More than sheer power to open, portals require careful technique to stabilize, especially ones between realms. The professors on the Nexian side not only used a cartload of mana and barriers to prevent mana-drain onto Earth, they also stabilized Earth’s portal. It is implied that adjacent realm-to-adjacent realm portals are impossible due to mana concentration considerations which is why the Lost Realm’s legendary counter to the Status Communicatia was such a big deal: even if it was just messages, it removed the Nexus middleman. Humanity’s mana concentrator technology would be critical to enabling portals that bypass Nexus.

Transportium

The transportium network is an interstitial dimensional space betwixt that is a completely lightless, black void filled with highly concentrated flowing manastreams - raging rivers really - that distort time and space.
Certain couriers at the social level of entrusted nobility specialize in rapid delivery using transportium routes. The Crown has a classified network of warrant-exclusive transportiums to secure locations (warrant = official permission slip). The transportium from Elaseer’s South Gate in the Crown-herald-lands (at the border of the Crownlands?) to the courtyard of the Royal Academy for the Magical Arts in the Crownlands is both kept on the low-down and warrant exclusive.

Theory: Traveling unprotected in the transportium network is deadly

The background mana levels of the transportium network during surges are equal to a 21st level spell. Despite elves normally being quite poker faced, Lartia and Rila both visibly react to Emma admitting she accidentally went through the transportium network. Although horseplay involving portals has apparently gotten several Transgracian students lost in the nearby forest, there is not a lot of clarity about if they went through the actual transportium network vs mis-aimed a portal, nor if the lost students survived the ordeal. Without a protective enclosure like a carriage, Lartia must have thought Emma was an outstandingly talented caster to be able to hold back the mana deluge, which in turn goes a long way to explain Lartia’s error in evaluating Emma as high nobility for sheer magic strength despite her not having a visible aura and identifying as a cadet.
During their first meeting, Larial made a jab at the death of Humanity’s first candidate, implying that she thought the first Earthrealm candidate was in part slain because of a malformed portal. It’s likely she thought the candidate was liquidated by the transportium network’s mana background or that of the similar ethereal space between realms rather than merely the background radiation of Nexus. As a younger apprentice, she may not have been present for the first crossing attempt.

Theory: Transportium currents confine the chiming entity betwixt

I will properly get to the point in part [10d dragons], but the transportium network’s raging manastreams might be a literal network constraining a godlike entity related to taint. Distortion of those net nodes with artificial fast travel points, diversion of transportium manastreams to power instantaneous portals to arbitrary locations as opposed to transportium gates which go with the flow, and general overuse of the network loosens its bonds and allows the entity’s influence to reach out into Nexus and the beyond....

Life Vaults

There is only circumstantial evidence that (some of) the creatures within Elaseer’s life vault are tainted and that they are used to manipulate the transportium network. Among the clues are....

1. The powerful-looking creatures got soaked by the light-like spells Mal'tory was flinging.
   
2. Dean Astur’s comments about a “transportium holding facility” being disturbed by the explosion.
   
3. Mal'tory threatening Thacea with imprisonment in a vault for the tainted at the Yearbook signing.
   
4. Life vaults are placed in highly populated areas below bustling areas of trade-related traffic (e.g. a warehouse district) where a breakout is catastrophic. This would be the worst possible place unless proximity to the vaults was absolutely required for a necessary function of civilized society.
   

Dreams

A more figurative between, dreams are significant in human space because they grant visions of the magic realms. In tainted individuals, dreams emotionally empower their miasma. Combined with loss of inhibition in sleep, tainted having vivid dreams may accidentally consume the manafields of those nearby.
As mentioned in 8B, human souls might have projections but don’t gather manafields like magicrealmers’ souls do. Instead they may function as antennas for signals making them more receptive than normal magicrealmers. Sleep may additionally increase the signal reception of human souls to outside forces because dreams seem to be prime time for eldritch entities to dial in.
Prescient Dreams and Portals. It is mentioned that dreams can be prescient. For precognition to work, information must be traveling back in time, implying a mechanism to violate causality. The only place so far we have seen severe time-funkiness is the transportium network where we get future leaps. It is possible that higher divine entities are using sufficiently advanced magi-tech to achieve future vision. In the receptive state of dreams, sleeping magicrealmers might unintentionally receive mana-vibrations from the planar fabric bordering the ethereal betwixt and thus get a glimpse of future possibilities. Humans pick up signals as well, but directly without a manafield intermediate.

Author's Reddit Comments (lightly paraphrased and collated for brevity)

Why can humans only portal from one place?

There is a specific reason why it is the IAS is located where it is that will be revealed down the line, but a lot of it is spoiler heavy and relates to deeper parts of the lore we haven’t reached yet. Humanity is not using the same methods that the Nexus uses for their portals. Humanity’s unique tunneling method relies on Quintessence, which is currently isolated to one specific point on Earth and curiously has been found nowhere else in humanity’s territorial reach. The UN tried to get the IAS to establish other portal tunneling points within space and other remote areas but, without more Quintessence to facilitate, their efforts never panned out. Meanwhile, the Nexus uses purely mana to power their portals, so they are more or less able to open portals anywhere from within the Nexus. Their central positioning is the reason for the name “Nexus”.

What does Nexus know about Earth’s portaling efforts?

There have been no real excursions from the Academy or Nexus into Earth proper, so the faculty extrapolate based on circumstantial and tangential evidence and data. They know that Earth is a manaless realm, so they are boggled by the idea that Earth could master mana well enough to open up a portal. The faculty have a vague idea though.

What is the history of the Institute for Anomalous Studies’ portal efforts?

The IAS started out as a fringe group of scientists since the concepts they laid out were simply impossible according to the scientific understanding of the time. The first proof micro-portal was achieved at their facility on Earth, the same location where the current facility is and where all other portals have been opened.
The Nexus was later contacted accidentally from that facility, so those specific Earth coordinates were then acknowledged by the Nexus as the point where further communication would take place, thus solidifying the location as a fixed point.

Why didn’t humanity figure out the mana-radiation lethality problem before Pilot 1 was killed?

The scientists took abundant precautions when opening the first portals: distance and remote operation, so they were well clear of the mana radiation that leaked through and thus unaware of the danger it posed.
The experimental portals the IAS opened before were very unstable, extremely finicky, and above all else they were always extremely variable with the mana output they gave out. Since portal tech on the human’s side of things is quite unstable, the data gathered from it, at least with regards to mana leakage, was just overall extremely variable when compared with the data after they established contact with the Nexus. After Nexian contact, the rate of mana leakage became much more consistent with each and every successive portal opening.

Why can’t humans open a portal to Nexus at will?

Almost every single portaling has been partially aided by the Nexian side. Human portal techniques are still primitive and rely on a combination of brute force, novel techniques, and a lot of power. Human portals are inherently unstable and require assistance on the other side to open for long enough to send people and matériel though! The only reason humanity is allowed and aided to send stuff through is because Nexus requested a ‘candidate’ to ‘prove’ Earth’s ‘worthiness’ so that they can assess whether or not they’re fit for joining the Nexus.
The Nexus side also cast layers of wards to slow the rate of mana drain through the portal. Emma’s armor’s mana blocking materials were engineered to defeat the levels of mana observed by the sensor suite worn by the liquefacted first student, aka Pilot I. On the other hand, the portal room was only designed to withstand the levels of mana observed leaking through the portal. Unknown to Earth, those observed levels were artificially suppressed by the wards set up on the Nexian side to prevent a catastrophic mana drain.
The facility uses a variant of the mana resistant materials alike those used on Emma’s armor and is thus rated for several orders of magnitude higher than the output of the portal, but it won’t be able to withstand unrestricted Nexian levels of mana.

Humanity’s quintessence-based “puncture” portals

This is reposted content from [4a gadgets humans] and [8b magic].
Quintessence. The strange material that humans use as the foundation for their exo-reality not-exactly-portals. Quintessence is isolated to a single, unique location on Earth and not been found elsewhere despite the military looking for more. If that place turns out to be old Yankee-land, aka the US Northeast coast, that is ground zero for the Lovecraft mythos aka the Elder Gods of primordial chaos outside space and time. I note the parallel between current humans using a Niagara falls of electricity on quintessence to open a portal and the Lovecraft mythos being created (rediscovered?) in the same timeframe as the widespread ramping up of background electromagnetic fields from electrification and shortwave radio. In the same way that mana radiation exposure can activate unusual precognition in magicrealmers, Quintessence + artificial EM exposure may have reactivated soulvision/soul-linking capabilities or very buried racial memories of the elder gods that existed prior to Nexus in humans, one of which is the library with its cthuloid writing.
My suspicion is that quintessence is special stuff with a very particular historical origin. There is a long-term plot reason why it is specifically found on a manaless Earth which will clarify the glaring contradiction between humans obviously belonging to the taxonomic xeno-family of magic-capable, physiologically humanoid magicrealmers while being nullfielders on a manaless planet with an oddly short known history compared to everyone else. I am concerned that quintessence might react with concentrated mana and that Nexus might reawaken something better left dead and dreaming if/when they decide that Earthrealm needs to be threatened with a mana flood.
Human “Portals”. Human exo-reality holes use quintessence plus a boatload of electricity (and maybe other energies, quantum syncing, or aggressive space bending) to puncture a tunnel-like hole to Nexus rather than make a proper mana-based portal which is not location or quintessence-locked. To differentiate the two, I am calling what the humans do a ‘puncture’ and the Nexian methods ‘portals’. Given that humans only see mana when it leaks through the puncture and not from the puncture itself, it means humanity’s method isn’t using mana (duh) nor forcibly generating mana on Earth roundabout by some sort of energy conversion process like how scientists today smash existing particles in colliders to make new particles. This is very strange, and I don’t think the Academy/Nexus has grokked exactly what humanity did to rip open a puncture and the implications. Mal'tory would rather believe humanity was somehow given the mana/mana-based tools needed by a greater patron who might be a threat to Nexus than entertain the thought that spell effects could be replicated by non-magical means. The Library might suspect the true reason.
Human punctures differ from mana-based Nexian portals because they can only be opened where quintessence is naturally located, require non-mana energies, puncture the planar fabric without generating mana, and are much less stable. The fact the Academy was the first major contact and exit point is also suspicious and likely meaningful.

This is part of a collection of notes I have made so far. Terms [in brackets] are invented by me, for lack of an official name. Comment-exclusive material is marked with spoilers, which will be my policy as the author may choose to decanonize anything said only in comments. ([MAIN DIRECTORY]: [1 taint dragons], [2 nulls souls], [3 academy Vanavan], [4A gadgets humans], [4B EVI], [5 Library], [6 Mal’tory], [7a Nexus glossary], [7b Nexus detail], [7c Nexus-Earth war], [8a Magic Catalog], [8b Magic], [9a Yearbook], [9b Emma’s Null, Mal'tory’s Fate], [10a portals], [10b ECS crate], [10c taint], [10d dragons], [10e tainted dragon god], [11 timeline].)
Extra notes on soulvision can be found here.

Magic

Mana Overview

Mana. Mana is the substance of magic. Mana comes in types. Humans have identified 29 distinct manatypes, and Emma discovered at least one more. Mana exists in the environment as flows: manastreams. It follows concentration gradients. Talented casters individually manipulate the different manastreams and their combinations with motion, voice, thought, and soul to cast spells. Magic is most concentrated on Nexus and is thinner in the various adjacent realms.
Most mana types are lethally harmful to bodies not shielded by their soul’s protective manafield. Manafields are membranes which regulate the amount and types of mana allowed near the soul. Manatypes have different absorbency and reactiveness with souls. Protective manafields make environmental mana visible to those who are so shielded. All magicrealmers have the sixth-sense ability to see mana radiation and visualize manastreams and auras to varying degrees of acuity. Acuity improves with magical acumen, meaning that casters (most nobles plus a few stray gifted) can see magic streams significantly better than nearly-auraless non-casters.
See the mana section below for a more comprehensive treatment.

