A Magical Journey Through Outer Space

A man crouched over a book and scattered pages of notes in his parents’ shed, excitedly comparing the script within to his notes and improving his understanding of them with every passing moment. This was a task years in the making, having required him to translate an unknown but vaguely Latin-descended language into something he could comprehend with no outside assistance.

After all, neither his family nor the church would have appreciated his interest in magic here in the deep southern United States.

The book was an heirloom that had gone unnoticed in a corner of the attic for generations, sealed within a safe none remembered the combination to. It was more effort to move or open the safe than to leave it where it was, and the contents- which his family would surely have committed to the flames had they known of them- were long forgotten. The lock was composed of six separate dials with literally a million possible combinations, and the only ways to open it were to either try every combination until one worked or force the safe open, risking damage to whatever was behind it.

It had taken over a decade of sneaking into the attic during the brief windows when his over-strict parents were out of the house and trying one combination after another before he’d gotten in. The winning number was 958104. He’d started at 000000. Even once he had gotten into the safe, he’d had little idea what he was supposed to do with a book full of arcane circles and indecipherable scribbles, so he’d just taken a photo of a page and used some of his spare time here and there to try to figure out what it said.

Eventually he’d found a hit, or something close enough to one to pass muster. The language on the page was somewhat similar to the early Spanish languages, but with heavy Basque and Mozaribic influences. He’d come to suspect it wasn’t a language at all so much as a pidgin or early form of cipher developed using all the languages of the Iberian peninsula during the early Reconquista.

But, well, he was hardly an expert. He had two semesters of Spanish in college under his belt and the rest was painstaking word-by-word manual translation which had to be conducted with the use of multiple language dictionaries and online resources for the dead languages. That’s why it had taken so long. But now, he was pretty sure he knew what all the spells in the book did, to some degree, along with a complete understanding of one spell in particular he wanted, no, needed, to cast.

Except magic wasn’t real. That was the conventional knowledge. Evangelical Christianity was convinced it was, and that it was the domain of demons, of course, but they were crackpots. Yes, including his family. And yet, that wasn’t going to stop him from trying. With shaking hands, he filled in the blank spaces in the circle with the appropriate values. From what he understood, these spaces were meant to be filled with variables that defined the exact parameters of the spell, without which it wouldn’t function properly.

That meant that casting this spell might very well be an exotic form of suicide if it was filled out wrong, but he was long past the point of caring. A less unusual method might be the alternative anyway. His suspicion of what this spell did, which eventually crystallized into certainty, had been what kept him alive for years now.

Now the moment was here. He read the spell carefully, locking the meaning into his mind, while trying to channel whatever it was that powered a spell into it. He wasn’t sure if he was filling the circle, the page, or the image of the spell in his mind with power, but he didn’t have a better guess as to how it worked, so he just tried all three until the circle suddenly began to glow.

Just as he felt something begin to change within him, he blacked out.

A woman awoke on a cold metal floor, in a freezing cold room, to the feeling of ill-fitting clothes clinging to her body in all the wrong ways. A blinking blue light provided the only illumination, and a dull vibration was running through the floor.

“Did it…it worked!” she exclaimed, hearing her own voice for the first time and knowing immediately that it had changed. She patted her body as she checked to make sure everything was in the right place, and found that although her clothes no longer fit, her body itself was exactly as it was meant to be. Now she could escape her family and they would never find her…and she wouldn’t need a fortune for medical bills.

Finally she really registered her surroundings, and began to question where she was. She stood carefully, finding her center of balance to be vastly different than before, and looked around. A shiver ran through her body and she rubbed her arms. The light was dim and intermittent, but she could see well enough to figure out she was in a room made of metal, with unfamiliar structures throughout. Circles similar to those in her book- which she noticed on the ground, still open to the same page- decorated a few surfaces in the room, but she didn’t recognize the script at all.

More importantly, something felt vaguely off. After taking a step, she realized what it was- she felt lighter than normal. She hopped, and noticed that it took a moment longer than it should have to hit the ground again, like she was in low gravity.

Picking up her book, she looked for an exit, and found a door partly open directly opposite of the structures she couldn’t identify. Fear of the unknown ran through her, but she stepped towards the door as quietly as possible, rolling her feet as she’d learned to in marching band to make her footsteps near-silent.

It took all the strength in her body to open the door enough to allow her through, pushing the sliding door into its recess and cringing at the screeching sound it made the moment it came loose. All she could do was hope nothing heard that as she stepped through into a cold metal hallway with closed doors lining both sides. A blue light on the opposite end was blinking on and off, revealing a single open door beneath it.

The time it took to reach the other side of the hallway silently felt like an eternity, but she finally stepped through, and immediately knew that her efforts at stealth had been wasted when she laid eyes on the new room.

