Mother of Magic

Ballpark

The new ballpark Stephanie and Le built stood on the south side of town. A former cow pasture Stephanie and Le bought from a family that no longer raised cattle. Buying things was not an issue for the couple. They were, via magic, infinitely wealthy. Ava cautioned them and they both understood that flooding the town with Gold would not be a good thing for the local economy. They did not do things like that often, but in this case, they wanted the land for their project, and it was for sale, so a little extra money in the economy was not going to hurt things.

If anything was disrupting the local economy, it was not Stephanie and Le creating money out of thin air; it was the shop. Inventions that Le and Silena spun out to others to manufacture, and that they in turn sold to other safe harbor towns. Miriam's hotel was almost always full of out-of-towners, coming to Collins to buy technology or learn how to make it themselves.

With their new land, Stephanie and Le magically cleaned up the former pasture. Mowed and flattened it to make it work as a baseball park. In the same way they built their lodge, the couple created viewing stands. A padded outfield wall with distance markers. There were no stands in the outfield. Baseball was not yet that popular to need them. There were huge scoreboards. Those loomed over the outfield walls on steel frames. There were ladders up to them so incandescent light bulbs could be changed.

The scoreboards were not electronic. No integrated circuits or LED displays. It was incandescently lit. Incandescent lights were available with local technology. The ball/strike/score displays could be controlled from the scoring stand behind home plate. The set of switches that allowed ball/strike counts and the score to be displayed. Unlike little league parks of their own Earth, there were no ads for sponsors on the scoreboards. No mention of Stephanie and Le either. Only the name of the park. 'Collins Stadium'. Not original and honoring no one. Its sole purpose was to let people coming to games from out-of-town see the name and perhaps think they needed a stadium of their own.

Stephanie was hoping baseball would catch on here. It had been her life for as long as she could remember and felt this Earth was poorer not having it. Not counting the games the various tribes in the region played. Stephanie was not looking to damage that either. For her, here, it was about building community spirit with friendly games. It is not as if she needed money, or had ever really cared that much about it even on her Earth. She donated a lot of it to charity there. That was how she came to meet Le.

Power for the stadium came from a windmill located well past the outfield wall. The tallest structure in the Collins area was a large water tower. It stored water as high up as Stephanie and Le could reasonably make it, to increase its potential energy. Water could run down and through a generator for power generation when there was no wind. It then flowed out into a water feature of the park area. When the wind returned, it would pump water back up high. Simple floats and limit switches controlled everything. Le had not perfected batteries enough to power the stadium. Gravity gave him what chemistry could not yet. Simple power storage.

Using gravity to store power like this was not a new idea for power in Collins. Mountain lakes performed the same function. Le's inventions and refinements to existing technology made it more efficient.

The baseball park would not look out of place for any minor league team in Stephanie and Le's home. There were opposing team dugouts and fences between the stands and the field. No one on Collins had ever seen seats like the ones in the stands. The couple replicated the type that would be in a Baseball park in their world. Flip-down seats, covered in fabric that would withstand the weather. In theory. They replicated the fabric as closely as their memory and knowledge of fabrics and materials would allow. Given the practice they received by creating their clothing, it was not a stretch. Like stadiums of their world, the seats were also colorful.