Despite being caught between mixtures of hopelessness, and harmonious acceptance, and actual hope. Despite being caught between despair, resignation, and ambition. Despite my emotions alternating between swirling and raging, and shutting down entirely. Despite all that, I still managed to grasp onto leads, onto ideas, to come to new conclusions, to find new ways to exercise my abilities. I glance at the massive portrait hanging nearby, the one that’s a map of this continent of Rayileklia, mostly zoomed in on this region, the Jaggedfen bog. It does contain more details at the outer edges, as if it were a painting of a full atlas of the continent, with a magnifying glass simply held over this region. I’m going to commit it to memory, and learn more than it shows at the same time. Hopefully I’ll have answers to the Aasimovian situation. Safety is really what’s at the heart of the matter, or the desire for it at least.

I can take best guesses, and fill in details where there’s nothing, where there’s an absence. Is that a part of my power? Or is it just part of how the simultaneous processing of my partially digital brain works? Absence, a lack, nothing. My innate ability has something to do with these things. I glance at the archsorc staff that is once again mysteriously in my hand. Is that because of my innate talent? Is it a subconscious action that eliminates the space between my staff, and my hand, causing it to appear? Or is it a trait of the item, one I’d never picked up on? Or am I subconsciously drawing on my space skill and inventory magic from Can’Z’aas, to move it into and out of my inventory with simultaneous processing going on so that it seems to just appear in my hand at times? Hm, that last one doesn’t seem to fit, I should be bleeding light and life if it were doing that constantly.

Hm, still—. As I begin to contemplate just how automatic, how subconsciously controlled some parts of my powers might be, my mind drifts back to Can’Z’aas, to tertiary powers, to side effects. I *thought* I could pause the velocity of objects I summoned from, or duplicated from my inventory, but what if that wasn’t what I was really doing? What if a part of my power was micromanaging summoning, recalling, and resummoning the object in place, repeatedly, and that’s why it was harder and harder to do it the longer and more objects I attempted to do it with? If I knew more about the truth behind how Can’Z’aas and its skill systems and magic worked, maybe I’d have had a better understanding of things in the now. If I wasn’t actually pausing the velocity, then my space skill had one less application directly, but more versatility in the long run, by way of being able to operate side tasks on an imperceptibly detailed level. Could that be what’s going on here? It still wouldn’t explain how it’s happening without me bleeding for eight minutes, and passing out though.

But thinking more on that, I dreamed up how thermokinesis should work on a basic scientific level, and it *did*. How much of that was self actualization? How much of it is my subconscious ability to micromanage multitasking? How much of it is the power itself? How much is it the way that Can’Z’aas works as a whole? Parts of my thermokinesis and electrokinesis are still active, they always have been. The ones that I *consciously* delegated to my subconscious to take control of. I can feel thermal fluctuations nearby, feel the swarms of electrons within my body, and the nearest molecules. Can I use that somehow? What if I tried to allow my conscious brain to delve into whatever stream of information my subconscious is processing? I mean, more actively than I already am. Can I sense thermally across a wide area? That could essentially give me thermal vision.

Casting my senses about, focusing on ignoring my hearing, ignoring the sight of the back of my eyelids, ignoring the air brushing against my skin, ignoring the weight of the saliva on my tongue, ignoring all the usual sensations that I rely upon, I focus on the other things. I remove my danger wraps for the first time in a very long time, and set them in my lap. I’m loathe to ignore the gentle firmness of the two hugs that are enveloping me at the moment, but I set that sensation aside as well. The greatest heat source, and fluctuation in heat, is of course the dwindling pyre, the air currents that rise from it, and its embers. The cluster of three bodies in the room is another source of higher heat, rising by the moment, as their insulated forms reflect warmth back into one another. Their cores pulse and beat with tiny fluctuations of heat, and even their brains give off minor fluctuations as their thoughts drift, especially the short one with the wild mane of insulation. That one would be me. My brain is going into overdrive, trying to actively process things that my power, or subconscious would normally filter out. I have to pause, or slow time, or spread out the nothing, the space between moments, to have enough time to analyze what I’m feeling with this sense.

I reach out further, throughout the manor. There are warm bodies moving about, and I’m surprised that none had attended to Dame Altross, but she must have given them orders to avoid the foyer today. There aren’t many, one is standing near a source of open flames, likely an oven, or stove, I guess they’d be a chef. My head aches and reels as I try to stretch the sense further, to analyze it beyond the scope of the building, beyond direct lines of sight. Still, there are several heat sources moving animatedly near an insulated object, I’m guessing people near the carriage, discussing with the groundskeeper.

I pant with exertion as the pressure in my skull grows unbearably high, and I can’t keep analyzing this sense any further. Huff, phew. That, well, that’s definitely something. I am *not* going to try to do that with electrokinesis. Intuitive retrocognition, thermal vision, what other applications of my brain, and powers, have I been slacking on realizing and utilizing? Ugh, no more thinking for a bit, ow my freakin’ head.

Teuila’s telepathic avatar appears in my mindscape, or perhaps it hadn’t left, and I can only now acknowledge her presence. She seems downtrodden, but I can sense the mixtures of emotions bubbling up within her. She nods at my assessment, and laments, “Air, it’s hard, it’s just so hard. I know that, that, I know those things you showed me, the sort of dreams, the conversations we could have had, um. I know how real they are, how much work you put into them. I just, I hurt so much. The weight is so heavy. Good people died. *I* killed them. Wait, before you say anything, at the very least, I failed them. I can barely even comprehend how to measure what happened against what I do next. My heart aches for people I barely knew, for lives cut short, and I won’t accept not accepting the blame in some way.”

