Zoe stared at her friend, the familiar purple shapes of the cosmos dancing around her as she giggled, flabbergasted at the sight. Years of practice, of trying to merge the mana patterns together, pushing her skills to their limits to try and get them to merge with nothing to show for it.
And here was Emma, not even having the Time skill for a moment before it jumped at the chance to merge with her Space skill to form Cosmos. She couldn’t be happier, but it wasn’t without a tinge of envy.
Zoe took a deep breath, reminding herself of the dangers of envy. It wasn’t a healthy emotion to feel, it wasn’t a positive thing to have in her life. Emma was better than Zoe at understanding the cosmos. That was okay, that was great even! Emma was immortal now. She smiled.
But even if she rid herself of the slight jealousy she felt, curiosity pressed at the back of her mind. Why did Emma get the skill before her? Why couldn’t Zoe get them to merge, after years of smashing them together like a child playing with dolls?
“Alright, I’m gonna go let Joe know. I’ll be back!” Emma said, and stepped through space. Zoe watched the space part as she stepped through it, like a gentle wave that wrapped around her.
What was Zoe missing, that Emma wasn’t? Cosmos was a combination of Space and Time, just as Flora was a combination of Earth, Wood and Water. This whole time, she was under the impression that she had to mimic her experience with getting the Flora skill. To use the two skills in such a way that they had a similar result of the Cosmos skill, but was that right?
Zoe thought back to when she sat in a tree on Moaning Point, playing with her Earth, Wood and Water skills to form the Flora skill. She enforced the earth the plants grew in with Earth, flooded it with moisture to feed them with her Water skill and grew the branches using her Wood skill.
Was that the trigger, or was that only part of it? Plants were something that Zoe understood very well from her life back home. The cellular walls that made them up, the chlorophyll that gave them their vibrant green colour and let them absorb energy from the sun. The nutrients they pulled up from the ground, and acids that helped store those nutrients as carbs and further break them down into simpler sugars to be more easily processed.
But the cosmos, or the closest parallel Zoe could think of from her hometown being the spacetime continuum was something she could only be baffled at, even still. Knowing that she held its power at her fingertips was incredible and awe inspiring for her. How it worked, how every piece of the puzzle fit together to form the cosmos was something that she’d never even seriously tried to understand. The smartest people back home couldn’t do it, so why would Zoe be able to?
She thought to all the time she spent practicing with Emma. Though looking back, could she really call it practice? All Zoe had to do was push mana into a skill she had. She didn’t need to understand the Time skill intimately, she didn’t need to understand how it worked or what kinds of effects it would have on what it touched. Even getting the skill, she didn’t need that understanding. She took a class with Time Manipulation and managed to follow the patterns the mana had.
Whereas Emma at the same time was paying attention to every little detail, every single moment her hand moved in a way she didn’t expect. Every flicker of light that passed through the zone Zoe controlled in a strange way. How her Spell Creation interacted with the anomalous time, and how the most minute changes she made to her spells affected the flow of time.
And all without being able to see it as clear as Zoe could. Would she be capable of that if the roles were switched, Zoe wondered? She shook her head, unsure of herself. In time, she could. Maybe even in less time than it took Emma, if she wanted to be confident. But right now, as she was, could she weave together mana to form the Time skill without even having the Time Manipulation skill itself?
Zoe laughed, remembering her failures from trying that very same thing before. The utter confusion she felt from watching Eliza pour mana into her skill, just to watch the mana hop around in ways that made no sense to her. How impossible the task felt before she got her Seasoned Persistence class.
Yet Emma broke through that barrier on her own. Without the help of a powerful time class, without a skill dedicated to just what she needed. She studied it, and practiced day after day for years.
Of course after all that, she’d understand the element itself better. Maybe Zoe wouldn’t understand the mana behind it better, the structures it created and the patterns that formed as their magic twisted reality to their vision.
