“Well, that sucked,” Nathan observed with copious understatement. “I’m really glad that I invested into anti-trauma bullshit, because otherwise I’d be an emotional wreck right now.”
“Hey, come on, it can’t be that bad,” scoffed Honeydew. “I’ve—”
“Love, you are a divine masochist,” Tanya pointed out. “You literally get off on pain and you’ve picked more than one divine blessing to go on top of that.”
“Oh.” The sorceress with the pain tolerance of yes please thought about that for a moment. “You’re right,” she said, nodding briskly. “Sorry about that, Nathan! I shouldn’t invalidate your lived experiences. That’s rude.”
“I appreciate that and forgive you,” he said, forgiving her instantly.
“Great!” Honeydew’s voice was light and chirpy, without a care in the world. “Here, you should eat the cryma! Or just carry it, or something, it’s yours, who am I to tell you what to do?”
“You tell everyone what to do,” Tanya observed dryly. “It’s part of your charm, you tell me.”
“I tell you that?”
“Regularly.”
“Oh.” The two of them paused for a moment, Honeydew contemplatively and Tanya with an almost-suppressed smirk. “Well! That’s great. I’m sure I’m right about it, anyway, and Nathan should absolutely eat the cryma and don’t you dare tell him otherwise.”
“Why would I do that? It’s the obvious thing for him to do. He needs to core up.”
There was a moment of silence, and Nathan took advantage of it to ask the obvious question, or at least two of the many obvious questions. “Okay, maybe these are both super obvious questions with equally obvious answers, but. What do you mean by ‘core up’ and what does eating mean for crystals made of primordial flame which have been metaphysically squeezed into a more-or-less fixed, material shape? They’re not digestible. I mean, unless people here can generally eat… extremely radioactive bits of frozen fire?”
“It’s idiomatic,” Tanya said, helpfully omitting the potential, honest, but fundamentally unhelpful addendum of “obviously, you dumbass” to her explanation. “They’re both idiomatic, but I made up core-ing just now.”
“Which I appreciate, because it tells us what the limits are of your language powers!” Honeydew beamed at her partner, leaning over for a kiss.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
The kiss became another, longer kiss, and Nathan surmised that his attention was no longer socially required. Instead, he looked around and took in the visual changes to the area, looking as well for the aforementioned so-called “crystallized mana” which was neither crystallized nor anything meaningfully mana-like.
The room, the courtyard which had coalesced around the party of three as two of them had fought and the third had charged up her one-hit godkiller knockout strike, had faded. Its colors had desaturated, the textures of the ground and the walls alike had become muted, and the air’s smell had become weak and thready. Where music once played, those sounds had begun to whisper in a more minor key; where stone felt as though it were the steadfast root of the world itself and rushing waters burbled cheerfully along patterned paths, instead they were shallow imitations of their previous selves, inasmuch as inanimate objects and their effects upon the world can be described to have selves. This is not an unknown turn of phrase, of course, but there had never been any will within the surrounding themselves; only the animating intelligence that had assembled and reified the courtyard possessed anything which could be described as a self, and it in its own right was nothing more than a tool in the metaphysical hands of something that could make claim to having a Self.
But we digress.
There was a small heap in the middle of the courtyard of what did, Nathan admitted to himself, very much look like something one could describe as crystallized mana. Jagged of edge and irregular of shape, there were thirteen of them, ranging in size from one no smaller than the free edge of his pinky to one that was the size of his forearm. Each of them shone with an obviously supernatural radiance, though why the radiance was palpably supernatural evaded Nathan entirely. It was a kind of first-principles act of communication by the crystals, or by the magic within them, or possibly by the universe itself; he did not hazard a guess as to the reason for his understanding, being distracted by other matters, but it would not have been inaccurate to say that this, too, he owed to his supernatural, metalife-acquired instantaneous mastery of all languages and most other modes of communication.
“So, uh. What,” he ventured out loud, squatting down in front of the pile and gazing at it dubiously, “can I actually do with this stuff?”
“There’s mostly three things—”
“Four things.”
Honeydew glanced back at Tanya, shrugging. “I guess, sure. There’s four things! Core, craft, cast, and… I can’t think of a good c-word.”
“Cover. Cuirass. Cantilever.”
“Cantilever is a great word! Web. Core, craft, cast, and web. And you don’t need to bother with three of them.”
“Because…”
“Because they’re not relevant to you.” Tanya picked up where Nathan’s voice had trailed off, her words blunter than usual. “Craft, you need the Nexus and its manaforges, they don’t exist in here. Cast, you need to actually know what you’re doing, and you don’t. Web, that’s channeling bound cryma into the Cityweb in the Nexus, to pay the Delvetax or as surplus, whatever, but that doesn’t matter to you because you won’t be getting there. I’m going to kill you at the exit, maybe earlier, so that just leaves you with core.”