Rarity of casters

In the current magicrealms, few people are capable of powerfully casting magic or visualizing manastreams in detail. Those who are most capable are nobility and reliably pass this ability to their biological offspring.
Certain species have different phenotypes when they are casters. Thacea’s Avinor have more colors if they are more capable of magic, but it unclear if that is a result of magic affecting phenotype/genotype in some way or Nexian species tampering.
Interactions with lesser gods and spirits sometimes awaken the spark of magic in commoners.

Origin of the Noble-Commoner magic dichotomy

Given the importance of land and titles in the Nexian system, the [spark of magic] may be drawn from the land the nobility dwells upon. The more (and better spiritual quality of the) land or fonts of power under the noble’s control, the more inherent magical talent the noble family possesses. In this system, dividing up the magic fairly among all denizens is likely seen as inferior to having a few skilled casters. Stray commoners who somehow inherit magic are like thieves, taking an allotment that strategically ought to belong to someone who could use it better.
Another option for explaining the dichotomy is a mythal (Dungeons and Dragons term for an epic-scale spell) that Nexus implements on its home plane and in adjacent realms to ensure that only nobles keep their magic. The mythal spontaneously aborts, drains the spark, or suppresses the spark of commoners who would be magic capable.
Yet another possibility is a ritual to awaken the [spark of magic] in a newborn. This ritual is practiced in secret by nobility alone or doled out by Nexian representatives to designated heirs as a fairy-godmother-like blessing.
Undercount of casters. Nobles like Ilunor seem unaware of most commoner casters and minor talents. Emma has encountered numerous workers in the periphery of the school who supposedly should be auraless given their job roles, but are skilled in their own ways.

Souls

Sentient creatures and sapient creatures have souls. It appears that soulfields/soulstuff is attracted to active, low entropy densities that correspond to living intelligences and organizes/crystallizes as a soul. Souls also encode information. The presence of environmental mana is not a prerequisite to form or possess a soul - Nexus teaches this incorrectly. My guess is souls are some type of dark-in-the-physics-sense particle/energy field that doesn’t interact with most forces and thus isn’t detectable by ordinary human tech with the exception of itself and mana radiation.
The fundamental forces and energies of “soulfields”, as opposed to manafields, are their own separate thing. They can be measured by means other than mana; the soulbinding yearbook has “soulfield vision” but the Owlexandrian Library appears to be soulfield blind. More on true soulvision later.
Force interactions with soulfields. Mana interacts with souls, explained below, but quintessence, miasma/taint, and the non-mana interfaces of portals/punctures (see notes 4A) are also candidates for forces/energies that interact with or are related to soulstuff and soulfields.

Information contained in souls and binding souls with names

Soulfields are drawn to information and contain information. In sapients, souls encode a unique identifier. This “Soul ID” is a vulnerability exploited by contracts, binding spells, tracking spells, and stealing spells. The soul owner’s mundane, mortal name can be used like a password to reach this underlying identifier. High quality binding magic can likely get to the ID even if a name is not given at all or the person changes their name. Giving a servant or apprentice a new name may be a ritual for mid-tier binding spells. We have yet to see any low-tier binding spells, but it is possible that feeding a weak contract a fake or bad mundane name will defeat it.
A creature’s manafield retransmits the Soul ID like iron filings duplicate the arcs of a magnetic field. Tracking magic that cannot directly see soulfields like the soulpath map read the manafield instead. I suspect divination spells like the Library’s veracity checker also read the manafield retransmission to detect information about the target’s hidden state of mind. A being with a soul (or equivalent) but no visible manafield stymies these conveniences: Emma and her Null, for example.
Powers that can interact directly with soulfields rather than the manafield encoded version are the exception rather than the rule. Most contracts and binding magics are reliant on the manafield’s retransmitted info and their functions are blocked by mana-disruptive materials. Only elite artifacts, like the Yearbook, have true soulvision and can divine directly from a soulfield. In general, interacting with another’s soul without a mana-based intermediate force seems to be a higher tier of power than simply seeing a soul. If Emma’s Null returns because it has a second health basecond core, it will be proof the Yearbook has non-mana-based soulvision sharp enough to spot an additional entity within the armor despite only a single name being signed.
As a theoretical idea, talented rogues or shapeshifting beings may be able to make their manafield “lie” about their soulfield and trick spells that don’t directly read the soul (most of them!). A false soul ID ought to be able to slip most binding spells. Fooling the Library’s veracity checker with a fake mind state should work similarly. In particular, a nullfielder could wear an artificial aura/manafield as a disguise because they don’t have a natural aura that needs to be suppressed...

Manafields: Souls to Magic

Magicrealm creatures have souls that project into the environmental manastreams and create an interface. This interface is called a manafield. A manafield protects the core of the soul and the rest of the body from unregulated mana radiation. A spellcaster is someone who can manipulate their manafield to make contact with individual manastreams around them to create spells and regulate the admission and expulsion of mana from their soul. The people that Nexus labels “commoners” and “auraless” have weak interfaces, correspondingly less effective manafields, don’t possess a firm grasp on the manastreams to absorb and bend them, and so can’t cast magic very well or at all. Even so, a commoner’s weak manafield is enough to keep them from getting cooked by background mana radiation, but their thin shielding renders them especially vulnerable to becoming mana sick from overload or underload (more on that later).
A human soul doesn’t form an interface/manafield when in the presence of manastreams. It is missing the “soul physiology” projections which normally recruit a protective barrier. (My imagining is that magicrealmers have dendritic growths off their soul like bare trees which gather mana “leaves” to create a manafield canopy to shade the surface of the soul from radiation downpours. This barrier is sturdier than a forest canopy.) Humans are “nullfielders”. It may be that the human soul is adapted to link with something else that isn’t manafield generating which neither Nexians nor humans are aware of. (Continuing the analogy, humans might have dendritic projections too, but they don’t gather mana “leaves”. Maybe they function better as antennas for signals or bridges for other souls to link?) Either way, humans are truly auraless and can’t cast spells. Their unshielded souls and bodies get destroyed by low levels of most types of mana radiation.
An important point of contention, it is unclear whether mana radiation is 1) naturally destructive to all unadapted organic bodies without a soul-protecting manafield, meaning that all organisms on a manaless world would die from mana exposure, or 2) the reaction of uncontrolled mana + unprotected soulfield is what generates a local meltdown of destructive radiation meaning that a mana inundation would only kill unadapted sentient and sapient beings while leaving alone mindless organisms.
Taint. A tainted individual that can use miasma has an abnormal manafield: there is nothing inherently wrong with their soul, but the tainted’s manafield links to manastreams differently which allows them to be used, absorbed, and expelled outside the usual methods. Tainted individuals have darkened, slightly ominous auras that mark them for discrimination even when their condition is under control. Given that taint tends to overlap with portals, the aberrant manafield may allow the tainted to summon mana from elsewhere which is why the 30th manatype suddenly appears despite not being present in the nearby environmental manastreams that magic users are normally restricted to using.

[Cores]

Magic-made constructs like golems and gargoyles have manafields and “centers” that simulate some of the properties of a soul and grant rudimentary intelligence/programmatic sub-sapient behaviors. I am calling these [cores] because that’s the term used for the Null. At minimum, they distort environmental manastreams like souls which allows many of the same spells and devices that target souls to also detect and interact with cores. Cores are vulnerable to many of the same mana radiation over and underload problems as regular souls, if not more so. The grade of a construct’s core and the complexity of their behavior increases with the tier of magic used to create them.

True Artificial Intelligences and souls

True AIs are sapient enough to have souls, but there is no telling yet how freeform they might be spread across all the hardware they might occupy. I expect AIs in mana atmospheres to require shielding from mana lest they corrupt and run rampant or die as biologics do, but an AI contained on concentrated hardware might pack its soulstuff in densely enough to resist the background radiation of Nexus by sheer solidity like certain cores.

Information and the soul

Nexian mystics think that the mind, memory, and spirit resides within the soul. They think getting liquefied by direct mana exposure causes the information in the soul to join with the gods which is why some of their old clerics used to get themselves consumed by mana on purpose.
Mana as a Gestalt Intelligence? It’s worth considering that each death somehow adds information to manastreams and that the collection of mana on Nexus is something closer to a gestalt intelligence fed by the life cycle. While mana might be useful to mortals, they might simply be the maintenance and their individual lives are not important to the greater being(s) that think within. That sort of attitude meshes with the Nexian desire for stability and the placement of an immortal king on the throne who will not allow network outages so to speak.
Pilot 1’s soul and his information is a potential issue and point of espionage against humans if he has been captured by gods or the Crown.

Visualizing the soul

There is no particular reason for a soul to correspond to the organism’s fleshbody appearance. Souls are information based and probably reflect the organization and distribution of information and information gathering features. Soul-vision Emma+EVI might appear like a biblically accurate angel with halos of a thousand camera eyes, sensor sweep wings, and data link contrails. The monstrosities of the Lovecraftian mythos and other hypnagogic entities that show up surreal art and myth might be a variant of the typical cross-realm inspiration: humans are observing their soulforms rather than their physical appearances - this may apply especially to greater entities like gods (or higher aliens) that are “above” mana-based methods.

Mana, Manafields, Manastreams

“I’m causing ripples in the mana-fields as we speak! Weak ripples, but any stronger and I’ll be casting a spell! Look! Just, look! You want me to imagine a world without the constant ebb and flow of mana streams around every living thing?!”
“Stop hopping about like a raving lunatic, and sit down, Vunerian. The Earthrealmer says she can’t even see mana-fields, what makes you think she has the ability to sense mana-streams, let alone see them?!” Thalmin attempted to quieten the lizard.

Mana

Mana exists in the environment, but it is unclear if it is constant churn or if there is a wellspring source(s). Manastreams are likely gravity-attracted/surface-attracted or else they would have been siphoned off of the Adjacent Realm planets into the void of space. Another option is that mana is produced at ground level and either decays before reaching far into space or requires lifeform proximity to remain stable.

Manatypes

We don’t have context yet for what makes one type different from another. Classes will eventually demystify. I wonder if each type of mana corresponds to one of the major gods?

30th Manatype

The 30th manatype is not present in the normal background manastreams which means magicrealmers don’t ordinarily use it in spells. Humans did not detect it in their sampling. So far the 30th has only shown up in places that might correspond to portals being opened (and taint, which is also related to portals). It might be photolabile, so it only exists in dark places and decays quickly when exposed to light, magical or otherwise.

Manafields

Refer back to the “Manafields: Souls to Magic” section above for how Souls make Manafields.
An aura is a more qualitative description of someone’s manafield. Thacea’s miasmatic aura is colored with a dark, almost ominous glow while normal magic users have iridescent auras.

