Dennis Theophrastus Blass was born in deep space, roughly a quarter of the way along the opposite arm of the Milky Way galaxy from the Sol system, aboard the Terran Colonization Vessel Isomer. He was a member of the third generation of his family to inhabit that space-going city. Providing an environment tailored to the needs of a given generation on such a mission is more complex than one might imagine. The initial crew has to be given the psychological conditioning necessary to cope with being permanently severed from their home planet and all the people they left behind there. The mid-voyage generations must keep their cultural history alive while maintaining a sense of mission and minimizing any perceived feelings of deprivation stemming from living and dying in what is essentially a high-velocity prison. The final in transit generation must be prepared for colonization and social construction that builds on the history and cultural touchstones of their ancestry.
The generation into which Dennis came was not intended to be the final one born en voyage, but the machinations of an ambitious and somewhat unstable life support technician named Philmon Iwo accelerated the schedule. Fortunately, the Isomer was passing near a star system that hosted at least two habitable planets, the nearest of which was N’plork. That gave Dennis not only a place to live and thrive off-ship, but the opportunity to develop a heretofore-unknown talent for magic. When the Morianellan Academy of Arcane Arts was founded, he was in its first class and the only student with human origins to advance beyond Magus Incipius.
It was the intention of those who designed and authorized the Terran colonization missions that colonies be established only on habitable planets with no preexisting sentient populations. The idea that a ship might be forced to divert to a planet with native sentient peoples due to some emergency was considered too remote to be credible and so little planning was done with that contingency in mind. While many of the humans found the indigenous races of N’plork to be grotesque or monstrous, Blass was comfortable with them almost from the start and never gave a second thought to the fact that they were like something out of science fiction from a human perspective. It was no less feasible than colonizing planets on the other side of the galaxy.
Dennis was startlingly intelligent as a child and gravitated toward mathematics, cosmology, and quantum physics in the classroom. The academics provided to colonist children were rigorous, as survival in space depended on every person being well-trained in some aspect of shipboard functioning. Dennis excelled in his schoolwork. After graduation from college he was assigned as a sciences officer while pursuing graduate work in quantum teleportation theory. Quantum teleportation was used to transfer complex information instantaneously through entanglement cascades among the ship’s artificial intelligence systems; as such it was vitally important to Isomer operations.
Growing up on board a starship may seem to offer somewhat limited opportunities for childhood’s rebellious shenanigans, but with a vessel the size of the Isomer there are in fact quite a few adventures to be had. When Dennis was ten years old, for example, he and his best friend Addison skipped class to roam the zoological gardens on the Life Sciences deck. The gardens existed to provide husbandry animals and genetic material of potential use to colonists. Dennis found their sights and odors fascinating.
While most of the animals in the gardens were intended for the production of milk or other products to help the colonists survive, a few pens were stocked with natural predators, to be released as a measure of last resort if the introduced animals became invasives deleterious to the native environment. The predators had been bioengineered not to harm humans and to be controllable with neuromodulators so they could be recalled once their prey populations had been reduced to manageable numbers.
Dennis and Addison discovered a poorly secured maintenance hatchway behind the predator pens that led down into a series of tunnels used for storing feed and cleaning the enclosures. They crept giggling along the narrow corridors, pretending to be famous explorers from the old stories of far-distant Earth who had uncovered some great secret of ancient significance. A dozen meters or so beyond the hatchway, they came across a metal locker set into the wall. In it, among other interesting things they found a handheld neuromodulation transmitter unit that enabled the zookeepers to pacify animals when it was necessary to interact with them for medical or logistical reasons. They spent the best part of the morning zapping each other for the strange euphoric calm it generated, narrowly avoiding being caught at one point by hiding in the locker itself. Whether in a deep jungle or deep space, children will be children.
When the evacuation order came and the Isomer’s crew found themselves struggling to survive on an uninhabited island of an alien planet, they naturally did not expect to encounter magic. It was something out of myth and fantasy fiction that did not exist in the real world, or so they had believed. It was actually several years before they did in fact discover the existence of arcane practice on their adopted planet. It wasn’t until the seafaring peoples of the Merton Empire landed on Morianella to resupply their stores and discovered it suddenly occupied that the human immigrants thereon residing learned about the myriad civilizations and cultures of N’plork. Of all the strange new things for them to take in, however, the strangest of all was magic. Most of the crew found it too antithetical to their established notions of physics and thermodynamics to countenance, but Dennis shrugged and embraced all things arcane without a second thought.
It would eventually both threaten and save his life.