Alissa’s problem was revealed, a wall of energy. She hadn’t seen it because of how subtle it was, a finely woven mesh forming a barrier between her and freedom. Now that she had noticed it, she honestly wondered how she had missed it before. Even her initial impression was only part of the picture, it wasn’t so much a wall more a boundary, a point where the energy it was made of didn’t travel past. Similar to a field like gravity at a certain point it wasn’t there. She suspected that this field was spherical and truly surrounded her going through the ground and walls as it appeared to end abruptly.
“Ok, Nova. There is a weird energy field in front of me give me a few minutes to try and figure it out. Use what I am seeing to analyze it as best as you can. It is unknown so I don’t know if our sensors can pick it up.”
“Not a problem but that is not a good sign” Nova replied.
“I know but we have to deal with it, I am NOT going to step past that when I have no idea what will happen.” She responded.
Taking the time to study the now visible field Alissa was starting to have remarkably bad premonitions of what it meant. And the crystal she had been deliberately ignoring looked to be the only way to get the answers she needed. She had been ignoring it because her people learned long ago to be cautious of unknown energy sources. It was glowing and the energy couldn’t be seen or detected, therefore it was unknown. The general rule regarding these things was to avoid it, don’t try to interact or manipulate it, and remove yourself from its presence as soon as possible.
Certain forms of energy were toxic or could affect their people in strange ways. They always approached new energy sources with both a sense of wonder tempered by hard lessons of preparation, and caution. While it was unlikely that the energy would affect her when none of those encountered by her people would, Alissa was not a scientist. All she knew was that she didn’t know this energy, she was not prepared so all she could do was be cautious and leave. Except now she couldn’t, so slow and cautious was the plan of the day.
This energy was the same hue as the Crystal's glow to her senses. Part of why she didn’t notice it, as from the inside she couldn’t tell that it wasn’t just a part of the environment, as she got closer to its limits, she sensed that the area outside of it was different. That was part of why she froze, the other part was a soul deep sense of dread and impending danger. That was the only way to describe it. Every one of her instincts told her that stepping out of the field would be bad, like “your definitely gonna die” bad.
It also seemed to radiate from said crystal until it hit this border filling the inside of this bubble. She seemed to be left with little choice but to study the source and look for answers to her current conundrum.
Moving back to the ledge she started on she saw a pile of rock and outcroppings on the right-hand side that formed and impromptu and crude set of stairs to the top of the ledge.
Nova seeing Alissa’s intent asked “Ally are you sure about this? This seems like a really bad idea.”
“Not much of a choice if I want to leave, I need to know what’s going on, or at the very least what will happen if I do cross that border. Besides without knowing why I get this sense of danger it may happen again, and of course that will be when I don’t have time to figure it out.” Came the reply.
Nova was worried she knew the difficulties they would have going forward in this environment, especially with Alissa’s “unique” needs thrown in. But she couldn’t think of a realistic reason not to proceed. That decision made she turned her focus on helping Alissa process the information she detected and running a threat scan of the area to make up for her companions focus on the energy field they were apparently stuck in.
Reaching the top of the ledge and approaching the glowing crystal Alissa noticed that it was actually floating next to the wall and not imbedded, it looked like two hexagonal pyramids with the bases stuck together with the points facing the ceiling and the floor respectively. She had seen similar shapes at gaming or gambling dens a D12. It was also unnaturally still, no rotation, no bobbing, like it was totally locked in place. Somehow, she felt like this was both right and at the same time filled her with a sense of wrongness.
After approaching to what she felt was a safe distance while still allowing her to “see” close enough to study this oddity in detail, she spent a few minutes analyzing it from multiple angles slowly walking around it standing on her toes and crouching down, as the widest point was floating at about chest height and the crystal itself was about the length of her forearm from tip to tip, she was able to get a pretty comprehensive look. Unfortunately, the secrets of this thing did not simply reveal themselves that easily.