Manastreams

Manastreams as a garden model. Even though they are environmental, manastreams can be manipulated to guide people and let them know there are magical applications nearby to be used. My analogy is greenery; manastreams near civilization and especially within dwellings are tamed, gardened, and pruned into organization and useful loops and shapes. Far from civilization, they flow wild like a forest grows wild. The students use manastreams to guide themselves around the Academy maze.
I wonder if “wild” manastreams respond to thought and intent as if they are their own programmatic or intelligent entities?
At hand casting only. Magicrealmers draw magic from without to power their spells rather than power them from within (Tainted may be an exception), so they are utterly reliant on all the right types of manastreams being present when they need a spell. I am unsure if manastreams are monotype or if they are heterogeneous or homogeneous mixes of different manatypes. Well, the important thing is that if some component has been removed from local space (say an “mana-magnet” attractor has been set up on a high ceiling to draw all of a certain type out out arm’s reach), certain spells might be weakened or not castable for lack of a critical mana ingredient. Again, more specifics are needed to work out the implications, but we can be sure the anomalous 30th manatype is not part of most spells since it isn’t present in the environment most of the time.
Magic weather. Given that mana follows concentration gradients, math pretty much ensures manastreams will form up into “weather patterns” like laminar flows and gyres. Depending on what pushes them around, these weather patterns might get pretty violent and cause strange effects like “mana static” or “mana typhoons”. Buildings are probably magic-weatherproofed. On the smaller scale, indoors weather manastream flows might be perturb careful experiments unless stilled. Fine labs are probably recognizable at a glance for having static mana hazes rather than streams to reduce noise on measurements and to achieve consistent results.

Navigate by streams

In places where casters gather and where casters need to exclude noncasters, manastreams provide another, rich layer of sensory information about the world. It’s like having a HUD and instant access to all the apps to interact with the local features and devices. The level of detail makes other senses redundant at times. Students and workers have been shown in working-meditative states where they rely solely on information embedded in the manastreams to function, causing them to miss out on other events and disasters going on around them.
Strong casters have manavision, essentially a blindsight that allows the user to navigate to bypass darkness, fog, mazes, or other murky environments. “Navigating by stream” is easiest when the individual ignores their other senses: elves use a cataract-like contact lens magic-equivalent to suppress their ordinary vision (or else one forms from not using their eyes after a while). Manasight appears to be a full sixth sense rather than an extension of an existing sense like vision, so individuals with weaker vision or visual disability aren’t affected.
Chances are that magical wildlife also has manavision which implies an evolutionary arms race between prey and predators to see concealed auras and hide from manasight, which might in turn be replicated by spells. While questing, it would not be unreasonable to encounter intelligent wildlife used to navigating and hunting by manasight and being naturally cryptic within it.

Magical colors

So far we have two pretty good indicators that color is magically significant. 1) Casters have theme colors. Mal'tory uses grey and green spells. (Caster colors, if known, were listed in Part 3: Academy and 8A: Magic catalog) 2) Shards of impart come in colors and combinations that relate to their function. Another potential hint is the need for an entire first-year class on Light-Magic Theory. (I am also considering the alternate possibilities that Mal'tory’s light class is like ‘defense against the dark arts’ because light opposes taint, or it is misleadingly named and closer to an “Imperial-thought on Enlightenment with Nexian Characteristics” taught by the state commissar.)
Dark is the spooky color. Black is associated with transportium/portal-betwixts, soul/memory stealing ink, soul-stealing null cores, and tainted miasma - all of these have interface and taking themes. A thought I am keeping in mind is that the soultrapping book’s light-eating magic ink might be ‘spreadable hole’ rather than a substance.

Humans might know about manatypes that Nexus is unaware of

The idea of a visible spectrum of magic raises a conundrum: could Nexian mages be missing some mana-types because they are limited by their manasight? Are there non-visible and rare-incidence mana-type spectra only detectable by rare creatures or high-sensitivity experimental equipment? EVI’s diagnostics prove that humanity has excellently extracted distinct manatype IDs from the slim data they were able to collect remotely. EVI’s sensors identified the thirtieth manatype that appeared for a fraction of a second at the yearbook signing as novel, not with a probability, but with certainty. Human research on mana is credible.
As silly as it sounds on the surface, there is a chance humanity has identified manatypes that Nexus is unaware of or can only theorize about. Experience and practice are stronger teachers than time alone. Nexus research that we know of is weak at collaboration, experimentalism, objective determinations of truth, and intuition for when and how to search at extreme ranges and test quantitatively. The extremely simple notion that features you can’t see with the naked eye might affect crystal properties is a Nexian state secret.
In contrast, humans are grizzled veterans of ridiculous high and low energy extremes, collecting massive datasets for supercomputing statistical analysis, experts at establishing theories for observations and deriving predictions to find even more evidence, and bleeding upon the knife’s edge of physical law to find and categorize all sorts of particles, forces, elements, molecules, light waves, etc.
Nexian manatype classification errors may include: 1) wrongly split types based on origin or property-changing impurities they are associated with, 2) compound types identified as single elements, 3) incorrectly lumped types that are similar but hard to separate or have similar properties under most usage conditions, 4) cryptic types that are especially dilute or signal-overwhelmed by other types they associate with, 5) Off-the-visible-spectrum types which require exotic technology to visualize, 6) short-lived manatypes that decay or color-shift into other types and require fusion-like reactions or high energy to create, 7) especially unreactive manatypes that are not easy to concentrate or isolate using mana-based methods, 8) inertia-of-history errors e.g. a famous or infamous person insisted a manatype is so and contradictions hurt credibility, and 9) other physical phenomena like magnetism or atomic radioactivity wrongly identified as mana-based.
Human manatype classification errors more are likely to be omissions: 1) types not present in any of their samples (e.g. the thirtieth type), 2) beyond their means to generate, or 3) unpredicted because theories are incomplete or incorrect.
The 30th manatype is a candidate for a manatype magicrealmers may not be able to detect without special equipment.
Taint. Nexus may think Tainted people have extra capabilities no else ordinarily does because the tainted can absorb and interface with these unseen manatypes and wield them indirectly.

Mana overload and underload

For species adapted to mana atmospheres, both magical surges and voids are dangerous to personal manafields, souls, and health. The damage depends on if the exposure is gradual or acute. To simplify discussion, all conditions involving too little mana are [hypomagixias] and all conditions involving too much mana are [hypermagixias], following medical naming conventions.
Differences in souls and cores. Some species have souls or essences that are inherently more resistant to mana radiation and thus can survive swings. Emma’s null is an extreme example. It has no manafield to protect its core yet readily handled 7th/8th level spells and a salvo of 3rd level beams.

Author spoilers about the magixias - How Nexians die if they go to Earth

Mana, like water, follows concentration gradients from areas of high concentration to areas of lower concentration. A manafield, created by a magicrealmer’s soul, creates a semi-permeable barrier to regulate the influx and efflux of mana. Human souls do not contain mana and lacks a manafield to regulate the inflow, so human souls bloat and explode, resulting in liquefaction. A magicrealmer in a manaless void loses their natural internal mana. The soul desiccates, and the effect on the body if like a grape becoming a raisin.
Nearby humans. Mana siphoned from a magicrealmer seeps out and equalizes with the environment so rapidly that it wouldn’t really affect humans. A human could be irradiated if they were standing close to a particularly mana-rich being ex-mana-ated.

Mana Underload [Hypomagixias]

Gradual. The symptoms of the manafield adaption process to a lower-mana environment hasn’t come up, but I imagine it is like exercising at high altitude: easier to get spellcasting strain, lethargy, and the like. Manavision is probably impaired.
Acute. Mana floods out of the body and soul. See spoiler above for what happens to the body.
Magic tools. Magic tools work best when a caster is supplying the tool with magic from their manafield. A tool used by a non-caster is like missing lubricant; it wears the tool out and it breaks faster. Tools of all sorts don’t last as long in thin-mana atmospheres. Shards of impart discolor under high strain before going inert.
Decompress to mana-free environment? If species can acclimate to higher magic environments, then some species of magicrealmers theoretically might be able to survive if very slowly stepped down to a mana-free atmosphere. The ones with bodies clearly composed of magic, e.g. elementals, probably die no matter what. Magicrealmers would call foul because they believe the soul requires mana even though human existence proves otherwise. Emma could probably test with her tent apparatus if local animals and plants are truly mana obligate and always die in mana voids.

Overload [Hypermagixia]

Gradual. “Acute mana-field adjustment sickness” is mild mana-overload caused by a personal manafield acclimating to especially mana-rich air. It takes a while to set in because visitors to Sorecar’s lab don’t get harmed immediately, and Sorecar might adjust the manastreams of the upper factory level to be kinder to visitors. Same for the Library. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, intermittent loss of consciousness, and profound precognition. Transgracian students have historically used the school’s on-site mana-pool to overexpose themselves for boasts and dares with injurious results.
Acute. A disruption to one’s manafield or a strong surge of mana can stun or knock-out magicrealmers. Even commoners with thin fields are relatively tough. One police-typical magic attack does this on purpose.
[Burnout]: Too much casting and getting hit by high-level spells. Overuse and over-channeling of mana by too much spell activity causes a burnout form of hypermagixia.
“Barbaric” mana eaters. A type of caster that seems to ingest mana for greater power and gets [burnout]-like hypermagixia as a side effect. Casters of this type probably swig liquid mana potions or similar.
Synergization/Liquefaction. More extreme than acute disruption of a manafield, exposure to a miasmic surge from a tainted source deletes the personal manafield of victims in range so their naked soul is fully exposed to uncontrolled mana radiation influx. The deletion is called “consumption”. The uncontrolled radiation blast destroys the physical body, “synergizing”/liquefacting it into a genetically unrecognizable mess and mortally wounding the soul. It is possible that an especially extreme liquefaction event causes an outright disappearance of one’s physical matter. See the notes above about the information in the “synergized” soul supposedly going to the gods.

Attacks targeting manafields

Mana-based weapons often use magic to generate spell-like effects that, say, set fire to things or dice a body like a kitchen cube cutter. Other magic weapons, specifically the high grade spears associated with the Outer Guard, directly attack manafields to induce hypermagixia that stuns, disables, and even kills or destroys constructs, like an anti-personnel-sized Mana EMP if you will.

Head injuries and sleep

Certain types of injury that incur permanent brain damage, like concussions or severe strokes, may cause the victim to lose part of their protective manafield and be susceptible to mana overload. Sleep doesn’t seem to disrupt or weaken manafields, but does incur a loss of control. Sleep in humans may increase the signal reception of their souls to outside forces because dreams seem to be prime time for eldritch entities to dial in.

Words

Names are magically meaningful. See the soul section above for the full treatment.

Casting Languages

High Nexian as the magical language. Thalmin’s offhand comment implied High Nexian is related to the fundamentals of magic somehow. Of course, it isn’t the casting language which goes untranslated and has an otherworldly cadence.
Other Magical Languages. Adjacent Realmers had their own languages before they joined with Nexus and several seem to have kept them alive (Havenbrock). These languages probably have their own homegrown spells and magic arts bound to them. Nexus has probably supplanted or (tried to) eliminated them with reformations. Regimenting the spells into tiers with casting words and eliminating freeform casting using fluctuating willpower alone is probably part of the reforms.
Imagine the elvish professors trying to sing the modem dial-up sound. Given that words are bound to casting magic and command words activate magic artifices, it would be an easily-made but mistaken assumption for Magicrealmers to expect a natural “casting” language for Earth’s complex technology (and to be fair, there kind of is: binary or some flavor like it if quantum computing is the norm). Contraptions activating at a distance without Emma’s verbal or apparent mental direction will probably surprise them, once. Everything being a semi-autonomous programmable golem is a novelty.

Writing

Writing may imprint a book with a little manafield-mediated memory. The Yearbook and the Sight-Seer tomes are extreme examples, but it may be that any sort of writing with magic-made ink also captures small shreds of the author’s intent and semantic understanding. The embedded information facilitates useful searches and translations later, so it’s not all unintentional. Think of it like metadata or header information on a webpage.

