Slowly at first, Jack began to pour his altered mana into Charise. After about half a minute went by Charise paused and then asked, “Aren’t you going to be giving me mana at some point here?”
Jack opened his eyes and forced out through the pain in a gravelly voice. “I am. Sorry. I don’t know.. if I explained this well… earlier… or not. But… I am in fact a Jack. In function… as well… as in name. I also… have very… very poor… aspects. I can’t… send… much more than this… and sustain… my ability to watch… your mana.”
Charise meditated deeply to try to find the trickle of power that was being sent her way “You said that my dream was reality and in that you managed to use some kind of magic well enough to stop me. If your aspects are this poor that this is all that you can send while splitting it’s use, how did you manage that? Is it something that you can do again?”
“I… I don’t know.” Jack paused sending the mana into her. “We can try what I was using earlier. I have delt with pain before and I can do it again. A warning though. Provided you are in fact free of parasitism or whatever. I will likely not be too much help if we have to fight or anything when we make our next steps. Whatever those may be. For this we will need to move to the other side of the bed. I need to hold onto the lamp.”
“That’s an odd requirement. But sure. And noted.” Charise nodded not sure why Jack would specify that he would be of no help. Obviously with his aspects as weak as they were he wouldn’t have been of any help anyways. Though then how did he manage to escape her for so long in her dream if he was this weak? The man was a strange puzzle.
Jack had walked around to the other side of the bed when Charise called out in an irritated voice. “Hey! Aren’t you forgetting something?”
He blinked and looked around tiredly. There was the lamp that he needed, having fallen to the floor after he had slammed it into Charise’s face. He was here. What could he be missing? He blinked again as his tired mind made the connection. Charise! She was still on the other side of the bed.
“I can’t really fucking move myself. You did a good job with these damn knots.” Continued the irritated voice.
“Whoops. Wasn’t thinking for a moment there. Alright let’s get you up and around and get this finished. Ugh. My body is not going to be happy with this here tomorrow.” Jack grumbled as he went back and halfway lifted Charise.
Once both of them had moved over and got situated Jack reaffirmed that he was going to get started. He pulled mana from the artifact and channeled it through his body, purifying it and converting it over to his imitation of Charise’s mana signature. Unlike before where he could channel the energy directly into a magical effect, the mana he was drawing in was too dense to be channeled into someone else. He needed to make the energy looser or freer flowing if she was going to be able to handle it.
The numerous times that he had been absorbing the concentrated mana of artifacts recently had caused him to start thickening his own mana in response. What he needed to do was reverse that process, at least enough that Charise would be able to take in the energy. It felt strange to do, almost like he was speaking backwards. Even so he managed. More and more efficiently as he got used to it.
Charise called out in forced cheer, trying to stay as positive as she could. “Hey! I can actually feel the energy coming into me this time! Yeah, this works much better.”
“Good… let me… know… when you are going to… channel… something here. So I… can… try to… pay enough attention.” Jack ground out.
A few minutes of channeling went by and Jack’s body was starting to have problems. Anytime he opened his eyes his vison swam. His body wasn’t even feeling pain anymore, instead he just felt completely numb. Finally, Charise’s voice caught his attention through the wooziness. “Hey, I’m ready to start casting here. You can stop giving me mana. Did you hear me? I said you can stop. Oi dumbass! Stop giving me mana!”
Startled from his concentration Jack stopped pulling mana into his body. As it stopped flowing sensation came flooding back into him. Even as his body spasmed and cramped he forced a rictus smile onto his face and replied. “Okay. I’m ready to keep a watch. Go for it.”
As soon as he said that he once more closed his eyes and sent a small amount of his mana into her body. Ignoring everything other then what he could see happening within. He saw her soft violet light flow tightly within her mana signature then burst out strobing into her internal passages. As the mana went to be used Jack turned his attention to see if he could find her external passages. If his theories were correct then that was where he would possibly see a reaction.
Jack stared in amazement at just how smoothly the mana flowed for Clarise. It was soft and beautiful like violet rivers made out of clouds. He had never really seen up close how other people’s mana flowed within their bodies. His only experience was his own agonizing method that was more akin to needing to create a drill to smash through jagged outcroppings that grew and blocked his passages.
As he watched the mana flow, he saw small wisps float up and away from the streams. They moved over to certain points where they disappeared. Looking closely those spots looked almost like how the start of the passages were in his own body. Narrow and filled in with an almost crystalline substance.
The small amounts of mana that coalesced at the closed apertures was much more dispersed than what was flowing through Charise’s internal passageways. Jack had always wondered just how spellcasters and body enhancers passive abilities were said to continue to improve as their main skills advanced and it seemed like this was how. Small bits of excess mana would make their way into those passages and become part of the solidified mana within. Making them even more robust than they already were.
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In his body those little bits of excess mana likely were the cause of some of his numerous problems. As that seemed to be what transformed into the crystalline substance that would fill the unused passages. Perhaps once all this was over and he was done with this truly cursed case, he could take some time and see if anything that he had learned here could help him with his problems in channeling mana.