She was going to have to look a little closer, it would have been nice to see a solution with minimal effort but that had been unlikely from the get-go. With little choice she sat cross legged in front of the crystal resolving to figure out what was going on. Doing so would likely require her to spend an ungodly amount of time and effort to achieve, she had been trying to save certain abilities for a more dangerous situation, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Alissa was a rare variant of her species, she had a far greater capacity for their inborn ability to manipulate energy. It was a side effect of the millions of years of evolution that occurred after they became a space faring empire. Technology had been present for so long that her species had actually started to evolve in a manner that included it in their environment, that was to say that they evolved and adapted to better be able to utilize that technology and the energy it created as its presence was pretty much guaranteed. It also made it harder for them to survive without its presence as certain biological adaptations had become insufficient on their own. It was part of the reason her people had enhancements, many of which were now a part of their everyday reproduction as some would become part of the child when it was conceived, copied from the parents.
For Alissa this was both blessing and bane. Every member of her species had six survival needs, food, water, shelter, clothing (appropriate to the environment as they remained active and didn’t have a period of hibernation), security, and power. That last was the problem, her people needed Watts, where they got them from was flexible and they had developed a remarkable ability to seemingly pull this from thin air. Most could get by with eating more or using their tech to pull it from certain environments, but Alissa’s constitution meant that she needed more than normal to survive. Her abilities also let her convert excess power into calories, if she had sufficient power there was no need to eat or drink. That was definitely not the case, and without access to super foods that had truly obscene amounts of calories in them she couldn’t convert the extra food into enough power to survive.
She had failed several survival courses because this higher consumption wasn’t accounted for. She could be eating all day to convert the excess calories into power and still fall behind. It shouldn’t be that surprising she had been hooked up to a planetary power grid while still in the womb. But without significant power sources present she would rapidly lose her ability to function. She only had two things going for her first was an internal reserve of power she could, at the cost of losing it as a resource that she had no way of currently replenishing, and a temporary state of pseudo-hibernation. The second was one she had been saving and needed to use now. I
t allowed her to slow a lot of her bodily functions reducing their cost but with the aid of her enhancements, up her ability to think and process information by redirecting some of that power to her brain slowing her perception of time and creating a time dilation effect that applied to her. Thinking at computer speeds at the cost of becoming immobile while reducing her consumption needs.
Not as helpful in her current situation as one might think as she couldn’t do anything to actually fill those needs. While Nova could direct some of her tools while in this state, the current environment wasn’t going to sustain her, so setting up a base didn’t help, also if/ when she figured this field out, the goal was to leave. In any case even a basic analysis was like to take weeks of subjective time, and months to truly figure out detailed information she could likely risk a few days of constant analysis in this state but more than that would be risky.
With little choice she settled in for what was going to be a long, long period of study. Her breathing slowed, her eyes closed and even those little motions you can’t stop became nearly non-existent.
Alissa hated going into subjective time as it always made her feel like she lost time. Imagine spending a week trying to answer a question only to come back and find that the person who asked you has barely finished talking, and you can’t remember why they even asked. The only way to tell how much time passed for her was to look at the internal clock on her Heads-Up Display (HUD), a now relatively useless feature, for anything but her own knowledge as she was underground. Day/night cycles didn’t apply, and she was going to operate on a basis for fulfilling her needs not normal time management things, for the foreseeable future anyway. Mostly it was turned what felt like a long period of time into a short one as if the subjective time didn’t really exist.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Anyway, she got down to the nitty gritty and began the laborious process of studying this crystal and its effects.
~ * ~
Her clock told her that a little over a week had passed. And the results of her study where in…
And they sucked.
First off, the crystal was made of an unknown material, unknown as in neither Nova, her, nor the databases Nova had stored could explain how this existed here in this reality. This was not totally unheard of as some of the things her people dragged in or found in alternate dimensions were like this, formed from unknown processes in areas with unknown laws. But they hadn’t ever found one that naturally existed in their own reality.
It was also perfect, like down to the last atom perfect. Everything from the basic dimensions were accurate to the atom. The spacing and arrangements of its molecular structure were identical. This object would have been an oddity even if her people had made it. Every atom was perfectly spaced containing exactly the same amount of energy with no motion, that was the truly weird part the atoms weren’t vibrating or shifting at all, the clouds of electrons even moved identically with no deviation. That was beyond what her people were capable of, and this was a supposedly natural phenomenon. It defied explanation.
