This account by Silverius was originally posted to to Sergio's longstanding forum in GoKrida, told from the point of view of the people of Red Catastrophe, minor souls who think of major souls as gods. The narrative discusses the environment, culture, and government of this imagined planet, including stories and rules for games. Some of the details were inspired by events and discoveries in GoKrida, while others must have been inspired by Silverius' other interests. The GoKridan planet Red Catastrophe Earth, commonly known as Legendary Red Catastrophe, was named in honor of this tale.
The Lab
Far away from everything else a bunch of mostly not very interesting structures stand on black, burned, ground. These structures are known as the Labratory for Highly Dangerous and Very Complicated Experiments or just the Lab. It is here where the smartest and most couragious scientists work on making our lives better, or that of our enemies worse.
A black rectangular building with some weird crystals on it houses the luminology research. Luminology is the science of the light (not the Light). Currently the researchers are busy with two major projects: light logic and high energy light.
Light logic is based on the strange properties of a very rare material called Solarium. Solarium can under certain circumstances merge two streams of light but only when both streams are active (be it just a little bit). It can also temporarily store light and release it once light falls on the right spot. There's also talk about other possibilities, but those haven't been confirmed yet. The scientists believe that Solarium can someday be used to solve complex problems automatically. Before that time arrives they will have to find a way to produce it that doesn't require large amounts of Quintessence though.
High energy light is simply a large amount of light together. Using Solarium it's possible to create a trap for light to which light can be added constantly. In theory one could use this to create a weapon that fires an incredible amount of light at once, causing everything in it's path to burn. However there are two problems: the Solarium tends to explode when too much light goes through it and the scientists haven't found a way yet to let the light out of the trap.
Related to the light resource is the solar alchemy research. This research builds on an old craft of the Lords that turns starstone and some other materials into a bomb that when it explodes stupifies everybody in range. The researchers are working on reducing the requirements for such a glitterbomb and on making an activation mechanism that doesn't require a very skilled mage to help.
One of the more safe buildings is ironically the fuel and explosion research center. It's a common knowledge among the denkers that if we have better explosives we could probably build machines that don't need to be powered by humans or at least make machines that cause other humans not to be powered anymore in a spectacular fashion. However the best so far is a concentrated extract of violet nectar, which does burn well but only releases it's energy fairly slowly, which isn't very useful.
In the past the Finsternis project was also part of the lab. Finternis was a fairly secret project that revolved around the extraction of charge for military purposes. Our physical theories say that charge is needed to prevent matter from falling into the void. If one could extract the charge from an area it should fall into the void, if it's not carried by charged matter.
Now the problem with making such a weapon isn't extracting the charge, there are ways to do that, it's extracting the charge on a large scale. However the researchers found out that when charge is extracted from uncharged matter the matter would become negatively charged, it would start to behave like the void. Such voidmatter would exercise an attracting force on other matter and "eat" it. The scientists found out that while eating positively charged matter would weaken the voidmatter eating uncharged matter would make it stronger.
Further experiments and calculations showed that if enough voidmatter was dumped in the middle of a medium or low charged area it would eat up most of the area. Their logic was flawed however and that showed at the first big test. In that test voidmatter was released in a desert area. First it seemed to work fine, but while after some time the voidmatter should have been neutralized due to all the positive matter it ate it kept on growing. In the end our Lord, who was luckily present at the test, had to intervene to neutralize the voidmatter. Shortly later the project was canceled, the lab was destroyed and most of the papers burned. One of the scientists noticed however that the second prototype bomb and some copies of vital research papers were not destroyed, when he brought this matter to the attention of our lord all he got was a strange smile as answer.
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