Inside the fully enclosed sleeping bag, Robert used the Prime Vestige. it dissolved into mist and entered his body, just like the first one.

"We are together as one now!" The pink Prime's voice echoed in his mind. "Use your new talent!"

Instead, Robert dove into his Ethercosm. His two stars now had six colors. In addition to the previous, the pastel pink he assumed was Fairy and the deep violet of Space magic. It was curious. The deep violet was almost the exact opposite of the yellow-silvery of Time magic. They also sat on opposite sides of his stars.

"Why won't you use your talent?" The pink Prime asked again. Her voice echoed in his Ethercosm as she hung like an ethereal presence.

"Not yet," Robert said. "I want to make sure everything else is as it should be." He had a hunch that the transformation would not go as smoothly as the Prime was leading him to believe. "Anyway, I need a name to call you by. Do you have any preference?"

"No. I wasn't supposed to be here. I guess I'd take on the name of whoever was chosen for the glorious task of being your fairy guide. Now, it's wasted."

"It wouldn't happen. If anything, the government might've considered you an illegal prime if you were going to basically destroy a person's identity. It's akin to murder, you know?"

"A worm should be grateful it would gain the opportunity to ascend into immortality, whether it remembered it was a worm or not."

"And that's why I decided to give you this chance."

"Chance or not, what's done is done. We are one now, Robert Blaze."

"I'll call you Blossom."

"Blossom it is."

What he didn't tell her was that Blossom was one of his crushes back in junior high.

"Say, Blossom, do you know any spells or techniques?"

"No. I came into awareness when you manifested me, Robert."

"How do you know all that, then? About making a servant for me, and the change in talent?"

"I just know. While you manifested me, I believe I convey a deeper will."

His mind went back to the stone giant in that vacuum passage realm. Were the powers that be making yet another move? In any case, power was power. And he knew of some pretty nasty Space abilities. With a gesture of will, Robert returned to his body and opened the sleeping bag. He saw Freddy sitting on one side and Amanda standing up on the other. He quickly sat up.

"So, show us your new talent!" Amanda demanded, anxiety leaking into her tone.

"Sure, just a moment," Robert made sure nobody was touching the sleeping bag as he used his talent. The first one.

In the liminal void, he stowed away the sleeping bag and then prepared himself. Using his second talent was as easy as the first one. Just a flex of his willpower and he started to shrink. His clothes fell around him as he became trapped with one leg in each boot. He hit something painful and dropped to the side. Crawling out of the boots, he glanced around himself and found he was naked as he felt no clothes on his body. Also, he was about a foot tall now. The clothes he wore were all on a pile in front of him.

"Damn it!" He cursed. Then he stopped, completely shocked at how sharp his voice was. After taking some time to recompose himself, he decided to try the fairy powers he was supposed to have. "Blossom, how do I fly?"

"Just will your wings to spread!"

He did it. It took some time to learn that he needed to flex his shoulder and back muscles in a particular way to bring his wings forth. They didn't grow out of his back as much as materialized with a shower of glittering mercurial particles. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw these gorgeous butterfly wings behind him. They had shades of green and blue with silver and black lines and accents.

Another exertion of his will and he was airborne. At first, his torso was in a horizontal position. It took him some hours of stumbling around in the air to learn how to position himself upright.

"What about the invisibility?"

"Just wish nobody could see you."

This one was trickier because this invisibility was not created by bending light as some Light-affinity Archs could do. Instead, it was more like a glamour or a charm to make people not perceive him. He wondered if it would work on recording devices. Most likely, not. Which led to the conclusion he needed fairy-sized clothes.

Landing next to his human clothes, Robert stored them in his ring. That's when it struck him. The four spatial rings were still in his fingers. They had shrunk down by his talent but his clothes weren't. When he asked Blossom about that, she said she had no idea.

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"This will be a real bother if I go around flying with my junk showing."

Deciding to rip the band-aid, Robert took a hand mirror from his storage ring. He set it against a tree limb going up and then took a good look at his fairy form.

A gorgeous and angular face with a delicate V for a chin. The face resembled him but in the way a cousin could resemble him. It looked like some depictions of elves in pop culture. Pointy ears reaching above his scalp. They went straight up close to his skull, not like those droopy anime elf ears. Long straight pink hair, the same color as the Prime... Blossom's ball. The arms were thin and delicate, even without considering the fact he was a foot tall now. Long fingers, out of proportion with a human hand. They weren't made for punching, that was for sure. The belly had no navel. It was flat but with some roundness to it. His feet were a bit longer and could bend in the middle, which was super weird. The toes looked a bit like fingers and he quickly found they were made to grab onto things. Maybe to make it easier to balance on small features like tree branches or other perches.

Robert could feel that he would lose some of his sanity if he dwelt on the fact he was human no longer.

"Hell. It is what it is, I guess," Robert the fairy sighed.

