[Transcript  of presentation to Lyceum Combined Faculty by Harold Stockmoor]

   Good morning. Throughout Thelian history it has been believed that the first documented use of magic was the Alyssum Incident of 0007, however while preparing a report on the history of Dawn’s Light, I came upon archived security footage taken aboard the Thelian Dawn itself that I believe shows an unexpected use of magic much, much earlier than we currently teach.

   At the time of the incident, the Thelian Dawn had been traveling through space for over sixty years. Most of the people had been born aboard the ship. They knew no other life than that of being on the Thelian Dawn, but they’d grown up hearing stories of Earth and holding out the hope of finding a new planet: of walking on soft grass; of feeling the wind upon their faces; of seeing  a sunset.

   It was this persistent, frustratingly out of reach hope that prompted a man named Thaddeus Crick to give voice to suspicions that the Captain of the Thelian Dawn and his senior officers were deliberately bypassing habitable planets. His accusation — for which he had no proof — was that the leaders of the ship knew they would lose their power and influence once they reached a new planet and so they conspired to keep everyone in space.

   Now, we know these to be the paranoid rantings of a disturbed man, but at the time he managed to gather a small following.  This group was so convinced of the corruption of the officers that they devised a plan to storm the command module and seize control of the ship.  They were poorly armed and poorly trained, but they had the strength of conviction they would succeed against the Dawn’s Light guardians who protected the module.

[Audience laughs]

   Needless to say, the uprising was short-lived.  The guardians quickly repelled the attack, subdued the enemy with minimal injury on either side, and the rebels earned themselves an extended vacation in the holding cells. Now my report on the history of our organization was focused on the heroes: the men and women who have performed exceptional feats even by our standards.  So when I was researching this incident I came upon a name of a sergeant within the ranks who was hailed as having potentially saved the lives everyone in the module — possibly the ship. 

[Play Archival Record TD3589766]

   Now while most of the rebels were engaging the guardians outside the command center, a small group of the rebels broke off to head to the communications core.  There they go — those three there. Their mission is to disrupt the communications between modules so messages and orders could not be passed from the command module to the other sections of the ark. They knew, though, that all the computer cores would be nearly impossible to access due to the various controls on the entry systems.  Storerooms would be far easier to access and there was a storeroom next to the command core.  Their mission was to place a bomb on the wall in the storeroom to blow a hole into the communications core.

   Now you can see here our sergeant following after them. Aralena Sparks had just completed her training and was made a member of Dawn’s Light just ten days prior.  She was brand-spanking new to this job, was in her first real combat, and she alone noticed the three rebels slip from the fray.  She follows them here and confronts them, but they are able to slip into the storeroom before she can neutralize them. Let me pause here and point this out.

[Archival Record TD3589766 paused at location 57.334.28]

   This door, my esteemed colleagues — the one next to the storage room — the one which the rebels are trying to blow up — is not the communications core.  It is the life support core.  The rebels went the wrong way.

[Resume Archival Record TD3589766]

   Now the record switches to inside the storeroom and you can see two of the rebels are waiting to confront Sergeant Sparks while their friend prepares the charge. The door opens… and immediately the rebels attack, knocking her down and pinning her in the door. Now look here — this right here, well out of her reach — that’s her standard-issue RS-352 stun weapon. She’s pinned in the door and can’t stop the rebels from accidentally blowing up the life support systems.

[Gasps and exclamations from Audience]

   You saw it? She suddenly had her gun, was able to stun all three rebels and prevent them from setting off the bomb. In all the reports of the incident, she notes that she was straining — reaching for her gun and that she must have stretched a little bit further to get it. This was accepted by the authorities of the time: she stretched a little more, reached a little further, and was able to reach her weapon.  But when we slow down the recording… the weapon moves on it’s own… and there is a red glow between her hand and the weapon as it moves.

   My friends, this is fire-sourced magic. This is proof that we did not come to a world of magic, but rather we brought magic with us.  Perhaps we brought it from Earth, or maybe something about space travel caused a mutation — I cannot say. But we now know that magic has been with us far longer than we ever realized.