Comprehending

Comprehend Languages spell doesn’t work on nullfielders? I suspect the Nexian spell for translating unheard-before language taps into the target person’s or tome’s manafield because most divinations function that way: using a manafield as a proxy for soul-stored information. A nullfielder or a book penned by a nullfielder won’t have shreds of magic context embedded unless an outside intelligent force is intervening in the transaction. If Nexus enchanted the minor shards of impart sent to Earth with a comprehend languages spell for espionage, it probably returned untranslated English: there are no manafields around humans to divine semantic meaning from. This would explain why Nexus potentially sent an untranslated dictionary and grammar guide across - they could not understand English and were forced to use non-magical brainpower to try to understand what was being said (possible for an academic). There might have been additional cultural materials intended for Earth despite Mal'tory claiming the test was only a few items (e.g. treaties and agreements and such), but it was too embarrassing for him to admit that all the king’s men couldn’t make them work without an accurate English-to-Nexian translation. The shame would be even greater because IAS researchers collaborating with the professors on the other side of the portal with the proposal to enroll a student casually defeated the Nexians by suddenly switching to speaking High Nexian just fine - Earth’s people seem way swifter than their Elvish counterparts.

Magic Tools and Artifices

Construction

Nexian tools use a combination of crystals, metals, glass, tomes, and innately-magical organic cores enchanted with spells and entwined with conditionals to create simple programmatic magic that activates with motions, command words spoken or mentally invoked, or even physical buttons. (E.g. pairing a mana-detection spell for locating creatures with a restraining spell inside a pole creates a non-lethal thrown weapon to arrest a target if it hits.) Magic cores and crystals seem to be the most magical of materials, more potent than steel enchantments. Crystals seem more powerful, rarer, and harder to work with while organic cores are more economical, flexible, renewable, and durable to wielding shock.
These components and their braiding to form physical linkages for the program take up space. Figuring out how to fit all the functionality and enough power into a device is limiting for smiths. Larger weapons with plenty of haft are best for complex functions, “compounding enchantment” synergies, and brute-force magical weapon applications. Organic materials and power-scaling with size creates issues with tech miniaturization, environmental operating conditions, and fundamental durability.
Organic cores are also better for custom orders rather than mana-steel which is preferred for large-batch orders.

Use

Magical tools can be powered by the manafield of a caster but most tool users are not casters. A tool used by a non-caster is like missing lubricant; it wears the tool out and it breaks faster. Tools without caster users can be powered with atmospheric collectors: mana ducts, or a battery: mana ampoule. A worn-down tool can simply cease functioning, behave aberrantly, or break catastrophically. The majority of factory activity on Nexus is refurbishing spent magic tools. Items like the Yearbook seem self-powered rather than fed by the manafields of the users (or power is drawn from elsewhere). Others like draconic shards of impart were naturally created by mana-rich beings and are sustained for a time by their own natural radiation stores.

Enchantments

Enchantment is the art of embedding spells in materials. It is unclear if certain spells are enchantment exclusive. Some artifices work with applied potions or inks. In general, enchantments on magical tools seem stronger than those used by the average first-year Transgracian student, so it implies most smiths are highly skilled casters (or have group circle casts to boost power) and there are plenty of dangerous creatures or casters running around with powerful abilities or black-market tools of their own to require such effective enchantments.

Earth

Ritual for creating mana-resistant materials. The non-description of the fabrication process for mana-blocking compounds seemed downright cultlike, like a nonmagical summons of tiny bits of materials at a time by means that machines cannot accomplish without dedicated human attention. This sounds more like a typical magical art than a technological process.
Quintessence. The material that humans use as the foundation for their puncture portals discussed in Part 4a. They differ from Nexian portals because they can only be opened where Quintessence is naturally located, require a boatload of electricity and other energies, puncture the planar fabric without generating mana, and are much less stable. The fact the Academy was the first major contact and exit point is also suspicious and likely meaningful. We don’t know where Quintessence is located, but if it turns out to be old Yankee-land, aka the American Northeast coast, that is ground zero for the Lovecraft mythos aka the Elder Gods of primordial chaos outside space and time. WPAtaMS contains a very Mythos-typical plot of humans making dream-contact with a world afar and unlike our own.... but we have seen very few Nexian analogues for Great Old Ones outside the Library. It makes more sense that some humans might have natural soulvision and viewed the magicrealm’s non-Euclidean spaces, gods, or advanced beings in their information forms.
I wonder if quintessence reacts with mana to produce something else. Manaflooding Earth could reawaken a dead and dreaming devil Nexus has forgotten because they have gotten too good at burying their own history.
5G Conspiracy Theories. I note the parallel between current humans using a Niagara falls of electricity on quintessence to open a portal and the Lovecraft mythos being created (rediscovered?) in the same timeframe as the widespread ramping up of background electromagnetic fields from electrification and shortwave radio. In the same way that mana radiation exposure can activate unusual precognition in magicrealmers, Quintessence + artificial EM exposure may have reactivated soulvision/soul-linking capabilities or very buried racial memories of the elder gods that existed prior to Nexus in humans, one of which is the library with its cthuloid writing. I am concerned that bringing dense, organized EM radiation from human devices into Nexus might cause similar mental disturbances in magicrealmers. If the Dragon’s Heart tower residents start having eldritch nightmares, maybe blame Emma’s 205G network of gadgets.

Class: FleshGrafter

Class Features:
Hit Points: 1d8 per FleshGrafter level
Proficiencies:

• Armour: Light armour
• Weapons: Simple weapons
• Tools: Tinker's tools
• Saving Throws: Constitution, Intelligence
• Skills: Choose two from Medicine, Arcana, Investigation, Sleight of Hand, and Nature

Equipment:

• (a) a simple weapon or (b) a dagger
• (a) a dungeoneer's pack or (b) an explorer's pack
• Tinker's tools and a set of traveller's clothes

Flesh Grafting:
At 1st level, you gain the ability to graft body parts to yourself. During a long rest, you can spend time grafting a body part, gaining a benefit based on the type of part. Choose from limbs, organs, or sensory enhancements. You start with one graft slot and gain additional slots at higher levels.
Grafting Techniques:
At 2nd level, you gain proficiency in the Tinker's tools if you didn't have it already. You gain a number of graft slots equal to half of your intelligence modifier.
Subclass - Graftmaster:
At 3rd level, choose the Graftmaster subclass.
Ability Score Improvement:
At 4th level and again at 8th, 12th, 16th, and 19th level, you can increase one ability score of your choice by 2, or you can increase two ability scores of your choice by 1.
Extra Graft Slot:
At 5th level, you gain an additional graft slot and an additional attack.
Subclass Feature:
At 7th level, you gain a feature based on your chosen Graftmaster subclass.
Evolving Grafts:
At 9th level, your grafts become more potent. Choose one of your existing grafts. Its benefits are doubled and you gain the effects of another graft of the same type of your choice.
Mastery of Grafting:
At 13th level, you can now graft more advanced body parts, such as wings or defensive plating. You gain two additional graft slots.
Subclass Feature:
At 15th level, you gain a feature based on your chosen Graftmaster subclass.
Perfect Fusion:
At 18th level, your mastery of flesh grafting reaches its zenith. You can now graft multiple body parts simultaneously, up to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of 2), without adverse effects.
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Subclass - Graftmaster:

1. Biomancer

• Flesh Manipulation: Gain the ability to reshape your body temporarily, granting disguise self as a cantrip.
• Adaptive Resilience: You can adapt your body to resist certain damage types. Choose a damage type when you finish a long rest; you gain resistance to that damage type until your next long rest.

3rd Level - Biomancer's Prowess:

• Gain proficiency in Medicine if you didn't have it already. Additionally, you can use your Intelligence modifier instead of Wisdom for Medicine checks.

7th Level - Adaptive Regeneration:

• Your body becomes more adaptable. During a short rest, you can expend hit dice to regenerate lost hit points the next time you take damage. Additionally, you gain advantage on saving throws against diseases.

15th Level - Biomimicry Mastery:

• You can temporarily assume some characteristics of creatures you've studied. Once per long rest, you can choose one ability score from a creature you've encountered before and gain a +2 bonus to that ability score for 1 minute.

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1. Technomancer

• Integrated Weaponry: You can graft weapons into your limbs, allowing you to make weapon attacks using your intelligence modifier.
• Enhanced Augmentations: Your grafts can now include technological enhancements, granting you advantage on Intelligence-based ability checks involving machinery or devices.

3rd Level - Integrated Toolset:

• Gain proficiency with thieves' tools and one additional set of artisan's tools of your choice. Additionally, you can use your Intelligence modifier instead of Dexterity for checks involving thieves' tools.

7th Level - Mechanised Defense:

• You can incorporate defensive mechanisms into your grafts. Gain a +1 bonus to AC for each limb graft you have but lose the ability to gain ac bonuses on armour. Additionally, you have advantage on saving throws against traps.

15th Level - Technomagic Overdrive:

• Once per long rest, you can enter a state of technomagic overdrive for 1 minute. During this time, you gain advantage on all Intelligence-based ability checks, and your grafts' integrated weaponry and graft weaponry deals additional damage multiplied by Intelligence modifier. Ex 1d8 x intelligence modifier + other bonuses

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List of all Grafts

Limb Grafts:

• Steelclad Arm:
  • Benefit: Your arm is replaced with a sturdy steel limb. Gain a +1 bonus to AC while wearing light armour, and you can make unarmed strikes with this arm, dealing 1d6 bludgeoning damage.
• Spider Leg Extension:
  • Benefit: Graft spider-like legs to your lower body. You gain a climbing speed equal to your walking speed, and you have advantage on saving throws against being knocked prone.
• Shadowstep Foot:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your feet with a shadow-infused appendage. Once per short rest, you can teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space you can see.
• Tentacle Appendage:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your limbs with a prehensile tentacle. You gain advantage on Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) checks and can use the tentacle to manipulate objects or make melee attacks 1d6.
• Stone Fist:
  • Benefit: Graft a stone-like substance onto one of your hands. You gain a +2 bonus to damage rolls with unarmed strikes made using this hand, and your unarmed strikes are considered magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to non-magical attacks.
• Ethereal Grasp:
  • Benefit: Replace your hand with an ethereal substance. You gain the benefits of a bag of holding.
  • Drill Arm:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your arms with a rotating drill. Gain advantage on checks to break objects, and your unarmed strikes can deal piercing damage.
• Winged Shoulder Blades:
  • Benefit: Graft wings onto your back, granting you a flying speed equal to your walking speed for three turns or 18 seconds.
• Magnetic Palm:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your hands with a magnetic palm. You can attract or repel metal objects within 10 feet of you once per short rest.
• Phase-Shifted Limb:
• Benefit: Graft a limb that can phase in and out of the Material Plane. Once per short rest, you can move through solid objects for that turn.

