After a number of days spent reading and meditating, both out into my currently tenuous connection to the Akasha and inside into the various aspects of myself, I had generally figured out what had happened - both why I was the way I was, and what my mother had been attempting.

According to the histories, Atlantis had a long history of magicals - really, the most ancient history had Atlantis as this giant floating island continent above the clouds, where the Titan Atlas held the firmament from the Earth. It seemed less of a literal “holding up the sky” and more a “defending the atmosphere from things outside of it” scenario. Atlas was the border guard for planet Earth from things outside of it, for a very long time. His progeny were the primordial giants, beings of innate power and storms up past the clouds, and they helped him in this task.

After a significant period of time, either directly due to fighting (it wasn't mentioned but I assume the Titanomachy had happened at some point, maybe, and Atlas got assigned a very ironic punishment, also Zeus and Poseidon likely weren't huge fans of others having powerful Storm/Lightning powers) or due to fading levels of magic over eons, the might of these ancient giants began to wane, and the “Isle of Axis” that once floated around the planet guarding the Earth became more of a floating island in the clouds, then floating over the ocean, and slowly this gradual decline of both power and literal position of the island continued on over the generations until we got to the current state. Atlantis is now just another island continent with slightly taller and better human genetics, and some sort of innate magical bloodline, although even that seemed to wax and wane over the centuries. Honestly, there are stories of wondrous cities of what looks like either crazy Hi-Tech or Magitech, and then what might as well be hunter-gatherer tribes. It's all very confusing.

Regardless, the slow inexorable dwindling of magic made the current ruling families incredibly protective of their sorcery, leading to carefully planned marriage alliances and “family planning” *cough* eugenics *cough*, as those who didn't exhibit “the right signs” were… disposed of. It was also apparently a huge mark of shame on the parents, which encouraged folks to toe the line, I imagine. So here I arrive, and apparently I don't automatically show the right magical signs or something, leading to panic and my mother's subsequent flight from Atlantis and centuries-long quest to “fix” my magic, somehow.

The process for that, it seems, included a lot of rituals to try to “awaken” my blood, which I guess meant going dumpster-diving in my DNA for whatever atavistic triggers would unlock my magical blood. In order to better make sense of it all, I was going to use a framework I was more comfortable with— tabletop gaming. In the vernacular of the dice-rolling, pencil and paper games I spent so many years of my first life playing, she spent a ton of resources doing rituals, therefore stacking a few templates on top of me, starting with shifting my race from “Atlantean Human” to “Atlantean Half-Giant”. Sadly, it seems the Half-Giant side had somehow landed on latent psionic gifts, not magical ones, so when that didn't awaken my “magical blood”, yet another DNA-dive session had found me getting the “Primordial” template stacked onto the Giant side of things. This was likely where the runes on my skin came into play. Of course that still wasn't enough, so another ritual had tried to awaken my magical “Spark” specifically, which just seemed to give me my magical vision and aura sense. Then there was this final and most lengthy procedure down here, which had accomplished a few things.

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First, it had apparently cranked the latent magical and psionic aspects of my blood dramatically. Second, keeping me in stasis had messed with my temporal stability - my biological and chronological ages were seriously out of whack, though I didn't see any impact of that yet. Finally, it opened up a more direct connection to the Akasha and allowed me to interface with my development, like I was doing now.

So that all explained what had been done to me. But it took significantly longer to figure out why it was necessary in the first place. Ultimately, I concluded that it came down to choice. In the terminology of that tabletop game, Atlanteans had a long history of a specific type of bloodline sorcery - some sort of callback to their primordial ancestors, those magical storm-casting defenders of Earth. Babies would instinctively reach out to that path (or “class”) shortly after birth, and everyone had at least one “level” of it before they grew up and decided what they actually wanted to do with their lives. The only ones who wouldn't would be those who couldn't qualify - that is, their required “stats” were below the average, even after the boost from the Atlantean bloodline (which seemed to just make everything generally… better). It was a horrible situation - can you imagine a kid with the equivalent of an 18 Intelligence or Wisdom score, but that was “disposed of” because they had Charisma as a dump stat? Not the brightest move on the part of the Atlanteans, it takes more than a pretty face to run an empire, but then again that decision making isn't very surprising, both from the fact that they were in this situation in the first place, and what scraps I could recall from my first life. Didn't they end up sinking a continent or something?

Granted, this seemed to be a completely different world so maybe that wasn't the case here. I guess I would have to find out when I eventually freed myself.

To be fair, my Charisma was quite low initially. I would never have been an incredibly powerful sorcerer, even had things worked out properly. That was moot, however, since it seems that because my soul and instincts were already quite… seasoned… from my first life, I didn't automatically latch on to the first path available to me like everyone else. I had always been a bit more cautious than others, holding back, calculating the odds, weighing the pros and cons, and it seemed that even instinctively that had been the case here as well. Unfortunately, instead of waiting until I was old enough to understand what was going on so I could take that step, cultural pressure had my mother off the island and undertaking this mad quest to lock in that Sorcerer level before I said my first word. Unfortunately, the order in which she went about the various rituals ended up preventing her from seeing her success.

If she had done the “Spark Ignition Ceremony” first, that would have forced a primary path of Sorcery on me with that Atlantean bloodline as my only option. Sadly, she had me go swimming in the deep end of my gene pool first, and all of a sudden I not only had new paths available to me, based on both my half-giant and primordial heritage, but I also had a new sorcerous bloodline available, too, which meant that the signs would be all confusing. So instead of that single ritual after which we could have gone back to Atlantis, with me a little more unstable but with a boost to my magical blood, we found ourselves in this situation. Or rather, I found myself in this situation - alone in an underground lair, with nothing but unseen servants and training constructs for company.