But the elements themselves? What Space and Time were, how they interacted with each other? Zoe never paid much mind to that, and maybe that was to her detriment. Focusing so much on the mana structures themselves, and how they could fit together might not have been the right decision. If she watched Emma use her skill, she could replicate the mana patterns in time.
But combining the skills was never about manipulating mana in an precise way, it was about the elements themselves. Her understanding of them, and how they could play off each other to create more powerful effects.
Zoe felt like the world had opened up for her. How many of her other skills were just waiting for her understanding of them to deepen, before they merged into different more powerful skills?
The next day flew by as Zoe shifted her focus from the mana that ripped through the air as she cast her skills, to the elements themselves. How space shifted as she cast her Space skill, and how Time twisted and bent the light that travelled through it. How the two intertwined, acting on each other. Time slowing down and forcing space to expand, or space twisting around as time warped to keep things sensible.
She’d never just sat down and ignored the mana she was seeing as she used her skills, it seemed so natural to her at this point. The world was made up of mana, every skill she used was cast through some pattern of mana that forced reality to bend to her will. Ignoring that underbelly of reality was unintuitive, and went against everything she’d spent the last couple decades working to understand.
And yet, she felt like she’d made more progress in the last day than she had in the last few years helping Emma understand the skill. How space and time interacted with each other, how they pulled and pushed at one another as she cast her skills. The impact her skills had, and the slight imperfections in how she used them in her day to day life. Small details she’d never noticed because the mana itself seemed complete. It formed the structure of the skill, and let her act on the world. What more could she want?
“Joe’s here!” Emma called out from down the hallway.
Zoe stood up from the comfortable leather chair she sat on in the library and walked out to meet Joe. He looked the same as he always did, with a joyful belly rocking as he chuckled looking in Zoe’s room.
“Yeah, Fennel unlocked blanky yesterday.” Emma smiled.
“Oh did he, now?" Joe asked.
“Yup! Warm and comfy and he can do it himself!”
Stolen story; please report.
Zoe looked into her room and saw Fennel laying on a wooden chair she’d made, wrapped up in a fuzzy white blanket. “He looks cozy.”
“Hello to you too, Zoe.” Joe laughed.
Zoe rolled her eyes. “Hello, Joe. How’s it going?"
“Well. As well as it can be, anyway. Business has been good, which is always a bittersweet moment for me. I’m glad I get to help, but it’s never nice to see it being needed.” Joe sighed before he smiled at Zoe. “I hear you’re leaving soon?”
Zoe nodded. “I’m getting frustrated. I still can’t figure out this beacon thing, and honestly I don’t know if I ever will. I feel like I need a new skill. Or a pigeon. Do we have pigeons here? Do you think they’d still be able to find their way home if I gave them a necklace that let them breathe in space and took them millions of kilometers away? Probably not.”
Joe laughed. "You’ll get it someday.“
“Last chance before I leave by the way.” Zoe smirked.
“For what?" Joe asked as he walked into the kitchen to sit down. Emma and Zoe had take a few minutes to set it up as more of a lounge for the day, with a couple couches and smaller tables rather than the kitchen table they normally had.
“Space. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, so if you wanna go to space, this is your last chance for a while.” Zoe said, sitting down next to him.
Joe laughed. “I told you, I don’t like heights.”
“Oh come on, it’ll just be a moment. You can close your eyes, and then blamo you’ve got a cool new skill. Maybe I should sell it, actually. I bet people would pay a lot of money for that.” Zoe pondered.
Emma laughed as she sat on a rocking chair she’d bought recently. “You’d hate that.”
“Yeah, probably.” Zoe said. “But I still bet it’d make good money. A hundred gold for the Space skill. Bet I could get some takers.”
“Maybe, but do you really need money?” Joe asked.
“Not really.” Zoe checked a glimpse of the front door and saw Peter and Lauren standing outside it, then teleported out behind them. “Hey,” she said.
The two jumped as they turned to look at her. “My god, Zoe.” Lauren said. “Don’t do that!”