Organ Grafts:

• Clockwork Heart:
  • Benefit: Replace your heart with a clockwork mechanism. You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed or frightened, and you cannot be magically aged.
• Chameleon Skin Graft:
  • Benefit: Graft chameleon-like skin onto your body. Gain advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks, and you can spend an action to change the colour of your skin, providing advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks for 1 hour.
• Acidic Stomach:
  • Benefit: Replace your stomach with an acidic chamber. You can vomit a stream of corrosive acid as a ranged attack (range 30/60 feet) that deals 2d6 acid damage on a hit twice per long rest.
• Hive Mind Brain:
  • Benefit: Replace part of your brain with a hive-mind organ. You gain advantage on Intelligence (Investigation) checks, and you can communicate telepathically with creatures within 10 feet.
• Echoing Lungs:
  • Benefit: Replace your lungs with a set that can produce a disorienting sonic burst. Once per short rest, you can use an action to create a 15-foot cone of disorienting sound. Creatures in the cone must make a Constitution saving throw or be deafened and stunned until the start of your next turn.
• Mimicry Vocal Cords:
  • Benefit: Graft special vocal cords that allow you to perfectly mimic any sound or voice you've heard for 1 minute.
• Amplified Kidneys:
  • Benefit: Replace your kidneys with enhanced versions. You gain advantage on Constitution saving throws against poison and resistance to poison damage.
• Regenerative Liver:
  • Benefit: Graft a regenerative liver, allowing you to regain hit points equal to your level at the start of each of your turns if you have at least 1 hit point.
• Photophore Skin:
  • Benefit: Graft skin that emits bioluminescent light. You can illuminate an area within 10 feet of you, providing bright light, and dim light for an additional 10 feet.
• Psychic Nexus:
  • Benefit: Graft a psychic nexus organ. You can cast Detect Thoughts at will without expending a spell slot.

Sensory Enhancement Grafts:

• Eagle Eye Implant:
  • Benefit: Graft an eagle's eye into your eye socket. Gain advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks based on sight, and you can see up to one mile away without difficulty.
• Bat Echolocation Ear:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your ears with a bat's echolocation organ. Gain blindsight up to 30 feet, allowing you to "see" in total darkness.
• Mindscape Antenna:
  • Benefit: Graft an antenna to your head that enhances your telepathic abilities. You can communicate telepathically with any living thing within 30 feet that understands at least four languages.
• Infrared Eyes:
  • Benefit: Graft specialised eyes, granting you the ability to see in infrared. You can see heat signatures, allowing you to perceive creatures and objects in darkness or through obstacles but you lose your normal sight so if a creature has no heat signature you cant see them.
• Psychic Antennae:
  • Benefit: Graft psychic antennae onto your head, enhancing your mental awareness. You gain advantage on Intelligence saving throws against mind-affecting spells and effects.
• Sonic Resonance Ear:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your ears with an organ that grants you advantage on saving throws against deafening effects and allows you to hear sounds at a much greater distance, you gain advantage of trying to hear things.
• Holographic Retina:
  • Benefit: Graft a holographic retina to your eyes. You can cast Silent Image once per short rest without expending a spell slot.
• Nanite Olfactory Enhancer:
  • Benefit: Graft an olfactory organ enhanced by nanites. Gain advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks based on smell, and you can track creatures by scent.
• Temporal Eye:
  • Benefit: Graft an eye that perceives the flow of time. Once per short rest, you can gain advantage on an initiative roll or make a Dexterity saving throw with advantage.
• Reality Disruption eyes:
  • Benefit: Graft eyes that allow you to perceive planar disturbances. You can cast Detect Magic at will without expending a spell slot.

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Advanced Grafts

Advanced Limb Grafts:

• Quantum Manipulator Arm:
  • Benefit: This advanced limb allows you to manipulate the fundamental particles at a quantum level. Once per long rest, you can reroll one attack roll, saving throw, or ability check and choose the preferred result.
• Vorpal Blade Limb:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your arms with a blade capable of cutting through almost anything. Your melee attacks with this limb deal an additional 1d8 slashing damage, and on a critical hit, the target must make a Constitution saving throw or be instantly decapitated.
• Wings of Celestial Ascent:
  • Benefit: Graft celestial wings onto your back, granting you a flying speed equal to your walking speed, and you gain advantage on saving throws against being restrained or grappled.
• Armored Titan skin:
• Benefit: Replace your skin with enormous, heavily armoured skin. You gain a +2 bonus to AC while wearing light armour and can use this to make powerful melee attacks, dealing an additional 1d10 bludgeoning damage.
• Energy Blade Limb:
• Benefit: Graft an energy blade to replace one of your limbs. You can summon or dismiss the blade at will, and it deals 3d10 radiant or necrotic damage on successful attacks.
• Rocket Propulsion Leg:
• Benefit: Replace one of your legs with a rocket propulsion system. Once per short rest, you can use a bonus action to gain a burst of speed, doubling your movement for one round.
• Magnetic Grappling Appendage:
• Benefit: Graft a magnetic grappling appendage to your body. You can use this limb to attract or repel metallic objects within 60 feet.
• Banshee Wail Vocal Cord:
• Benefit: Graft vocal cords capable of emitting a banshee-like wail. Once per short rest, you can unleash a sonic scream in a cone, forcing creatures to make a Constitution saving throw or become frightened and poop themselves.
• Temporal Phasing Limb:
• Benefit: Graft a limb that can phase through time. You can use an action to become incorporeal the rest of your turn, allowing you to move through creatures and objects.
• Spectral Grasp Hand:
• Benefit: Replace one of your hands with a spectral grasp. Once per short rest, you can make a melee spell attack to grapple a creature from a distance, pulling them towards you.

Advanced Organ Grafts:

• Nanite Infused Blood:
  • Benefit: Replace your blood with nanites that enhance your body's natural functions. You gain advantage on Constitution saving throws and have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned.
• Symbiotic Healing Organ:
  • Benefit: Graft a specialised organ that houses a symbiotic creature. Once per short rest, you can use a reaction to have the symbiote heal you for 2d10 hit points when you take damage.
• Ethereal Essence Heart:
  • Benefit: Replace your heart with an ethereal essence, granting you resistance to non-magical slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage.
• Aegis Shielding Kidneys:
• Benefit: Replace your kidneys with advanced shielding organs. You gain resistance to one type of damage of your choice (fire, cold, lightning, acid, or thunder).
• Hyper-Adaptive Liver:
• Benefit: Graft a hyper-adaptive liver that grants you resistance to a status effect of your choice for 6 hours after a short rest.
• Magnetic Resonance Brain:
• Benefit: Replace part of your brain with a magnetic resonance organ. You gain advantage on Intelligence (Arcana) checks and can detect the presence of magnetic fields.
• Quantum Probability Gland:
• Benefit: Graft a quantum probability gland, allowing you to manipulate probability. Once per long rest, you can reroll a failed saving throw.
• Bioluminescent Spine:
• Benefit: Graft a bioluminescent spine that can emit light in a 30-foot radius. You can activate or deactivate this light at will.
• Petrifying Gaze Eye:
• Benefit: Replace one of your eyes with a petrifying gaze organ. Once per short rest, you can force a creature to make a Constitution saving throw or be restrained as if petrified for one minute.
• Psionic Network Cortex:
• Benefit: Graft a psionic network cortex that links your mind with others. Once per long rest, you can cast Telepathy without expending a spell slot for one hour.

Advanced Sensory Enhancement Grafts:

• Reality-Warping Eyes:
  • Benefit: Graft eyes that can perceive the fabric of reality. Once per long rest, you can cast True Seeing without expending a spell slot for 1 minute.
• Teleportation Beacon Ear:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your ears with a teleportation beacon. Once per long rest, you can cast Teleportation Circle without expending a spell slot.
• Divine Insight Retina:
  • Benefit: Graft a retina infused with divine insight. Once per short rest, you can gain advantage on any Intelligence-based skill check.
• Quantum Olfactory Glands:
• Benefit: Graft olfactory glands that allow you to perceive quantum scents. You can detect the presence of other creatures or objects in alternate realities within 60 feet and make attacks against them.
• Dimensional Echo Ear:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your ears with a dimensional echo organ. You can hear echoes of conversations from alternate realities, providing advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks.
• Arcane Sight Retina:
  • Benefit: Graft a retina infused with arcane power. Once per short rest, you can cast Arcane Eye without expending a spell slot.
• Sensory Overdrive Cortex:
  • Benefit: Graft a sensory overdrive cortex to your brain. Once per long rest, you can enter a state of heightened senses, gaining advantage on all Wisdom-based checks for 1 minute.
• Nullification Gaze Eye:
  • Benefit: Replace one of your eyes with a nullification gaze organ. Once per short rest, you can use an action to suppress magical effects in a 30-foot cone for 1 minute.
• Quantum Phase-Shift Nose:
  • Benefit: Graft a quantum phase-shift nose that allows you to detect the presence of creatures in the Ethereal Plane within 60 feet.
• Harmony Harmony Harmonica:
  • Benefit: Graft a small harmonica-like instrument to your body. Once per short rest

Like everyone, I have been amassing headphones and varous equipment over the years. Also like the entire group, I only listen to one setup 99% of the time. I've arrived at a place that has me totally content, and it is oddly very affordable.
This setup won't be for everyone but I've been having a *ton* of fun with what is almost my cheapest gear. This post will lay it all out. There will be plenty of nasty responses, and that is great, but this really does it for me, even over some extremely popular and well liked planars and a couple of well reviewed amps with gobs of power.
Again, this is not a joke.
Headphones: Sennheiser HD 58X
Mods: All foam removed (in front and behind the drivers). Nothing has replaced the foam. They are wide open and susceptible to dirt. I do not work in a coal mine. They've been fine like this for two years.
Cable: I don't recall the brand, and it couldn't matter less, but I have a 6n silver plated balanced cable from a Chinese vendor on AliExpress. It was not the cheapest cable but certainly an affordable silver plated cable. I was specifically looking for 6n or 7n, silver plated. Yes, I believe I can tell a difference in cables and this cable is way, way better than the stock unbalanced cable (something may be wrong with it). lol!
Amp: Qudelix 5K
Amp notes: The Qudelix is cheap, sounds very good, and has PEQ in hardware (the silver bullet).
Qudelix configuration:
DAC/AMP -> Mode -> Output Power -> Normal ; This is very important. On High Power, detail is lost. The effect is very noticeable.
DAC/AMP -> Filter -> Minimum phase slow roll-off ; This is sounds the best to my ears but the effect is extremely subtle and preference may vary.
DSP -> Equalizer -> Sennheiser HD-58X -> Modified using a confluence filter -> Saved to a custom preset.
​
Creating the confluence filter:
https://autoeq.app/
​
Select Sennheiser HD 58X at the top. On the top left, select "Harman Over-ear 2018". On the upper right side, select "Qudelix 5K".
Use the values on the right side to create a custom preset on the Qudelix amp.
​
Clamp pressure: These headphones have a lot of clamp pressure. I did not reduce it by bending the head strap. I've become accustomed to the pressure and don't find it the least bit uncomfortable, at this point. Heavy clamp facilitates heavy bass. It did take some getting used to but now my Sundaras feel like a bean bag balancing on my head. There's nothing wrong with Sundaras, comfort or sound wise, but I oddly prefer the Sennheisers configured as I have.
​
Sennheiser 6XX: A friend has a pair and I have compared the two on a few occasions. I can see how many people would prefer the 6XX but I think they are very similar, once the 58X have the foam removed. I've read the foam doesn't change the sound signature. This is incorrect; it does.
You could probably do exactly what I have done, but substitute the 6XX, and achieve an identical result in every way. IMO, Senns all have a similar sound.
​
Usage notes:
This configuration wants really good source material. I have some 24 bit content that came from my collection of 3 SACDs. 16 bit FLAC CD rips sound decent but that is really the base level, IMO. Source is so important.
I use "Music Player" on Android as a source but my linux desktop PC sounds a tiny bit better.
I won't go down the rabbit hole in this post but it was necessary to get my linux system to not resample everything. It was worth it but took a lot of research plus tial and error to get it to play music at their native sample rates.
My PC has built in bluetooth but I use a TP-Link AC1200 dual wifi/bluetooth card. It's just an M.2 host card with an Intel 7265 wifi card and external antennas.
I upgraded the stock 5dBi external antennas with a pair of 10dBi whip antennas from Amazon. I don't recall the brand and don't think it matters but I made sure the specs showed 2.4GHz, as that is the bluetooth frequency. I have nearly perfect coverage on all three stories of my house, plus our half acre of yard.
The system operates in LDAC HQ essentially all the time.
This is the setup I use when portable and also at home with my desktop. I only bring out the Sundaras when the Qudelix 5K battery gets low (and that is extremely rare). BTW, I love the Sundaras, also. They are detailed, crisp, powerful. They just don't sound like a smoke filled whiskey bar like the cheapo Senn configuration this post outlines.
​
Results:
The Harman curve creates a warm, intimate, sound signature. They get bottom end heavy when the content has a lot of low frequency content. I do not adjust this out. This was intended so my job is to enjoy it; which I do.
The Sennheisers are a pleasure to use. When I leave them at the office and have to use a different, more expensive, pair at home, it is always a small let down.
​
​
OK. Burn me to the waterline! lol!

