Chapter 13: Ether Ignition

7 0 0
                                    


Ms Luxford tuned away from the class and made a swiping gesture at the board with one of her gloved hands. The writing which had been on their before burst into silver coloured specks like many miniature fireworks exploding simultaneously, and were swept off the board in the direction which she had made the gesture.

She then pulled off her gloves and, after placing them on the podium, took her wand into her hand and began to use it to write on the board. "The stuff I'm writing down now is the basic theory behind the process I'm about to teach you. It would be a good idea to either copy this down or make sufficient notes so that you can remind yourselves if you ever have trouble remembering or if need to clarify something and can't, or don't want to, find me to ask."

After she finished writing, Ms Luxford turned around and began to address the class. "The process of raising your saturation was once known as 'Ether Ignition', this is where the profession 'Igniter' came from. An igniter is someone who oversees the process of raising your saturation so in all your cases, I am your igniter." Kason subconsciously nodded his head, having been told this exact thing a few moments ago, "We now know that the name 'Ether Ignition' is not really suitable to describe the process but the name has been solidly cemented in our culture so hasn't been changed for anything more suitable."

Ms Luxford grimaced slightly when she said this as if she was personally against the name not being changed. "Anyway, as I said before, to raise the saturation of a particular part of the body, that part must be exposed to higher levels of ether than are naturally present in that part. To do this, I could just send you all to someplace with naturally high levels of ether, such as the Astral Fields that are near the college. But apart from being highly inefficient, it would also be very dangerous, so the college uses these things to help you instead."

Ms Luxford held up a little indigo coloured marble measuring a couple of centimetres across which she had at some point acquired while she had been talking, it looked to be a perfect sphere and glinted in the sunlight that shone through the windows. "This is a ball of solidified ether." She said looking around at the class with a serious look in her eyes, "It is currently covered in a thin protective coating which prevents it from turning back into gaseous ether, but once that coating is removed, it will almost immediately begin to sublimate and after a few moments, it will disappear completely."

"This is what you will be using, however, if you were to just use these marbles as they are, once you took off the protective coating, you would expose yourself to unsafe levels of ether which could result in serious injuries. To be able to safely use the ether contained in this ball you will be using this device." Ms Luxford held up a something that looked like a transparent container in her other hand, this container was comprised of a semispherical transparent section which had the open end covered with a thin gauze of tightly woven, light purple threads.

"This is a small-scale version of a device called a 'Regulator', it has a storage compartment made from reinforced, ethefied glass fitted with an ether filter which will contain the solidified ether and regulate the amount of gaseous ether that can exit so that you are only exposed to safe levels of ether. To use this to raise the saturation in the brain, you just need to have this somewhere near your head, within roughly half a metre, and the gaseous ether will disperse throughout the air near the filter in that radius. To begin with, you should not expose yourself to ether for longer than an hour every day, otherwise, the build-up of ether in your brain will go into unsafe levels. If this does happen though, you should visit the healer as soon as possible for treatment."

Ms Luxford placed the two items she had been holding on top of the podium behind which she stood, "At the end of every week, I will test the saturation of ether in your brains just like I have done today. Every time your saturation goes over a unit of ten Cs, say thirty or forty, you will be given a different filter which will allow more ether to pass through, allowing you to be exposed to more ether as appropriate to your level. This will allow you to progress at a steady rate because otherwise, you would find that your progress would slow down until eventually, you would no longer be making any as your brain would become fully tolerant to that level of ether."

The Time MageWhere stories live. Discover now