I gnaw on my lips and gulp before responding, “You’re right.” Teuila, for her part, looks stunned, as if I’d slapped her in the face, so I quickly continue, “The weight, that burden of guilt, of conscience, of feeling blamed, wanting to be blamed, all of that? It might never go away, not completely. But you *are* a good person Teuila. You don’t have to find that measure alone either. We have a few moments, you could talk to Elder, Dippy, Miza, Scrap, the younglings even. If they offer you forgiveness, or absolution, let them absolve you. I can’t tell you how they’d respond, not offhand, I don’t know them well enough.”

I set my gaze on her eyes and plaster my countenance with support, with a sad smile, the love that’s always there, evident beneath everything else I try to convey. I offer, “Maybe you could talk to Timbik, maybe he’d get angry at you for it, maybe you feel like you deserve that, to have someone angry at you. I’m almost positive that you do. Dame Altross here, Taylynn’s grandmother or great grandmother, something like that, has barely spoken, and I feel like I’ve intruded on her grief. Somehow, I’m pretty sure Taylynn’s dead. Maybe the Sisters told her after all, I don’t want to get into my speculations at the moment.”

Teuila half-smiles, and half-frowns, before admitting, “Yeah, I, I think I’ll do that. Talk to them. All of them. Then we figure out what to do about the hydra, and, and whatever your plan is. I need to give Tiki a big smooch for helping out in that last fight. She didn’t look like she was better yet. L— luh— lurve that gal.”

I begin to flood thinkspace with love for Teuila, helping shunt her back to meatspace, before my complex thoughts on Tiktik’s injuries can give anything away. I’ll obviously tell Teuila before we leave, the whys and the hows and the whats and the whos and everything that I can. I just know that she needs to act on this while she can, while she’s in a headspace to accept that she can talk to them, to process her feelings through a filter tempered by the feelings of those who knew the slain the best. Teuila begins to move, and Dame Altross stands, releasing us from her embrace. I glance at her, and follow her gaze to Teuila, a woman most obviously not her descendant. Dame Altross simply nods, and Teuila walks away, not a word spoken between the two.

I gulp, and begin to address her, but Dame Altross interrupts to say a single word, “Leave.”

I stutter, trying to find words as I lamely offer, “I, um, I can fix the chair, sort of, maybe, part of it, or, or well, pay for it. I’m sorry about the chairs. I wanted to talk t—“

Dame Altross’s face hardens as she reiterates, “Leave.”

I begin slowly backing away, keeping my gaze locked with hers, analyzing the sternness on her face, the despair beneath it. I know from my earlier thermal analysis that her heart is weak. Lacing up my danger wraps, I realize they’re blaring warnings at me once they’re back in place. The source of the warning? Dame Altross. It’s not like the physical warnings of incoming attacks, of where to position myself, of any of the ways that their silent sonar could guide me to react to movements. It’s a subtler warning, and I’m not able to parse its meaning. They aren’t guiding me anywhere, they aren’t instructing my limbs on how to move, they’re just sending a buzz into my brain, directed at Dame Altross.

I hesitate, but still try to ask, “About the refugees?”

Dame Altross takes a step closer, almost menacingly, as she orders, “Leave!” She clutches her chest at the exertion of bringing herself to almost shout. I reach towards her, to offer support, but she swats away my hand, the message is clear. It has been for some time now. We aren’t welcome here, and she wants nothing to do with us. I can sense the stirring of other figures in the house, approaching the disturbance of Dame Altross’s shout.

I don’t want to end up harming her, or her family or staff, whomever are here, so I do as she commanded, and I leave. The groundskeeper has apparently also heard, and is very firmly directing anyone back through the gate, off the premises. I follow, at a loss for words. What could have been a sanctuary, at least a rest stop in Jaggedfen Bog, is now little more than an obstacle to traverse around.

What have I done? Would I do anything differently? To have Teuila back, or to have temporary respite, and some mild comfort for all those displaced from Aasimovia is an unfair choice, an imbalanced comparison. Perhaps I’m looking at it wrong. Hopefully I’m looking at it wrong. Maybe they’d never have let us onto the estate in the first place. My head aches, throbbing pulses situate themselves behind my right eye, at each mandible joint, and oddly at the left-fore of my cranium. That’s an unfamiliar migraine location for me.

I’d better eat, and drink. What else demands my attention? I need to operate at somewhere near peak efficiency for the time I have left, I can’t allow myself to fall into a rut that leaves me leaning on Kozzurth’s dragonforce for basic survival needs. My heart suddenly flares with pain, and clenches momentarily, causing me to gasp at the shock of the pain as well as to stumble. Thunder claps at seemingly the same time, almost symbolically indicating the sudden blow from within. Huff, huff, okay, ow. Now I’m panting with exertion, and all I’m doing is walking back to talk to the foremost members of the refugees. Investigating myself, down to the core of my true inner changeling self, I can see why. I don’t know if it has always been, but the location within me that’s being strangled by the corrupted mana is tied intrinsically to my heart. The physical representation of my inner changeling self is my heart, and I’m getting a warning that my time is near. The buzzing I felt from Dame Altross was to signify that the danger wasn’t from her, but rather that it was similar to hers. Our hearts are going to fail. At least now I know. Reggie Shellcracker, dead of heart attack, sometime in the next couple of weeks.