SARAH AVERY VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 1
CATACLYSM MOUNTAINS, KILDARI FEDERATION, IR 20192
Sarah sat naked in the punishing light of the sun with the world frozen around her. She was doing her best to steer her treacherous thoughts away from Earth as she tried to figure out how to get out of this impossible situation. I can’t think about Earth, I’ll just shut down. Just think about something else. Anything! Sarah thought, clenching her jaw and squeezing her eyes shut. Why is the world still frozen? What am I missing?
There were no clues around her. She was still trapped on the ledge of a cliff somewhere completely strange to her. The only way down was the sheer cliff and that was pretty much suicide. It was no easier a climb up the cliff either. Just the narrow ledge with the nest at one end and her at the other with the bird in the air, ready to impale her with its beak. The Starlight Crane was close enough to touch if she stood on her tiptoes and she wondered what would happen if time suddenly un-froze and she wasn’t in the same spot she’d been in.
She thought back to the floating text box. It had mentioned a lot of things. The Ten Star Vortex gathering technique, cloud downloads, SynthSkills, sure. But there was something else there…Something about tensa. “Right! I have to cycle my tensa, whatever that means—” she cut off as she realized abruptly that she knew exactly what that meant.
My tensa pool is a well of personal power gathered from the ambient energy of the world around me—the whole world has magic just floating free which is called tensa, Sarah thought, having the truly weird sensation of remembering something she never actually learned. It’s used to empower our bodies by unlocking our Attributes and giving us the ability to fuel the powers we gain from ethershards, commonly called grafts. As I use my powers and abilities, the tensa in my pool is depleted so I have to recharge with a gathering technique. One that I already learned through that SynthSkill thing! Sarah realized. And I have a power! That Never Unarmed thing the text box was talking about before. How do I even use that?
The memory of how to use the Ten Star Vortex gathering technique came to her. Once again it was a faux memory, knowledge that she had never actually learned coming to her as if she already knew the question before she asked it. The first step to being able to use the tensa pool for grafts and racial abilities is to cycle it through my body, she thought. To do that, I need to burn those paths within me with my anima. The method came to her as naturally as the DPS stats of all the damage-dealing characters in Titan’s Battle, her competitive FPS of choice.
Sarah thought, If I cycle my tensa, will time unfreeze? She had no idea.
Just in case, she picked her way over to the side of the ledge with the nest on it so that if suddenly everything went back to normal, she wouldn’t get stabbed by the damn bird. This path-burning thing could take a long time, she knew. Sarah crossed her legs awkwardly, wishing that she had a blanket or a pillow or, hell, even a non-gritty rock to sit on as gravel pressed uncomfortably into her bare skin.
To carve those paths, she’d need to use her anima. This was something that she had more instinctive knowledge about that was somehow even more mysterious when it was free of context. I need to use my anima to carve the paths, but I have no real idea what an anima is or why Reborn have them and regular people don’t. And apparently, I’m Reborn. That fact was indisputable in her mind, like knowing water was wet or 1 + 1 = 2. What the hell am I Reborn from?! And I don’t know what an anima even is except that I have one and I need to use it to open up paths inside myself—which I’m now realizing is called ‘burning’ and that sounds fucking awful. But what else could she do? The world remained frozen and she couldn’t get off this ledge without something else. Maybe her magic powers would help her get down? She had to hope.
The Synthskill had planted a knowledge of a specific breathing pattern that would send her into the meditative state where she could start, but she would need to be sure she was ready when she did it since she would only have one chance to get it right. If she rushed it or didn’t do it right, she’d have a stilted tensa pool or wouldn’t be able to use her grafts at all. She even knew what paths she had to make with her anima, and her implanted memories indicated that it could take a long time. Sarah tried not to think too deeply about the implications of a world where memories could be implanted by cloud download and stretched, hearing pops and cracks come from her stiff back. She brushed as much fine gravel out from under her as she could and tried to visualize her anima within herself.
Despite having never heard of an anima before, she was instinctively able to visualize it in her mind. To her, her anima looked like a floating bit of silk suspended in a well of darkness. But that wasn’t quite right because it wasn’t made of silk but rather trillions of teeny tiny motes of light that rippled and, Sarah realized as she watched it, even moved independently from time to time. She concentrated, seeing the tensa flow map that she needed to create superimposed on her own body, and started pushing her anima from her center outwards along the paths she saw.
The process wasn’t painful per se, but it was long. She had to guide a mote of her anima along a specific pathway and then hold it there with her mind. She imagined that she was holding a stylus and that the mote of light was at the very tip of the stylus. It helped to visualize it like that because it would have been difficult enough if the pathways were short, but none were. They swirled, curved, and branched in all directions.