This is a collection of notes I have made so far. I intend to release a batch of notes on a different group of topics every couple of days before the public release of chapter 50. The next batch on Emma's home and tech will thankfully be a lot shorter. ([MAIN DIRECTORY]: [1 taint dragons], [2 nulls souls], [3 academy Vanavan], [4A gadgets humans], [4B EVI], [5 Library], [6 Mal'tory], [7a Nexus glossary], [7b Nexus detail], [7c Nexus-Earth war], [8a Magic Catalog], [8b Magic], [9a Yearbook], [9b Emma’s Null, Mal'tory’s Fate], [10a portals], [10b ECS crate], [10c taint], [10d dragons], [10e tainted dragon god], [11 timeline].)

The Transgracian Academy for the Magical Arts

Structure

Transgracian was created to school Adjacent Realmers as well as Nexians. Assuming all peer groups get sorted into houses, the Academy admits between 80 to 100 students a year and has a student body of between 400 and 500 students. Admission standards by polity are unclear:

• Do all adjacent realms send one student each year or one every X years?
  
• Is it mandatory for adjacent realms to periodically send a student or do some skip?
  
• Can adjacent realms send more than one student per year under certain circumstances?
  
• In the case of multiple species per realm, do multiple students attend?
  
• Do the students need to be the native species of the Adjacent Realm, or is a colonizing minority allowed to monopolize admission?
  
• What proportion of the student body is native Nexian?
  
• (If realms must send one student for each species every 20 years, then there is a max cap of 2,000 adjacent realm species. If realms must send 1 student for each species every year, then there are minimum 80 adjacent realm species. Good old log-means guessing says there are around 400 adjacent realm species sending one student every five years.)
  

Transgracian’s matriculation standards are a candidate of 19 years of age, of any rank and station, with “a heart of gold and a willingness to accept what is beyond the known, and willing to sacrifice everything should it come to it”. Some species might age at different rates, so that 19 may be flexible, or not. What is known is that Adjacent Realms usually send a student of high nobility (but not always), and Transgracian has comfortably settled into an overt role of inculcating students with Nexian dogma and hierarchies so that they can rule their masses and keep their realms in line with the force of Nexus-approved sorcery that few individuals otherwise possess.
Transgracian Academy schooling lasts five years with known breaks during summer and winter and post-yearly graduation. Other vacation days are unknown, and the presence of weekends as a concept is likewise unclear.
Peers and Houses. Students form into peer-groups of 4-5 individuals, chosen by who shares a table at orientation. Peer groups room together and cannot be changed over the five years, barring exceptional circumstances. First year student peer groups undergo a series of “trials” after their five day atmosphere adjustment period. The results are used to sort the peer groups into one of four academic “houses” of five peer groups each. It is unclear whether houses are unique to each grade level, meaning there are twenty, or if there are only four with all five grades in them. Houses likely have differing prestige. The selection process is probably influenced by faculty and politics rather than purely meritocratic means: trials might be rigged, or faculty gets the last say. Students seem to cram for the house sorting trials during the five day adjustment period. Emma and friends have not been studying to their likely detriment. The houses compete for an annual House Cup which might be for bragging rights only or grant an actual magical boon. Peer groups can change houses at the end of the school year. Likely, one peer group must exit to make room for another and points-based coercion could be involved which is additional proof that the houses are not well balanced.
Points. Peer groups, houses, and each school class separately accrue points. Points can be awarded by teachers (Arbitrarily or by rank? Can be deducted too?). It is unknown if individuals accrue points as well or if peer-group grading is the norm. The purpose of points is unknown. Are they redeemable like currency or simply keep going up? How much do they factor into grades? Are there associated privileges? Do they only count for the house cup? They will be later explained when they matter.
Teaching Format. 1st years are all taught together in auditoriums, one morning and afternoon block, with occasional night hours. Breaking up into small group work is not mentioned. 1st year classes are theory weighted, but tests and exams (2 different sorts) involve challenges. Interestingly, the department-level professors teach the 1st years’ ten classes: Vanavan (Magic Theory, Mana-field Studies), Articord (Nexus and Adjacent Realm History, Politics), Belnor (Potions Theory, Potions Crafting, Healing Magic), Mal'tory (Mana-Field Perception, Light-Magic Theory), Chiska (Phys-Ed). Electives are optional for first years which means Emma and gang will be doing them. First years don’t go home on breaks during summer and winter, but do community service, aka quests. Failure means remedial classes and no going home at the end of the school year; Mal'tory and allies may want to trap Emma on Nexus to prevent info exchange.
Student dress code. Student uniforms are overall blacks and greys with decent body coverage and undescribed decoration on unmentioned parts that increases with year. I am not certain if students can add their own native trappings or flair to uniforms. Students can change out into casual wear in their private dorms. The first night everyone seemed to wear elements of their native dress, except Thacea. Emma’s armor will conflict with the robe and interfere with functions, so probably some compromise will occur. Shoes are not mentioned and we know Thacea is barefoot in the dorms, so I guess that’s up to personal preference?

Observations

Extracurricular and Community Service Quests. Students are given the option to do free labor for the crown as extracurriculars. Skilled magic users are rare, so using students makes sense. Expect quid pro quo for the survivors. Chiska also implied that for some nobles these quests might be the first time they interact with peasantry. I suspect that students on extracurricular quests use their own money to engage hirelings and guides from guilds to assist them. Some students might rely entirely on hirelings and direct from the backline or even contract out their quests to private guilds for cash and take the credit.
Magic smart, World dumb. There are no plain brain subjects like law, rhetoric, accounting, or philosophy. This implies the top of society are magically inclined but potentially numbers and logistics dumb (prior and later local schooling might cover for some of that). There are probably lots of royals who think they are in charge because of their superior magic yet are absolutely shackled to their mundanely intelligent viceroy-level help which occasionally erupts into stupid state-level decisions and violence in both directions. The realms are likely unsettled by personality-driven authoritarian shortcomings all the time. Havenbrock’s situation sounds typical. It is Thalmin’s turn to get snarked upon, until someone else’s realm implodes.
Electives. Emma’s latest mission is to repair the Exo-reality Communications Suite, she will need to shard hunt, so chart a path to Chiska’s extra credit questing missions, or going for a swim in Telliad lake to see if any crystals fell in it. Depending on how things shake out, an engineering elective with Sorecar to rebuild the equipment or alignment help from Vanavan may be on the table. Thacea, Thalmin, and Ilunor are ambitious and will likely take electives as well to complement Emma’s aims and fit their own interests.

Academy History

Honestly, I still haven’t worked out the timeline.
The Dean claims Transgracian started 29,019 years ago, assuming no breaks where the Academy didn’t run. It probably started next to the library on purpose. There was some sort of accords following a conflict in 10,092. Whether this conflict is the Great War, or the centuries-long conflict between Nexus and the Realms that resulted in a messily written treaty bringing the Black Robes into being, or the war Sorecar remembers is something Articord must sort.
Arrival of the first human candidate. Dead on arrival. The liquefaction of the first candidate traumatized an entire class of students, some of whom became faculty and staff in the next 20 years. See Vanavan’s entry for extra speculation about a special connection between him and the first candidate.

Rival Royal Academy

Transgracian Academy is the less-prestigious rival of the Royal Academy for the Magical Arts. Professors between the two, specifically Mal'tory, cooperate on crown-relevant functions. The Royal Academy’s student body is likely locally prestigious elves and dragons. Admission of Adjacent Realmers is suspect. A “lesser known” warrant-exclusive portal in Elaseer links to the courtyard of the Royal Academy for the Magical Arts.

Academy Features

A couple dozen millennia of extreme income inequality and freedom from Euclidean spatial considerations built an overlarge and overgrand, mazelike castle atop a mana pool and 2000 foot raging waterfall overlooking Lake Telliad and Crownlands Herald-Town Elaseer. (Which implies that Transgracia borders the royal crownlands. The town also doesn’t accept visitors without prior approval, so the whole area is pretty locked down.)
The Academy is old and full of artifacts from civilizations forgotten. It is also full of hokey magical mischief which Emma glosses over most of. Floods, ‘magic potholes’, moving staircases, and moving pictures are mentioned. It sounds very much like the magical school of a popular IP that will go unnamed. Getting anywhere in the castle on foot takes a ridiculously long time, so teleporting, like the apprentices do, is probably preferred by those with rights to do so.
The Academy hosts the Library [of Owlexandria], a mana-pool (presumably some sort of concentrated mana wellspring which is dangerous if tampered with because of overload consumption), the well-regarded Transgracian Smithy and factory run by Sorecar, and a massive garden marked by an archway with a non-euclidean hedge maze which may have some sort of life vault or other suspicious construct below it. The ring of medical towers and the library are on the waterfall side of the academy.

Rooms

• Grand Reception Hall - Yearbook binding took place.
  
• Grand Dining Hall - Has balconies overhanging it
  
• Grand Assembly Hall - Opera-like meeting hall with stage, theater seats, curtains, and orchestra.
  
• Solarium Common Room - Dragon's Heart Tower common room
  
• Medical Wing - A ring of five towers with grapple-able outcroppings rising at least 7 stories.
  
• Faculty Wing - non-Euclidean to prevent sneaking about
  
• Lesser elf backrooms - Low-height side halls and coatrooms where the lesser elf slaves labor to keep the castle tidy and student uniforms clean. Students avoid them.
  

Dorms

Emma scored the top-floor dorm in her tower because Thacea’s group had to be as far as possible from everyone else’s rooms on account of her miasma release risk. Top floor with lofts puts all but her roommates out of range. This is probably also a good thing for antenna placement. The dorm seems to have a mickey mouse arrangement. The head is the main room which has a secret door for slave lesser elves. A door and ten foot corridor links to the “ear” bedroom spaces. The bedroom has an open floorplan living and study area with a wrap-around second floor balcony that overlooks the first floor. The second floor has a nook for a poster bed on each side and a walk in closet for each side. Emma takes over the first floor, near the shower, leaving one bed free. The toilet situation is unclear. The dorm goes pocket space-like at curfew to keep students from sneaking out.

