Chapter 2
Jesse and I took a second elevator further down than I’d ever been before. As floor after floor rose past us, I got a sense of just how massive the place was. I grinned as I skritched my quill on the paper, taking notes; Jesse certainly had his work cut out for him.
Elevator rides were always different when I was with Jesse. I wasn’t worried about the light disc failing anymore; Jesse’s absolute certainty of his technology’s reliability carried over to me. Plus, one way or the other, he wouldn’t let me fall.
At the same time, it was an elevator made for humans, not ponies. Even if Jesse was about twice my mass vertically, I took up more floor space; that meant we were both crammed together pretty tightly. I wasn’t afraid of Jesse, but I did hold a healthy respect for him and his power.
The one and only time I’d seen him angry, he’d punched a hole through the machine he’d been trying to fix. Its metal sides had been two inches thick; when he saw I was standing behind him, he froze long enough to keep his fist in the glowing, cake-like slag.
We didn’t really talk about that event, but six months later, I could see some faint scarring on his left wrist. It was eye-level with me, right by my head, which reminded me that I was squished up next to an ancient, powerful entity.
At least the music’s still here. I grinned, but I didn’t hum this time. Instead, I put the finishing touches on my written postulations about how many humans had lived in that enormous facility, and what its purpose had been. Knowing that Jesse wanted to repair things didn’t exactly tell me what I was helping him fix.
“Enjoying yourself?” He looked down blankly at me and my notepad.
I smiled up at him and put the notepad away. “I gotta take notes, Jesse. That’s the bread and butter of observational science!”
He made a quiet, agreeing sound, but he didn’t say anything else for the remainder of the ride. When the glass doors slid open, I followed Jesse out of the tube; after he led me through several hallways and intersections that looked exactly like the rest of his home, I looked up and asked, “So, uh… where’s this drill?”
“Drill?” He kept looking forward and taking long, sweeping strides. “Oh. Yes. First, we need to take a detour. The moissanite?”
I magicked open my saddlebag and brought out the chunk of metal. “Right here.”
Jesse plucked it out of midair and inspected it up close for the first time. A few moments passed, then he nodded quickly. “You did well.”
I swelled up and walked taller for a few steps before voicing the obvious question: “So, what’s it for?”
Above me, Jesse stared off into the distance for a few moments before answering. “Moissanite is a type of metal I can use to repair some bare-essential computer components. Once it’s been purified, I can feed it into the mechanical printers and finish rebuilding the automated production lines.”
For once, after some Jesse technology-speak, I actually knew what he was doing. Kind of. “Production lines? What are you making?”
“I’m creating power over life itself.” I stared up at him and raised an eyebrow; he looked down and mirrored my expression. “Or at least, a device that will allow me to directly harness certain aspects of biological entities.”
A knot twisted at the top of my stomach. “Biological… entities?” Even though he lived in the Everfree Forest, other than the two of us, I’d never seen any signs of life in his home—not even plants. “Like... intelligent beings?”
He threw his head up in a quick, harsh blast of laughter that made my mane stand up. “Intelligent? Hardly. I suppose it does have something akin to a neural network across its swarm…” He looked down at me, and it must have clicked for him. “Oh. No, not you. Tiny horses don’t have the types of energy I’m looking for.”
Somehow, that didn’t do much to take the edge off my uneasiness. I kept walking and asked, “Why do you need more energy?”
“I’m merely reclaiming what I once lost.”
“Lost?”
Jesse’s face twitched from a mildly amused grin back to its usual, distant manner. He never explicitly told me to stop asking questions, but when it came to certain topics, he simply refused to answer. I hated that; it was like falling over a conversational cliff that I didn’t even know was coming.
Silence persisted until we reached the door Jesse wanted. It opened, and he held up a hand to stop me from following him in. “I’ll just be a minute.” He slipped through the door and it slid shut before I could complain.
Fifty-seven empty seconds later, the door slid back open and Jesse reappeared. “Now, it’s drill time.”
He turned and began leading me back the way we’d come. He never waited around for me, so I cantered the first few steps to catch up. Once we were side-by-side again, I decided to leave my moissanite curiosity alone and move on. “So, uh… What are you drilling for, anyway?”
“Power.”
That was the only thing he said on the matter. Once it became clear that Jesse wasn’t talking, I tried to figure out what he meant based on my own brainpower.
