“Magic missile is just a teleportation spell to a gun range. Create food and water? Teleportation. Teleport? Believe it or not, a hack of disintegration”
We found a race condition in the teleport code. Turns out the efficiency curve for the restoration magic that undoes the disintegration in real time has a parabolic mana requirement related to mass, but disintegrate has a caterneric curve. For human sized stuff they match up, but if you try to teleport something of sufficient mass the restoration starts to draw a disproportionate amount of mana and the whole thing falls apart.
Also, we need to hire some more QA contractors.
How we found out? We knew from the start there would be a discrepancy. Early testing pointed to this problem. And we warned every superior up the chain. But in the end we were ordered to just put a warning on the scroll.
We were only taken serious after a junior magician thought it was funny to teleport an elephant into their observatorium before exams and neglected the warnings. That is how the Mana Void of Barkley Academy was formed.
The superiors were out for blood when the first court summon scrolls appeared, using competitors teleportation technology. That was until we gave them a copy of our manilla scroll holder full with communication of them neglecting to heed our warnings.
Charles Stross’ Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.
It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.
The gender is actually Lovecraftian, spy thriller, science fiction, and workplace humour source.
It’s seriously the best thing I have read in a decade.
Edit: genre I guess 😅 (have been learning French lately so sometimes it messes it all up!).
God help the poor mathematical geniuses who accidentally discover that math. If they’re lucky, they end up working for the Laundry.
If they’re really lucky, they’ll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.
I don’t know what’s going wrong. That spell works perfectly fine on my summoning circle.
As a QA myself, this is what dealing with developers (and I this case, wizards) is like. Way too much trust in their code.
I’m a dev, and once when I pulled something like that, QA told me, “oh cool, so we’re shipping your machine to the customer then?”
Have you tried closing and re-opening your spell book?
What’s the uptime on your portal?
Apple-wood makes really good wands for illusions.
Oh, the staff? Built it myself. Hexacore silicon based crystal lattice CPU (Casting Power Unit), 4 billion RAM (Refined Arcane Modules) with an upgraded SSD (Swift Spell Deck) that can hold 2 trillion sigils. Yeah, of course it has RGB aura effects.
“What the fuck? why is this spell trying to access your Patron directly? Theres no reason it cant run off your local mana reserves”
“Wow I made the pact with the creature from the abyss to get my powers, and now it wants a monthly sacrifice in order to keep use them?”
“How does a simple “create water” spell have a 15 second cast time? Is it doing something else in the background or were the glyphs written by a first year apprentice?”
“Ah fuck how do I change the incantation for my spell again? Let me search the the orb real quick…”
“I copied this spell from an overflowing stack of tomes. I think it was originally meant to cleanse all living things from religious stonework, but I changed some of the constants now it works as disinfectant.”
