Alissa didn’t consider herself and expert at well… anything really. She was competent but not an expert, certainly not by her peoples standards. If the situation was forced and you limited it to her age group as a comparison she might be an ‘expert’ in two maybe three things.
One was ruling she had trained her whole life to be a ruler, much of this revolved around environment, training, and expectations. There was more to ruling than simply being the person in charge and many aspects of it were learned rather than innate. Only incompetent nations failed to plan for bad rulers, or planned only on having good rulers. It made for unstable governments in the long run, the ones that collapse because a single individual was incompetent, or the ones that collapsed because a more competent individual couldn’t do what was necessary.
The learned behaviors, attitudes, and actions when combined with study bridged and filled the gaps making those who were mediocre on their own into some of the most effective national leaders. Just knowing when and where to put truly competent subordinates, might make up for a lack in the leader. So for Alissa’s entire life she knew she would one day rule, unless something bad happened. Kind of like her current situation.
The second thing she might be considered an expert in is probably best described as ‘martial athlete’. She wasn’t a soldier or a warrior, she could fight but the things that made the others what they were just didn’t apply to her. She had been trained, but despite the paranoia that her bodyguards had, it was never a realistic possibility that she would need to use those skills. She had studied warfare and fighting, but in practical terms it was more a method of remaining fit and even part of being a future ruler for her. Several of the things that made professional fighters regardless of their field so good at their jobs would hurt her in the job she was born into.
The third was slightly more ambiguous, and it was what threw her through a loop right now. She was close to being an expert in energy manipulation. The trademark ability of her people and here she was seeing something that should be impossible.
Honestly it wasn’t the fire so much as it was how it was created. The same things could be done either with psionics or with her peoples abilities. Either way it would be considered a primitive method of attack, but the shaman lookalike had done it in a way that looked like a trick. This was both watching someone fart out a bolt of lightning and at the same time knowing it wasn’t made out of lightning.
Psionics used mental power, knowledge and a small amount of physical energy to project their will on the universe. Her people used the energy they absorbed to manipulate other energy around them using the power that had their signature. That little bastard had pulled ‘energy that had the properties of fire’ from its chest and threw it at her creations. Fueling it with the ‘energy that had the properties of fire’ that naturally existed in the cavern.
She should probably thank the fucker for the demonstration, but her pride and a bit of embarrassment would never allow it. The shaman had been the missing link in regards to the ‘weird’ energies filling both her domain and flowing into the cavern. It had shown her how to manipulate these forces and gave her the insight to ‘see’ them.
She simultaneously wanted to whoop for joy and stand in a dark corner banging her head against the wall. It was in many ways so simple, yet it existed in her blind spot. Sensing the energy wasn’t just a matter of knowing it was there, it was also knowing what it meant. The particular energy that had reacted to the goblins ‘ball of fire’ had become clear in her mind, the way the goblin had shaped and used that energy was witnessed and could be replicated.
“No, seriously though. What the actual fuck was that. And what sort of crazy bastard would allow such a thing.” Alissa was muttering to herself. “This planet hates me, why else would it give something so stupid to these creatures.” She had to know so she felt inside herself for a similar energy to what the creature used, it took a little while to find, a little while longer and she felt confident in manipulating it inside herself. She held out her hand and repeated the flow of manipulation that the creature had used.
Soon she was staring at a ball of fire floating a few centimeters above her outstretched hand, and now all she wanted to do was face palm it had been sooo simple. Here she was trying to figure out how to sense and use the unusual energy around her and a freaking goblin had taught her. To say it was embarrassing for her someone who considered herself something of an expert at manipulating energy it was embarrassing to be shown up like this.
“Nova not a word to anyone about this. If anyone asks I figured this out on my own.”
“I cannot do that Ally” Nova said in a serious and stoic voice.
“That’s ri… wait! Why not?” Alissa practically shrieked.
“Ally I am required to inform others of such circumstances and cannot lie to save you the embarrassment of being taught how to make fire by a native.” Came a moderately snarky reply.