I wasn’t the best physicist, but I’d passed some basic courses as an undergraduate. I knew that in order to have all the lights, machines, and elevators work, they needed some sort of force powering them. The usual Equestrian solution for stuff like that was in the form of magic-powered crystals, but those were mostly used in small tools and appliances.
Unless he had a ton of unicorn friends that I’d never seen, I doubted Jesse was using crystals. I also doubted he ran the whole place off his own powers—he could do stuff like kinesis and other functional spells, but he said they messed with some of the more sensitive equipment.
I puzzled over just what was powering everything down there, even after we crammed back in the elevator. It started heading downwards again, and after what felt like a long time, my curiosity took on yet another form. “How… how far down does this place go, anyway?”
“Deep enough.”
“Jesse…” I warned. As patient as I was with him, I had my limits.
He looked down at me and frowned slightly. “It’s… we are actually headed to the lowest part of the facility.” He raised a hand, palm out. “Honest.” His hand slowly drooped back to its usual resting place as he finished, “Since I doubt knowing that we’re forty-eight kilometers below sea level is the sort of scale you’ve had personal experience with, I’d rather just show you than explain things in metrics you can’t comprehend.”
I did some quick math that he’d taught me—add a tenth and half of the original number—to convert from Jesse’s distance to one that Equestrians used. Twenty eight… ish… miles. After smugly grinning that I understood what he meant, despite his condescension, my eyes shot open: we were deep underground. The tallest thing I even knew about, offhoof, was Canterlot Mountain; even that was less than two miles tall.
Begrudgingly, I admitted that he was right.
Then, lights outside the elevator died. In hopeless darkness, I twitched helplessly to my right—into Jesse’s leg—grabbing his knee before realizing the light disc below us was still solid and glowing its usual, golden yellow.
“There, there…” Jesse patted me on the head.
I brushed his hand away as I stepped back to where I’d been standing. I glowered up at him before turning away; his blue-fire eyes were really weird in the dark. I tried to calm myself down with, He’s just trying to be reassuring, but I knew better than to give him too much benefit of the doubt. For our first few months together, Jesse had been pretty handsy. I could’ve taken it as an odd form of affection—especially given his usual distance—but it quickly became obvious that he was just petting something he thought was cute.
The elevator slowly began getting brighter—in a firey, orangeish way. It got bright enough to see that the walls of our tube were surrounded with smooth, black rock. I wanted to ask what sort of rock it was, but I was still silently fuming over being petted.
“Are you angry?” I heard a hint of guilt beneath his curiosity.
“No…” I sighed. Because that would be illogical for like six different reasons. “Just… we’ve talked about this. You know I don’t like it when you… pet me, like that.”
“You grabbed my leg.”
I sighed, harder, this time bringing my hoof up to my nose bridge. “Yeah, I know. It was a reflex. Because the elevator, and the darkness, and—”
“I make you uncomfortable.” He stated it factually, but not coldly—more like, it was something he was so familiar with that it bored him.
I put my hoof down and turned up to him, not sure which of us was wrong anymore. “I mean, I don’t dislike you, or anything; it’s just… well, we’ve talked about this, too. Everything’s always business with you, and advancing your plan—”
“Which is priority.” He turned down to look at me; in the fiery light, his eyes were even more pronounced.
I swallowed my fear. “Which is priority,” I agreed. “But ‘priority’ implies there’s other stuff that you’ve got to put off—that doesn’t mean you should just completely ignore it.”
“Elaborate.”
I pointed a hoof up at him. “That. Th… maybe that’s how humans talked to each another, and that’s your cultural prerogative, but your culture’s…” I stopped short of saying something we’d both regret. “Different, than the one you’re trying to save.”
“Our cultures’ differences are irrelevant; once I am finished, there will be a substantial merging that will redefine one culture.”
“Will it?” I countered. “I mean, freshman year I sent my parents some of the magic candles that my roommate invented. They’re brighter and never burn out, but when I went home for Hearth’s Warming, my parents were still using the ones they had grown up with. So… if my parents can’t do something as simple as candles, how do expect all ponies, everywhere, to embrace stuff like—” I stamped my hoof on the light disc we were standing on. “This?”
The elevator slowed down, and the light inside grew brighter—but still fairly dim, like a candle-lit restaurant. When the doors opened, a wave of hot air wrapped around me like a blanket. Jesse immediately walked off the elevator into what I recognized as a cavern-like hallway. It was roughly the same height and width as the ones higher up in the facility, but its walls and floor had been carved out of the same black rock that lined the elevator shaft.
