Kinetropic School
“Motes move through Jade at three hundred theonanomons per second, Exaltations respire them at a base rate of four per hour, and they are utterly indivisible. What does it matter where Essence comes from, I’ve got work to do.”
The Kinetropic School of Sorcery is one of the major schools of sorcery extant in the present Age, taught by two major schools and studied by numerous Scavenger Lords. It is also a young school, borne out of the Devonian School of Sorcery during the dark days of the Dragonblooded Shogunate, as sorcerous knowledge was lost and focus shifted from exploring the underlying truth of Creation to testing and implementing a broad set of laws, which could be consistently replicated and rigorously tested to prove that consistency. The Devonian School had already investigated Creation in this way, and the Kinetropic School built upon that foundation, while stripping away both the drive to pin down the nature of Essence as an expression of the laws of Creation, and to uncover the universal Law beneath all others. The resulting school has a number of theories, based on experimentation and evidence, and while its practitioners feel these laws apply universally, they do not feel that the laws must necessarily share a common root.
Though many proponents of other Sorcerous Schools were horrified by its lack of philosophical depth, the Kinetropic school proved prolific: it could train its sorcerers more quickly than rival schools, its lack of deep philosophy meant it was less riven with sorcerous civil wars over metaphysical concepts, and its individual theories were optimal for dealing with the magitechnology that the Shogunate daimyo were so desperate to maintain. The Sidereal Exalted believe they encouraged this process, creating a simple school fit for the minds of the Terrestrial Exalted… if this is true, or mere hubris, is difficult to say.
To a Kinetropic sorcerer (more accurately sorcerer-engineer, as the number of sorcerers holding this school who are not artificers is few indeed), Essence is a form of energy (in fact several forms) that exists in Creation. How it came to be or why it behaves as it does is irrelevant, because it is testably and provably present. A large number of laws have been formulated concerning how Essence behaves (particularly how its behavior differs for different substances and configurations). Each spell, and each artifact, is constructed using these laws of Essence so that energy is challenged in the amounts, rates, and types required to achieve a particular end result. Kinetropic spells and artifacts are both set down not as rituals or oral traditions but as blueprints showing how each theory and component interlocks together to form the whole of the end unit. Development of any spell or device layers test upon test: laws applied together until the correct combination is determined, and then the next law combined with the result until that combination is determined, on and on, and for any new spell or device, even those similar to existing projects, the whole process is repeated again to ensure everything interacts properly. This is a great deal of (somewhat dry) lab work, and for this reason Kinetropic sorcerers (both during learning and developing afterwards), tend towards group work and joint projects.
Kinetropic spells tend to be physical in nature, motes pushed in and physical effects pushed out (spells such as Death of Obsidian Butterflies.
Notable Kinetropic academies include the Kinetropic Curriculum of the Heptagram and the Valkhawsen of Lookshy.
