“A-Aurora?”

*Bang!*

“Aargh! Guh!”

I suddenly feel an invisible force throwing me into the wall. My senses get overloaded too and it feels like my brain is about to go up in flames! It hurts, I can’t even make a sound. I try to concentrate but I can’t! I can’t even feel anything right now!

I need to get myself together somehow is what my subconsciousness is telling me. I try and I think it almost works but what I then immediately get my brain overloaded again and puke a mouthful of crimson blood. Hehe, with the color trend I have going on it’s a surprise the color is not blue… A random thought flashes through what remains of my consciousness and I pass out.

I wake up and look around in confusion. There’s nothing around me I try to touch the air ahead of me to make sure and only then do I realize that I don’t have a body to touch things with. Suddenly a screen appears in front of me. There’s a bunch of incomprehensible symbols appearing and disappearing and moving in chaotic patterns. I look at them closely and my head begins to hurt.

Somehow I know what happened. I have no proof but I will believe in this feeling for now.

My… whatever spirits have for souls got overwhelmed and a defensive mechanism kicked in so my mind got pushed into this weird… place to escape the damage. All the while the things my mind got overwhelmed with are still actively coming in and my, well, for the sake of convenience let’s call it ‘soul’ even though spirits don’t have souls but it doesn’t matter now. So, my soul is still trying to deal with those things. What I see on the screen is what I get after processing the… it’s probably information or maybe intention? Is intention information too? I’m not good at these things, so let’s call it ‘info’. So the screen gives me the info that it was dealing with.

I probably should try to understand it to make sense out of this mess. It will not kill me to do so at least, right? I hope so.

I steel my heart and take a look at the screen. A wave of pain assaults me once more and I can’t really find a way to quell it. I still look at it and carefully take in what I can understand.

What I get from my observations is that this info is a weird form of mana. Mana is generally referred to as a type of energy but I tell you that it’s bullshit. First of all, energy is the ability to do work, without minding the small details. Work is proportional to both acceleration and mass. Neither matter to mana. If you want to move a pebble or a mountain by the same distance you still will spend the same amount of mana. Of course in order to make adjustments you will spend more on one than the other but still, in the end, mana doesn’t care about mass and acceleration and what not so it’s not an energy.

So, what is it? Well, I don’t know for certain! But the most popular theory among the witches and wizards and sorcerers of the three planes is that mana allows one to access the primal laws of the universe that affect it on the metaphysical level. So, the bare concepts of existence unstained by the material world are accessed through mana. So, is it a link between the “perfect potential” and the “imperfect actuality”? Many seem to believe it. There’re tons upon tons of things that seem to affirm this belief but I think it’s not that.

It’s hard to believe it, there’s no logical proof for it either, I just have the feeling that mana is something akin to a rulebook. A codex, if you will. It puts restrains on those metaphysical concepts and at the same time reinforces their effects. Like, say, it puts down the rules for how the concepts of “change” should work in this particular part of existence, for example.

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Why magic can be done with mana then is because we access the codex and then we see: “Aha! So, this should work like this! But there’s nothing that says that that thing can’t be done like that, therefore it can be done in such a way! In fact, I make the world do that thing in the way I want right now and right here!”

A crude example: You open the door to a room and see a dead body with many knife cuts and a suspicious-looking fella that is fully smeared with blood who also so happens to hold a bloody knife. You would think that that fella is the killer. Then I come in and say: “All we see here is a dead body and a guy with a knife. It points at nothing! It could be that an invisible bat that can pass through walls flew in stabbed the victim, flew out, the suspicious guy came in, saw the knife and he just so happens to be a knife enthusiast so he picked it up. That’s what really happened!” - And before you can refute I access mana and solidify my view of things so they can become the truth in this world. Of course, doing something like this is impossible because of many factors but I just made that example so you can understand what I’m trying to say. Who are you, actually? Hm, seems like I’m going slightly mad after exposure to the info.

But I didn’t just spend a whole… probably three seconds just running off my (metaphorical) mouth about magic, y’know. I said this before but this ‘info’ is also a kind of mana. I think Aurora called those arcane energies or something? Whatever, it’s all mana in the end. And the special property of info is that it carries a person’s will instead of the rules of the world. Not that an info user can load a bunch of nonsense like “The world is made of caramel!” and it will work, no, it simply makes others who can understand it aware of the person’s will.

And this info is full of the assailant’s will. And it’s all chaotic as if the person in question isn’t used to having a will. A madman’s mind is tidier than this!

Could it be that I was attacked by Shuffy? But I don’t remember feeling its presence. I don’t remember much anyway as the attack really did a number on me.

I try to remember what happened and hazy images flash through my mind. The HQ of the Council of Fey, the Abyssal prison, uncle, some kind of gates and then… is it… Aurora? No, she’s not supposed to be here and not with such an appearance anyway. Then… Shuffy? But there’s no presence. Wait, if it was Shuffy then it only had the feeling of presence because it didn’t have a body. In other words that presence was Shuffy, at least I think that’s how it works. So, if it somehow managed to form or obtain a body then, of course, it wouldn’t have a presence!

But why in the thirty layers of Hell did it take on that form? Oh, and it’s not viewer-exclusive like “what you see is your own interpretation of what you see” like how the more powerful Gods who actually rule stuff do. It really did take on the form I saw!

Hm. Let’s try to understand that will that I’m getting through the info…

*Warning! Dangerous pressure on the user’s mind! Any kind of excessive activity is not advised!*

The alarms in my mind go off but I choose to ignore them. I’m so close to understanding!

“Aaaahh! It hurts! Ithurtsithurtsithurts!”

My mind is overloaded yet again. But this time I can actually understand what it all comes down to. There’re many intents and question but basically, it’s an endless stream of confusion. It doubts its identity, purpose, origin, existence itself and it’s for some reason is asking me all those questions.

!!!!!

I think I understood many things just now. I will deal with them in just a moment but I need to salvage this situation first.

Since I understood the problem and the methods I can deal with the stream of info I’m receiving.

A~nd DONE! I don’t feel like my… soul is being torn apart now and I am getting the control of my body back!

I open my eyes and I see a lot of black smoke all over the place. It thrashes violently. I have a guess but it best to be sure so I access my memory and see for myself.

Spirits naturally don’t rely on their eyes to see, their ears to hear and other sensory organs to do their job. Those are made with convenience in mind to lessen the burden on our minds in day-to-day life. So I saw everything that happened. Uncle was at first shocked at my state, he checked on me then he attacked… I don’t want to call that being Shuffy anymore. Naturally, the being retaliated so now Uncle is having the worst time of his eternal life.

Well, thanks for getting angry for me I guess? Let me help you first. I concentrate and create my own info. I hope that works. Sending… Done!

It worked! Uncle Jim got a hang of it and now he’s fine! The fog converges on a single point and finally forms the familiar creepy look.

Now, to deal with our new friend here…