At the far end of the hallway, the next room shimmered and flickered like a massive fire was burning in there. I wasn’t quite sure if it was safe to get off the elevator, let alone if I wanted to see what burning down there.
Jesse turned and asked, “Are you coming?”
“Am I going to… combust, if I walk out there?” I was already sweating, and the hot air stung my eyes, even in what had to be the relatively cooler elevator shaft.
Instead of answering me, Jesse walked over to one of the metal wall panels and opened it; from my height and angle, I couldn’t see what was in it. After reaching inside and grabbing something, Jesse walked back over to me and held out his hand. On his palm rested a small metal ring—like the gold one he wore on one of his fingers, except this one was white with a glowing, blue line that ran around the outside. “Put this on.”
I looked at the ring, clearly designed for a human finger, and lifted my hoof. “Is that going to fit?”
Jesse leaned down and slipped it on the end of my horn.
The temperature plummeted, to the point where I shivered. That was only reflex; once I adjusted to the new, comfortable temperature, I nodded thanks up at him.
Jesse didn’t acknowledge my nod before turning back around and heading down the hallway. I caught up with him and continued our conversation from the elevator: “I mean, how are you going to help ponies if you don’t even know what they’re like in the first place?”
“I have you for that.”
That sinking realization slowed me down; I had to jog to catch back up with Jesse. “I… me? I suck at selling things. Seriously, my worst summers were the ones where my dad tried to get me to run our family’s antique shop. I… I don’t think I can go up to the surface and tell ponies about everything down here, even once you do get everything up and running.”
Jesse grunted like he did when he was having trouble fixing something. “Then what do you suggest?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Well, if you want to get technology out there, you could start a business and sell things—start small, then work up to bigger and brighter things. I mean, you already know how to do that if you’ve fixed this place up, right?”
He smirked, a quick little twitch of one side of his mouth. “That plan seems like an unnecessary delay.” I tried to cut in, but he spoke over me: “However, perhaps there is some logic to learning some of your culture, for interfacing purposes.”
Interfacing purposes? I fought to keep from rolling my eyes—if that were the sort of thing he wanted to fix, it wouldn’t do any good to mock him over it. Instead, I asked, “So, what do you have in mind?”
“For you to teach me, one-on-one.”
I almost smacked myself over how obvious it sounded, but given Jesse, I was expecting something technical and practical, like bringing him a history textbook. I liked his idea, so I nodded that agreement. “Okay.”
We reached the end of the black rock hallway, and like I’d seen from back in the elevator, it opened up into a huge, circular room whose walls glowed with firelight. A metal railing lined a downward-sloping path that jutted out from the walls; above me in the center of the ceiling, hung a trio of massive pipes.
I couldn’t see the flames, but since shadows stretched and danced from down below, I imagined that was where the fire was.
Jesse stopped and pointed to a sheet of metal that had been bolted to the wall at the end of the hallway. “Safety regulations. Back when this part of the generators was built, they were still concerned with full-body environmental protection suits, but the points about security clearances and hazardous materials still stand.”
I looked at the sign; words were on it, but they were written in Jesse’s language, not mine. “I… I can’t read that, Jesse.”
He shrugged. “They basically say to avoid touching anything important-looking and to watch your step. It’s a long way down.”
With that, I finally walked over to the metal railing and—keeping my four hooves firmly on the ground—I stuck my head under it to look straight down.
Below me, the chamber went down for—as Jesse had so eloquently put it—a long way. It was a huge cylinder, but the very bottom only looked like a tiny circle of bright orange. Magma, I realized, even though none of the area around the Everfree Forest had ever experienced any volcanic activity.
I remembered how far down we were, and I stepped back from the edge of the path with a new sense of respect for humans. They’d dug all the way through the earth’s crust and into the deeper, molten mantle.
As I watched, magma shot up one of the three pipes that ran down the center of the room like it were a massive straw. I suddenly knew what Jesse had meant by “power”, and from behind me, he explained, “Even in the glory days of humanity, geothermal energy was seen as a viable backup solution to power a facility of this size: low-tech and reliable.”
I blinked at the enormous mechanism in front of me, and then turned around to Jesse. “Low-tech backup? What… what was the primary energy source?”
“Stars.” My eyes and mouth shot open, but he ignored my wonder. “Those only lasted long enough to get the drill online and self-sustaining, which in turn is now beginning to reach the lower portions of its effective range.”
My head still reeled implication of “stars” as an energy source; finally, I pieced together enough of what he said to ask, “Wait… so, you’ve tapped out all of the magma here?”
