"Chase, it is good to see you, the council is most pleased with your learning." the man interrupting me said over a neck beard long enough to tickle his balls if he sneezed. Clouds of smoke puffed from the pipe perpetually in his lips. His ears wiggled whenever he was irritated, and my ignoring him had set them flapping like bearded Dumbo.
"You're an idiot Alex, you're all idiots." His face darkened at the insult as he looked around the lab.
"Your lab looks like a goblin engineers' workshop, than a proper magical research facility." He touched a copper pipe and burned his fingers. "What in the Gods' names!"
I turned and smiled at his injury, "You're all idiots, look at it, you practice magic with best guesses and second hand second sharing without applying any real science or engineering to the principles. Your stock fireball is a basic incendiary change accelerated toward the enemy where it would burst."
Marching over a wall I hit a panel and it opened up, the spells were familiar to Alex, but refined. Beyond, the Calei Plains, was an unofficial weapons testing ground, "Go on Chase, Cast a fireball."
Sneering he frowned and cast the biggest fireball he could manage, maximizing it with metamagic. The flame moved out at a hundred feet per second, slamming into the plains and bursting with a twenty foot wide burst of flame that went out almost as rapidly as it started. I am one of the pre-eminent fire mages. What could you do?"
"Several things," I called up the flame,shaping the intended shell that would improve on it velocity, binding it with other spells, "I call this the fireball Mk 2." I cast it out and it zipped out at two hundred and fifty feet per second slamming into the plains, the blast began and the secondary spells fired injecting air into the mix blasting out to a forty foot radius. As with his, it fizzled out quickly. "It has high power, but it isn't sustained"
"This though is hellgranade.," I conjured from the barrel a ball of naphtha with one hand and a fireball Mk 2 with the other. The Naphtha was surrounded with air bursting spells and was hurled out before, ten feet from the ground the spells triggered and vaporized the naphtha into a cloud of particles before the fireball slammed into it. There was no fire in the end, just a shockwave blast that scorched the ground for hundreds of feet. "Still think science doesn't matter?"
