Journal of Rover Wagstaff

I am glad that I have started journaling this year, who would have thought that I would be in the midst of such an interesting time in our history! As an academic and a historian focused in magic, the historical record will certainly be improved by the fact that I am able to be a primary source during this time. Even though I do not possess any magical abilities myself, I have studied the history and workings of magic throughout my life, and consider myself to be an expert (well, not to brag, but many others would consider me an expert as well, I assure you). So here I am, even though this is a strange and dangerous time, I am excited to be able to record this time, and potentially be part of the solution in order to get the magic of our world working once again!

This is indeed a strange time, and a dangerous time as well. Magic is so integral to our society, so its no surprise that things have been chaotic, even here in New Barkston where I live near the university. We have made do of course, many puppillars (and snailcats as well) rely on magic for little things, and have had to do things the "hard" way so to speak, but there are also many things that cannot be done without magic. There are a lot of parts of our infrastructure that work with magic, but to thier credit the local government here in New Barkston has really stepped up to make sure everyone stays safe, and many creatures have volunteered to help out with things such as deliveries, directing traffic, or maintaining electricity the non-magic way. Though this is a scary time, it is heartening to see everyone work together!

Now, back onto the matter at hand. Though others at the university have been trying thier best to figure out what is going on with magic, all our experimenting and research has yet to make any progress. I have been helping on the research side, without much to show for it. The archives at the university are vast, perhaps with more time and help we can see if anything from our past can help us with our present situation. 

The university and local government have been doing thier best to keep people calm during this time, though it has been difficult. The issues we are facing are scary indeed, and the university having no answers hasn't helped. The media has been trying to keep everyone informed as well, though some outlets have not been helping the situation by speculating on what the causes could be without any foundation... that Jake Barker has been talking on his broadcasts about the moon of all things, and I'm not sure how well he is vetting all those callers, or if he even is vetting them at all! He has asked me to come on his show, so hopefully that is a silver lining and I can dish out some information that will help people...

The last few weeks have been exceptionally busy! It heartens me to see so many puppillars and snailcats volunteering thier time and expertise to the university, but having such a frenzy of activity has certainly been stressful. I'm used to the library and archives being quite silent, but I didn't have it in me to shush any of the enthusiastic readers combing through our history. Thankfully, even with all the hubbub, our oldest and most precious records have been handled safely, either by university staff or those volunteers who came from other libraries with experience to handle the delicate pages. Even so, our answers weren't found in our oldest archives, though it was very nice to read through some of them again.

Jake Barker, though I am quite unsure of his flashy nature still, has actually been a great help with coordinating the volunteers. His broadcasts were responsible for many of the volunteers hearing about our endeavor, and naturally he was great with helping pupps get to where they needed to go, and coordinating things like lunch breaks and even bringing in food for the volunteers. I suppose being well known and having connections can be useful, for things such as that anyway. Even with all the enthusiasm and volunteers that Jake has brough to the archchives, we still haven't found our answers.

Its interesting how things work out, you would think that such a significant event would be well documented, and it is true that we found a lot of references to the past incident, which they called the Magic Ebbing (perhaps optimistically hoping a magic flowing would happen...), but there's no specific recordings of the history of the event. I suppose they were too busy trying to remedy the situation to keep the best records. Well, as I mentioned in my previous entry, I will be doing my best to remedy that for this occurance! One would hope that after we get through this, it wouldn't happen again but it's always better safe than sorry.

After our discoveries, Jake has begun to coordinate the volunteers to look into some magic experts that we can talk to. I don't know why I didn't think of that before, seeing as magic is one of my research specialties. Those who are in tune with magic can be quite strange and aloof....

Its been four months and our world's magic is still in flux, a lot of folks have gotten used to the current state of magic, but that doesn't mean that we have given up hope. Jake and I have been working closely together to reach out to those with a deep connection to magic, which can sometimes be tricky! Many with strong or deep powers tend to live alone, and some keep thier powers secret, but we have been able to talk to quite a few strong magic users and enlist thier help on figuring out our current conundrum.

Stella the fortune teller has been of great help with all this, they have a pretty strong connection to magic, but have been more invaluable thanks to thier connections to other magic users, largely due to thier family's history. Stella comes from a long line of fortune tellers and their family has always  been well connected to other magic users! Besides all the help they and all thier connections will be to figuring out our current dillema, I am exited to be able to pick their brain and meet more of thier connections for my own research into magic in general!

Jake and I have been able to visit some of these magic users, with Stella joining us, and the ones we have been able to talk to have agreed to use thier skills to help the cause. A few of them have even already been doing thier own work on the issue! Its great that Stella has been able to help with contact information for these magic users, as most that we have talked to tend to live on thier own. Even so, these magic users, who I will keep anonymous even in this journal as they rend to be quite private, were friendly enough. Besides the help on the issue at hand, just talking to them has been quite interesting and I've been able to learn a lot and observe some amazing new magical abilities!

