pitch

Quincy

Joan held the script after Anisa had first declined to show up then, John had offered to read in her stead, and finally the stage magician stereotype had told Joan to read it in her stead instead.

You’d — he’d — been banking on her joining the RBB pitch board. Next step, perhaps. He would be all pre-amble, then, and save the post-amble for when he saw her.

“This is a problem that has been driving me crazy for the past 4 years.

“I assume you are all familiar with Gordian and Howard’s 799 paper on the simplification of geometric calculations via subatomic miasma?”

They were not, and Weathers (presumably. He was in his raven form), John and Carrion gave a respective head shake, a blank stare, and an annoyed stare. The anonymous stage magician was flabbergasted.

“Oh. Well, you can use miasma to make your calculations affect eachother. This is particularly relevant when you’re trying to find the correct angle to pull things 4D. It’s always a bit in flux, so one of the biggest issues with flipping there without a fixed tether is actually finding the right angles. There are probably some improvements that can still be made, but the current implementation is, calculate the interval upon which a valid answer could lie, subdivide it into n selections, then randomly select from the n until you get it correct. If you massively increase the n, you can get some indication when you’re close, but often you have no idea until you hit it.”

“But Tessence,” said Joan, blandly, as scripted, “I thought going 4D was as simple as turning 90 degrees, why is there a big calculation for angle?”

“A great question, Annie,” said Tessence. “For one, our world isn’t 4 dimensional, I think the last number they settled on was 11.5? There was a pi in there somewhere. Was it 11 pi/4? So if you rotate 90 degrees, but in the wrong way, you just die, or you get knocked back. For another, it’s all about teleporting onto solid ground in the other dimension. If you just teleport into the sky, you fall and die. And, there isn’t much of an indication of the difference between the sky, and the 11 and a half dimensions where you die. So, better to do the calculation that you’ll angle onto the ground than not.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” said John. “What’s the point.”

“A great question, Annie,” said Tessence.

“You already said that line,” said Joan.

“Shut up,” said Tessence. “The point is, by using the miasma to tangle up all the angles, through magic that’s beyond me, you can take the square root of the amount of spatial magic that was previously required. And so,” he pulled off his hat, showed the inside again to the audience, reached in, reached in, reached in, “Uh, it can still take a while,” reached in, and pulled out a tiny, bloody pouch. “Shit,” he said. “I was supposed to grab a whole rat, there, I had one waiting on the other side. How many thaums was that, Joan?”

“That was, uh, purple.” she said.

“100k,” said Carrion.

“One hundred thousand.” said Tessence. “Works both ways, too. If I were in that rat’s position, I could reach in here and pull out one of your hearts, and you’d have no way of knowing, or stopping me. Or, I could reach into your bank’s vault and steal a bag of money. Or a bag of magical artifacts. The point of all this, all of this, is, teleporting up and down dimensions is a lot easier than everyone thinks, and once everyone realizes that, crime will be a lot easier, And I don’t understand why nobody has realized that yet, when it’s all so simple.”