Alice did as asked, brushing the ephemeral core of light at the dead centre of her chest with but a thought and making her Echo spring to life before her. At a loss of what to do now, she looked at Marie, who inquisitively raised an eyebrow.
Frowning, she figured that it couldn’t be that difficult to modify her interface — Echo? — a bit, or make it visible. With a focused effort of will, she tried to turn around her Stats and Identity. Marie’s smile confirmed that she had succeeded.
Attributes
Base
Class
Profession
Gear
Points
Total
Strength
4
4
Vitality
5
3
8
Agility
7
2
9
Reaction
7
2
9
Perception
6
2
8
Presence
4
4
Power
8
4
12
Control
6
1
7
Will
9
9
Unspent Points: 6
Identity
Class: Acolyte of Pain.
Bonuses +3 Vitality, +4 Power, +1 Control per LV.
— You can’t run away from yourself.
Profession: Initiate Explorer.
Bonuses: +1 Vitality, +2 Agility, +2 Reaction per LV.
— Never lost, never found.
Class Skills
Profession Skills
[1.1 Mindtap] Minor ease of access and use of Psi Ether for broadcasting purposes.
[1.1 Let Them Scream] Your agony is theirs.
[1.1 Wanderlust] — Enhanced ease of travel when navigating unknown terrain.
[1.1 Northstar] — Enhanced sense of direction and intuition when navigating unknown terrain.
Scratching her chin, her tutor leaned forward, staring intently at the screens. “Quite the class, there. Also, an aberrant Class Skill at Tier one? That’s a bit uncommon, if not unheard of.” At Alice’s look of confusion, she elaborated. “Aberrant Class Skills are those skills whose purpose is not immediately apparent or aren’t explained in detail by the Echo. [Let Them Scream] is one of them.”
Alice nodded. It made sense, even if she didn’t understand why such types of skills existed, nor why the Echo didn’t classify or explain them directly.
“We’ll get more into your Identity and Ether later. Now, you should allocate the stat points you have, and I believe that the best option would be to add one to Will, two to Control and three to Strength. Why?” She forestalled Alice’s question before her lips even began moving, “Because you’ll need the Will and Control to get a better grip on your Ether, and the extra Strength so you don’t get flung away by a stray gust of wind. It also helps so you aren’t completely and utterly helpless if a beast crosses into melee range. At least you’ll get a good punch or two in before it guts you alive.”
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The whiplash that the fundamentally different tones Marie could switch on a whim between statements was starting to become less jarring, but she couldn’t help but wonder for the tenth time if her tutor would stop insinuating that certain and horrible deaths awaited her.
Alice assigned the points she had as Marie had suggested, seeing no inherent flaw in her reasoning. Her physical stats were okay-ish, comparing them to the rest, but that four in Strength bothered her more than she wanted to admit.
Strength
4 →
7
Control
7 →
9
Will
9 →
10
With that done, Alice closed her Echo and barely caught a gleaming black sphere made of some kind of incredibly smooth crystal. “That,” said Marie as she pointed at the ominously glinting rock, “is an Attunement Crystal. It’s a basic one, so it’ll only tell us your main Affinity, then one or two more depending on how high of an affinity you have with them. Go on, focus on the crystal. It should help out draw a bit of your Ether, and that, in turn, should help you locate it for later use.”
Doing as instructed, she grabbed the sphere with both hands, intently staring into its depths.
At first, nothing happened, and as Alice grew increasingly worried that something had gone wrong with it or something was wrong with her, she felt an incredibly slight pull coming from the depths of her chest. Almost as if a strange straw or pipe had started to draw out on something inside her that wasn’t quite part of her body, but, instead, kind of two inches towards a direction that wasn’t even present in three dimensions, proprioceptively.
A warm trickle of something that left a sizzling aftertaste along her veins slithered its way towards her arms, a tendril for each. It crept forwards until it met her palms, the warm feeling of what she was sure was her own Ether now being sucked into the black orb.
Opening eyes she hadn’t realised she had closed, she gazed towards the once-upon-a-time black crystal, now pulsing an angry, bloody red. Swirling mists made of a shade of pure crimson that reminded her of freshly spilt blood danced inside the artefact, streaks of black she was sure had links intermixed within them mixed with said mists, forming a beautifully entrancing sight.
Her palms bloomed in sharp staccatos of pain each time the mists inside completed a revolution, or each time one of the blackened chains grazed the limit of the sphere, almost touching with her palms.
She didn’t mind. She welcomed the ardour with open arms. It had been a constant companion back home — back on Earth. She hadn’t missed it, but she embraced it nonetheless. It was something familiar, something she intimately knew on a fundamental level, and the bursts of prickly agony made her heart beat faster and faster, her blood pumping quicker than it had ever before since she had arrived in Aethas.
It made her feel alive.
A sharp sting in the middle of her forehead snapped her out of the pain-induced daze, and she saw Marie take the artefact away from her, subsequently stashing it inside one of the myriads of small pouches she carried. Her vision twisted and pinched as she directly stared at the inside of the pocket just as the orb that was way too big for it slipped inside without fanfare.
Blinking, she made a quick mental notation to ask about how she could get one of those at a later date.
A frown of something she couldn’t decipher crossed Marie’s face. “You looked pretty drawn into the Ether daze right there, even more than other cases I’ve seen when first ever interacting with Ether. You okay girl?”
Alice nodded, distracted by the sudden appearance of what she could only describe as a swirling vortex made up of the same colours she had seen inside the artefact surrounding her Soul, or what she was sure was her Soul. Picturing an ephemeral strand and brushing it alongside the outer section of her soul, she noticed the same sting that had been present before, but this time a lot more muted and extended alongside the entirety of her body.
