Rupegia

Chapter 179: Augmented Reality – Part 1

While the helmet is a curious thing, it's still barely usable due to the headache and heavy mana drain, so Lina retreats back to our mansion to work on it. Improving her understanding of the fourth dimension would help, but first, she wants to polish the enchantment a bit.

She doesn't need to take the helmet with her since she's going to make another one, so I play around with it while the rest of the girls return to our guest mansion. I still have no idea how Lina did the filtering and splitting of light; it just works. I assume the heavy MP cost means that it shouldn't work, but we're using enough mana that the laws of reality just bend over and take it up the ass while crying tears of blood.

That might make it sound like the laws are weak and easily fucked, but Lina needed a total of thirty free plus fifteen trained points in [General Enchanting] and twenty-six in [Space Magic] to achieve this. It isn't something a beginner could ever make.

But now I'm wondering how Lina's enchantment could actually work while obeying physics. I mean, the rules of reality are merely a suggestion in the face of overwhelming amounts of mana, so much so that a mana storm is an extremely destructive thing that just fucks up anything it touches, but the more compliant with physics a spell is, the less mana it costs, so this train of thought should help Lina.

But I have no idea where to even start, so… yeah…

Alcander returns the helmet to Jarn and promptly drinks an MP potion. He's certainly motivated, so I might as well hear his thoughts.

"What do you think of the enchantment, Sir Alcander?" I curiously question.

The tall imperial immediately beams in excitement, a rare sight since he's a rather pompous man.

"What a marvelous thing! I can't believe it produces such a clear image, even though it was Her Highness Lina's first try!" he exclaims while gesticulating with his arms, making his long robes sway.

I reflexively smile at his enthusiasm as I explain, "It's because of my Gift. Let's just say I 'powered her up' a bit."

"And what a powering it was!" he adds, his black eyebrows high up in awe.

I make sure Lina hears what he's saying just because I love to make her embarrassed, and her bashful reaction makes me flash a smile. So I inquire further, "Any other comments about it? I'm trying to think of ways to make the enchantment more physical rather than have it use such abstract magic to build the layered three-dee picture."

He nods in agreement and then becomes pensive. "Yes, that's exactly what I'd recommend Her Highness focus on to start her improvements, but as to how to achieve that… perhaps an Illusion mage could help?"

Alissa's fox ears twitch at that, but I have other things to talk about first. "Hmm… maybe. But I was thinking more along the lines of how to physically turn four-dee photons into the image the enchantment gives."

"'Photons'?" he repeats confusedly.

"Particles of light; they form an image when added together," I promptly explain.

He nods in understanding, then turns to the 4D corner as he starts to deliberate, "Ah, yes. Now that is quite the question… but I believe I'd start by finding a way to suppress the fourth dimension of the light particles and then project them onto a wall so that I could see the resulting image."

That's right! Light is a 3D wave, but you can think of it like a piece of string being whipped in a spiral, and if we pass the string through a vertical fence, it now only moves along the vertical axis. That's how polarized sunglasses work, and they make images darker but not completely black. And now that we have four axes, what if we suppressed two axes in one image and then inverted the suppressed axes in another image?

No, that… that wouldn't produce any interesting results.

But what if… we linearly interpolated the axis suppression while also rotating the suppressed axis, creating dozens of images of each axis combination?

Yes, it's-…! Actually, let's just forget that one because even I don't understand what I just said.

No, no, I'm just mixing up my mathematical terms. What if we suppressed one axis, then used a rotating polarized filter along the plane perpendicular to another axis? This would create a polarized 2D image that's understandable to us, but what plane is perpendicular to an axis in 4D space?

If you're in 3D space and you have the X, Y, and Z axes, all perpendicular to each other, the plane created by the X and Y axes is perpendicular to the Z axis, but how does that work in 4D space…?

I'm starting to think I'm just spouting bullshit again. I don't know enough math or physics to think about this properly, and I feel like I'm about to pull a muscle in my brain!

But wait, a normal image is in 2D, so 4D light creates a 3D image. Can I use this information in any way…?

Nope, nothing comes to me.

I sigh and resurface from my inner thoughts. My brain is twisting too much.

And seeing that I'm not reflecting anymore, Alcander makes another suggestion, "Your Highness, I'd also look into improving the way the image is projected into our minds. An Illusion mage might know how to do it more gently and naturally, which I believe should help with the headache."

"Oh, that's a good idea," Alissa happily hums inside my soul space.

"Alright, I'll see what Alissa can do," I gracefully agree. Then I let out a long sigh of tiredness.

"What's that thing about 'polarized sunglasses'?" Lina questions curiously.

"You think it's workable?" I curiously ask back.

"It'll be an improvement, yes," she replies with a nod in real life.

So I explain to her how polarization works as I [Gate] back to the mansion, and she recreates the sunglasses after a mere half hour. It also consumes a stupid amount of mana to keep it active, but less than with the helmet.

But the sheet of glass she enchanted only becomes polarized when the spell is active, and I think that's a bit wasteful.

So I propose, "Wait, I think Alteration would be better here because we could create a material that absorbs horizontally-polarized light, and then we wouldn't need to spend mana to maintain it."

