Tala lay on the sand, Terry on her chest taking his ‘five more minutes.’

As she lay there, she used the opportunity to continue to amplify her own reality-node's attraction to itself with all her available power, even utilizing her void channels to pump more power to the inscriptions and let it amplify faster.

It felt… like nothing? But a lot of nothing.

It felt like staring up at the sky and really considering how big everything was, and how small she was within it.

It felt like standing on a mountaintop and truly realizing how massive Zeme was, and how little she had mattered thus far.

It felt like drowning in the ocean, far from shore, with no one nearby to even notice her distress or her passing.

Her eyes snapped open, her breathing coming fast yet again. She recognized the feeling, even if it wasn’t quite the same as when she was using the existence shield. Rust. I’m cutting myself off from the rest of existence somehow.

She purposely broke the working and the feeling of building dread, separation, and isolation vanished.

Well… that didn’t work at all. She grimaced. Can you send the notes and theories to Mistress Holly? Mistress Ingrit, too… Yeah, send over the memories associated with the dissociation. She huffed a laugh at that reversal. Things associated with a dissociation. She let the humor of that pull her further from her oh-so-recent feelings.

-Absolutely. Shall we move on to more traditional gravity amplification?- Alat was doing her best to move Tala on from that experience as well. Neither of them had particularly liked it.

Yeah… that would be safer. Still… she couldn’t get past it without at least considering things. It was odd that she’d had such a feeling when she didn’t actually detect any such separation from her sanctum’s sparring ring when she’d amplified their reality-node connectedness. Was it because she was sentient and the reality nodes that she’d compressed weren’t? Was it because she was drawing multiple nodes together? It bore further experimentation and analysis… but later.

Instead, she looked inward and picked a place to start, her little toe on her left foot. After all, that is where her magical grid designations began. The little markers that had been incorporated within her inscriptions were simply intended as regional markers despite there being literally hundreds of thousands of them laid out as a grid within her.

The purpose was to give her an easily discernible starting place for what she was about to do, along with ready-made labels for her augmentations. She began within grid-place ‘0000’—each symbol being used was either a digit or letter, giving her plenty of designations to work with. Similarly, she mentally divided up the space within that grid-place into ten segments in each dimension. This division was purely a mental construct to help her.

Then, she analyzed the cells within 0000-000.

Alright, these need to be augmented toward each other, but in separate blocks. These should be pulled in together. It’s important not to stress these connections…

With Alat’s help, Tala developed a plan and got to work, using void channels to dump power into the gravity augmentations that she was performing. With a bit under six hundred cells within her chosen location—because she wasn’t going to be affecting her blood with this change—it was actually relatively easy to conceive of the connections and various alterations needed.

While acting on such a level wasn’t exactly easier, she also didn’t want to amplify their gravitational attraction by that much. Thus, she only worked on that section for a bit less than an hour.

Next up, 0000-001. But she’d definitely given Terry enough time, and she didn’t want to stay on the sand any longer.

Tala sighed, patting Terry again. “Terry. It’s been… it’s been way longer than I promised you. I’m just going to get up if you don’t move.”

He let out a quiet chirp of acknowledgement.

She shook her head and sat up, holding him to her chest as she did so.

He didn’t object, nor did he move away.

I… should have just done this to begin with. She huffed a laugh at herself, reorienting the bird to be upright in her arms as she got to her feet.

She didn’t have another duty-shift until midnight came again.

Mistress Cerna and Master Clevnis had invited her and Rane to breakfast, but that was still more than seven hours away.

I could go and get some sleep… but she wasn’t tired yet, and that would just move the ‘what to do’ issue to the early morning rather than when it was currently, at that moment.

She could go to her sanctum and do the next set of her self-augmentations. She felt like she’d learned quite a bit, and would be able to go faster and still get the same levels of augmentation out of the effort.

That made her consider once again the process that she’d just been going through. As she’d been working, she’d felt like there was something… else alongside gravity. Something that—at that scale—was far more important than gravity in the moment to moment interactions of her cells.

There are other forces like gravity in the universe, right?

-...Yes? That’s a very vague question. One could say that friction is like gravity, or surface tension, or air resistance, or… oh! Electromagnetism! Then, there’s the strong and weak nuclear forces. You know all of this. Right? I mean you must. I pulled it from your memories, not my own research.-

Yeah, but I just wanted to verify what I thought.

-With someone pulling from your memories…- Alat’s tone was rather incredulous.

That’s… fair. Regardless, I’ve never had any talent or ability to alter electromagnetism—that’s Master Cazor’s department… I mean the endingberry magics affect that, broadly speaking, but it’s not exacting or specific work. Regardless, I don’t think that I’ve worked with the strong or weak nuclear forces very much… They are rather hard to perceive, except on a purely cognitive level.

