Once I was confident that no one was pursuing me I forcefully stopped the Navigation enchantment and let myself come to a halt. I was somewhat curious as to what exactly the Depths were, considering they were apparently a valid location to visit. However, the context I had learned about them suggested they were a curse worthy place, not a tourist destination.
Instead, I simply let myself relax. I had all the time in the world now to do what I wanted, and I had a powerful tool to help make things happen.
My initial introduction to Navigation had been as a simple enchantment to get me from one place to another. I navigated to Shellpin Bay, then I navigated back to Lirillin’s Lighthouse. But even from the start I had known that there was more to the skill than that. I could navigate to a location I was already at.
The real revelation for me had been today, when Lirillin had wanted me to navigate not to a geographical spot, but to a person. It shattered the implicit assumptions that I had about the Skill. On Earth, where locations were fixed and everyone else could move around, it made sense to only navigate using geography. But this world I’m in is magical, something that is still sinking in when it comes to the details. Magical navigation doesn’t operate using predefined maps or global positioning satellites that track my every move. They use magic, and it’s time to figure out just what that means.
Asking for a heading that would take me back to Lirillin only takes a second, but I stop moving almost as soon as my oars start to row. It’s nice to have confirmation that I’m not permanently cut off from him, that I can return if I ever feel the need, but I don’t think reappearing at his doorstep at the moment is a good idea. Maybe once I feel a bit more secure in my position, or if I ever manage to take on human form.
Beyond places and people, I’m interested to see if the enchantment can handle something even more abstract. It would be interesting to see if ‘buried treasure’ is a valid goal to navigate towards, but I really don’t need gold doubloons or their ilk at the moment. I need something a little simpler, something that meets a more basic need of mine.
“Take me to someplace safe.”
A simple request, but a profound one. I don’t know what dangers might lurk in this world that just weren’t talked about in polite conversation. I don’t know how exactly things work at a scale larger than a small fishing town. I can try and bull my way through problems by myself, but my toolbox of abilities I can bring to bear is pretty sparse. It makes far more sense, to see if I can simply avoid those future problems before they crop up. A safe harbor gives me time to think and to plan.
Navigation is more than willing to comply with my request. In some ways, having an open ended goal as large as ‘safety’ was easier on the skill than having a set physical location. Even if it might take more energy to power the skill while it handled such an open ended search, it just needed to find a safe place, not all of the safe places. There could be hundreds of potential coves or islands that I could harbor in for a time, and Navigation only had to be able to make a connection to one of them. Navigating to a specific location, on the other hand, might be easier up front for the enchantment to figure out where to take me, but with only one valid location to head to it would need far longer to figure out the specific path that would safely get me there.
It was absolutely fascinating, getting to see the other side of the navigation equation at work like this, and a few seconds of watching the magic whirl about told me more about the world than I had learned in months of eavesdropping. I might not have a great idea for what the inhabitants of this world consider normal or not, but the slight feedback I got from Navigation confirmed for me that this world was not a regular sphere existing in normal space. Earth was a planet rotating about the sun, functioning only according to physics as I knew of them, but in a different universe with magic thrown into the mix everything was different.
Places didn’t have a fixed geographical location here. Instead, it felt like the world existed as a strange sort of network. A location by itself operated on the rules that I was familiar with. But instead of the rest of the world between cities and towns being filled with static wilderness, there was something else. I couldn’t tell anything more than that, simply because that wasn’t what the Navigation enchantment was focused on. It was only concerned with connecting my current location to a valid destination, but it had endless ways to do so.
It explained how I could travel to and from town without ever getting to the point where I could recognize landmarks. There weren’t any because I wasn’t taking the same route every time.
It must be fascinating from a geopolitical perspective. So much of Earth’s history was driven by territorial conflict, with land being a limited resource. Here, even the short glimpse I had made it seem like land was functionally endless. It also didn’t seem to come with the same problems of infinite space on an infinite plane, either. There were always new places to spread out into, and they were always within easy reach. I’m sure that there were still wars and conflicts aplenty, people wouldn’t be people if we weren’t willing to fight each other at the drop of a hat, but things were probably a bit more subdued. Any country might have large parts of its territory hidden from outsiders, giving them unexpected resources to defend themselves with if they were ever attacked.
My steady rowing soon brought me to a placid cove, mostly sheltered from the larger ocean waves, but with steep rocky shores that eliminated any oceanside construction. I might not be able to see what was happening on land, but the area was blissfully silent to my sense of hearing. Not even birds made this out of the way place their home. I stayed close to the entrance to the cove, waiting for anyone else to show up and scare me away, but all that I could hear or sense was the steady ebb and flow of waves coming in to rebound off the rocks.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
I slowly let myself drift inwards, keeping one metaphysical eye out for any sharp rocks that might come near me, while the rest of my attention turned to my status screens.