"But my specialty is enchanting," she promptly points out.

It takes me a moment, but I come up with a better idea, "What about an enchantment that conjures the material?"

And it takes her only a couple of seconds to agree. "Hmm… okay, but put my extra points in [Conjuring Magic]."

Now it takes her an hour to come up with the enchantment as she doesn't have much experience working with Conjuring.

And she conjures a long sheet of polarized glass.

"Huh, it really makes things darker," Alissa curiously remarks as she looks through the glass.

"Look at the sheen of metal; it should be gone now," I point out after I [Equip] my sword.

"It really is!" she innocently exclaims and grabs the sword so that she can inspect it more closely through the glass, but then she turns the sword vertically, and the sheen comes back. "Wha…?! How interesting!"

I just love the cute reactions of my curious fox, so I give her one more tidbit of cool scientific knowledge, "If you put two lenses on top of each other but rotate them to a right angle of each other, you won't see anything. Light is a wave, so it's like trying to shake a string through fences. A single still fence lets you wave the string in one direction, but if you put a horizontal and a vertical fence on top of each other, they stop the string completely."

"'Correct' angle?" she repeats confusedly, but our verbal Wikipedias don't have enough time to load the page as she makes her own guess based on my fence example.

And I warmly state, "It's easier to show than to explain."

So we conjure another sheet and then put them over each other, but at a 90º angle to each other, and the overlapping area turns black.

"Wow," Aoi childishly whispers in awe, though there's nothing childish about her double draconic voice.

And Lina stares intensely at the sheets, trying to unravel their mysteries as she mumbles, "We could use this for the helmet, but how…"

While the girls play with the polarized sheets of glass, Lina and I retreat into our minds and continue our contemplation.

Let's simplify things. What if we think of this problem as if a 2D character is trying to see in 3D? What the character actually sees is a 1D line, but to "see" a 3D world, they have to add all those lines together to form a 2D image, which is a projection of a 3D world. Thinking this way, what we have to do is simple.

Lina then gets an idea, so she alters the "inserting the image into our mind" part of the helmet's enchantment, and now it allows one to see in all directions, by which I mean all four of them. It seems like she misunderstood the 4D stuff and made the enchantment do too much unnecessary work, only to constrain the results back down when feeding the image into our minds, and this obviously contributed to the ridiculous mana cost.

I don't blame her since even I don't understand what it is that I myself don't understand, so I couldn't even tell what exactly she didn't understand, and the overall lack of understanding created a mess.

Anyway, it's easier to make a new helmet from scratch, and so the four lenses become one, and then we test it in the 4D room, but now the image is blurry and very dark. It isn't the fault of the lack of lenses; it's just that now that we're obeying the rules of physics more closely, the resulting image is also more easily warped by our lack of understanding or just quirks of physics.

"It's the eyes…!" I whisper in realization.

A 2D person in a 3D world would be so thin that they'd be invisible if looked at from the "front," just like Patrono. It's possible their innards would spill out in a 3D world, but since that didn't happen to us, we can assume that the magic that created the 4D world has also established certain rules and adjustments so that a 3D living being can exist there without falling apart. That also means that we either have some sort of "depth" in the fourth dimension protecting our innards, or we're all just Paper Mario.

But my point is: 2D eyes need some depth in the third dimension to be able to perceive 3D light. And even if the 2D person is as thin as paper, eyes that thin would just be horribly inefficient, so we need Lina's lens to also extend into the fourth dimension.

After some tinkering and copying of Alcander's spell, we achieve that, greatly improving the clearness of the image and making it bright again. We also add another lens to give us a stereoscopic view, and that improves the clearness of the image even further, so we return to using four lenses as that creates such a sharp image that we can see even better than in 3D.

Could even try to use them in combat as it gives a super kinetic view, so Alissa and Yunia might benefit from it. That's for later, though, as the enchantment needs more improvements before it'll be viable for such a scenario.

A lot more improvements. But night has already come, so we begrudgingly leave our lab to have a bath.

Unfortunately, both Lina and I are too distracted to properly savor our sacred routine. For the first time in my life… well, my Rupegian life, I'm more interested in research than sex. It's like my scholarly Cock has been teased so hard that even my real Cock is unable to pull it out of the wonderfully tight pussy of Research.

"It's fine. I can handle not being fucked for a day," Yunia snootily states and turns her head away like a tsundere.

Alissa doesn't want to say it, but she also thinks the same.

I could do two things at the same time and fuck them while reflecting on the lenses, but they want a full course of Ravaging, and I don't have the spare mental capacity for that, so it's best to leave it for later, or else it'd just be a disappointing fuck.

But then the dragon wakes up and puts these whores in their place, "Wait, who do you girls think you are to demand a Ravaging from me? I'm going to turn this into neglect play and not let you get any release until I'm ready to fuck you."

"That… is also acceptable," Yunia slowly replies, a chill running down her spine while Alissa nods excitedly.

And just like that, they're happy again. So this is my relationship advice: be positive, and always try to turn things around… because you never know when you might stumble upon the chance of triggering a fetish.

Caterina just briefly raises her eyebrows in surprise, already starting to accept the level of our depravity.