He shook his head, walked to the wall behind him, and slapped it. “These walls are several meters thick, but behind them, there’s magma enough to power this facility indefinitely.” He turned away from the wall and began walking down the spiral path.
I followed him. “Why can’t you just re-fill the chamber? That sounds…” I bobbed my head. “Easy, I guess, compared to making it in the first place.”
“Yes.” Jesse turned to look at the wall on our left. “The main problem stems from something I didn’t foresee when I began this mining operation, back when I made modifications to the drill to dig a deep hole instead of a wide one.”
To my right, the far side of the chamber looked at least five hundred feet away. “This is narrow?” I chuckled. “So why do you want to go deep, if the power system can’t go that far?”
“Because I’m hunting something.”
“What?”
We walked for so long that we passed back under the start to the massive, spiraling path—an entire lap of the room. Every step of the way, I’d gotten closer and closer to giving Jesse an impromptu lesson about being social; finally, he broke his awkward silence: “The part of me that I lost a long time ago.”
I turned to him with a raised eyebrow. “Part of you fell down a volcano?”
“This isn’t a volcano; it’s an artificial magma chamber whose pressure is well-regulated by a series of ventilation—”
“Okay…” I raised my hoof, surrendering the joke to a not-so-clean death. “Not a volcano.”
He looked at me sideways down the side of his cheek before he went on: “But no, this fragment… it didn’t fall. It sensed danger, after the final hours of the Chaos War, and decided to retreat to a source of safety and warmth.”
My ears perked up; he didn’t talk about that war often. “So…” I tried to play my cards right. “Something at the end of the war broke off a part of you?”
“Essentially.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t actually know,” he admitted. “Whatever it was, it nearly killed me. I hope that, among other things, reunification will give me a clearer understanding of that event.”
Reunification… Part of his plan clicked into place for me: “And that’s why you want the moissanite; you’re building something to absorb the energy from that other part back into yourself!”
He shrugged. “That’s a close enough statement to the truth.”
I smiled for a few moments after that; I was glad to finally be able to know part of his plan. My satisfaction drained away when I realized some of the implications. “Wait… so you’re only a part of your old self? Just like the part you’re hunting? Which of you is… the real Jesse?”
“I am.”
“But what would the other part of you say?”
Jesse held up his left hand, so I could clearly see the burn scars on the back of it. “Do you think I have some sort of clone, swimming down in the magma? The entity I’m hunting is a brainless cluster of self-replicating nano-machines. It’s effectively a metallic tumor with the collective intelligence of an ant colony.”
He put his hand back down, and I nodded. “Okay, so why do you need it if it’s so dumb?”
“Because it, being a fragment like me, has roughly an equal amount of the powers I command.” His eyes flared for a moment. “I wish for that strength to be returned to me, a thinking individual. That will certainly help with my plan.”
The remainder of our trip felt like it took close to an hour. As we drew nearer to the bottom of the chamber, I finally got a good look at what Jesse called a drill. Unlike most drills I’d seen before, it looked like a massive metal bar that spanned the diameter of the room we were in. The two halves of it were tilted, almost like a giant fan-blade; vaguely, I remembered that Jesse mentioned building part of it out of diamond. The middle part of it was bulkier and spherical, and it connected with the massive pipes that sucked magma up into the main part of the facility.
When we got to the end of the path, we were also at one end of the drill’s length. It seemed obvious to me, but the drill, as part of its function, had carved a giant spiral down to itself.
“Wait here,” Jesse told me again. That time, I didn’t complain about it; I only watched him as he leaped onto the drill and ran to the center. Once there, he knelt down and opened a hatch; after a few moments of fiddling around inside, the drill screamed to life in an almighty roar.
Jesse seemed satisfied with that, so he closed the hatch and ran back over to me. When he was next to me, he had to shout over the drill. “It’s not a permanent solution, but I’ve overridden its safety protocols to tell it to keep going down. It’ll take another few weeks before it’s out of range of the geothermal generator’s flow intake, but that gives me more than enough time to come up with a better solution.”
I nodded, and Jesse led me back the way we’d come. As we spiraled up the sides of a massive underground tunnel, I mused how we hadn’t really done all that much during our trip—just dropping off a chunk of metal, and whatever Jesse did to the drill.
At the same time, I’d learned more about Jesse and his plan than I had during some of the past months I’d known him for. I organized my thoughts a little, I didn’t pull out my notepad—I was comfortable, but I didn’t know how far the bubble of cold air around me went.