She spent a few seconds trying to come up with a reply but had nothing. So she growled in frustration and ‘tossed’ the flaming ball across the cavern into the main artery, where it promptly exploded into a large firestorm sweeping down and out of the tunnel leaving scorched ground faintly streaming with the evaporated moisture.
She looked at her hand, then at the results, then back at her hand several times. Despite following what the shaman had done the results were different by orders of magnitude. She was really glad that she wanted it to push away, a trick she had learned when manipulating energy, and that she hadn’t carelessly tossed it to the side. It might have ended badly.
“Oh, good job was that planned?” It sounded like Nova was making fun of her.
There was only one thing to do “Of course I meant to do that, I can’t let even a first try be outdone by some primitive.”. She put as much confidence as she could into the reply. Of course all she got back was Nova’s laughter as lying was impossible.
While she was figuring this stuff out the workers were disposing of the bodies into her composting heap and the nano-swarms were cleaning up the blood. Damaged units had moved into an area she designated for repair and damaged equipment was replaced from the small stockpile she had made. The damaged equipment would either be repaired or recycled depending on what was more efficient, maybe it would end up in the hands of other units as they were completed.
All she knew was that she had to keep expanding her forces and the network in the room. What she really wanted was a defense in depth, and the cavern didn’t really offer that. She was beginning to think that all of the space here would be needed and that trying to place static defenses in this room would hinder that.
“Great, Krystal (the core) is all about playing wide. That sucks as tall would be better in our situation. GRRR, screw this planet!”. Alissa had apparently developed a habit of talking to herself.
~ * ~
Just as Alissa was getting ready to go back to playing… no studying this new energy phenomenon, Nova reminded her of something that was at least as important as learning how to manipulate the ‘weird’ energies that the core cleaned and emitted using corruption.
“Did you notice what happened when the goblins were killed?”.
This almost had Alissa growling in frustration again until she thought about it. She had gained a stupid amount of power between her and the core with each death that had happened inside her domain. It had actually been enough to give her reserves again. The same reserves that she was going to use to learn about this energy, had this been one of the novels she was reading it would be called mana or magic power. She settled for calling it mana, mostly because for her people it was important to have a solid concept of precisely what they were manipulating to gain any sort of mastery. What it was called and how they might classify it in their heads didn’t matter as long as the knowledge about it was accurate.
“Yes I did now that you mention it.” She said thoughtfully. “It appears that things that die in this domain have their power stolen by the core which somehow changes it into its own. Because we are essentially one being at the moment that makes it mine. I probably didn’t notice the first time due to Krystal being nonfunctional, it didn’t overcome the deficit or didn’t happen as the core wasn’t working the way it should. Give me some time I need to think some things through and practice a bit to familiarize myself with this new thing this crap-tastic , planet has in store for us.”
For days Alissa spent significant periods of time experimenting with her newfound ability to sense this ‘mana’. She played with the corruption, which she discovered conclusively was the same energy as what was floating around. It ‘felt’ used though as though too many people had played with it, or like oil left in a vehicle without being changed for too long, getting contaminated by other ‘stuff’ (it was the only way she had currently to describe it). There was no easy way to get the information she needed without time, many of these sorts of things just took time. She had to use it often enough to get a feel for what was possible.
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That being said she found that she could increase the input to the core by actively ‘connecting’ to Krystal and pulling on the surroundings to draw more in. By using her power through the core she was able to use the gates in it to manipulate how it functioned. She would have to spend serious amounts of time testing that out, it could be both incredibly useful of totally worthless considering the environment was mostly corrupt. She personally could draw on what was in the core and now that she had a sense for mana she could to a lesser extent draw from within and outside of her domain.
A small test had showed that she need to use caution when drawing from inside the domain as it was supported by mana and depleting it could cause significant problems for the denizens. Yes she had killed a worker testing it out, no she did not feel bad, it only needed another seed to reactivate so all was good.