As Jack watched all of that happen at first there seemed like there was absolutely nothing wrong. Charise was able to channel the mana through her internal passages without any issue and the small bits of mana that would go into her external passages moved smoothly and easily. It was just at the very end of whatever enhancement that she was using that trouble reared its head. There was a small flash of white light at one of the openings for the external passages. At the same time that the passageway flashed he heard Charise let out a loud pained cry.
While Jack had expected something to happen that would reveal a problem, that was certainly not it. He had been thinking that after Charise had finished that there would be an outflow of blue mana from the closed passages. Where the excess that flowed into them was turned into more of the system’s mana and then a small amount of that would be used to slowly infect the signature. Not whatever that had been.
Opening his eyes, he looked at the pained expression on Charise’s face and asked “Are you okay? That sounded painful.”
“Ugh. I’ll manage. By the agier what was that? I have never felt something like that before.” She let out a groan and asked rhetorically. Not really expecting any kind of answer.
Jack responded, not noticing her tone. Pondering his thoughts and conjectures out loud. “I’m not completely sure, but it looked like something happened in one of your external passages. There was a sudden burst of something at the same time that you cried out. Not exactly what I was expecting to see. If I had to hazard a guess… It looked a lot like your mana interacted with something else and they detonated. Almost like they were diametrically opposed or something.”
Charise only halfway paying attention to Jack’s babbling mumbled out, “Diawhat now?”
Jack paused for the briefest moment to apologize and try to explain his thinking better. “Sorry, uh... in complete opposition. Where two things cannot stand for the each other to exist. If it is what I think it is then your mana and the mana of the system are no longer compatible. It seems like it still hides from your conscience or memory but it may not be able to convert your mana any longer. I wish I had any fucking clue of what I am doing here or how this happened. Good news and bad new though if that’s true.”
Cradling her head Charise groaned out. “Right… I’ll pretend that I have a clue of what you’re talking about and you just lay it on me. What’s the good news?”
Jack tried to invest as much cheer as he could while he told her his guesses, but with both his current suppressed emotions as well as the deep understanding of just how much pain she would likely be in he wasn’t sure how well he did. “Well. Good news, you probably will never be under the control of the system again. Probably. Most likely. Maybe. It’ll need to be tested without me having channeled the mana into you but… So, yeah! Congratulations you are now free from outside control for the first time in however long you have been locked up here. Bad news. Channeling mana is probably going to hurt. A lot. For a while at least. Best guess is that it will continue until your external passages are fully cleansed of the system’s mana. How long that will be and what restrictions you should do? I’m not sure on that part. But every time you enhance your body there will likely be a response like what you just had. The more you channel the worse it will probably be.”
It was at this point that Jack realized that Charise was holding her head in her hands. She had obviously freed herself earlier when she was channeling her mana.
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Madam Blue was not having a good night. She had been awoken at around two in the morning by an alarm blaring in her home. She scrambled out of bed prepared to cast in the case her wards had been breached and she needed to either defend herself or escape as best as she could. There was a brief moment of confusion before she realized that the alarm was for the facility. Something had happened.
She picked up the emergency communications crystal that was linked only to the building’s security office. This crystal was specially designed so that in addition to being able to work through the dead space of the manaless environment it could also be used to monitor the information provided by the wards. The updates were not real time as the amount of energy it took to communicate through the environment was exorbitant. Instead, the information was updated on an hourly basis or when an emergency protocol was activated.
It looked like there was currently a Class Two breach. There were at least two of the fully sapient subjects that had escaped containment and were roaming the facility. It was not a good thing to have happen but similar incidents had occurred before and were easy enough to fix. She walked over to her small home office and used the communication crystal that she had in there. The first call was to the head of security to make sure that they were already sending reinforcements for the night guards. No sense in taking chances after all.
It was about half an hour later when she was in the middle of talking to her superiors about what had happened and what was to be done about it, when the worrying thing occurred. The emergency crystal had turned off. Not the alarm but the crystal itself. The only way that that would have happened is if its partner crystal had been severely damaged or destroyed.
She excused herself from the conversation with the managers and called the head of security again to find out just what was happening. It should not have been any major issue to capture one or two subjects who were for all intents and purposes crippled. Every guard was well outfitted with strengthened uniforms that were tested to be able to withstand huge amounts of physical damage as well as personalized mana holders to allow for them to store a small amount of mana so they could cast at least for a short while within the facility.
When she was not able to get ahold of him, she called for a company driver to come and take her over to the building itself. The entire ride over she kept trying to get ahold of one of the security officers to find out just what was going on.
A short way outside the facility the car’s mana engine suddenly stopped. For that to have happened the secondary containment array had had to have been activated. That normally would require her authorization unless there was such an emergency that she could not be contacted in time. To do so required a bypass by the two highest ranking security officers as well as one of the civilian researchers. If that array was on then whatever had happened had escalated quickly. Far past what a Class Two breach should have been able to cause.