A Jaded Life

The Oculus, as I had dubbed the addition Lady Hecate had put atop my tower, was an incredible construction. Even knowing that Luna had only been an instrument for Lady Hecate to work through, I was incredibly impressed by the sheer complexity of the magical construct. Once again, I was reminded that divine magic was complete and utter bullshit, as it wasn’t really the mortal who actually used the spellwork. They merely ordered something from a menu provided by their deity and the deity was the one providing the spell, as if ordering at a restaurant. Sure, a lot of people could only order at fast food places, or generally order delivery, so the quality of the magic they received wasn’t all that much better than the quality a mortal could produce, but then there were those who received their magic from a five-star chef or something along those lines. Stupendously complex and incredibly intricate, to the point of making a poor mortal like me gape in awe. Before sitting down on my throne and starting to try out the new toy we had been given.

Controlling the Oculus was amusingly similar to the way I had been controlling my scrying constructs and, similar to my constructs, the Oculus allowed me to perceive visual information through its lens, quite literally. The thing functioned similarly to a giant telescope, somehow capturing and magnifying images from far away, even in the near complete darkness of the night. By now, I was starting to get tempted to set up a roof over my throne so it would be in constant shade and I could use this fascinating device during the day, too, though given that the days were getting progressively shorter, I’d spent the entire time the sun was up sleeping. There couldn’t be a better way to spend my days, really.

For now, I simply used the Oculus and marvelled at the resolution it could produce and the clarity of the images I could see with it. The edge of the city, some five, maybe six, kilometres away from my tower, could be viewed with enough clarity to read what little signage still remained. What’s more, I was fairly certain that the only thing stopping me from reading a newspaper, even at this distance, was the simple fact that no newspapers had survived the Change. If there was one lying about, I would be able to read it.

And that remained through for every location I could see within the city, even those some twenty or so kilometres away from me. It was difficult to estimate those distances, but it felt roughly right. The only things keeping me from observing those remote objects were the buildings that blocked my line of sight. Their roofs and the facades of the higher buildings were easily visible.

When testing further, and trying to observe objects near the horizon, across the plains east of the city, I remained able to see extremely far and still retained the ability to zoom in with incredible clarity. Reading the license plates on cars stuck below a bridge so far from me that I couldn’t even see the bridge or the buildings nearby? No problem. By now, I was trying to find the limits of the Oculus and it looked like the only thing actually blocking its observations was, well, objects blocking it. As long as there was an unobstructed line, I could see it remarkably well.

So, with that realisation, I started to point my new toy up, into the sky. What better way to test the remote viewing capabilities of this magical construct than to point it towards objects at a known distance and try to see how well it worked?

The Moon, for one, was an object at a known distance and there were even a few manmade objects on it, giving me a reference for the size of things I was observing. It wouldn’t do to look at a mountain and think I was viewing a pebble after all. Scale mattered, even if I was just trying to find out how impressive Lady Hecate’s creation actually was.

There was only one tiny problem with my idea. Or rather, a fairly massive one, namely, the sheer difficulty of finding an object the size of a car on a planetary, or at least lunar, scale. Zooming in on the Moon was easy, almost too easy. I had no idea just how much the atmosphere should disturb the image but it felt a little weird to have the ability to observe objects on the Moon in a visual clarity similar to that I enjoyed when observing objects across town. How big the objects on the Moon were, I wasn’t sure, but from my perspective, they didn’t look all that big. Just, similar in size to the buildings I could observe here but without some objects of known size to give me an idea about their scale, I just couldn’t know.

And finding those objects of known size was the problem.

Sure, I knew that there were a few dozen objects mankind had sent to the moon and left there, some intentionally, some because they had crashed. Finding them, however, without any idea where to even start looking was a bit of a problem. There were countless craters, mountains and rocks strewn all across the lunar surface, so I couldn’t really use a wide-angle view with little magnification to find spots that stood out, at a usable scale, there was little visual difference between a rock and one of these objects. Despite that, I kept trying for some thirty minutes until my view was disrupted for a split-second by a rapidly moving object and I was left with a headache and the realisation that I had been telescope-bombed by a satellite, unintentional as it had been.

Upon that realisation, I began to wonder, what had happened to the few people living on the international space station. Sure, the most likely, by far, possibility was that the station had been damaged by the surging energies of the Change, leaving them dead or dying in space, to say nothing of the sheer insanity that would have happened if one or more of the astronauts had turned into Shattered. As amusing the idea of zombies, or something fairly close to them, in space was, it was only amusing when safe in the atmosphere. Out there, stuck in a pressurised tin can with very limited space and air but an endless amount of vacuum all around you, ready to kill you in a fairly grotesque manner, the amusement would die just as fast as anybody else.

Shaking my head, I began trying to find other celestial objects. That was also when I came across the first limitation of the Oculus, I couldn’t use it to zoom in on other stars. It wasn’t a real surprise, the difference between the moon, or even other planets orbiting our Sun and other stars was, quite literally, one of lightyears. Still, I wanted to try but when I did, I only succeeded in turning small pinpricks of light into bigger pinpricks of light. Not unexpected and, amusingly, a bit of a relief. The Oculus had limits, as cosmically vast as they might be.

Trying to find other planets was similar in difficulty to finding the man-made objects on the Moon. Sure, I knew they were there, I knew they orbited the Sun, and I even knew that I only had to find the pinpricks of light that moved compared to the stationary stars but putting that information into practice wasn’t as simple as that. I would have to make an astronomical chart to track the movement of celestial objects to find the other planets by comparing the observed movement to the known movement of Terra and finding the miss-match.

That idea, in turn, made me wonder. Did Terra move differently compared to Earth? It sounded so utterly absurd but the idea was as intriguing as it was frightening. On a macro-scale, I could be quite confident that the movement hadn’t changed all that much, a day remained roughly twenty-four hours and the observed seasons matched what they had been before the Change, even if the weather had turned a little less capricious. This might be sheer coincidence and observer bias, I might have to make an effort to note these things down and study the data, just to see if there was a pattern.

But for now, I had a wonderful new toy to play with and miles upon miles of terrestrial terrain to observe, looking for movement. Hopefully, if I found something moving around in the plains or in the city, I would find something interesting. Or at least something living.

When the Oculus’ gaze swept across the city, it wasn’t movement that drew my interest. Instead, I came across something I had been looking at for the last hour or so, a small pinprick of light in the otherwise dark city. Only, this pinprick wasn’t a far-distant star, burning up itself as it turned hydrogen into helium. No, this was something far closer and, at least to me, far more interesting.

It was a small, fairly simple, torch. And those didn’t spontaneously come into existence, nor did they ignite themself. Somebody was living in the city.