[Dragon Earth]The Three Ladies Return

[mythusmage]

The Law of Conduction

The magic of transporting and storing energy. Of taking it from one place to another, and or saving it for later use. This is the magic that creates the wires and batteries (so to speak) through which energy can be magically transported or saved for later. The heka reservoir of Mythus and the mana stone of GURPS Magic are examples of the Law of Conduction in action.

Magic under this Law takes two forms, Direction and Transportation.

Direction Magic tells the energy where to go. Gives it a destination where it will power an effect or device.

Transportation Magic guides energy along pathways, and allows the control of energy as to its nature. This aspect also allows the translation of a subject from one plane of existence to another, or the transportation of a subject to another part of the multiverse.

When creating a conduit to power a construct, or a 'wire' to invisibly connect an electric motor and a generator it is the Law of Conduction that applies.

 

[mythusmage]

The Law of Obstruction

The Law of Obstruction is the last of the laws of magic on Dragon Earth. it is the law which deals with hindering the flow of energy, and the manipulation of energy. It also governs magic with interferes with previously enacted dweomers. Any spell that disjuncts, disrupts, or dispells an enchantment.

In this it is both the easiest type of magic to use, and the most difficult. Easiest in that a spanner in the works will bollix up most any mechanism. The hardest in that sometimes you only want to stop the machine from working, but you don't want parts flying all over the place at great velocity and causing damage. Especially to you.

This is the sort of magic that stops things from working, or keeps them from working in the first place, by impeding or halting the flow of the energy to the subject so powered. Any spell with creates a zone of darkness, or one that creates a 'magic dead' zone falls under this law.

Coming next, wrapping up.

 

[mythusmage]

Wrapping Up

So we come to the end of this sub-thread; a look at the Laws of Magic in the world of Dragon Earth. These are the laws that apply, as far as people know, when using magic in this world.

Sometimes it would appear that more than one Law applies. A falcon's feather when casting a spell to drive away rats from a cornfield for example. The feather being evocative of the falcon, and rats being frightened by falcons, and thus repulsed or driven away by such. In this case both the Law of Sympathy and the Law of Antipathy would appear to apply.

Not so. The Law of Magic which applies in such cases is the lowest on the list. Which means an animated scarecrow which incorporates a hawk feather bonnet would be governed by the Law of Conduction, with the Law of Sympathy and the Law of Antipathy playing minor roles.

The one exception is the Law of Ritual. Which always applies in the sense any magic must be done right in order to work as intended, or to work at all. It takes precedence when the spell in question is complicated in casting. Such as when a, well, ritual is being enacted. Regardless of what other Laws may apply.

That is an incomplete look at how magic works on Dragon Earth. When next we return to this thread we'll be taking a look at the history of Dragon Earth, starting with the Big Bang.

 

[mythusmage]

The Story Begins

Here now we start with the history of the Dragon Earth universe.

According to the text books the Dragon Earth universe began with nothing. Then there was a 'big bang' and the whole shebang grew from there. In the rarefied atmosphere of theoretical cosmology it gets a tad more complicated. The DE universe began either from nothing, budded from a greater universe, was extruded from a parent universe through a wormhole, or any number of alternate origins.

Regardless of how it all began scientists are pretty much in agreement regarding the first moments. The whole thing started out very hot and very dense. For this reason the patterns known today could not form. By themselves folds can travel at a velocity much higher by many factors than the speed of light. It is patterns that have a slower speed, with the pattern of patterns we know of as the photon having the velocity we call the speed of light. This all means the universe could expand at a very rapid pace. This we call, 'inflation'.

The inflationary period was short lived. With a lower density folds could form into patterns. The first stable one being that twine which gives us the curvature in space time we call gravity. The strong nuclear force was next, then heka, then finally electromagnetic and the weak nuclear. As the DE universe continued to expand (at a much slower pace) more complicated pattern became possible, leading to strings, quarks and leptons, then the hadrons. After a very short time cosmologically speaking the DE universe was pretty much as it is now. With a few exceptions. Those we will cover in the next post.

 

[mythusmage]

Things Get Organized

Just a few million years after matter and energy became possible the first stars appeared. Enormous, very short lived objects around which the first galaxies formed.

Which were enormous, and chaotic. Huge conglomerations of gaseous matter and stellar objects with no discernable organization. Over the Æons these first galaxies would begin to spin, to shrink in dimension, to become organized. Until, unless something happened, they evolved into the spiral galaxies we know today.

