Chapter 39 - Building a Holographic Hogwarts (Patreon)

My world still felt unnatural, being a flat grassland stretching uninterrupted to the horizon. So I brought the black lake into existence and added some topography, including a large cliff. With little effort, I brought into existence one of the most iconic magical castles known to the people of my world and time.

Rising seven stories into the air, large pointed turrets pointing into the sky, Hogwarts castle, for the very first time, came into existence in the Star Trek universe. Kind of.

Rising gracefully from my sitting position, I took in my latest creation, carefully maintaining my mental connection to my ship and the holodeck to keep everything static and functioning as I wanted it to in this nascent program. I was in a sort of free form narrative test mode where every parameter of the program was still fluid, rather than semi-locked as fixed narrative parameters. It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that my will was keeping this world from dissolving into nothingness, from disappearing into the digital ether.

I was simultaneously proud and disappointed in what I had built, which made for a strange dichotomy. What was in front of me was decidedly Hogwarts castle as described in the books and borrowing heavily from the movies. Per the first book’s pages, it was a thousand-year-old castle supposedly in the medieval gothic style, but with my real time access to Earth’s historical database I could see the castle was actually a bit of mutt, a mix of several styles, including Northern Romanesque, Gothic, and Gothic revival. My new knowledge wasn’t the cause of what was bothering me, though. The magical world was filled with a distinct subset of humanity, arguably an entirely new subspecies, with their own unique culture, and their own buildings infused with magic to fill in the blanks on the architectural and engineering knowledge that didn’t yet exist in the time period in which it was built.