Silash could barely believe it as he ran through in his mind the myriad of ways the Tesserator could break reality. By creating perforations between the realms of the living and the dead, the Tesserator was manually performing a process that previously had been thought possible only by use of [skills] and a system. Then again, Tim had also been able to implant Silash's consciousness within an automaton and grant him a system through his cybernetic form, so clearly whatever research Tim had been undertaking had taken all this into consideration.
Really, it was a bit of a wonder. And, from what Silash could tell, Tim was highly intelligent himself - although he liked to get others to do his bidding as much as possible. And of course, this was case in point - here he was, forced into a robot form, ready and even excited to work on the Tesserator again.
It was a little different every time. Tesserators, with their universal fusion cells built out of [enchanted] gems called soul cores stored with strange properties that Silash wasn't entirely privvy to the contents of, allowed passage between life and death by tearing open seams in space and time itself. This had, unsuprisingly, a number of troubling implications. One of those, in fact the first that occurred to Silash, was that it meant that space and time had seams, and that those seams could be torn.
This implication got even more troubling for Silash when he first saw the Tesserator in action. Which was when he mistakenly activated a soul core and saw a blinding ray of light shoot through the air and open up a small gap in reality. This was not a perforation, Tim had explained, but indeed it was a gap.
Gaps were different, and gaps were strange. This specific gap just looked like an impossible emptiness in space, an impossibleness that Silash was unable to focus on. In fact, whenever he tried to look at the gap, or focus on it, he simply couldn't. It was almost like his own mind was forcing him to misinterpret reality and not see the gap before him. But if he moved a metal appendage into the area that was the gap, the strangest thing happened. It would be as if it would cease to exist.
And this is not to say that it would simply disappear, although of course it did that as well. However, so much more would also take place. Silash would lose all sensation, for one. For two, he would lose all conscious understanding of what was lost. That is to say, if he stuck his left arm in the gap, then all of his memories and understanding of what a left arm was would immediately become null and void - and in fact he wouldn't even be able to think up the words 'left arm' with his left arm in the gap. To his conscious mind, it would be as if there was no such thing as a left arm, anywhere, ever. Which, of course, complicated things an awful lot when he needed to get away from the gap. Thankfully, moving said appendage out of the gap, lack of sensation and understanding or not, would restore all his prior memories - however, his memories of forgetting would remain. It was a haunting thing to realize, and it quickly taught Silash to be much more careful around soul cores.
This event had prompted Silash to ask Tim again what soul cores was. His response was... Less than satisfying.
"A soul core is, well, at its core, it's something that has a soulful power," said Tim anxiously. "It's got, well, it's got certain ethereal properties that grant a strong amount of power and universal malleability. It stores a large amount of... data... in a way. A very specific kind of data, a soul core stores. Get the picture?"
Silash had tried to get the picture, but - and this was one of the cruel tricks Tim had played upon him in programming the machinery that upheld and maintained his consciousness - he found he was genuinely unable to grasp the concept of soul cores, or indeed to read between the lines regarding what exactly Tim was alluding to. And of course Tim had to know this, but Silash had a bit of a permanent blind spot installed into his mind - a result of which, all he could truly do was wonder.
Another troubling implication of the Tesserator Silash was currently performing maintenance on was the fact that it was not sentient - or, at least, as much as Silash could tell, the Tesserator was a non-sentient piece of machinery. As opposed to his own mechanical form, of course, which was imbued with the gift of consciousness - something that Silash hoped to one day understand, although it seemed he'd have to wait until his diligent Tesserator configuration was completed first. All that said, the real thing about the Tesserator not being sentient was that it was able to perform actions, using soul cores, that otherwise only people with systems could - namely, only overpowered mages could otherwise open up a perforation, and even then, it would only be a very small perforation. From what Silash could see and gather from the Tesserator's workings, it could on its own summon up an enormous perforation.
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Of course, the Tesserator was huge. It was a huge dome, big as several buildings, and within it the many cores and transistors were whirring and clicking and working their magic. So maybe its size did have an impact on its abilities, and along that maybe the many transistors, with a powered up soul core each, were powerful enough to sustain large perforations. Still, it seemed near impossible to Silash, and in fact if he hadn't been there working on them, he would've been convinced that the whole thing was impossible.
But among these impossibilities, and shocking things and otherwise wondrous features of the Tesserator, what Silash was currently experiencing dwarfed all else.
It had been what was supposed to be a simple task. One of the soul cores had been slightly tilted to the wrong angle, and the transistor needed to be opened up and then have the soul core repositioning within. Not too wild of a task, it seemed. And yet, it was.
As soon as Silash had realigned the soul core, he had unwittingly tripped a wire in the transistor and activated it. Now, this was different than a small, controlled burst of power creating a gap. At this point, the tripped wire unleashed so much energy that a full fledged perforation bored its way into reality in that moment, just a strip of unreality running diagonally through the air, and hitting Silash. That is to say, this gave Silash a true near-death experience. Or, more accurately, a near-afterlife experience.
It had all happened so fast. One moment, Silash had been tightening the transistor gears and realigning the soul core, and the next he was no longer working on the Tesserator.
He was floating in a void. A dark, chilling place. And not much longer after that, he was standing at the edge of seaside cliff.
"What the fuck?!" Silash shouted, listening to his voice echo, echo, echo.
In the far distance, he could see some strange, awful giant of a creature lumbering in slow steps across the ocean. It was pale and partially translucent, and it had long tentacles that reached far and wide through the water. They were pulsating, and almost looked like they were sucking up water for sustenance.
Silash balked. "Seriously, what the fuck?!"
"Shh! You'll wake the young ones!" replied a semiopaque skeleton standing next to Silash on the cliffside, gesturing to a small group of small skeletons that were sleeping peacefully inside a large clam.
"What the fuck are you on about?!" Silash responded.
The skeleton grimaced. "No need to be rude."
Silash looked down at his hands. His tauman hands. And then, he screamed, and he jumped, and he fell off the cliffside. In a terrifying whirr of speed and sound he rapidly plummeted towards a rocky doom, and right as he braced for impact-
There he stood, over the transistor of the Tesserator, seeing the soul core correctly set and no strange beam of light opening up perforations. So, everything had been under control.
"Tim, what in the fucking hell was that?" spat Silash with confusion, frustration, and fear.
"What do you mean? I told you, there's a good reason that tauman beings don't work on Tesserators. If you were a tauman, that perforation would've almost surely claimed your life permanently. Thankfully, due to the configuration of your circuitry, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for a perforation to claim your living soul. That isn't to say you can't die, of course - but, it is to say that you're most likely not going to die if you end up inside a perforation. That privelege is reserved for your actions here in the realm of the living, where I can afford you no such protections other than the gift of freedom from the inevitability of biological aging. That said, try not to go into them. While I'm not concerned about the fact that ot can stress your hardware substantially to travel between worlds, despite your design for this task - after all, I can always just buy you some more - what I am concerned about is that you may end up doing very real damage to your psyche. There is a mental cost to traveling between dimensions, entering voids, seeing your own death pass before your perception over and over again. It can have many unintended psychological effects and twists to your personality and cognition. It can numb you to reality. It is... dangerous, to say the least. And the last thing I need is someone as brilliant and capable as you losing their ability to truly reason. So, please, do try to avoid falling into the perforative beams."
Silash made a mental note - the perforation could make him go crazy. Great.
"That said, this Tesserator is almost operational. Which means that I'll need to move you on to your next task soon."
Silash felt a deep sense of unease. Something in Tim's voice made everything seem... off. Something bad was coming.
"I'm going to need you to harvest energy for some old soul cores, Silash. I hope you understand."