The last thing I want to do, is end up killing innocents out here in this darkened canyon. Teuila must be mentally hurting in ways I can barely comprehend. The visceral brutality of finding oneself unwillingly decimating living, breathing people, people you considered friends, it seems like it shut her down so hard that she didn’t even try to dodge the dragon’s strike. Then she crumpled like an empty aluminum can when struck, and splatted against the wall like wet paper. I know she hasn’t derezzed, but that was an awful blow.
As much as I worry about harming innocents, my first priority is to get to Teuila’s side. Then I’ll make sure she’s okay, or is going to be okay at least, and then return to the carriage so I can stand guard over everyone. I’m almost to Teuila’s side, just a bit more. There’s a group of kobolds near her, each drawing back their arms as if to strike. They’re swinging either spears, or their claws. I’m sorry, I don’t know if any of you are doing this against your will. I’m sorry. I hate taking lives. Please forgive me.
A projectile speeds into my sensory range, at an angle that’s going to perforate my carotid artery. I barely roll my shoulder in time to swing my arm towards the projectile. I connect mid-flight, and snap the arrow in half. I don’t have time to waste tracking down the ranged assailant, but now I’m torn. The power, and deadly precision of something like that could end an unconscious Teuila in an instant. Yet if I give these melee combatants free reign of Teuila’s unconscious form, they’ll also be able to end her in short order.
As I’m about to lay into the kobolds standing around Teuila’s slumped body, there’s suddenly new sensations entering my sensory range. There’s a whole volley of arrows as if conjured simultaneously. I wouldn’t be able to block, snap, or dodge them all. If any were aimed at me. Along with the arrows comes a familiar, stuttery, nervous voice.
The voice asks, “The, the, the Reggie? The Tay Oo Ee Lah? Pack, pack, packmates, come, come safe, get, get, get safe. Dippy knows safe way, Dippy, I, me, I know safe way, Zippy knows too, follow Zippy.”
I hear many scampering scaly feet headed towards the sound of Dippy’s voice, but I can’t tell who is and isn’t hostile. The dead kobolds, slain with arrows in their necks or skulls or hearts, that surrounded Teuila, all fall to the side as I bend down to grab her fallen form. I can’t follow Dippy though. I have more injured comrades to watch out for.
I call back, through a cracked sob, “Dippy, I’m so glad to hear your voice, but I have injured friends out here, and our carriage and supplies. I can’t follow you. Thank you for sa—glp, saving Teuila.” I cough several times as mucus floods my throat while I’m caught on the edge of a tearful panic.
The voice, definitely Dippy’s voice calls back, “The, the, the Red gee, the Red gee trusts the Dippy, me, right? Yes? The, the, the, you, you follow Zippy. Zippy shows you the way. Safe, safe for the Red gee, and friends.”
Conflicted, barely moving under the power of magic manipulating the physical elements within my body, I’m struck by Dippy’s request. Of course I trust him. I’m suddenly surrounded by wolves and canines. Several of the beasts are intercepting blows meant for me or Teuila as I stand here with her. One grips Teuila’s cloak in its teeth, and begins dragging her away. Panic sets in for the briefest of moments, but I recognize these beasts. These are the soulless creatures that follow the one wolf that Dippy befriended. These are allies, friends. Glancing back, our carriage is moving, being pushed by several canine and lupine bodies.
In a moment, a tiny fluttering form zips through the air nearby, then lands upon my shoulder. Zippy. Dippy’s beloved companion. Zippy’s draconic features are small, and seemingly fragile, yet here he is, amidst a battlefield that just contained at least one adult, or perhaps ancient dragon not moments ago. He directs me with some sort of animalistic noise that I can’t comprehend, but I get the gist of it, based on his posture, and body language. If Dippy’s taking charge of the rescue, and bringing all his allies and friends to bear, then we’re in good hands. I begin to stumble, and falter as relief floods my system.
Still, let’s not make it any harder in Dippy. I call out, “Dippy, get everyone, Zippy included, off the field and out of the way, everyone you love, and trust, and want safe, get them out of here, and tell me when it’s only me and our foes!”
There’s several moments of silence as I continue to erratically maneuver towards where Zippy is pointing. I hear a sort of a whistle from Dippy that seems to signal for Zippy to abandon his perch on my shoulder. I wait for Zippy’s flapping to be inaudible as he zips away, flitting about, his wingflaps drowned out by the din of growls and shouting and the pitter patter of acid rain. The chaotic sounds of an uneasy stalemate of a combat rises around me, and I hear what must be a signal from Dippy. Glancing around, our carriage is somewhere beyond my sight range, not visible amongst landscape of The Gap during any of the frequent lightning strikes.
Dippy’s signal is sensible as his voice calls out to me, “C-c-clear! The, the, the Red gee is all clear!”
Hey Reggie, remember that thing that we said to never try again until maybe we got Linti to teach us? Ugh. Yes. Of course I do. Please no. Yep. You’ve been able to acutely sense thermal fluctuations for ages now. It’s time to start seeing the path between sparks, the electron jumps, the flow of the current. No, please no. Yep. Come on Reggie. I heave a sigh as my shoulders slump. I’m arguing with myself. Why do I even bother? Part of me must have already made the choice to commit.