Tonight's dinner is a private affair, so we do it sans clothes because why not? Just because my mind is unable to stop thinking about research doesn't mean that my eyes don't enjoy staring at naked beauties while I swim in my thoughts, and I'm especially thirsty for Caterina's strong body.

Since we don't have anyone to entertain, our meal is as diverse as our birthplaces. The chef is no Krysta, but they know how to prepare most of the dishes very well, though the elven ones are lacking, in Yunia's opinion.

Today's top dish is a dragonkin classic, a spicy sausage shepherd's pie called Chiisakureta. It's got a strong bite to it, but the browned potato top serves as the perfect balance for it and even enhances the flavor further.

Honestly, anything dragonkin made with sausage is a certified classic, though it has to be smoked with elven lumber, or else it won't achieve its maximum deliciousness potential. Their cheeses are also great, but they have to be made with cow milk, or else they taste weird. It's like the dragonkin know how to make the good stuff, but they're just terrible at picking the right ingredients.

And Hana actually has something to say about that, "Nothing good grows in Ryutake because it's so cold, so we made countless trade companies ourselves to bring in food from all over the Realm."

That's curious, so curious indeed that it even prompts Lina to share some of her trivia, "Before the Avgi Empire conquered the dragonkin, the Ryu was the largest empire of the time, but the dragonkin considered their territories to be 'colonies' rather than actual parts of their nation, unlike the true union that Ajax created. This made the colonies easier to control from afar, but the downside was that the Ryu military power didn't grow with the size of their territory, which contributed to them being conquered."

And Hana wryly adds with a shrug, "Guess it's in our blood to travel in search of wealth; we just used to take it by force before Ajax put a leash on us."

"You've also adapted well to being leashed," I huskily state as my arousal continues to grow.

Her emerald scales wave in excitement as she gives me a fearsome grin and nods. "That we have."

While we eat, Hukarere gets her meal from me, so I'm the only one getting any sexual satisfaction today, which makes the girls frustrated enough to arouse me further.

But I still keep most of my focus on improving the lenses.

The part where we take a 4D wave of light, project it into a 3D image, then slice it up into 2D slices is still completely abstract, so we need to come up with an actual physics-based mechanism to replace it. Like with the polarized glass, making an enchantment that polarizes light is easier but more costly mana-wise in the long run than just making a physical object that polarizes light without the continuous need for magic, but the enchantment requires much, much, much less actual knowledge.

So let's do this step-by-step. First, take the 4D wave of light and project it into a 3D image. This is basically the hologram problem: how do you generate a floating dot of light? We have a 3D mirror magic tool that creates holograms, so I guess Lina could study it because my Earth's technology wasn't advanced enough for holograms.

Next, splitting up a 3D image into 2D slices. This depends on Lina's hologram solution, so it's pointless to spend much time on it before she's done.

Finally, feeding all of the slices into our minds at the same time. And this is where Alissa comes in, though she wishes it was a "come in," get it?

"Very funny," my sexually-frustrated foxy slut remarks with a wry smile as she lays down on my chest, pressing her soft tits against me. She accepts being my sex toy and even enjoys the denial of sexual release, but that doesn't mean she'll make it easy for me. "Now, where do I even start…?"

"Fuck his mind gently," Hana eloquently suggests.

"That's actually an apt description of what you need to do," I agree with a chuckle and get my fill of Alissa's furry ears.

And her fluffy tail lazily wags as she counter-proposes, "Can I fuck someone else's mind, instead? It feels wrong to do such a thing to you."

So I hum as I look around, "Alright…" Then I point a claw at today's victim. "Elven whore, I want to see you get mind-fucked."

"I love it when he abuses her," Kaatohe whispers with mild excitement and starts to gently touch her clit.

"Same," Roxanne whispers back, and she doesn't know whether to stare at the masturbating cat or the elf being mindfucked.

Caterina just stares in silence at Yunia, seemingly worried but maybe also a bit aroused. Being surrounded by this much lesbianism every day must be torture, so I give Alissa a hand with fucking and fucking with Yunia's brain as lewdly as possible.

[Illusion Magic] is an unfinished magic school, so its themes aren't as clear and streamlined as they could be. The first two spells, [Ghost Lights] and [Double Image], are simple holograms, but the next spell, [Ignorance], already starts to mess with the brains of those who gaze upon the illusion. The fourth and following spells, [Pacify], [Vicious Rage], and [Nightmare], directly mess with the target's brain without a single hologram being used, and it's exactly those spells that Alissa has to study to help Lina.

My fox already has enough points for [Pacify] and [Vicious Rage], but she never really needed to use them as she focused on Nocturna's more useful Illusion spells. This is a great opportunity for her to broaden her knowledge further, though, and even Nocturna's spells make use of the mind-bending aspect of [Illusion Magic] to make the illusions more powerful, so this experiment may prove to be quite useful to her.

But those are all just side bonuses because pleasing me by brain-fucking Yunia is all the motivation that Alissa ever needed. My foxy and elven whores would do anything I ask if there's some sexual component to it.

So Alissa scours my mind for all sorts of depraved fetishes.