While that was going on stellar generations were passing. The early, nearly pure hydrogen stars had their day; to be followed by stars with heavier elements. Until the first yellow dwarfs came about.

Dragon Earth's sun was born out of a nebula, the debris of a supernova. A yellow dwarf of middlin size, it had a disk of material surrounded by a cloud of the same. The cloud would become the sphere known as the Oort Cloud. The disk would become the eight planets, asteroids, and moons known as the Solar System.

[sidebar]
Pluto is considered a planet on Dragon Earth, But is also counted as one of the Oort Cloud objects. So the Solar System proper has 8 planets. The DE Oort Cloud has another 5 officially recognized planets besides Pluto. These being Orcus, Hecate, Chronos, Rhea, and Hera. So, officially, the DE Solar System as a whole has 14 planets. With more being discovered and assessed all the time.
[/sidebar]

Next up: Dragon Earth itself

 

[mythusmage]

Dragon Earth, the Early Days

The early history of Dragon Earth was much like our own. It formed from the disk orbiting the Sun, got plastered by asteroids and comets, royally wacked by a Mars sized world (from which the DE Moon formed), produced an atmosphere, and developed life.

It is possible that magic using life evolved before the Middle Triassic, but there is no certain evidence that points to it. So for our purposes the existence of magic in the DE universe only starts to play a role where Dragon Earth is concerned in the Middle Triassic.

Even there the evidence is only circumstantial. A small mammal-like reptile that could apparently teleport. For the only specimen known was found in an underground lair with no discernible tunnels leading to it. And that could be an artifact of the manner in which the site was buried.

The first unequivecol signs of magic using life comes from the Early Jurassic and involves the dragon. So we'll end this here and go on to dragons and their role in Dragon Earth's history in the next post.

 

[mythusmage]

The Coming of the Dragons

The end of the Permian, on both versions of Earth, was marked by the worst mass extinction modern science knows of. On Dragon Earth it is said that a time-probe managed to go back some 3 billion years to the introduction of mass quanities of oxygen in the atmosphere, but that feat has not yet been verified.

As with our world Dragon Earth's Permian Age ended with the extinction of approximately 90% of all known marine species, and some 80% of all known terrestrial life forms. Phylums disappeared.

The once dominant therapsids (mammal-like reptiles) were largely wiped out, with a few exceptions. They would be replaced by a pair of new orders, descended from an heterogeneous group known as the Thecodonts.

These two orders, the Saurischia and the Ornithischia, would become known to us as the Dinosaurs. In our case two more orders would arise, the crocodilians and the lizards and snakes. On Dragon Earth a 5th (and a 6th, when the oriental dragons get added to the SRD) order arose from the thecodonts; Dracos, the dragon.

The early Dracos were small, lizard like animals. Unable to compete against the early Dinosaurs they took up residence in the primitive trees. There they became agile little beasts, evolving an erect stance, much as the early advanced mammal-like reptiles were doing on the forest floor. However, by the Late Triassic they were facing new competition .

By this time the mammals had appeared. The first being the triconodonts, followed by the multituburculates, the marsupials, and the placentals. (On Dragon Earth the monotremes are considered descendents of an, as yet, undiscovered mammalian order that might be descended from the triconodonts. At the same time, there are those who say the monotremes are descended from a late mammal-like reptile animal, and should be considered mama-like reptiles themselves.) One of the oldest placental groups are the primates. who moved into the trees late in the Late Triassic. Where they might have driven Dracos into extinction had not a big change taken place in that group.

What that change was will have to wait for the next post.

 

[mythusmage]

A Voxular Mishap

One of the oldest gene-suites found in multicellular animals more advanced than the sponges is known as the Vox Box. It is these genes that gives all animals their basic frame, and even shapes such things as limbs in more advanced forms. It is these genes that gives us our four limbs. However, sometimes mistakes are made.

On Dragon Earth most of the time these mistakes are unviable. But in the case of Dracos (and other groups) the inadvertant duplication of the forelimbs further down the trunk was successful. Some time around the start of the Late Triassic Dracos started being hatched that were functioning hexapedal terapods. Six limbed vertebrates.