Within it existed dense natural “molecular circuitry” molecules aligned to facilitate some form of computer thinking and logic gates for energy to pass through moving to different parts and create different uses. This is what created the energy field as some of the energy flowing through the crystal generated the field deliberately, also making the field variable, able to change its size based on the energy flowing through it.
There was only one flaw in the crystal that was that is seemed it was just as susceptible to toxic energy as some of her people. It was being corrupted by the energy it was absorbing.
Perhaps overloaded would be a better term as it cleaned the energy as it passed through the crystal it simply wasn’t doing it fast enough making the blue-green gem with platinum circuits look like it was being stained black in some places. Much like watching a colored dye being poured into water in slow motion. The gathering areas of the crystal had become overwhelmed filling the open areas of the crystal with black and slowly corrupting the platinum lines of the circuits, overflowing into open areas around it.
Secondly, the crystal was clean not one drop of moisture, not a single grain of sand or dust lay on its surface it was perfectly and totally clean.
Most of this was interesting but not the problem, those started with its energy flows. Starting with the worst possible conclusion it was impossible for Alissa to leave. Her personal energies and the energies of the crystal were immutably tied together, in a sense becoming one organism as far as energy went. That was why she felt that she couldn’t leave the field. Next there was far more energy in the environment than she had thought, but her only method of accessing it was tied to this crystal as she could not move what she couldn’t perceive. She fed the crystal, and it fed her creating a feedback loop.
The purpose of this crystalline organism seemed to be to clean the dirty, nearly imperceptible energy and release it back into the world. Corrupted energy was gathered through the field then drawn to the crystal to be cleansed. That energy was then released leaving small amounts in the crystal's domain to facilitate growth and power the process. Much like trees cleaning carbon dioxide out of the air this thing cleaned toxic energy and released the non-toxic variety.
BUT there was an issue, the current environment was smothering the crystal there was too much of this toxic energy for it to handle and it had dragged Alissa into its' bullshit. Sending her the overflow so she could process it before feeding it back to the crystal. Her current hypothesis was that she was similar enough to the crystal energy wise allowing this bond to form. The energy didn’t truly harm her, but she wasn’t able to process it fast enough for the crystal to be helped.
This toxic energy was denser than the non-toxic varieties, so it sank, you know underground. As in where she was, the further down you go the more you encounter type of thing. Basically, this situation meant that she had to find a way to clean this energy to live because if the crystal died, she might as well because their energy was linked at a particularly personal level. SO, on top of everything else another problem pops up and it was getting worse. In the week she had been studying the crystal the field had shrunk a good 30 meters in diameter and was in danger of collapsing and falling apart.
Feeding Nova these new conclusions Alissa sat fuming and trembling with abject rage at the situation. All boiling into a scream that couldn’t be held in. She neither had a pillow or the inclination to muffle it. Alissa of the house of Night and one of the most powerful Voidborne in existence screamed an undignified and unladylike “FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!” into the quiet cavern.
~ * ~
It took Alissa hours to calm herself after the outburst, the situation was just so obnoxious. Like a sadistic game developer making a hardcore survival game couldn’t have made this more annoying. The limits on what she could do in this cavern were one thing but being essentially locked in a cage and having to find a way to survive. Oh, that burned.
It wasn’t helped by her own anger at not being able to control herself and think clearly, or the fear she was pushing back in her mind. She prided herself on being rational and dealing with things calmly the way her parents and instructors had taught her, on being able to analyze situations from multiple angle and perspectives. However, this, this just hurt, she was little more than a baby among their people. Barely 300 years old and almost all of it was time she had spent learning how to live and function as a part of society, as the heir.
Now she was stuck in a cave with her AI companion and this FUCKING crystal. It had dragged her into its shit and now she had to clean up the mess if she wanted to live. She didn’t have time to waste but part of her just couldn’t think rationally and come up with a plan.