This, she assumed, was her Ether, and it was beautiful.
“Yes, I’m… I’m okay. Just a bit dazed, and overwhelmed.”
Marie nodded. “That’s the usual reaction, yes. Now that you’ve made contact with your Ether, you will be able to will it into different shapes, configurations, and later on, mixtures. This is the way most people manage to cast spells from different affinities that aren’t their primary ones; otherwise, everyone would run around with a single type of Ether in their repertoire, and that would get dreadfully boring staggeringly fast.”
“From what I’ve seen, your main affinity is, obviously, Pain, with Air and Pure closely behind. This makes sense, due to Air and Pure being components of Psi ether, and Pain being an apparent mixture of Psi and other things I couldn’t pinpoint with this catalyst in particular. It seems you won’t be stuck with only mind attacks, as it could get you killed.”
At this point, Alice didn’t know if she should laugh, cry, or throw a rock at her instructor each time she issued one of her omens of death.
She’d probably enjoy the latter option, and take it as a challenge to boot.
Marie raised an eyebrow due to the unusually strong stare Alice was currently sending her way but kept going on regardless. “First off, and before I show you how to construct your first and most basic spell, you should know that casting anything that has strong traces of Psi Ether inside the city is incredibly ill-advised. There are incredibly tight measures inside the city to prevent any kind of Psi-induced sleeper agent, or, Goddess forgive whoever thinks they’ll get away with it, any kind of non-consensual mind-tampering. The spooks will find you, and they will drag you into the darkest place they can find, and if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll toss the key away, maybe for a while, maybe forever.”
Alice reeled back as if struck. She could almost feel the air leaving her lungs in one big gust, leaving her breathless and lightheaded. Not trusting her voice, and petrified to the spot thanks to Marie’s unflinching gaze, she nodded, not daring to break eye contact.
The staredown continued for what seemed like an eternity to Alice, even as she dared not to breathe. Just before she felt her vision narrowing, Marie nodded tersely, and she permitted herself to breathe anew the fresh if coppery air of the Blood Blossom.
“Glad we’re on the same page. Now,” continued Marie and if nothing had happened, which was more unnerving to Alice than if a hint of hostility had remained in the air. “You’ll create your first spell. Follow my instructions closely, but if you are absolutely certain that something is wrong or should be changed, do so. Each type of Ether has its kinks and tricks to it, and there is no way to make a one-size-fits-all teaching model.
“Close your eyes, and reach towards your Ether with whatever method of visualization you desire, be it a spoon, a rod, a rope, a hand, or whatever you use.”
Alice did so as Marie’s tone switched from her usual duality of laid back and or threatening, to a soft monotone that suggested that the explanation had been rehearsed time and time again.
Alice tried to picture a kind of ‘rope,’ for lack of a better word, and tried to ‘soak’ it into the carmine mists of her core. To her surprise, it worked, the imaginary rope that existed solely within her mind now acquiring a kind of weight it lacked before. On the side, she also noticed how the same kind of itch had spread across her body, this time even milder than before.
“Now enclose whatever container you chose for your Ether, as if you were making a fist, and squeezing as hard as possible. Pressure it down from all sides as hard as you can, until you’re unable to compress it further. Then, slowly, carefully, move it towards your arm, then to your hand, and pressure it against your palm. When you’re ready, loosen the pressure on the side that is touching the innermost part of your palm. The rest will sort itself out.”
Marie fell silent as Alice complied, first trying to picture a hand and squeezing down on the rope, but that didn’t work at all. The Ether kept trying to escape using the gaps between pressure points. She kept trying the same method until frustrated beyond belief, she discarded the hand idea.
Marie had said to do anything different from what she said if it felt right, and that was what she was going to do.
First, she tried making a knot, but that only complicated things further, and she almost lost control of the Ether when she tried to undo it.
Growing increasingly displeased at her own perceived incompetence, a small idea bloomed inside her mind, and she quickly put it to the test, connecting the two ends of the ‘rope’, and willing them to fuse.
Surprisingly, they did. Easily so, even.
Spurred on by the undercurrent of success, she tried to make the rope, or ring now, smaller and smaller, applying pressure with a mental construct in the form of a ball that she had created after discarding the inefficient form of a human hand. The sphere kept shrinking ever smaller, until, finally, she felt herself reaching a limit, and intuitively knew that further compression would lead to harm.
Moving the ball towards her arm felt surprisingly easy now, but it almost seemed too… basic, too sterile of an idea, and she disliked it, quickly discarding it. Instead, she brought the orb of concentrated Pain inside her chest, gave one last-minute compression, and then dissolved the spheric construct all at the same time.
Pain Ether bloomed outwards, shooting from her square inch and into a carmine nova with streaks of interlinked black. It dashed forward with incredible speed for around fifteen feet, until it suddenly lost cohesion, the Ether dissolving into the atmosphere in the blink of an eye.
Alice’s pupils shrunk into a pinpoint when the nova reached Marie. The older woman impassively watched the Ether as it washed over her, and an unusually soft smile graced her lips, even as Alice prepared herself for, at minimum, a very strongly worded reprimand.
Success!
You have created [Pain Nova].
Learn?
“It tickles. Good job kid.”
Alice stared in mute incomprehension until it suddenly clicked that if she couldn’t even see the woman’s Tier, she had to be so far beyond her, at least relatively to her personal power now, that her first-ever spell not doing much else than a mild breeze shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Even then, she couldn’t stop her racing heart or the sudden perspiration plaguing her neck and forehead.
“She’s going to be the death of me.”
Mortified, Alice noticed how her thought had been a lot more vocal than she intended, and Marie smiled widely, showing two rows of perfectly white, unnervingly sharp teeth.
“Ain’t that the truth.”