Instead of notes, I pondered the new information I had about Jesse and his plan. Like usual, I wondered how effective it would actually be; that time, with a shrug, I decided I’d actually helped him.
At least now, he’s making an effort to consider the ponies he’s trying to help.
With that in mind, I smiled and began putting together a lesson about Equestrian etiquette for him.
Stats
Page generated in 0.031 seconds
Total duration
971 users online
357,139 hits today, 2,314,256 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
3826287
3828509
Right the hell now.
3825896
I'll definitely give humanity a fair representation by the end of this.
3827965
3828960
Hah, and now the social experiment portion of this story: to see how many Daft Punk references I can get in the comments section!
3829073
Overuse for your tastes perhaps, but I don't see a problem with them.
3828455
3825708
3825970
Thank you guys; and I hope again to not disappoint.
3826926 Post TCB survivor?
3824818 I'm replying to you out of pity because nobody else did. Please refer to the FAQ or contact a mod about it. Don't do it on a story's page.
I'm just glad that, by what Nick commented before, the story is already completed (or nearly so), so there is little-to-no chance of this ending up in the dark, lonely corners of abandonment.
My god this is beyond impressive...
Chaos War?
I sense Discord in this mess...
Also... I'm gonna wager that Jesse is... Not exactly in it for pony-kinds best interest...
~Skeeter The Lurker
I'm calling it now, Jesse is an android, and his nanites are the parasprites. The master plan is a massive mind upload to a planet wide super computer where everthing serves humanity, as it should be.
3830257
Son of a... really?
I mean...
Kidding.
3830189
Hear, hear. Genuis wants it all posted by the end of February; I'm hoping to have it all out by the first week of February.
I for one always loved the 'Lyra/Humans' trope
...then again, I might be a tad biased.
3830406
Your avatar is a tiny happy Lyra. Tiny happy Lyras make everything better.
3830451 Make sure every Lyra picture comes with a warning, because they tend to unexpectedly melt hearts and other vital organs with sheer adorable radiation.
Also, you're paying for my medical bills once I get my heart transplanted.
3829944 And thats all I ask.
Also you got feature box'd!
3830706
Heh, so I did. Fun times.
Good start, interesting story and thank the holy titans not one of the typical self-inserts - earned a fav :)
And congrats for being featured on EQD!
3830794
Thank you :)
I think that "the self-replicating nanomachines" collectively hold his personality within them, the irrational thoughts that makes Humans flawed but perfect: ranging from imagination, practical jokes to cheating at boardgames (we've ALL left the Battleship pieces off of our boards to win a game at some point in life, I know I did
). Because he's running solely on Logic and 5% Illogic, he's imperfect from completing his plans overall.
so, he's a robot and humanity got turned into ponies by discord and he's going to turn them back to save humanity?
This guy is giving me a serious BORG vibe. All his talk of unifying cultures to benefit both without asking if they want it.
Somebody say human?
fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/089/a/4/daft_punk__program_problems_by_ladyavali-d3csi4c.jpg
3831116
Heh... I listened to that album many, many times during the writing of this story.
3831122 Awesome.
I gotta say, beautiful art, alright.
What utter trash.
3831712
If you're gonna call it trash, at least give a reason as to why.
Mmm, lots of big tech going on. I guess they can tap stars but drilling a second hole is beyond them.
Hope Lyra can sway this guy before he springs the unification on ponies in some backwards pseudo-version of TCB. Might be something to bring to the attention of the Princeses at the very least if Lyra can figure it out in time. Still, as Lya explained, sometimes ponies like their old trusty stuff and don't need new tech for the sake of it being new. I'd say, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink" but that might be offensive to ponies.
3832035 He is joking.
Seattle and Nick are best hugbuddiespallyfriends.
And you fell for it.
3832277 maybe when he was talking about 'stars', he was referring to nuclear energy?
3830229 what if Discord was created in the chaos war, like some freak acciedent of nano bots, AI, genetic enginering, quantum physics, and space time warping devces.
3830271 he's totally trans-human, don't even try to say he isn't.
3831652
Mm. Gaia is good for me.
3831712
Thanks for help on the revision, you cock goblin.
3832035
This
3832370
And also,
3832629
This
Though I didn't really put too much thought into "how do power plants work" for this. That's why the geothermal power plants are using giant tubes for lava, instead of just... sitting there, deep in the earth (which is how regular ones work).