The same test showed that she could without the core draw from outside the field to support herself, it had the same downside as the core as she ended up pulling corruption into herself. That could be solved by discharging that power into the network she created, this was slightly useful as it meant she could act like the core and actively pull in corruption in her domain and dump it into the circuit. Not necessary yet but useful to know. The material of the core somehow was the part that filtered the corruption so she couldn’t duplicate it, she could however target the draw and not just pull from everywhere. Not having a need for this currently she put it aside.
A second discovery was immediately useful and had world shattering implications. Before contacting Nova she whispered to herself “What kind of bullshit, overpowered nonsense have I stumbled on, probably going to be used against me…”. Then she called to Nova “Hey Nova got some interesting things going on here. That mana stuff seems to be everywhere and in everything, the ground, our drones, the air, fire, and water you get the point. It looks kind of like if I have enough of it I can feed it through the gates and maybe make some things out of it.”
“How the can that possibly work?” Nova was confused every, test her creators had run said such things were in the realm of fantasy. Even their technology to convert energy into matter still had to be made, so here was a natural thing that had the same principles as technology that supported an empire. You didn’t just push energy through a hole pointed at something and have what you wanted ‘poof’ into existence. Yet that was precisely what Alissa was implying. That if they had enough mana and knew what they wanted they could ‘just’ make it.
“Nope not going there, just letting it happen. I am done trying to make sense of this screwed up place.” As she said this she tossed a piece of what would be called meteoric iron on the pile for processing. “If this place lets me do it, Imma gonna do it. Not a word about how I talk. Not. A. Word… if we can use it to solve our problems that is good enough for me, and I’ll leave the processing to the computers and for when we have time to dig into this weirdness. Also it seems to work for biologicals.”
Dropping a bombshell on the shocked AI Alissa continued. “I copied a few of the microbes in the water and put them in the mud. If we have a basic blueprint we can create the biomass we need, its rather energy intensive though so big stuff has to wait. It will help Krystal though as biologicals give it more ‘something’ it seems to need.”
Nova at this point did the only thing she could do. “Yep just letting it happen, nothing at all weird here. Nope not breaking the physical laws of the universe, moving right along.”
Alissa with probably the first genuine smile since her awakening couldn’t resist getting a final word in. “Soooo… can we break anything else while we’re here, or do you want to be boring and require we act like adults and figure out the best way to exploit this nonsense.”
~ * ~
Having figured out that they were unlikely to ever figure this world out they set to work trying to discover all the nasty ways to use these revelations. Despite the theoretical capabilities at their fingertips the new ‘powers’ weren’t all that helpful. They had too high a cost to be currently usable in any impactful way. Alissa had spent a large amount of time using it to create an area of soil near the river. She had practiced using what she called a creation gate in the core to try and fill it out with harmless stuff. The nano-swarms could easily contain them in the area and kill off the new creatures if needed, both preventing spread into the water and dealing with them if they got out of control.
The small chunk of iron she created had cost almost ten times as what she had used to firebomb the tunnel, on purpose, of course. As several days passed Alissa had figured out that the goblin caster had been retarded… and didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Maybe it hadn’t been able to manipulate its energy the way she could, that was all she could think of as to why it had been so ridiculously inefficient in handling that ‘spell’.
Oh how she hated saying that, it felt like giving up. But it was the only way she had to describe what was going on without getting needlessly complicated in her thought processes. Anyway the spell that the shaman had used was needlessly complicated and slow for what it did. The cost of mana had been added to what she needed to maintain.
After discovering how to use the different types of mana, because of course it couldn’t be simple. She was already planning to see if they could be mixed to create more complicated things out of combining the different types.
Now she had the problem of mana income, she had to maintain a certain amount in the area and her passive growth of the resource sucked. She would have to expand her domain in order to gain the income necessary to maintain the sort of practice and practical use she wanted. If the creatures did contribute significantly after creation she might be able to use them as a stopgap. But she needed to pull in more mana, and for that she needed to expand. But in order to expand she had to get everything set up in the core room to handle the influx of corruption.
