No magic, no problem

Tales from the Here-After is a far far future from our own. Yet due to the events that led up to the fall of the There-Before left the landscape nearly unrecognizable. Huge chunks of land turned to sand, mountains rose where there was only wide open spaces prior, and portions of the coasts broke off to become long lost islands.

That means I try to be bound to the reality of our world. It has no magic, that doesn’t make it any less magical.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not someone who hates magic systems. Like most, I was intrigued by what Brandon Sanderson has done in his writings - putting guide rails up on his magic systems. You know what the limits were, you know what a magic user could do. This was wildly different from most fantasy novels I grew up reading where magic was a Deus-ex-Machina. The heroes are in a bind - magic! They need to get across the map in an instant - magic! They are super hungry and could go for a burrito - magic!

I wanted to do something different.

For any child of the 90s you may remember a cartoon called Gargoyles. It was ahead of its time. A serialized story that didn’t talk down to its viewers. A short synopsis is that gargoyles from the past - Arthurian times are brought to modern day New York. But so did the evils of the past. It was a show that was so well done that many scenes I can still play out in my head. In that series Morgan Le Fay discovers the new magic, science, and is amazed what technology and modern day chemicals could do.

I loved that thought, science is modern day magic. Every generation of man has created devices and advances that would look like something amazing to the generation before.

The Here-After is a far future where generations after our own still existed. So I have to look forward to what is minutely possible with scientific discoveries we have made, what may be discovered, and how that would look put into devices and machines.

Then I have to think about the world rediscovering these items and, not sure of their original intent, repurposed them to be useful to the lives of those living in Here-After.

It is a fun experiment and everytime I think of a device or cool character with a certain attribute I go to scientific papers to check out the science. Granted some of them are scientific theory, but I can work with a theory.