Casimir's Curse

[Danika]

Danika watched the rings in her hand shimmer with the residual strands of power Allan had woven into them, faint but undeniable. Something in the way the effect hung in the air, like dew caught in spider silk, made her pulse quicken. Not from excitement, but from that particular kind of focus that edged into awe. She didn’t know what he had done exactly, but it had shape. It responded to the field the way magnetic lines curled under force. It wasn’t her magic, not the quiet hum of equations turning radiant under pressure, but it was... something.

“I think,” she said carefully, slowly, “you didn’t just make something. You opened something.”

Danika moved to the center of the room, cleared off a flat workspace with a brisk sweep of her arm, and gently placed the rings in a steady configuration—roughly the same spacing Allan had instinctively used. Her fingers trembled slightly as she extended her hands over the makeshift portal.

“I’m going to try something,” she said—not as a warning, but a declaration. A small breath followed. She closed her eyes.

The glow came quick. White, the color of stars and unsolved questions. She felt it in her chest first, arcs of energy curling from her skin to the air like she was drawing static from another world. Then came the hum—low and even, tuned like a sine wave.

She reached toward the rings, let her field brush the shimmering surface Allan created. At first, nothing happened. Then—like slipping into resonance—his thread caught hers. The woven structure shimmered. Stabilized. Danika’s eyes flew wide. “It’s holding,” she said. The astonishment in her voice was quiet, reverent. “Allan—it’s holding.”

She didn't breathe, didn't blink. The fields layered in an overlay of harmonics to a song someone else had started humming. Nothing she did overpowered his; it reinforced, synchronized. His pattern had heart. Hers gave it something to reverberate against. The rings sparked once—soft, like a pulse. Between them, the air folded, rippled.

And then: a doorway. Small. Imperfect. But real. Not just theory. Not simulation. Open. Danika stood very still, her eyes wide, her voice excited with wonder.

“It’s staying open. Let’s move the rings apart and see how far they can go.”

[Allan]

Allan couldn't see what she was doing, but he could feel Danika channeling and he saw the stability of the rings getting better. He wondered what they could do together if they could figure out how to. But she was right it was staying open. He handed took one ring and handed her the other one, slowly. They weren't far apart and the portal looked stable. "I'll take a step back."

Allan slowly stepped back and watched the portal shimmer and shake. There was nothing between the two rings like he expected. Like a real worm hole or something, but there was nothing just empty space. He wondered if there was something Danika could see "I wonder if there is anything we can't see between them?" He didn't want sound smart or dumb so he just wondered outloud.

Allan took another slow step back. And then another.

He got about 5 steps away from before it failed with a little flickering pop. "Wonder if it's a size thing."

[Danika]

Danika was rooted in place, her eyes fixed on the space between the rings. Her channeling still flickered at her fingertips, a soft ultraviolet hue pulsing in time with something deeper than thought. The air shimmered in a way her instruments couldn’t quite register, but she felt it in the quiet vibrations running through the field they had created together.

Her breath caught. Between the rings, the space was so still. 

She tilted her head, eyes narrowing as she tried to tune her perception, to see not just with her eyes, but with that part of her mind that could sense the quantum layering of fields and forces. Something was folding there, just beneath the visible. Not a tunnel. Not a hole. More like a tension point. A boundary layer forming between localized quantum states. She imagined entangled particles trembling just at the edge of disassociation. Like two wave functions trying to resolve themselves into a bridge, but lacking just enough structure to collapse.

“Something is definitely there,” she murmured, half to herself. “It’s decoherence. A temporary shared state. Unstable but real.”

She adjusted her stance, coaxing more of the light into the weave. The rings pulsed again, steadier now. For a moment it felt close to balance. She was afraid that even moving too much might knock it apart, like breathing too hard on a tower of cards.

Then Allan handed her one of the rings. Her eyes lifted to him, confused at first then her hand closed gently around the metal, letting the connection hold. And it did. For a few breathless seconds, the field hummed in perfect tension. It reminded her of a mosquito walking on water.

She stared at the space between the rings as he stepped backward, watching the quantum noise gather, shimmer, and stabilize in its own strange way. Then, with a faint crackle, the shimmer faltered. The air hiccupped. The field wobbled once, twice, and popped out of existence with a soft snap. Danika let out a breath, not quite frustration, not quite disappointment. “So close,” she whispered, her mind already spinning through possibilities.

She turned the ring over in her fingers. The interference patterns were fading, but her thoughts were catching fire. “We need a way to reinforce the entangled boundary... Maybe a paired resonance field? Or modulate the lattice dynamically based on position?”