All she could say was that there had better be a light at the end of this endless tunnel of constant build up or she might just have to find a way to kill this planet.
Probably not, but still the sentiment was what counted. Right now the learning curve was killing her, she had so much to do. With not enough time she had to prioritize how to get things done which left her feeling like her to-do list not only never got shorter but was getting longer. That was enough to frustrate anyone, but it was made sooo much worse by the need to wait as what it required was time to get setup then time to figure it out.
Leaving aside her annoyance at the initial setup of her cavern, and the need to test her new abilities. She started to look at the ways she could improve her drones these crazy things would take forever to get settled and she could only work at it for a few hours a day including the analysis of her progress. Alissa was seriously considering how to remain occupied, while the tools she had toiled away seemingly endlessly.
~ * ~
As days and weeks passed in a seemingly endless succession she watched as her domain transformed. A network drew itself across the room filled with both corruption in some channels while others filled with a blue-green light, tracing complicated patterns across first the floor and then the walls and ceiling. The warehouse/ work area first had a network placed and then it was covered, beginning to be separated into different areas for focused production. Micro-bot base stations were built and then attached to the network, more workers and drones were built even after the numbers became cumbersome. Many continued refining their programming by training in the various places in the room, others rotated out into a perfect formation, each drone and worker being used as they gained benefits with continuing to perform actions.
How that worked was still a mystery, but it did. Alissa wanted her forces to be able to expand as soon as the room was complete, having a reserve would allow her to take over new areas quicker when she did begin. As the denizens of her domain gained strength over time, the sooner she made them the better. She was still limited based on her wellspring.
The soil was developing nicely and filling out the new area with the necessary microbes and small lifeforms creating the self-sustaining ecosystem she wanted. With little else to do she had watched and noticed that each time one died whether it was from natural causes or it was killed off she gained small bits of mana, but most importantly they reproduced naturally so she didn’t need to make more than a sustainable population to generate a constant source of energy for no cost.
The other major project she began on was her home tucked into the smaller bulge at the back of the cavern she had been building a small house as she refused to continue to endlessly sleep in the open.
On the other side of the river she had been training on how to use her magic, she was still disgusted every time she said that, but it had taught her how to manipulate these forces effectively and the limitations of its use.
Each time more of the network was increased she saw the corruption in the room being drained to manageable levels. She had to be careful as there was more corruption in the room than what the core was currently handling. She couldn’t let herself forget about the corruption filling the channels as she gauged the amounts remaining in the cavern. She needed to find some ways of using it more effectively but had some feeling that that was dependent on how large her domain grew.
Over time she had also noticed that the core was slowly becoming more competent in offloading the corruption onto the living creatures in its control. Each of which somehow added to its ability to process that crappy energy. She had a feeling that at a certain point this particular lifeform, the core, became pure nightmare fuel for anyone nearby.
Personally, she was actually happy at having things to do as well as the progress being made. When she first started to get to work she felt that no progress was being made, at least the progress was so slow it hurt. That was slowly changing as she built up her base of operations, those operations would slowly take over the areas she expanded her domain into other areas.
The final hurdle was in finding out if she could retain control of her creations beyond the limited line of sight she had with her implants. Every worker and drone was being run out of her head, so if they moved down the tunnel could they still function? That was the question, maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t. If she couldn’t she would still need to find a way to carry out continuous operations in her rear lines. Without ‘World Designer’ in the range of operations none of the technology she was using would continue to function the way it needed to. It would be in line for this world to have to follow her units into combat to get that expansion rolling. So in order to prevent that frustration she had two goals being worked towards, one was getting the materials for relays built, the other was a simple autonomous function in her creations.
One way or the other she was ready to get this show on the road. Whatever was out there she was going to drive forward and win. She would find the person responsible for her situation and they would pay.