-Tala… please don’t mess with nuclear forces. Please? At least not without a lot more research. The mental model alone would be… painful. Even if we were to make it work, would you enact your magics across every atom—every molecule—in your body?-

Yeah… that didn’t sound like the work of even decades. It would take centuries or millennia. She’d likely still be trying to make it work when the sun went cold. That’s fair.

She already had a monumental enough task before her.

That brought her mind back to her recently aborted reality-node augmentation. In an instant of oddly connected brilliance, she lightly smacked herself in the forehead, causing Terry to squawk irritatedly—even without opening his eyes—as she shifted to accomplish the action.

I can join all the reality nodes in my artificial lung together. That should keep the magics from affecting the walls as easily, at least based on the tests we did previously. That would reinforce Kit’s integrity in that area and should let me build up even more dissolution magic within.

With that idea so obviously before her, she looked to the soulbound storage, focusing on the dangling lung.

As she built the mental model for the space’s reality-nodes, Tala stepped into her sanctum, hardly even thinking about the motion. She didn’t even need to open a portal to arrive in the same spot that she’d meditated beside Rane a few days earlier.

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As she dropped into a cross legged position, she placed the still sleeping Terry on her lap.

Let’s get to work.

* * *

Tala practically sprinted out of her sanctum at the very edge of the area that she could exit from. That was about halfway to Mistress Cerna’s and Master Clevnis’s house. So that put her a bit ahead, allowing her to slow her pace a bit.

Around the brute-force work of augmenting the reality-nodes of her artificial lung, she had spent the remainder of the night working within grid-place 0000… she was getting sick of it, honestly. But that was okay. She was getting faster.

After all, if she could get fast enough to do a grid location in full every hour, she would be done in just under two hundred thousand years.

…This is ridiculous.

-Just a bit, yeah.-

So… figure out a different approach? Please?

-I will do my best… To be fair, though, you were diverting most power to augment the reality-nodes within your artificial lung. You’re still doing that even now.-

That’s true. I do want it done soon, though. I’m devoting a lot more power to it than I did for the sparring ring before. It should unify much sooner because of that.

-That’s true. It also gave us greater incentive to be more efficient with our cellular linking.-

Also true. The combination of the two had made her completely forget about getting any rest.

Tala didn’t need to sleep every night, but she liked to grab at least a couple of hours whenever possible. She needed it even less after her most recent inscription update, but that didn’t really change her mindset on the activity. Unfortunately, she’d been so obsessively working on trying to make the process faster that she had run hard up against the time for breakfast with Rane and their defensive unit leaders.

She’d also gotten messages from master Lisa and Mistress Ingrit during the night. She and Rane had spoken with Ingrit a bit, beyond just stopping through the Archon Compound’s Library to set up his Archive connection, but there hadn’t been too much to do besides catch up and make sure there weren’t any glaring issues with the current way of things.

As it was, Mistress Ingrit was still gate-keeping Tala’s memories against those who were interested, making sure that they had good reason and sufficient capacity to view them before arranging a workable price—be that in gold, favors owed, tasks accomplished, or information in exchange. That was all that Tala really needed from the woman, and she was grateful to not have to be handling any of that herself.

The message had just been a confirmation of receipt of the most recent memories having to do with augmenting her own reality-nodes pull toward itself. A small note was appended to the end, asking Tala to be careful and set up safeguards if she chose to try anything like that again.

Tala responded, assuring the woman that she would do just that.

Master Lisa’s message had simply said that he would consider the offer and asked for some more specific information to aid in his decision making process.

So, altogether, the messages hadn’t contained anything too groundbreaking.

Tala arrived at the street outside of Mistress Cerna and Master Clevnis’ place at nearly the same time Rane did. That wasn’t some sort of a cute coincidence either. They’d been coordinating through the Archive in order to time their arrivals.

Rane was getting much better at using his Archive connection, his new inscriptions coming into play to great effect in that regard.

He hadn’t ended up with an alternate interface like Alat quite yet. Instead, his own mental augmentations simply allowed him to process through his various mental tasks much more efficiently and quickly. The addition of the secondary consciousness would come later, once these augmentations had fully set.

Alat had been a bit sad to learn that, but she knew that it was better to do it right than to force it early. She, herself, had grown and morphed over time, and it made sense that a different mind would need a different path to develop.

Truthfully, most Archons never had anything like the inscriptions required for Alat. In many cases, it was because they weren’t of a mental temperament for it to be feasible, but even more simply didn’t see the need for a secondary consciousness taking up mental resources.

True, it was nice to offload some things, but that wasn’t required for most things by any stretch of the imagination.