She looked up, eyes unfocused, still buried in theory. “If we could stabilize the superposition state between the rings—”

Allan spoke out loud.

“Wonder if it’s a size thing.”

Danika gasped. “Of course. Of course. The field is collapsing because the structure is too small to contain the necessary energy distribution. It's trying to localize the quantum state in a volume that can't maintain coherence. I’ve been assuming tighter meant more stable, but if it’s too tight, the entangled space can’t stretch into a usable bridge.”

She turned to her console, pulling up a new simulation, hands already flying. “If we scale up the anchoring rings, increase the spatial boundary of the resonance field...” She trailed off, eyes shining. “That's genius.”

Before she could stop herself, Danika turned back and threw her arms around him. Not awkwardly. Not cautiously. Just a quick, impulsive hug full of momentum and caffeine and revelation. She pulled back just as fast, already halfway turned toward the projection table.

“We’ve gotta build a bigger one,” she declared with a huge smile.

[Allan]

How big would you need to go a long distance? Was it proportional to the size of the ring, or maybe what it was made out of? Did it need something with a particular resonating frequency, but that wasn't something Allan knew much about.

He watched Danika for a few moments silently as she got absorbed in her work again. He didn't want to startler so he made general movement sounds before he spoke, he might start wearing a bell so she didn't forget he was around. Not that he minded, she was busy and her mind was brilliant.

"I wonder how big it needs to be to transport around the world, or if it needs something with a bit more complexity than the ring from a key chain and an old bent paperclip. I bet the Ascendancy could get us samples of whatever material we needed to fashion the rings." He only wished he could show her what he saw. He didn't understand much on her screens. There were equations and wave forms and things but none of it made any sense to him.

[Danika]

Her mind was in motion, equations racing ahead of her fingers as she pulled up new models, overlayed harmonic maps, and recalibrated the projected lattice. She blinked, adjusted her glasses, and finally looked up from the projection table. “You’re right,” she said, tapping a few quick inputs that sent the current model spinning. “If the spatial aperture is too small, the energy field collapses under its own instability. We’ll need to scale up to allow a sustainable entangled state. Probably at least two meters in diameter to start... maybe three for safety.”

Her brow furrowed as she brought up material composition parameters. “The keychain worked because of the shape and the way you wove into it, but it wasn’t just that. Something about the metal must’ve been sympathetic to the weave. Conductivity, maybe. Or trace elements that react to channeling. If we’re going to make a stable, scalable portal ring...”

She trailed off, then turned sharply and crossed the lab in a few fast steps. At a smaller terminal, she brought up a database of materials: classified alloys, rare-earth metals, composite polymers. Her fingers hovered over the display as she considered the possibilities aloud. 

“We’ll need something with a high resonance threshold, low vibrational decay, and compatibility with both magical and electromagnetic frequency bands.” She paused. “Tungsten’s too dense. Copper’s too reactive. Vibranium’s fictional. Gold would be pretty, but completely useless.” That made her huff a quick laugh to herself before continuing. “Maybe a blend. Adamantite core wrapped in a boron-infused graphene mesh? Or…”

Her eyes widened a bit. “Or meteoric iron. Natural crystalline structure, high nickel content. It might channel intuitively if tuned right.”

She turned back to Allan, her focus re-centering. “You’re right about the Ascendancy. After we explain what this can do...” Her mouth twitched in a rare flash of excitement. “We might be able to bypass the test network entirely and leap straight to field testing.”

Danika walked back to the projection table, her energy tempered now but still glowing at the edges. “We’ll need to test different sizes, too. One ring at a half-meter. Another at full scale. Build them from different materials, document how each responds to the weave. I’ll draft a research grid.”

She looked at Allan again, softer this time. “And when we test them, I want you there. I think this only works if you’re the one doing the weaving. I can stabilize it. Maybe even amplify it. But you’re the one who opens it. Maybe there's a way to program the ring to open at a signal, for anyone to use? Ah, well, problem for future us.”

Danika smiled faintly, then finally allowed herself to stop moving for a breath. “We’ll build it. One ring at a time.”

And with that, she opened a new digital notebook, already tapping out material combinations and ring dimensions as the lab fell quiet again.

[Allan]

Allan didn't understand much of what Danika said, but she understood his words and she expanded on them. She looked lost in her equations and things. He smiled as made sure to make noise as he stood up. He was glad she wanted him involved, and that he could contrubute. He was pretty sure he'd still play with the weave he'd just found and see what it could do. He tapped Danika on the shoulder "I'll bring you some coffee in the morning. I don't think I can be much more help today and I do have to get to some training."