Ash Breeze - Rowboat
Autonomous Intelligence
Component
Weight - 123/750
Durability 9/10
Enchantments 3
Mana Saturation 15/18
Hull - Wood
Navigation
Listening
Oars - Wood
Automation
Name
Robert 'Bob' Rowland
Class
Ocean's Child : Lvl 3
Body : 0
Mind : 5
Spirit : 18
Perception : 3
Experience : 622
Skills
Power Strike
Blessing of the Tides
Saltwater Sense
Water Resistance
Active Sonar
The following Skills are available to you:
Endure 500 XP
Visualization 1000 XP
Meditation 600 XP
It was an impressive amount of experience for me, made all the more so given I had earned it over the course of only a few hours. I could purchase an additional skill, or wait just a little longer and buy another level and the improvements that came with it. Furthermore, I wasn’t stuck in the same schedule of having to play dumb for most of the day. I always had the ability to play things aggressively, but now I had far fewer excuses to hold back.
I spent the experience.
Meditation was not a Skill that I had been actively working towards unlocking or earning. However, it turned out that the idle thought patterns I picked up to pass the time when people were paying attention to me were close enough to count.
Star Wars, the Wheel of Time, Occlumency from Harry Potter and more works of fiction from earth had given me an implicit cultural understanding that meditation and the associated mastery of one's own mind were the gateway to many powerful abilities.
The associated connections that came with the Meditation Skill were quick to inform me otherwise. There were ways to create an appropriate mindset that would allow people to connect to and use outside mystical forces. Meditation couldn’t tell me what those methods were, or what specific abilities they connected to, but I at least now knew of their existence. But Meditation Itself was the antithesis of those skills. From what I could tell, if a Sith needed to channel his anger to use his dark Force powers, then Meditation would allow how to return to his natural state of existence, breaking down those mental constructs and hang-ups that shape the way people think.
On one hand, I didn’t have any of those corruptive external forces to worry about. I didn’t have the soul of a dark lord stuck in my head, nor a pool of tainted saidin to lure me astray. I wasn’t trapped inside the Warhammer universe with Dark gods lurking in my dreams. I was just me.
Actually getting to use Meditation disabused me of that arrogance. Just because I wasn’t interacting with a defined source of corruption didn’t mean that my thinking couldn't be altered. I was stuck in a boat. I hadn’t slept properly in months. My social interaction consisted of listening in on other people’s conversations, and running away from Lirillin.
I still thought of myself as human, even as I refused to actually explore just how much of my humanity had managed to join me in this new body of mine. And what I had gone through was enough to stress any person alive, no matter how composed they might normally be.
The mental relief provided by Meditation was refreshing, a mental equivalent of taking off a backpack after carrying it around all day at school. The weight of the burden never was at the point of being worthy of immediate attention, and was smoothly integrated into normal routines, but neither of those facts changed the fact that the weight was still there.
I had been functional, but for the first time since my arrival I had the mental and emotional distance and energy needed to begin to examine my recent actions. I definitely wasn’t about to say my new state of mind was perfect, but it was different enough that I had a sudden influx of perspective.
It was funny in a way, how problems in life have a way of coming up again and again. My first life in many ways had been defined by others, as I pursued a career and shaped my dreams for my family more than for myself. Cancer had been the moment where everything had fallen apart, or perhaps when I was first able to notice that I didn’t have things together in the first place. But counselling for cancer had turned into counseling for my other issues, and I had made peace of sorts, had realized what some of the underlying issues were and had come to terms with them.
Coming to a new world had in some ways freed me from all those problems, but I now saw just how many of them had stuck with me. My former existence was passively shaped while my life as a boat was intentionally built by one wizard. I had seen the parallel, and thought I could do better, as if my moments of revelation on a psychiatrist's couch had immunized me from ever struggling with those issues again.
I had told myself that I needed to be more active, and I had pushed myself more than I could have, but now I could see more clearly all the moments where I hadn’t. For every situation that I found myself having an internal debate over acting boldly or keeping quiet, there were a dozen more times where I didn’t even have that thought, where I simply went along with things. Even my initial comparison between Lirillin and my family had made so many assumptions about his character and his relationship to me, assumptions that I had never questioned or thought about until they had led me to where I was now.
I could have come clean right away. I could have worked at leaving messages for him to find later, confronted with new information instead of my entire existence. I could have, if the person I now am was substituted for who I was then. It’s tempting to let myself focus on looking backwards, to dream about how I could have done things better. It’s healthy, to a point, to understand what mistakes I made to be more prepared for the future. But at some level doing so is avoiding the issues that I’m facing in the present.
So I simply let all thoughts fade out of my mind, enjoying the peace I could find there in the silence as I gently bumped against the stone cliff I was sheltering under.