Unlock the secrets of the universe using pattern magic, and then get tenure by publishing those patterns! Can you stop potential dimension-ending horrors while not missing that one faculty meeting you absolutely have to go to?
Pattern magic is dangerous. A practitioner channels magic by staring at physical patterns that reconfigure their brain, allowing them to draw on cross-dimensional energy and create magical effects. If you’re not careful, though, your brain will never be the same…
As an undergraduate at Winfield Phillips, which has one of the foremost pattern magic departments in the world, you learned how to be a practitioner of pattern magic. After a long, hard fellowship and seemingly endless job applications, you’ve landed a coveted tenure track faculty position back at Winfield Phillips! Of course, the main reason you got it was that a professor vanished unexpectedly, and the university was desperate to fill his position. Oh, and Darcy, your best friend from college? The one who cheated you out of the fellowship you really wanted? Darcy’s a professor, too, and is angling to be department chair.
Then there’s the ongoing tug-of-war between the university and the college town over the university’s expansion plans. Guess which new professor gets to negotiate that mine field! Oh, you also have to organize a pattern magic symposium sponsored by Repro, the rapacious pattern magic company. Repro’s very interested in your research. Well, really, Taylor Coleman, Repro’s founder, is interested in your research. You’ll have to balance those duties with your teaching load, research, and student advisee’s needs if you want to get tenure. Though if those mysterious magical effects don’t stop popping up around town and threatening our dimension, tenure may not be worth what it once was.
The beta’s finished and it’s off to the copy editor! I may vomit with excitement.
Features:
- Create new and irresponsibly dangerous magical patterns.
- Wrest forgotten patterns from magical tomes that literally fight you.
- Develop theories about magic that will let you understand patterns at so deep a level that it might break your brain.
- Seriously, patterns are very dangerous, you probably shouldn’t study them, not that I’ll convince you to stop.
- Play as male, female, or non-binary.
- Romance (which can be ace romance) a brilliant algebraic geometrist who doesn’t know about pattern magic, the city councilwoman assigned to work with Winfield Phillips, the Repro CEO, the friend who betrayed you, or even the extra-dimensional being who comes to live in your head.
- (Look, I told you pattern magic is dangerous, you can end up with a being from another dimension sharing brain-space with you.)
- Deal with petty university politics, because even practitioners who can bend reality to their whim get all snooty about who was supposed to bring cookies to the faculty meeting.
- Discover the Vastness.