With another act of will, he turned back to his human form. Naked. Robert shuddered. Indeed, he wouldn't show his fairy form until he had a proper wardrobe that didn't look girly at all. If possible, it would be a small version of the Academy's male uniform. He couldn't decide how his alternate form was built but he could surely wear whatever he wanted.

"So, how did you like it?" Blossom asked inside his mind.

"I have mixed feelings," was the best answer he could come up with.

He worked on his mental palace while he waited for a couple of days to return to reality. He was still low on essence since he didn't have much time to recharge before coming back to the liminal void.

*

*

Amanda assaulted him as he reappeared. She grabbed his arm and tugged it to and fro.

"So? So? How is it? Show me! Come on! Show mee!" She begged and whined.

"Sorry, not right now. There's a little issue with the fairy form," Robert replied.

"What?" She flinched. "Is it one of those ugly baby-stealing fairy types? With gray or green skin, warts, antennae, wicked teeth, evil bloodshot eyes, leathery hide, claws, gangly limbs, and bad breath?"

"Whoa. Easy there. No. It's more like the classical pixie or sprite arts, looks a bit elvish."

"IS... IT... CUTE?" Amanda demanded to know with shimmering eyes.

"I guess?" Robert said, a bit uncomfortable. "But there's a wardrobe issue. The fairy form is a foot tall."

"What wardrobe... issue... Oh. OH! Ohhhh!" Her jaw hung. "You become a foot tall. Naked. Pfft," she broke into a fit of giggles and titters. "It should be so small."

Robert turned around and walked closer to the tree trunk.

"Hey, don't run away. I'm sure it's... pfft... pretty." Amanda chased.

"As Noah said, I shouldn't use that talent. And I won't," Robert said decisively. "Give it up, Amanda. I'm not showing it to you now. Maybe later, back on Earth. Once I secured proper clothing."

Dismayed, she latched onto his jacket with both hands and played her last card. "I'll buy you a whole wardrobe. Enchanted. I'll have armor crafted to your specifications. Enchanted."

"Find a size-alteration enchantment and we will resume negotiations then."

"Deal!" She grinned. Amanda quickly turned around. "Noah! I know you can do enchantments! Let's go back to the Puffbloom Islands!"

Robert felt bad he kind of set Amanda's hypercharged form onto the teacher but at least he could breathe a little. Coping with his second talent would be hard. He could always not use it but the advantages were enormous. A small size would mean harder to hit, flight, and that invisibility power, damn. He could imagine situations where he would resort to using that form even if it meant getting exposed.

*

*

They set the gathering chamber Robert built to try and get some extra essence for their tempering. Amanda still had a lot of work on a thousand wet hells and Robert wished he could just finish converting his blood vessels already. Not to mention he needed to evolve some of his tempering techniques into stage two. It wouldn't work for Freddy because of this little design flaw Robert injected into the project. Other gathering arrays usually took only a little bit of the wisps passing through to power itself. But Robert set this one to gobble up every single one of the Wind wisps, leaving nothing for Freddy. But it was just as well because Wind Archs had no tempering technique at one-star.

So they spent three days gathering, checking the vestiges the array captured for anything useful, and working mostly on Amanda's thousand wet hells. This particular tempering technique was extremely hard and progress was slow. The only one slower than that was mental palace, which already took around seven years of work on Robert's part.

After all that time spent gathering, Noah had them convey to discuss their plans.

"I didn't expect this realm to be so close to breaking," the teacher said. "The monkeys don't like the heat from the salamander caves but there's too many of them. I scouted around and found that the path to the next passage in our itinerary was blocked by thousands of them. I don't think we could clear the path even if we spent two months on it. Which would cut into our time left for the remainder of the expedition."

Amanda raised her hand, "Or we could go back home! Thanks to the two months we spent in the liminal void, my pendant is almost out of charge! The shocks barely startle me anymore!"

Noah glared. Or at least it was what Robert felt, because the professor didn't move his head and the painted blue eye was pointing straight at Amanda. "We are not going back early so you can commission doll clothes for Robert's fairy form."

"That's not it! Not what I meant!"

"Things have deviated from what we expected too much. Only the previous one was normal. The slime caves shouldn't be destroyed, the puffbloom islands shouldn't be lacking in essence and full of smugglers, and this... We will need to fight hundreds if not thousands of monsters if we want to reach the damn passage. And we are already on depth four. The amount of essence in this realm is mind-boggling. So this is my proposal. We stay here, we clear the region around the passage back up, stay for a month gathering as much essence as we can to finish your tempering, fight some monkeys that will inevitably find their way here just to escape the crowded areas, and then go back home a month earlier."

"Are you saying it's too dangerous for us?" Robert asked. "Even with your expertise?"

Noah paused to stare at him. "Yes. If we try to reach the next passage, it won't end well for us."

"If you say so, then it's settled," Robert said. "You are the one responsible for the safety of the expedition. What you say goes."

"Okay, then," Amanda said, a little dismayed. Was it that she was unwilling to train thousand wet hells or something else?