It so happens that four legged animals the size of a small rodent are more efficient in movement than six-legged animals are. Had things stayed as they were it's very likely the four-legged Dracos would have outcompeted the six-legged species, to themselves be driven into extinction by the early primates. And for the most part that is what happened. But there were six-legged Dracos who went on a different path. In the case of one hexapdeal Dracos line the mid-legs became first the support for a gliding surface and later, wings.

Next up, the first flying dragons.

 

[mythusmage]

Dragons Take Flight

[sidebar]
The animal is small, about the size of a modern squirrel monkey. It is lightly built, and may have hollow bones. It looks like nothing less than a reptilian winged cat, but with a vaguely crocodilian head and tail. It is in full flight.

Though the wings have yet to take their modern position just behind and above the forelegs, they still look very much as modern dragon wings do, and from the footage taken by the time-probe worked well. Well enough to make even early flying dragons strong fliers.
[/sidebar]

The footage was shot in the Late Triassic, near the start of the Early Jurassic. From the subject it appears the first flying dragons were small animals. They may have been predators or herbivores (no fossil remains have yet been found, and the animal did not show its teeth while being filmed), but it is fairly obvious they were flying.

This advance gave the hexapedal dragon a new niche. But one it still faced substantial competition in. The pterosaurs were already on the scene, and were better at flying than the new dragons were. Between pterosaurs 'threatening' flying dragons, and the new arboreal primates crowding out quadrupedal and terrestrial hexepedal dragons, it looked like the order was doomed any way. But a change was coming up that would alter matters irrevocably.

By the Early Jurassic the hexapedal dragons were extinct. A short lived experiment that didn't work out. The quadrupedal dragons, on the other head, were hanging on, though in greatly reduced numbers in terms of genus and species. By the Late Jurassic the quadrupedal dragon would be gone, with the exception of a single species that managed to hold on till the Middle Cretaceous. The exception was the flying dragon.

In 1870 a fossil was found in central Germany. In the same quarry that would later give us the first archeopteryx specimen. In this case it was a partial specimen; a part of the skull, the first half of the torso, and the lower half of the wings. There are three things to note about this fossil.

1. It is the size of an average pig.
2. The bones are solid. They are not the bones of a bird or pterodactyl.
3. The wings are functioning. They have the same structure and musculature as a modern dragon wing.

While there are those who disagree the consensus is, this animal took to the air not under the power of its wings, but through magic. It took flight through a psychic ability. As with modern dragons this animal used its wings to propel itself through the air. Its wings were for propulsion alone, not propulsion and lift as with birds.

This advance would make a huge change in the future of the order.

Coming next, dragons writ large, and deflecting asteroids.

 

[mythusmage]

The Age of Dragons

From an inauspicious beginning dragons spread to dominate the Jurassic landscape. They grew in size, becoming positively enormous. Possibly the largest dragon fossil ever found was a humerous discovered in Dinosaur National Park in Montana USA. A bone belonging to an animal estimated to have weighed close to 150 tons.

Most Jurassic dragons were substantially smaller. The next largest coming in at a mere 40 tons. It was also at this time that dragon scales started to evolve. Beginning as hair-like, later developing into the feather like structures known today. This is taken as a sign that the dragons were evolving endothermia. Though there is a growing consensus that the endothermic condition arose much early, when dragons became active fliers.

Unlike many orders around at the time, the dragons survived the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition with little trouble. The spread of flowering plants and the impact on herbivores also changed dragons as well. The old, large species passed away, to be replaced by smaller, presumably more agile species better able to hunt the smaller saurian plant eaters.

The accelerating break up of Pangea, and the slow climatic deterioration occuring alongside it, meant continuing changes. As the millennia passed dinorsaur diversity declined. Entire families vanished, and overall dinosaur numbers fell. At the same time the mammals were diversifying. Taking up the niches once occupied by the dinosaurs. The dragons, already the wisest of all the animals, realized they were reaching a crisis point. Unless they took action their primary prey animals would go extinct. Which could mean their extinction as well.

The discussions were long. Often bitter. But one central fact soon became clear. The dragons could not stop what was happening. Matter of fact, even trying could make things worse. Through careful work they could save some dinosaur species, but the coming age would be the age of mammals. What would come of this no one could say, but they might be able to guide mammallian evolution into productive channels.

Then Dragon Earth's dragons got word from their astronomers.

Next up: Making an Impact on the Goddes of Love