It was like something from a sci-fi movie. A window looked out into a starry sky, the Milky Way plainly visible in the distance. There were six seats around the room, three of which sat in front of consoles with dark screens and numerous switches. The seat closest to the door was on a dais, and she immediately pegged it as the captain’s chair; the remaining two were crash seats at to the sides of the door.

Oh, and there was a dead alien in the seat closest to the window.

Whatever it was, it was dressed in an environment suit, but the figure was absolutely still and slumped against the back rest of its seat. She was able to tell it wasn’t human at a glance even so due to the extra section protruding from the torso near the legs, which she took for an insectoid abdomen or something similar. The sight of the body unnerved her somewhat, but she stepped closer to the window all the same, trying to figure out where she was. What greeted her was the nothingness of outer space. It was clear by now that she was on a space ship, and there wasn’t even an asteroid in her field of view, much less a planet.

Or…perhaps not? A star blinked out in the distance, and then another. She realized there was something out there, blotting out a patch of stars. The shape made her think it was another ship; it was long and uneven in a way a chunk of rock wouldn’t be. But it was seemingly dead, drifting and emitting no light at all.

After a few moments it moved out of view- or rather, the ship she was on rotated until she could no longer see the other ship. Taken together with the low gravity, she was able to ascertain that she wasn’t so much being drawn towards the floor as she was on the front half of a spinning ship, with the floor constantly moving towards her. If she were on the rear half, perhaps it would be the ceiling doing so instead.

“An bhfuil aon duine amuigh ansin? Tá ionsaí déanta ar mo long agus is mise an t-aon duine atá fágtha. Téann tacaíocht saoil as. Freagair le do thoil. Tá an teachtaireacht arís agus arís eile.”

She nearly jumped out of her skin as a speaker to her left suddenly came to life, playing a message that sounded, of all things, Irish. Walking over to the station, she tried to figure out how to respond- assuming it wasn’t the last words of someone long dead. What few indications there were of what any given button did were incomprehensible, so she did the only thing she could think of: she flipped switches one at a time, saying a few words into the air each time in the hopes that one would get through.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” she said a good dozen times before she got a reply.

“Cloisim thú! Le do thoil, an féidir leat cabhrú liom?”

“I have no idea what you’re saying. Do you know English? Hablas español?”

“You don’t have a translator charm? No, that’s not important,” the feminine voice responded in a heavy Celtic accent. “Where are you? I’m not seeing any ships nearby.”

“I don’t know. I just woke up here a few minutes ago. I think I’m on a ship, but that’s all I know. Who are you?”

“Aoibhe Iníon Uí Cuill, last survivor of the freighter Kiznessa. And you?”

A moment passed as the nameless woman’s brain rebooted. Name. A name. How could she have possibly forgotten to pick a name? She’d been so focused on casting the spell- which she hadn’t even believed would work in the first place- that she hadn’t even considered what she’d call herself if she succeeded.

“Nancy. No, Jessica. Uh, shit, I don’t know, you’re kinda of putting me on the spot here. Ah! Miliam. I like Miliam. I don’t really know what ship this is, I was trying to cast a spell and the next thing I knew, I was here.”

“Okay, Miliam,” Aoibhe replied with a hint of amusement, mixed with confusion. “Can you describe the consoles around you? Digital, analog, dials, buttons, switches, that sort of thing.”

“Switches. Lot of them. A small screen, but it’s off. The seat has a weird depression in the center, like there’s an extra body part meant to fit into it.”

“Ah, it’s a carillion ship! Okay, that’s good, those always have a teleporter beacon that toggles from the bridge. Let’s see…find the captain’s seat, and look for a switch with a bunch of overlapping hexagons on it. Flip it and I should be able to come over and help get the ship online.”

While Miliam wasn’t sure it was the best idea to just do whatever this person said, she didn’t see that she had much of a choice in the matter. It’s not like she knew how to run a spaceship. It took only seconds to find the switch in question and flip it.

“Did it work?”

“Nothing. Your ship might be running on emergency power; that could be why no one detected it. I think you’re going to have to bring the mana furnace online.”

“What’s a mana furnace?” After asking the question, several moments passed in silence, and she could almost feel the frown on the other end of the comm.

“I’m not sure how I’m going to explain how to turn it on if you don’t even know what it is, but…a mana furnace provides power to the magical components of the ship. As long as the ship has electrical power available it will run, but…you’ll have to find the spell circle that activates the furnace. Since it’s a carillion ship it’s almost certainly analog, so it should be inscribed directly on the furnace itself. It would be best if we could get the reactor running first, but I think emergency power should suffice if we just need the beacon.”

That was a whole lot of words from multiple different genres, but only one question was really relevant right now.

“How do I know which one activates the furnace?”