Story Building - Another Short Story

I started the UFPE short story last night, and I like where it's headed. I need to work on the descriptions, which is funny considering that I usually have to restrain myself from letting description take over a story. I fear that I've restrained my sense of description so much that I've (temporarily, reversibly, I hope) stunted it a little.

That is not, however, the point of this entry, though I may address that in a future entry. Until an hour or so ago, that would have been the subject of today's post. I've had another idea for a short story, and I want to expand upon that instead. It came up during the discussion of a favorite novel of mine, speculation about how the state of things in that world came to be. The specifics are not important, but it got me thinking about an idea that could be the foundation for an original work of fiction.

The idea is this: a typical fantasy world eventually grows beyond its sword-and-spear level of weaponry technology, first to guns and then to bombs of increasing destructive capability. Pure practitioners of the magical arts look down upon these crude tools, of course, but there are always shills willing to sell their skills to the highest bidder. While the military has used magic in the past to enhance their weaponry, someone has the brilliant idea to create something along the lines of a magical atom bomb - technology and magic fully integrated to create a sort of deathly synergy.

R&D for this weapon starts to unravel tiny threads in the fabric of reality, perhaps interfering with whatever it is on the quantum level that allows magic to exist. It's not like real world physics, where an atom bomb isn't an atom bomb until the necessary pieces are put together; each piece of destructive magic created and tested bores little holes. On the level of killing individual people, even of razing a small village, these little holes are papered over in the grand scheme of things, perhaps by equally powerful acts of creation. But where the magic reaches further and further, with the idea of annihilating millions of people, the effects start to reverberate.

Meanwhile, a lowly graduate student at Magical Princeton is keeping an eye on boring experiments and starts noticing weird blips. Maybe these correspond to strange events happening in the real world. S/he eventually follows up and investigates and after much exhaustive research, not to mention ridicule from colleagues, traces it back to Magical Area 51. S/he confronts the military scientists with these findings, and...

Threats? Untimely death? Untimely death but not before Graduate Student has left incriminating notes behind?

I like to think that things become progressively worse and worse in this world, so clearly the military cannot take Grad Student's advice right off. Of course, the military must have good reasons for doing what it does; it has access to resources beyond Magical Princeton's, and perhaps it sees a threat even worse than its own assault on reality. Are Elder Ones from the outer reaches reaching their squamous tentacles toward Magical Earth? Or are the bad vibes the military is getting actually stem from the shocks of what they are undertaking now? Somehow both?

So how does the story end? I'm currently discussing this with that same friend. Okay, I have it settled. It ends with an article, of the WWN variety. It's a morbid ending but also a little bit funny and ultimately ambiguous. Does anyone take these guys down? Or do they successfully cover it up and laugh it off?