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Sarah spent hours tracing paths in her mind with the motes of her anima. During that time, she never opened her eyes and didn’t seem to need to eat or drink, take a leak, or sleep. The task in front of her occupied her entire attention and it was the kind of task at which she excelled. It’s just grinding, she thought as she slowly traced along a particularly complicated squiggly bit, and I’m queen of the grind.
After uncounted hours—was it days? Weeks? Months? Sarah still had no idea—she neared the completion of all her work. She knew what to expect when it was completed in an academic sense, but that was like knowing the water was cold versus jumping in and feeling the breath knocked out of your lungs with the icy shock of it. She had no real idea how her body would react to the changes this technique wrought on her, despite the unearned assurances that her mind kept trying to impose.
As she finished the last pathway, she decided to look within herself and “see” what happened when her tensa finally made its first full circuit of her body. She had to draw the energy out of her pool and along those paths within her, and she could tell it wanted to surge through her like a raging torrent. Slowly, carefully, she pulled out a tiny spark of tensa trying to hold tight to it as she guided it into the new pathways she’d created. As soon as she provided that first push, the metaphorical floodgates opened and her tensa pool surged down the new pathways she’d created.
Sarah could never really remember the exact feeling when she first felt tensa circulate through her body. First and foremost, it hurt. It was like feeling tiny threads of white-hot fire spread through her entire body. The process had been referred to as “burning pathways”, but she hadn’t felt any sensation of burning when she’d been creating those paths. Now though… She realized that the paths she’d created hadn’t been fully created until she sent her tensa through them. Now though, the energy burned through her entire body in a furnace of power and pain. Sarah lost some time as her mind was simply unable to handle the sensations in those first few moments. Eventually, though, the pathways were all burned through and her tensa was fully circulating.
Once the pain faded, Sarah couldn’t help but marvel at the feeling of raw power now surging through her. The cut on her arm had stopped bleeding and as she watched, it closed itself entirely, healing over without a single scar. Sarah saw the pattern within her that she had labored so long and hard to create. The pattern itself was a ten-pointed star, with each point ending in a ten-pointed star. The stars folded in on themselves until they created a mind-boggling, crazed fractal pattern within herself that glowed with tensa as it flowed around her. Two new floating text boxes outlined in shimmering purple appeared in front of her when she finished.
Achievement Gained!
Tensa Infusion
Description: Burn new tensa pathways for your body as a Reborn.
Reward: Ability to cycle tensa and use Attributes.
This time, the Achievement Gained message didn’t have any errors or any of the weird symbols that made her head ache to look at them. Huh, maybe that’s magic? She thought, decidedly underwhelmed. She read through the next text box.
House Vasilias Enhanced System Access
Never Unarmed Tutorial
Congratulations, Reborn! Now that you have cycled your tensa, all prerequisites have been met to build the Tutorial Realm for your new racial gifts and graft. To start the Tutorial, select “start”.
NOTE: During the Tutorial, your Attributes will only increase through direct absorption of ethershards. All Attribute training advancements and System Achievements will be deferred until your Tutorial is complete.
START
The first box faded as soon as she read it, but the other one refused to disappear until she made a decision. Glancing nervously at the frozen world around her, still wondering where the hell these text boxes were coming from and what they were basing their information about her off of, she hesitated before selecting START. She knew that once she committed to it, the Tutorial—whatever it was—would start. Sarah clenched her jaw and narrowed her eyes. She would not be passive and let an opportunity slip away because she was indecisive. She had no idea what she was doing here and the Tutorial offered her knowledge; the new perspective helped her decide and she firmly thought, ‘START’.
Once again, the box disintegrated, and the entire world changed. This time though, instead of time stopping or starting, her entire surroundings faded away until she was left in an empty black expanse. There were no walls, no ceiling, no ground, but she wasn’t falling. Her stomach lurched, but she was used to sudden changes in orientation: she’d been doing gymnastics routines since she was seven. Still, the sudden black expanse was dizzying.
Instinctively, she flexed her anima like a muscle, straining a little as she started cycling her tensa through her new pathways faster and faster. The dizziness fled immediately and she relaxed her anima, letting her tensa flow go back to normal. She was breathing a little hard from the effort, like she’d just run a race.
Her breathing evened out and she took the opportunity to look around her again. Nothing had changed. As far as she could tell there was nothing anywhere around her. It was like a video game loading screen. Then suddenly there was someone there, standing in front of her, just like he’d been loaded into a video game.