Zoe laughed. “Wanna come in?"
“Yes, please.” Peter said and stepped aside for Zoe to open the stone door, a chore she hadn’t needed to do in quite a while.
Neither her nor Emma needed to use the door itself, and the only person who tended to come visit them was Joe who had a key of his own. So Zoe couldn’t even remember the last time she needed to use the enchantment.
She chuckled at her younger self, trying so hard to find some way to conceal the door so people wouldn’t rob her. What better way than to just not have a door at all?
“Something funny?” Lauren asked.
“Oh, nothing. Fennel unlocked blanky though, apparently.” Zoe said.
“Unlocked blanky?" Lauren asked.
“It’s what Emma’s been going around saying. Fennel tucked himself in under a blanket. Guess it’s getting colder around here now.” Zoe answered, pointing to fennel who was still wrapped up under his blanket.
“That’s cute,” Peter said.
The five of them sat and chatted in the kitchen for a few hours, about Zoe’s plans to travel the world and Emma’s pride at getting her new skill. Idu, and Sally coming up on eight years old and how complicated that ended up being for Peter and Lauren. The anxieties they felt about needing to make such an important decision for their daughter.
Peter and Lauren brought some food from their restaurant. A large plate of fatty meat sliced thin, with a spicy dipping sauce and some colourful leaves to wrap it in. Joe summoned some brul he’d baked earlier in the morning to pair with it, and Emma harvested some of the veggies from their garden just outside the cave.
The night of celebrations drew on and the sun began to set, so Peter and Lauren started getting up and packing up their dishware. “We’ve gotta get home, Sally’s babysitter can’t be out too long.” Peter said.
“Alright,” Zoe said. “Hey before you go actually, did you wanna come to space? I always forget to ask. But I’m not gonna see you for a while maybe, so if you wanted to come, we could go see it together?”
“Hell yeah!” Lauren shouted. “Lets go!”
Peter smiled as he looked at his excited wife. “Sure, lets go. But make it quick, alright? We really do need to get home to Sally.”
Zoe held out her arms for the two to grab on, but Emma and Joe joined in the mix with them. “I’m coming too!” Emma grinned.
“I may as well,” Joe sighed. His hand shaking a bit as he held her forearm.
Zoe laughed teleported them all up into the sky, catching them in a wide platform of earth that she filled with air and surrounded with a layer of space. Then she teleported them all up over and over as fast as her mana allowed, and in a few minutes they stood on a platform far above the planet, looking down at it like a bowling ball just below them.
“Wow,” Lauren said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Yup. Yup. Beautiful.” Joe said, his eyes clenched shut. “Looks great.”
Emma laughed. “You’re fine, old man.”
Zoe watched as Joe opened one eye a crack and then blinked a few times as he looked around and opened both his eyes. “I guess at a point you’re not really high up anymore, you’re just… gone. Wow.”
“It’s incredible, really.” Peter said. “I can’t even see home. All of our lives, everything we’ve built and done, and none of it even amounts to the slightest speck from up here.”
“I can see it. Kinda.” Zoe said. “Thank god for that too, cause I’d never get home otherwise.” She laughed.
“Well I’m glad for that,” Peter said. “Thank you for this. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.”
“Hey,” Lauren said as she pointed at the moon far in the distance. “Can you take us there?”
Zoe laughed as she started teleporting them back down to Foizo. “Maybe someday.”
“Aww,” Lauren whined.
Joe’s eyes clenched shut as they descended back to the planet, and Zoe dropped everybody off just outside her cave door. They said their goodbyes, then everybody but Emma walked off through the thinning forest towards Foizo proper.
“You gonna leave now?” Emma asked.
Zoe nodded. “Yup. I think so.”
“Stay safe,” Emma said as she hugged Zoe.
“You too. And make sure the kittens get lots of love.” Zoe hugged her back.
“Always!” Emma said as Zoe vanished.