Both Tala and Alat readily admitted that the maintaining of Alat’s separate consciousness within Tala’s mind was a drain on their resources. They simply both agreed that having two consciousnesses to approach things was more efficient. Though, truthfully, that mainly meant that Alat worked on things in the background while Tala devoted her less expanded mind to maintaining their day to day activities and interactions.

They both liked it that way even if not everyone would. The greatest additional benefit was a more robust protection against mind magics, but as those were vanishingly rare, helped along in no small part thanks to her own actions on her last day at the House of Blood, most people didn’t see that as a factor. Tala most certainly did, even if she would likely never encounter such a threat again.

Happy thoughts, Tala. Happy thoughts.

All that to say, Rane had opted for the more common variations of mental enhancements and Archive connection as a first step, but he was hoping to bifurcate his consciousness in the future, when it made sense with his particular schema and mindset.

Wait… does that mean he’s smarter than us?

-No, dear, that means that he’s smarter than you—and probably a bit smarter than me—in raw capacity, but no, he is not ‘smarter’ than us together.-

Tala felt herself smile at that.

Regardless, they arrived at basically the same time, exchanging a quick hug and a few words of greeting before they turned and knocked on the unit-leaders’ door side by side.

* * *

The next two weeks passed without much to mark them, as Tala and Rane continued to spend intentional time together, as well as dedicated time apart to work on their own things.

They met and dined with their friends and unit-mates around their duties and training, and generally just settled into the lives of Refined Defenders during a waning.

Rane also took intentional care to invite Tala to spend time as just the two of them, whether that was a meal, a walk through the city or parks, a run through the countryside around Alefast, or even just a time sitting and reading or training side by side. If Tala was being honest, those times were usually the highlight of that day.

Tala woke up this particular morning excited. She was going to be spending the afternoon with Rane, but it was what they’d be doing that had her really excited this time.

Her test wall-segments were ready for her perusal… or they would be around noon.

So, she had four hours before then, and then four hours to learn about the various aspects of the segments before her afternoon duty-shift.

Alright. Breakfast first.

Mistress Petra had a spread of food ready for her, which she dug into with gusto. It was as delectable as usual, though it had yet more magical power within. Kedva and Mistress Petra were working to improve the power-retention of the various imbued foods provided by Tala’s sanctum, and they were actually beginning to have some real progress.

After breakfast, Tala moved through her usual stretching and morning training, mentally and magically working on her augmentation of internal gravity throughout.

She’d taken a break from the reality-node augmentation within her artificial lung a few days earlier, even though she'd observed no ill effects.

As to the augmentation of her internal gravity attractions, she and Alat had found some shortcuts so that she could actually complete ten grid-locations every hour with ease, even when otherwise engaged. Now, she was only looking forward to just shy of twenty thousand years of work.

Progress is progress, we’ve removed nearly one hundred eighty thousand years of work with only a few weeks of efficientizing and reconceptualizing.

-That’s right! We’re awesome.-

Looked at in that way, she should be able to finish rather quickly… if she could continue to rearrange her thinking and figure out how to make it come together more quickly.

One of the big changes that they’d realized was to figure out everything that needed to be attracted toward thing A, and augment all of those gravitational constants at once, rather than trying to conceive of everything that A needed to be attracted toward.

Honestly, that reframing alone had been most of her efficiency increase, and she felt like she was missing out on at least a couple more things that would increase her speed just as much.

That would only leave me with two hundred years of work.

-Hey! You’ll live at least that long, more likely than not.-

Yeah, there were still a lot of things to figure out.

When noon finally came, she was already at the Constructionist Guild compound, allowing her to knock on the entrance to the testing room precisely on time.

Terry was on her shoulder, and Rane was by her side, both boys seemingly quite excited to see what had been cooked up for her.

Terry was likely interested because of the simple, fun nature of seeing new magical things.

Rane had admitted that that was part of it for him as well, but he also had an eye toward his own mobile defensive segments, whenever he had earned enough to commission a set for himself.

That’s fine. I want him to be able to get what works the best for him, whether or not I think it works the best for me, or if the ideas came from my own commissioned pieces. Honestly, to want otherwise would be a bit silly.

Who would want their friend to be weaker just because an idea that could make them stronger wasn’t original or theirs to begin with? How much more so with someone who was more than a friend?

As to why he wanted them? Well, they would be useful in the Leshkin war, which they both fully intended to participate in. Before that, there would be cells in which they were useful, and there were uncounted one-off times they might be useful. Most of those could be handled by Tala having a set, but he had expressed a desire for his own, and Tala saw no reason to argue.

The doors swung open at Tala’s knock, revealing quite an interesting scene before them.