This intro sounds familar...The Chaos War? Nanobots inside people? Anti-Social Main Character?
Hello Diaries of a Madman, but this time the original Navarone survived for a long time and he's more Anti-Social and less rude.
I'm getting a vibe that Jesse isn't everything he claims to be. Like he is hiding something.
hueheuheuheuehuehue
3828960
Lyra would LOVE this one...
So... Equestria is future Earth... again...
And the obvious question: How does magic exist? And do NOT reply with that worn-out cliche "HURR DURR TEKNOWLOGY IN DA FOOTURE LOOKS LYKE MAGIK!!" Technology obeys physics. Equestria's magic constantly violates physics in more ways than I can count, thus the pony world cannot exist in our universe.
And then: >>>The one and only time I’d seen him angry, he’d punched a hole through the machine he’d been trying to fix. >>>
Oh lovely, now he's basically the levelled-up Khan from the new Star Trek film. And when frustrated he hits things. What a genius. Truly an example of the advanced qualities that typify the human race.
>>>Jesse’s face twitched from a mildly amused grin back to its usual, distant manner. He never explicitly told me to stop asking questions, but when it came to certain topics, he simply refused to answer. >>>
And this Lyra is an obsessed retard. Yes, some alien shows up talking about taking back stuff, acts like a megalomaniac, has bizarre technology that could... oh, I dunno... kill lots of stuff with ease... And he refuses to answer any questions with regard to his plans... which of course means Lyra must trust him implicitly because he couldn't possibly be up to no good!
3832277 Yes, and they actually managed to use up stars ((“Stars.” My eyes and mouth shot open, but he ignored my wonder. “Those only lasted long enough to get the drill online and self-sustaining, ... but magma has plenty of energy! "
That is... just so incomprehensibly ridiculous to compare the two... my god... even a tiny red dwarf star would put out trillions of times more energy than the Earth's core. And they are obviously absurdly inefficient if the energy of MULTIPLE stars was used up just to operate a drill. This makes no sense at all.
I see here the writing of someone who is going WAYYYYY outside their area of expertise and talking about topics of which they lack even the basic level of conceptual competency.
3831712 You know what would be at least 20% cooler than trash talk?
An update to Divergence! I'd love that.
3834894 I think it may be some sort of large-scale quantum physics. For instance: teleporting. Specifically quantum teleporting. Here's how it works: Quantum particle b is entangled with Quantum particle c. B hits A, which then instantly changes C to A. The originals are lost...
FOEEEVEEEER!
3834894 I'm sure Lyra would understand the term Thermonuclear fusion or whatever form of nuclear power he was using. Star though is simple enough. At his tech level he can predict her behavior.
3835343 It doesn't work like that. First of all, "large scale quantum physics" is an oxymoron. Quantum physics is valid only when applied to atomic and sub-atomic levels of observation. Reality as you and me perceive it follows classical physics, and if we go bigger, like galaxy-class big, we have to use Relativity. What you're talking about is quantum entanglement, which is not a method to teleport particles, but a phenomenon that involves only information, the quantum state of the two particles. Imagine it like this: you have two perfectly identical brown bags,one with an orange inside, and the other empty. You don't which is which, but one day one brown bag is mailed to you. You open it, and there's the orange inside. Now you instantly know that the other one is empty, it doesn't matter how far it is. Yet the empty bag is not moving an inch from its location just because you know it's empty. The physical bags stay where they are, the only thing that is exchanged is information. That's how quantum entanglement works.
Love where this story is going, I am hype for more!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3834894 (Oh god why am I even replying to this.)
The author didn't even compare the two... -
Referring to fusion reactors via a simplification for Lyra, oh and yes, they do require fuel. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_reactor#Fuel_cycle
This wasn't even implied, and it must have a hell of a haz-env system to keep something like that together in the heat of the mantel. Wait, I really don't think you even grasped the concept of a fusion reactor, go read that wiki article.
As for the rest of your comments: you seem to be a very close minded individual who doesn't like things outside of your own world view.
Good day
3831712
You know what is trash? Wasting the authors time with a comment that doesn't point out the reasons you dislike the story, and instead just saying its bad. That is trash, much like your own existence
3834894 Maybe it isn't in this universe. Maybe the chaos war was two universes smashing together.
hmmm....and his mention of "Chaos War"....this is starting to sound like....maybe.....
an "Anti-Disord"?
And when you mix Disord
with AntiDiscord 
, you get....