#exclusion zone

Kinetic magic allowed a practitioner to charge a held object before throwing it, making it curve slightly toward its 'target' when thrown, and to do more damage when it hit. This made 'flingers', as practitioners were called, a fairly uncomplicated inclusion in armies, especially because the magic was fairly easy to learn the very basics of, and outfitting a small unit of barely-trained flingers with slings often proved instrumental in overcoming even quite well-equipped foes. While the magic was taught at the Athenaeum of Might and Motion, the ease of learning it and general simplicity of its effects meant that it was hard to gatekeep, and remained a minor, if important, magic with military and occasional practical applications. The rise of firearms during the First Empire, however, rendered kinetic magic somewhat redundant – the deadliness and range of simple firearms was comparable to, and often exceeded, the “simply-trained squad of peasant flingers” that had previously been so instrumental. In fact, the only advantage that kinetic magic had over kinetic weaponry was that a flinger would just need a bag of rocks or darts, instead of the investment in materiel a squad of musketeers would require. Experiments were made, and the invention of explosive devices small enough to easily throw, such as grenades, levelled the playing field a little, but didn’t fully arrest the technique's decline across the period of the First Empire.

In 230 FE, in the small town of Rael, an enterprising kinetic mage, Siebs, explored the limits of the magic in a manner that, were it not for the Second Empire’s obvious interest in the military applications, someone in authority should probably have put a stop to. One of the primary limits to kinetic magic was the charging limit – a single flinger could charge a sling bullet for over five seconds before it stopped taking energy, the efficacy of which was dependent on the skill and training of the flinger, and if removed from skin contact, unthrown, it would immediately start losing energy, giving the flinger enough time to load it into a sling, but do precious little else. Trying to crack the ‘energy storage’ problem, Siebs discovered something new – if a stone was immediately passed to another flinger, it wouldn’t lose energy. Exciting enough, but the secondary effect was that this second flinger could charge the bullet too; on release, the effects of both flingers would apply. Extensive testing revealed something that, in hindsight, should have provoked more caution than glee – while this was a linear combination of the power of the flingers, it only needed three or four flingers before the sling bullet could be propelled faster than a bullet from a firearm, hardened by the magic to the point that it could penetrate thick armour or even stone walls. A demonstration with ten novice flingers managed to throw a pebble with more force and impact than a cannon. Interested in the possibilities and encouraged by their handlers from the Second Empire, Siebs inducted three hundred basic flingers, and set up a line, where each flinger would take a stone, charge it, and pass it to the next person in line. When the three hundredth member of this “peasant chain” released the stone, kinetic magic was excluded to a roughly spherical region surrounding the field the test took place in, centred just outside Rael, and the town was utterly destroyed by what, to all accounts, was an enormous explosion. When the crater was visited by concerned authorities, all that was found was a smoking crater across the entire exclusion zone, and a vast amount of heat and light being emitted by a ball of fire that was bouncing around the inviolable interior of the zone. Several weeks later, the fireball finally slowed down enough to simply disperse, and once the site had cooled down enough, expeditions revealed that the effect was still partially ongoing. Thrown objects in the zone accelerate faster and faster, until they hit another object or the zone’s boundary, and usually explode. Without extremely careful, slow movement, this can happen to basically anything, making exploring the zone incredibly hazardous to the unprepared. Several attempts have been made, over the years, to exploit this seemingly-unlimited kinetic energy generated by objects in the zone, although this process is complicated by the fact that very few materials exist that are strong enough to resist the kinds of forces generated in the PREZ, and that kinetically-charged material cannot leave the zone. Proposals about the use of rune magic to attempt to transfer energy out have been made, but are caught up in bureaucratic red tape, for the time being.