Our main victory so far connecting with these magic users has been the fact that a number of them have told us they have been able to sense strange pockets of magic throughout our continent! After we had spoken to a few magic users, Jake, clever as he is, made the connection that a few of them were talking about similar senses, and we were able to connect some of these magic users, who are now working together on pinpointing some of these magic pockets so we can go investigate them in person! I believe when we are able to see these pockets ourselves we will be able to start working in earnest on solving this mystery!

Oh, and post script! Stella, after looking through some of thier great-grandmother's journals, has found references to a Magic Council, which used to exist, with a few magic users who would meet annually and help with any issues puppillars and snailcats have been having, oh if only we had that now we could have reached this part of our investigation months ago! Another thing that has been lost to history, but there's a silver lining in that we know about this now, and Stella has been working on networking and possibly starting up this council once more!

What an eventful month this has been! There are things that we have discovered that are truly remarkable, I'm not sure where to even start discussing what's happened. I suppose I should start at the beginning! We had a lot of adventurous volunteers who were bravely willing to explore the unknown when it came to the mysterious pockets of magic that were appearing  across Arcanis. I was of course among those investigating this phenomenon, though perhaps I was a little too zealous, as I and many other discovered, interacting with these pockets of magic had some... interesting effects. I for one wound up being shrunk! Luckily, we all found out that these strange effects were only temporary, I was back to regular size within a few hours... but not without getting a lecture from Jake. Quite the funny little reversal of our usual dynamics. And yes, before I get too much furthur in this journal I will take a detour and confirm that we are in fact, dating, as the lovely Jake deciced to announce on his show earlier this month. We have been spending a lot of time together, and even though we are quite different, we make a pretty good team!

Now, moving away from matters of my personal life, and into much more exciting updates! Our research into these magic pockets has helped us to discover something truly remarkable, a completely new species! Well, our new friends are very varied, and have even been seen before, but I have suggested we call this species Arcane Fauna, since its a good catchall for all the various creatures out there. Some communities of Arcane Fauna have thier own names for themselves, such as the Flutterbats, or King Firenze and his Pride of Rarities. These groups, as well as other Arcane Fauna, have been coming out of the woodworks and we are doing our best to get them up to speed on what we have discovered so far, and to also help accomodate these new citizens however they wish into our society!

Many of these Arcane Fauna are excited to join us on our continued quest on figuring out how to restore magic, especially since Arcane Fauna, while not typically in possession of natural magical abilites like puppillars, have a strong connection to our world's magic and can sense its presence in the world. As such, the issues with magic have been effecting them as well, as if a sense of ours like smell was off in such a way. Distressing at the very least and harmful to the one with the faulty sense at the worse. Thanks to this incredible sense though, Arcane Fauna will be very important for our continued research into how to get our magic working again. We already have a few Arcane Fauna using thier senses to follow the trail of stray magic pockets, we can only hope they track down a solution soon!

I'm not particularly athletic, but I like to think that I'm in pretty good shape... but I perhaps feel that maybe I'm not in as good shape as I thought I was. Digging and excavating is a lot of work! Hard physical work too! Seeing everyone work together is heartenting, but I'm finding that I much prefer spending time with the books at the Archives than in the wilds north of Pawburgh, even if it is among friends. Jake is energetic as ever of course, he's done quite a good job at coordinating all the helpers we have out here! There have been many working to excavate the cave in we found, and we have especially been happy to have the help of many of our new Arcane Fauna friends! The excavation was a lot of work, and took us many days of toil, but we were motivated to get the answers we have so been seeking! And then on top of all the excavating, we had a long trek into what we have now been calling Arcane Cave, for reasons no doubt that you have heard by now from Jake's Logs.

All of our hard work was quite fruitful however, because at the end of a long march through the cave we met our new friend, The Guardian! The Guardian is quite  an interesting figure, and since our intitial foray into its domain we have learned a lot about our relationship to magic! As a reasearcher of magic I have been lucky to be able to spend more time with the Guardian, especially now that its health has improved due to the circulation of magic. Who would have guessed that the balance of all our magic could be thrown off by something as simple as a seismic event creating a cave in! 

Now that we have identified the issiue, I am happy to say that we can work better with The Guardian moving forward. It's a pity that information about The Guardian and the magic vein it guards was lost to us, but I think we have done a great job in rediscovering it, and as a society we will be able to stay in contact with The Guardian and help them whenever they need it! There's already plans being made to start the construction of a town outside the cave, so we can offer more support and stay in close contact in case anything else happens to this important place or to The Guardian!

When it comes to magic, things have more or less gone back to normal, which is a huge relief! This has been an amazing breakthrough in our understanding of magic, but we still have much more to learn. I will be making sure to keep good records of everything I have learned, and will continue to learn from The Guardian, and hopefully we will avoid this happening again!