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I’m currently overcharged with electricity, and if I want to stun a massive group of small foes almost simultaneously, I basically need to touch them all nearly simultaneously. This way, just in case some of them turn out to have been coerced, and willing to stop aggressing, we can try to sort that out later, when we all regain consciousness, well, those that live. I know this is going to knock me for a loop, and I won’t pretend like I know the exact voltage to temporarily stun a kobold. If this kills all of them, well, then everyone in the kobold warrens will be safe, despite me having tried to avoid killing. If the kobolds decide to mop up the survivors, killing the unconscious ones, that’s out of my hands. This feels like the right thing to try to do. Hopefully Dippy and his friends can find my body after I pass out.
I lean forward partially into a runner’s stance, before letting go of everything in my body. As I begin falling towards the ground, I rotate, swiveling my hips and shoulders. Building up my spin, concentrating on how the momentum interacts with everything around me, my senses alight on the electron pathways. Of course electrons spin, they rotate, they revolve, they’re like miniature planets in their own solar systems. Wait. Everything is connected. Even the seemingly deep stretches of nothing, of space. Nothing, my affinity, my semblance of power. Planets spin and orbit, galaxies traverse the vast, the emptiness. Everything moves. Everything except the nothing, the emptiness itself. There’s something here, something in this very moment that’s a clue.
As I’m falling, when I’m nearly parallel to the ground, I focus on the time between moments. I slow time to a crawl as I retreat into my own mind to puzzle out the clue that I’m scarcely able to comprehend. Think Reggie, think. A remarkable affinity for absence, an absensorcerer, my gift is nothing. There’s someone, some thing that can teach me, there has to be someone else that knows about nothing, other than the Sisters. Wait. The gift, someone they serve. Were the Sisters an envoy of nothing? Mist is an obscurement, their compound is located outside of normal space and time, yet they can allow oth—.
We’re the reason. We’re the reason the blood needed to be applied more and more frequently. We brought time and space with us, into their realm. The Sisters were compensating for allowing us into their domain. We’re why they were less and less accessible. Had we stayed, their very existence would have been driven back, if they hadn’t been working their magics. The Sisters were most definitely some sort of representation of nothing. An extension of a non-space, a non-being. That’s why they feared me most of all, and begged that I choose kindness. Some piece of my power holds some sort of sway over them, possibly a final sway.
On the one hand, I’ve no desire to ever learn of such a segment of my power, because I’ve no desire to ever use it on such kind individual— individuals? Individual? I’m still not certain if they were really more than one being. On the other hand, knowing anything at all about my power would be a boon, and might help me figure out more. I’m getting distracted, one of my fatal flaws, but this line of thought seems to be important, and I do have a fair amount of time between moments at the, well, moment. Should I try to reach out to the Sisters? Would they be more afraid that I’ve made these realizations? I have a feeling they’ll contact me again at some point on my Rayileklian journey.
There’s more to the conversations I’d had with them, especially surrounding Dawn’s death, but I can’t quite recall in perfect detail at the moment. The haze of grief is clouding the hours surrounding her demise. Crap, I’m crying here in thinkspace. I. Crap. Focus Reggie, keep it together, your time-halt isn’t a full time stop, and requires some concentration. Don’t get bogged down in the grief at the moment. You came here to try to make the lightning leap safer. You had an idea.
Right, right. My senses were always jumbled when Linti was doing it, but Linti seemed fine after every leap. Even though she was immune to electricity damage itself, she wasn’t immune to the effects of having her electrons scrambled or slowed, either by being electricity while in water, or by my thermokinesis. So she wasn’t straight up immune to all effects that might harm her, involving her powers. While I would benefit from learning from her directly, I can make some assumptions. Linti always wildly crashed about during her lightning leaping, in some ways, she rode the electron pathways, the conductive currents in the wind and land, with wild abandon. In some other ways, it might have been that, while she wouldn’t admit it, she was disoriented, because of one of the requirements to safely use her powers.
Linti could put on the appearance of the lineart of a lightning-drawn creature, and subsume things she wore or held into that existence of electrical energy. But what if she wasn’t actually that form at all? Or rather, who’s to say, that arcs, rays, and lines of lightning weren’t all spinning? I certainly couldn’t observe the electrical composition closely enough, to determine the rotational frequency of the lines of lightning that made up Linti’s form.
I might not have the level of power available on demand to command this ability at the drop of a hat, especially without having to risk my life utilizing various precious resources and bits of my own vitality, but I’m beginning to see an idea take shape. The form of it, is something that seems almost two dimensional, traveling through three dimensional space, but even as it does so, everything within it is traveling about itself, rotationally, almost in a fourth, no, fifth dimension. Always moving forward in time, at a one to one rate, but in an array that’s like its own quantum axis. I’m not just moving one part of me through points on an x, y, z, or even an x, y, z, t. I have to be moving all parts of me simultaneously along the q^360, x, y, z, t.
That— That’s a lot of calculations per instant. The simultaneous rotation and revolution of every electron at the proper rate to reduce the strain to a minimum. No offense to Linti, but some portion of her power must have handled that for her, she’s an absolutely brilliant woman, hunter, strategist, but she showed no affinity for calculating at literally light speed. Even stopping time every other moment to figure out all the next calculations would take me virtually forever to handle even a single leap.
Well, now that I know, I at least know I won’t be able to safely utilize this power without burning my brain out, and mentally aging several millennia per leap, if I want to use it without having to engage Kozzurth’s dragonforce to keep me alive. At the moment, I’m willing to take that time. I’m less likely to die, if I put in the effort right now. If I’m lucky, I might even remain conscious after this leap. That’s optimistic though, since I’m paying for empowering a rune in a non spelliform manner. Still, at least performing the leap without damaging myself is just going to take a few quintillion calculations. All those calculations and all those thoughts for one good turn.