Professors, Staff, and Students of the Transgracian Academy for the Magical Arts

There appears to be about 25 main professors(?), only some of which are considered “planar-class”. Common professors are divided up into at least four robe colors+ other styles. Until more professors, their robe colors and styles, and their relative ranks are nailed down, my best guess is that white is Dean exclusive, black are forced royal appointments (see below), and red and blue correspond to some sort of seniority rather than department. Department indicators are unclear. Other professorial-level robe colors are unmentioned. Phys-Ed profs get to have nice aerobic outfits instead. Some customizations like Articord’s face mask is either permitted, associated with the species, or the subject. The faculty is dominated by elves and then dragon-types (and I still don’t know whether elves are all from Nexus or a mix of places, or if they have distinct varietals with different traits or if their skin color is plain variable).
Black robes are the professorial equivalent of a military commissar appointed by the Nexian Royal Council to spy and rein in the school’s freedom following one of the major conflicts. Black robes are rotated out every year, probably to avoid loyalty attachments.
Academic tenure is hard to get. Blue, Red, and White robes are gained by a combo of personal merit, court positions, and scholarly nepotism. Apprentices are rarer than post-study peers who choose to continue down a specialized field after their five years are complete. Apprentices are ostensibly on a fast-track to assured tenure by sacrificing all ties with the outside world, relinquishing court politics and noble titles. Apprentices, who are something between post-docs and resident advisors, have silver-gold robes with dark grey trimmings.
Worth repeating: The major teachers and staff all attended the Academy in the past so any one of them might have failed the soul book ritual (or a similar ritual at another time. We know the academy has no qualms with slaves and is binding people like Sorecar!) and be a doppelganger or controllable.

Major Professors

Assistant Dean Professor Vanavan

Planar class mage, blue robe, professor of Magic Theory and Mana-field Studies, politically useless vice/assistant dean, a pushover, the too young kid-professor who gets no respect. Thinks things through, isn’t arrogant by default which is out of elf-character. (Nexus, Elf var. Tall)
Vanavan is traumatized by the first Earthrealmer candidate’s death and he is projecting his experiences and fears onto Emma. He was a student or apprentice when the first candidate tried to cross and was liquefacted, and he may have been in charge of the Nexian-side autopsy because his topic is Mana-field Studies. I suspect Vanavan and the first candidate were in mystic contact because Vanavan is one of those rare and innately gifted individuals who can breach the veil between worlds. Vanavan and Pilot 1’s connection could be anywhere from telepathy telephone, to dream experiences, to full-on Your Name body swapping. Regardless of the chit-chat format, Vanavan learned the superficial basics of manaless tech and human lifestyles, guns at minimum (potentially through games rather than a dream-draft into space forces boot camp). Pilot 1’s experiences were classified by the Institute for Anomalous Studies, and he was selected to be first to cross. Vanavan knew Pilot 1 was coming to the Academy, so when Vavavan’s friend (or potentially more) liquefied inside a suit right in front of him, the elf was devastated. Vanavan committed himself to an atonement quest equivalent to a life debt; he would see the second human through if one came which explains why he alone of the teachers is intense about guaranteeing Emma’s wellbeing at the crossing and ignores a whole rampaging dragon and fellow elf bleeding out because Emma comes first. While Vanavan might have been able to score a planar-class mage professorship despite being a young adult in elf years thanks to his abilities, I strongly doubt Vanavan let an authority know about the intimate details of his mystic link to humans. For one, no Nexian would have ever believed Vanavan’s descriptions of Earthrealm without overwhelming evidence they could hold in their own hands. Just like how an exasperated Emma gets trapped by self-deluded Magicrealmers she can’t correct without giving much more away, Vanavan is forced to silently let Mal'tory run his mouth about his Earthrealm-is-a-pawn-of-a-greater-power theories rather contradict him with his own observations.
Prior contact with Pilot 1 explains why Vanavan seems uniquely forward-thinking about Earthrealm and its capabilities. Elves are usually so far up their own butts that they can give themselves dental exams and only trauma seems to humble them, so Vanavan’s off-brand behavior originates from exceptional circumstance. From the Earth side of the equation, if you sent a diplomat across to a foreign party and they die bizarrely as soon as they meet their opposites, logically, you would suspect foul play. Yet, somehow, the Institute for Anomalous Studies was able to convince the UN Military that Nexus didn’t murder the first candidate and they ought to try again instead of retaliating. Prior unofficial contact notes could convince the military to stand down. Lastly, Thacea and Thalmin both sense that Vanavan has some personal agenda when they try to rope him into finding a portal-betwixt Emma.
If this theory is true, additional clues for how uniquely species-aware Vanavan is will manifest as differences between his unspoken assumptions about Earthrealmer habits, capabilities, tools, and appearances vs everyone else’s. If Vanavan is not careful, he might reveal he knows what certain objects do because he has experienced Pilot 1 using them. We already have two clues. Vanavan called Emma’s Power Armor a contraption on first meet which meant he recognized it didn’t conform to her body shape and had other functions. Other magicrealmers think the suit is armor that fits Emma, and she’s some sort of bigfoot creature. Next, Vanavan, not Mal'tory, warned Sorecar to be extra careful of Earth’s weapons. Not even a 5000 year old weapon smith takes the idea of unmagic attacks seriously, but Vanavan does because he’s seen guns fired! He also wanted to ask Emma first about the belongings in her crates before looting them because he is aware magic cannot detect Earth’s purely mechanical devices and that Earthmade things are often ‘locked’ to certain owners and require permissions to access.
One last thing to keep in mind is that Vanavan may no longer go by the name Pilot 1 knew him by because Nexian apprentices are renamed. If Emma has a sidequest related to, say, executing Pilot 1’s last will to pass off an object to a friend across timespace, she may not be able to ID Vanavan as the target.

Senior Professor Belnor.

Planar class mage, senior teacher. (???) Granny takes no sass and calls Mal'tory out for being a bawbag proper to his face despite him being her prior apprentice. Green color magic. +50 points for no-fear patting Thacea on the head while she was miasmatic after the signing. Probably will be a fair but hard professor. Potions Theory, Potions Crafting, and Healing Magic will be Emma’s stronger academic options, but expect Belnor to not find Emma’s mana-less methods acceptable... at first. Will probably middle-road re. Emma, requiring a frustrating preponderance of evidence to adjust her views, but won’t run a 42K delusion marathon either and thus will work out to be one of the less aggravating authority figures. Being too old for everyone’s politics will probably help. Hopefully Belnor won’t experience a medical emergency and get replaced.
Belnor was part of a major null monster incident with Astur that frightened her quite badly.

Dean Professor Altalan Rur Astur.

White robe, planar class mage. (Nexus, Elf var. tall) Does not teach first years. A problematic, aggravating elf personality and poor authority figure who will continue making headaches for Emma and ignoring major problems on campus. Patron of the library with a platinum(?) card, a status that might be inherited between deans rather than his own personal accomplishment. Patron and perhaps relative of Apprentice Larial which Mal'tory uses against him by taking her as his apprentice. Strike one against the Dean’s character for being aggravated at Emma rather than grateful to her for saving Larial’s life, likely because he victim-blames Emma for being the stimulus for the attack and putting Larial in life debt rather than Mal'tory and the privy council for being the perpetrators. He probably thinks that if Emma dies, the troubles are over (so he thinks).

Professor Mal'tory

See black robe notes above. (Nexus, Elf var. grape flavor) He requires a whole separate write-up because the amount of things I would like to say about him won’t fit here. Older. Very strong caster. Magic color prefers green and gray. Dangerously genre stupid; smart enough to spot Emma’s threat but too impulsive and arrogant to properly gather HUMINT to ground his assumptions before acting. Not dead - at worst temporarily inconvenienced. Formerly Belnor’s apprentice so likely some potion/alchemic/materials knowledge. Doesn’t have a lot of super-close allies in the upper faculty which can be used against him. Despite being a creature of the state, I suspect he is a double agent and ally of the Academy against the Nexian Royals. He is certainly no ally of Emma’s and probably wishes her out of the picture, but he is trying to keep Emma’s diplomatic missteps from impacting the Academy’s reputation. He acts like a jerk even in front of other professors while keeping his real beliefs close to his chest because he can’t trust anyone. Watch for Mal'tory’s angle against Thacea because of the taint issue which I suspect is half his current agenda, even if we haven’t seen it enacted yet. Later Edit (Dec 2023): This is guy is so incompetent that it is indistinguishable from betrayal. Also Null'tory.

Professor Chiska (Phys-Ed)

(???/FelinoCat/Professor) Laser pointer casualty waiting to happen. Her extracurriculars will help Emma unfail classes with extra credit. Chiska may be a monk, kickboxer, or extreme leaper on account of damage to her legs after the warehouse monster vault incident. She is set up to seem like someone Emma will get along with, but don’t rule out a rug pull.

Professor Articord (Politics and History)

(???/???/Fox/Professor) Mystery rogue teaching Nexus and Adjacent Realm History and Politics. Emma can memorize, but synthesis will be hard, and chances are she will get in trouble for going against pro-Nexus and Adjacent-degrading narratives in essays. Completely unknown character with unclear disposition.

Other Staff

Vanavan’s apprentice, Belnor’s apprentice, Astur’s apprentice. Unknown, but at least one exists.
Black Robe Apprentice Larial Essen (Aev---). (Elf var. Short) Relation to the dean? Lost her name because she is an apprentice. Being groomed for the role of dean. Blue colored magic. Affinity for plant-based magical arts, protective of Groundskeeper Alaton Tiven and vice versa. Now in life debt to Emma because she saved her from the null which seems to have worked wonders at suppressing her usual elvish arrogance after the 5-star display of superdickery while delivering Emma’s luggage. Mal'tory likely using her to control Dean Astur. Larial seems exhausted every time we see her, delivering luggage, at the hall with the surge, and the gardens, so either she is being massively overworked for some reason or she just looks like that. Commands the armored gargoyle Lortal.
Groundskeeper Alaton Tiven. (Giant???) Jolly giant, protective of Larial and vice versa. Lost his name because he is an apprentice or bound. Magic talent despite not being noble. Not involved in teaching.
Sorecar Latil Almont Pliska. (Soulbound unknown species) School Blacksmith and Armorer Professor Sorecar, at the North Field Proving Grounds. Emma is probably going to drop by his place on the semi-regular because she will need mundane materials to repair and modify her own devices and tools. If so, expect Emma to apply earth-logic engineering principles to magic materials to make simple devices that will round out her magical deficiencies. Meanwhile, Sorecar is probably going to try to invent the gun and/or some Emma-proof equipment and rope Emma into helping him test it, maybe in exchange for his help and hints scrounging his Radioshack of bits and odds. I’ve flagged him to die or near-miss for being too useful, knowing too much ancient history, and being too kind to Emma. :( “Five thousand? Hah! You’d be hard-pressed to find another spellbound living to that ripe old age! More often than not they’d become lost well before they reach two, let alone five thousand! And well, from there, it’s easy to have your bound sigil destroyed in one way or another if you don’t have your wits with ya.”
Arlan Ostoy. (Unknown Species) Appointed-Deputy Magistrate, Senior Apprentice. Sir title, so knight? Sounds like a school resource officer equivalent e.g. the cop. He has face concealing shadow magic that gives him artificial eyes, like Final Fantasy’s Vivi. Officer Emoji is probably pretty savvy, not anti-student. Thacea seems to have left an impression on him.
Aurin. Lesser Elf slave assigned as Emma’s dormitory’s resident porter.
Saucy Bridge Guard. (Elf var. ???) Taller, older elf apprentice. Manages to be less of an asshole than the other elves, despite being a doorblock.