That was the true problem now, she needed a plan and to plan she needed to calm down assess the situation with the new parameters in mind and get to work. The tools she had were limited by how fast they could do things and by the order certain processes had to be completed in. Eventually she managed to calm down enough to make some decisions.
“Nova, can you bring up ‘World Designer’ please. Sorry about losing it like that but this really sucks, it looks like we’re stuck so even though it is suboptimal we have to find a way to deal with this.”
“Coming up now Ally.” Was the AI’s reply.
World Designer was a program used throughout the Empire, an all-in-one design system that held the materials, and their properties, the premade designs. It could be used for anything that needed a creative space. Room remodel, easy it would overlay a space and show how things fit. Architecture, it would build based the applicable codes and even walk through the steps. You could design everything from a machine for a factory to the factory itself. To designing a pre-existing city down to the last detail wiring, ventilation, water, power, transportation networks, complete and functional building designs, and infrastructure. Design a spaceship with all the needed facilities and it could even help amateurs create something successfully. Containing everything from Neolithic to the most advanced tech the Voidborne possessed provided you had the clearances, and capable of advanced computer modeling it was able to test just about everything, and smart enough as a program to do so and warn the user of possible problems before they got too far. Storing all the data needed in the neural implant all Voidborne had.
Creating a virtual overlay of a real environment or an artificial space to create in, it was the go-to program for everything from home inventors, manufacturers, to those that designed and maintained cities and orbital stations, even game designers used it to create realistic environments and customizable buildings. The only limitation was processing power not that it needed much for what she planned as her AI was more than capable of maintaining virtual overlays of the simple things she had the ability to produce right now.
Nova had been on standby during the analysis, and had left her ward alone during the temper tantrum. Recognizing it as a stress reaction that she couldn’t do anything about, and that any thing she said might add fuel to the fire. The wasted time was unfortunate but seemingly unavoidable Ally rarely broke down like this and when it happened unless absolutely necessary it was better to just let it play out.
It wasn’t like she had been idle, the whole purpose of her existence was to support Alissa as needed. So she had be collating the data Alissa had stored in the neural network and coming up with feasible plans. When it became clear that leaving wasn’t an option she had started planning contingencies for her companion to go over. As well as running optimization processes for what would have to happen. While Nova was a construct she truly cared about her companion, and their synergy was unusually potent. She knew that once Alissa had gotten over the funk she would dive into what needed to be done and usually make up for lost time.
For Alissa her perspective of the room changed through the sorcery of technology she saw the room as it was but had precise measurements of everything available, along with a sensation of faint imaginary grid lines flowing over every square millimeter of the room. This coupled with an innate understanding of how the room existed in 3D space was the virtual overlay. She could now plan without the worry that the room would collapse if she removed a pillar as the equations had been done. She saw stress points, places that needed reinforcement as well as those that she could harvest for raw resources, and every change made in the overlay would update how she perceived the environment, “seeing” both the current room and what would exist with every change. This overlay would connect with the nano-swarm she was getting ready to release, prioritizing the workload for optimal efficiency, and even add in some design needs, unless she told it otherwise.
Cracking her mental knuckles and preparing to edit what was now going to be her home for the foreseeable future, a final fit of whimsy overtook her, and she stored this room as a base image in her mind. Situation aside it was a beautiful example of a cavern. Some lights a few paths and it would be the type of thing that would attract tourists, would be posted all over social media to “oooh” and “aahh” and squeal over. Before she got to work destroying the place to make it functional as a home, she wanted a before picture. Who knows maybe she would restore it if she got the chance.
After Alissa got to work, even though walking around the cavern wasn’t necessary and was slightly wasteful, she moved around the cavern inside the incredibly slowly shrinking field that marked the limits of her ability to move. Said field wasn’t shrinking in a linear manner as the smaller it got the slower it shrank, at least until a critical point was passed and it collapsed unable to sustain itself. Not being a professional in the design field it just felt right to her to be moving around. That and she was still royally (quite literally) pissed off and looking to burn some energy.
Well... that and her focus on the current task partially explained why she was so surprised by the things looking at her from the main artery of the cavern.