Students

Thacea Dilani. (Aetheron/AvinoPhoenix?/Princess) Paralegal Eagle. The Aetheron princess’ ability to pull a contract out of her pocket will be seriously handy later. The Cha and Int character from the realm of extremely courtly backstabbing. Her Avinor species seem to be mid-to-better prestige despite being animal-like. See my other notes for her sections about the Taint and the Signing for her +1. Unlike the other students who were mere peers, by signing the Yearbook, the princess she became a peer and a ward of the Transgracian Academy, which sounds like less freedom to me, but perhaps also means she has protection from outside persecutors as well. Her family and especially her court seem to be difficult.
Thalmin Havenbrock. (Havenbrock/LupinoWolf/[Mercenary] Prince) Prince of the diplomatically rebellious Havenbrock, Nexian attitudes are against his family for making reforms that Nexus doesn’t approve of and because his family defenestrated the previous admin. The Wis character; will probably Dex-based paladin/swashbuckler to make up for Emma’s Str fighterogue/cleric. Thalmin has a grudge against the Owlexandrian library, and I suspect it has to do with information that was traded to Havenbrock’s disadvantage because someone else (Nexus) pre-empted them (first come, first serve) or bought out their information and led to his realm’s loss of autonomy. We do know Nexus attempts to subvert new realms’ information advantages by acquiring info about newrealmer lands and physical natures with the ritual of duplicity and dumping the info in the library first to build up their own “credit” at the expense of the originators which the Library apparently does not recognize as a valid concept of value to it. Nexus’ credit imbalance also prevents lesser realms from being able to get much strategic value against Nexus out of even their best secrets and puts them at risk of theft by Nexus. Like Emma’s TSEC trooper Auntie Ran, Thalmin has a beloved Uncle who spent a lot of time imparting life advice (numbered wisdoms in Thalmin’s case). The two can bond over having kickass relatives.
Ilunor Rularia. (Rularia in Nexus/Vunerian/kobold dragon-type/Court Noble ‘Lord’) Clearly has talent as a caster and part of a cluster of dragon-themed species like the elven varietals. His species is implied to be a lesser prestige dragon-sort, like a near kobold? Probably going to be an Int character for his narrow areas of interest (not deduction), but dumped Wis and Cha and thus is the resident ass-pain. Hierarchical “following orders”, e.g. Lawful stupid, and “every exchange is a transaction” seem to be Vunerien honor points which will be a bane until Emma can coax a little more personal loyalty out of him. (Unlikely, IMO, in the near term, even if Emma saves his life from the library/academy because Ilunor’s head is lodged firmly in the sand re. her status and realmpower.)
Qiv Ratom. (Baralon/???/Dragon-type? Chibi-Godzilla?/Lord) Lord of Baralon, clearly a big shot and fancies himself a natural leadesuperhero. Teacher’s pet and tattletale, likely to work against Emma. Savvier than the other students and willing to defy narrative for the sake of correctness but seems to be a bully who enjoys it. Watch for the angle against Thacea in particular. Note the name similarity to Uven’s Alaron. Uven might be Qiv’s vassal and not allowed to protect himself in the binding ceremony so that he could be enslaved: Mal'tory would puppet Uven’s duplicant to Qiv’s benefit in return for tasks performed for him.
Uven Kroven. (Alaron/Ursina/BeaNone) No title Ursina of Alaron. Note the name similarity to Baralon. Potential masteservant realm relationship, and Uven was not allowed to protect himself from the binding the ceremony so that Qiv could use him as a slave with Mal'tory’s aid in return for Qiv doing Mal'tory’s bidding. Pre:doppelganger was dignified and composed despite knowing he would be fully trapped. Part of Qiv’s Peer group most likely.
Airit. (???/Lesser AvinoBat/???) Part of Qiv’s Peer group most likely. Flight? Female.
Unknown Rodent. (???/???/Hamste???) Part of Qiv’s Peer group most likely. A meter tall.
Auris Ping. (Pronarthia/???/MinotauLord) Honor and aggression over reason. Gonna Worf for Emma. I expect a duel challenge shortly.
Etholin Esila. (Rontalis/???/Ferret/Merchant Lord) Merchant lord, lower class vs other students. Wanted to see Emma for something: library help, to ask about the town explosion mess, or dispatched on the behalf of another student? Regardless, he might help Emma solve the upcoming in-town shopping money problem. Using the dictionary, humans can figure out which metals and gems are valuable, but how much money is normal? Human fantasies have massive magic crystals and dragons sleeping on coin mountains, so even if gold is the currency, it might be ... cheap. Nexus didn’t exactly send a Sears catalog to orient students to Nexian costs of living (and bribery expectations). Is it safe to assume that students have a meal plan? Don’t have to pay for extra amenities? Tip the staff? Pay for extra tutoring? Humanity has probably saw fit to make sure Emma was Fort Knox loaded with barter-worthy value/weight options like platinum and other bullion ingots at 6-sigma refinement purities Nexian debasement detection spells will BSOD at, lab-grown gemstones and pearls, handfuls of diamonds netted from the carbon hailstorms of Saturn, and ingots of hard-to-refine metals like titanium, tungsten/wolfram, and even more exotic options as insurance (which can also be used in machinery repairs and whatnot). A merchant lord like Etholin will know value, procedures, and contacts for converting stuff into the coin of the realm at reasonable exchange rates.

Academy Espionage

Thacea warned Emma that Nexus, and by extension the Academy, are masters at espionage and subterfuge. The spy techniques that we know they possess include:

• Scrying through all gargoyles. Not sure if active monitoring is required or the gargoyles can do it passively and report if they see something strange. Students can talk to the gargoyles to relay a message which means some passive monitoring ability is present.
  
• Soulpath maps that presumably record the location history of any ensouled creature or magic one with a manafield. It also seems to work on non-ensouled creatures as long as they have a manafield: the professors said Emma’s null could not be tracked because it had no manafield, not because it was missing a soul and wanted Emma’s. (It makes you wonder how the null doesn’t liquefact.)
  
• A neck chain or a wristband of transient passage controls the coming and going of non-noble guests and some town servants to the Academy. The fundamentals resemble a badge-system or ankle monitor but there are probably more coercive details.
  
• Lesser elf eavesdropping and secret passages. Most of the academy is spiderwebbed with well-hidden passages for servants, including the private dorms. It has already been established that students can use them if they are willing to try.
  
• Closed circuit television camera + microphone magic equivalents. Active monitor required or can they record by being coupled to a dictation spell?
  
• Making duplicates of students who were partially and completely soul trapped and being able to puppet them.
  
• The magic shenanigans in the castle may exist so non-magical talents have difficulty moving around in student spaces, relegating them to the elf-passages.
  
• Mal'tory gave Ilunor an invisibility cloak of total sensory blocking and may have one of his own.
  
• The Black Robe, the deputy-magistrates, and other staff who spy and keep the peace.
  
• Less espionage and more protocol, the Town of Elaseer has a blanket no-visitors policy because it is a Crownlands-herald town, so the Academy is already on “national-security” type ground. People seem to need permission to even live there.
  

Gargoyles

Gargoyles are ubiquitous, very tough, can fly, manifest (throwable) spears, wear armor, and obey orders without micromanagement. Some (all?) gargoyles are named. Lortal shows up with Larial. They are probably a type of golem based on how Larial’s Lortal seemed zoned out, but don’t rule out a stone elemental nature instead.

Known and likely weaknesses

• Emma resists and contact-nulls a variety of magic because of the suit’s resistance, and the mana-less space inside insulating her from probing mana-field contact like an insulator, and potentially the nature of Emma’s soul. Some security systems won’t detect her. Gargoyle scry-cams do. The Soulpath map likely doesn’t. Magical cameras likely do see her, but don’t discount that hearing might be the only sense she shows up on one with.
  
• Staff with minor magic talents are allowed to serve at the academy without a neck chain or a wristband of transient passage. This may simply be because their enhanced manafields make them more trackable with other means, which in turn implies that non-magic people or those who can suppress their fields can juke the system for a time.
  
• Hierarchy dynamics mean certain systems, like the gargoyle scry, require permission to use which inhibits their effective use by those with an intuition for an evolving situation.
  
• Guard always required: the need to maintain conscious security for certain systems means sneaks can slip by if the watchman isn’t paying attention.
  
• The Soulpath map tracks souls. A soul jumping between a duplicant clone and the real body as it is shared will probably look odd on the Soulpath map.
  
• Absolutely no security to stop the extremely adorable dragonfly drones, at least for most places in the academy. ^{Anti-bug bias cannot be tolerated!}
  
  • I strongly suspect Mal'tory deduced Emma has some unmagical means of spying (because how would she proactively respond to the null attack so effectively?) and chucked the stolen crate into a pocket dimension so Emma couldn’t get an easy line of action to it. After getting bug-bonked in the warehouse fight, I expect Mal'tory will use spatial, physical projection, and earth molding magic a lot more since Emma’s devices have a hard time dealing with it.

Known instances

• Sorecar’s factory is bugged. He tipped Emma off by looking at the cameras and microphones which seem to model scry sensors rather than a broad “web of awareness”.
  
• Larial was informed by unclear means she was about to have an unexpected visitor (Emma with a grappling gun) while in the medical wing. Exterior monitoring magic or gargoyles could be involved, but I think Officer Emoji simply knows the tells of naughty students, figured out Thacea’s distraction angle without knowing the exact details of how the wolf and knight planned to climb, and sent another note along to Larial.
  

Note: I am aware of certain posts and patreon-only content that explain additional facets of the Academy, characters, and mystic contact, but I have left and will continue to leave non-mainline info out of consideration until that info is republished in the main story. For the purposes of speculation, I would rather err on the conservative definition of canon (= the current version of the main published story) because it is closest to the engagement experience of a casual reader. If I get something wrong as a consequence, that’s the risk I chose to assume.
Terms of Service Agreement: By reading this post, the author of “Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School” forfeits the right to use the word “dulcet” in reference to Thalmin’s character or behavior for at least three chapters. Please refer to “baritone”, “resonant”, “sonorous”, and “basso” in the meanwhile. An orbital bombardment of “whilst” is currently being scheduled.

Ever wondered how computer chips are made? In the world of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration), there's a crucial player called "dummy metal." Let's break down what dummy metal does without getting too technical.
Dummy Metal's Main Job
Dummy metal is like the behind-the-scenes worker in a factory. It's not the star, but the whole process depends on it. Its main task is to make sure the chip's different layers are flat and even, just like ensuring a cake is level before icing it.
Planarization: Making Things Flat
Think of chip-making like building a tower with blocks. Each block represents a different layer of the chip. To make sure they all fit together perfectly, you need a flat base. That's where dummy metal comes in – it creates a smooth surface, so nothing is uneven or bumpy.
Stress Management: Keeping Things Intact
In chip-making, various materials and processes can create stress. Dummy metal acts like a stress-reliever, distributing and managing this stress to prevent the chip from cracking or breaking.
CMP and Electromigration
Imagine you're polishing a rough surface until it's smooth. That's what happens during chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) in chip-making. Dummy metal is the part that gets polished away, leaving the chip unharmed.
Electromigration is when metal atoms move around because of electrical currents, potentially causing problems. Dummy metal acts like a barrier, preventing these atoms from causing issues.
Density Balancing and Antenna Effect
Picture a town where everyone lives in one neighborhood, leaving others empty. Dummy metal makes sure everything is evenly spread across the chip, avoiding overcrowding in some areas.
The "antenna effect" is when metal lines on the chip build up electrical charge. Dummy metal acts like a lightning rod, discharging this excess charge to prevent damage.
Alignment Marks: Guiding Precision
Sometimes, dummy metal contains marks that help align different layers during manufacturing. It's like using guide marks to assemble a puzzle correctly.
Conclusion
Dummy metal might not be the star of chip-making, but it's a crucial part of the process. Next time you use your gadgets, remember that dummy metal played a vital role in making them work smoothly.