Ruventha idly hummed the tune to one of her favourite songs as she watched the sky. The spirit bubble taking her home wasn't a higher end model. It knew her usual routes perfectly, but it couldn't talk to her or do anything to keep her company.
Her dad had always been somewhat stingy, with both money and Mana, but he had bought her her first personal transporter to celebrate graduation.
She closed her eyes and recalled her favourite snip of the event. In her mind's eye, she was looking at herself, three years ago, dressed in the special white and gold themed graduation dress. Her arms were around her proud parents, smiling brightly. As a celebratory tune played, the spirit given proof of her efforts was displayed above her head in bright silver letters.
Congratulations!
Class Upgrade:
Level 10 [Student of Water] -> Level 1 [Adult]
That was one of her favourite memories. That was when she was officially no longer a child.
The next day, she was gifted her own personal spirit bubble, bought for a whopping 5000 gems. It was quite basic, but she'd insisted on controllable noise cancellation, opacity and seating options. She liked to dance sometimes when on a trip and didn't want her Unskilled steps to be observed by travellers.
It took an hour to travel from the paper making business she worked at to her house and at her current speed, she was just over halfway home. Sarasoor was just a Level 4 [Town], not even specialised yet. There were only a few thousand people, most of whom were Untethered who couldn't use Mana. Even most big businesses didn't have teleporters. Though her workplace had one, the huge Mana cost meant that only a few uses were allowed per day, which of course went to the higher ups.
Ruventha grimaced when she recalled the smarmy office manager offering to let her teleport home at his expense. It was one of the first things the other women had warned her about when she'd started working there. Any girl who gave that guy an inch had to spend the next month fending off simpering offers to hang out at the arena his family managed.
She brought up the interface for her spirit bubble. Like any spirit item, it didn't have levels but it could be upgraded by taking it to the maker. The next upgrade would double it's speed, increase the size enough to allow three people to ride, and unlock a bunch of customisation options.
'Toggle-able undersea cosmetic aura? That sounds great!'
Unfortuantely, there were a couple of issues. One, it would increase the Mana upkeep cost from 100 to 150. She winced when she brought up her current Mana.
Mana: 230/230 [510]
Yeah, her usable Mana would go down to 180. It was manageable. She could unlink some the stuff from her Equipspace. Maybe a couple of dresses and shoes? Yeah no, she's not doing that. 180 would have to do.
Getting to Level 5 would increase her max by another 100, so she'd just have to wait. The bigger problem was the 2000 gem upgrade cost. She'd only managed to save around 2500 gems from the two years at her job and she didn't want to blown most of it on a single item upgrade.
'Maybe I can convince mum to get it for me. After all, she's been nagging me to find a guy, and a better ride would help.'
She was startled as she got a live chat request from her mum at that exact moment. She smiled wryly as she accepted and the live window opened up at eye level. "Hey amma! I was just thinking about you."
The chat window displayed an older woman in her fifties, with nut brown skin showing a few wrinkles and greying black hair tied back with a simple band. The view angle was too close, as usual, with her face taking to the whole window.
"Amma! You're too close. No, no, moving back won't fix it. Think about the viewpoint showing you like a picture frame."
Ruventha smiled as her mum adjusted the angle once more. Her family had become spirit touched only one generation back, so most of her family were still not that great at all the nuances of using Mana. Her mother used to call her from an unlinked handheld device till a few years back.
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"I think it's ok now. You've left the office right? You'll have to show me how to make this view thing default when you get home, Ruvi. You know the town was only Level 3 when I went to school. They didn't teach us all the things you kids know nowadays."
Ruventha, affectionately nicknamed Ruvi, laughed. "Yeah, yeah. In great-grandma's time, this whole town was Untethered and she'd have to go past the cloud wall to even find anyone who knew about Mana. I've heard it all before.”
Her mother scowled. ”Hmph, well, I'll laugh at you when, one day soon, you see your children doing things with Mana you don't understand.”
Ruventha groaned. "Come on! Why are you bringing every conversation to the topic of marriage and kids? I just hit twenty. You know, people in high level cities live longer and don't think about this stuff till they're forty years old."
"Sarasoor isn't one of those, sorry. Anyway, I didn't just bring this up just to annoy you. My cousin got us in touch with a family he knows. They're looking for someone for their son. He told me their family worked as spirit appointed guardians to Untethered towns!"
Ruventha controlled her expression. It's not like she was never going to settle down, but ever since she got her class shifted to [Flow Shaper] a year back, her parents had started pressuring her to find someone. She was a bit shy, and her family didn't approve of dating anyway. In their eyes, it was their duty to find a good match and apparently, as a girl, she had a best-before age that was rapidly approaching. Some things, not even Mana solve.
"Ugh, fine, but like I told you, I have my own expectations, so don't go fixing everything before I've had a look at the guy's info myself."
Her mother beamed, accepting her silent capitulation. "Oh don't worry. Nothing is confirmed yet. You come home and freshen up. The guy's mother wants to live chat with us after you're home."
Ruventha frowned. "Is this some weird power play? Like, they get to see me, but their son is too precious to be paraded about willy-nilly? They sound like those old fashioned traditional families where the men are everything great and the women are second place."
Her mum just literally handwaved her concerns away. "No it's nothing like that. The guy and his father are working in some other city and are out of contact. It's just a basic info exchange so she didn't see a reason to wait for them to be available. You don't have to meet her today. I just said I'll call after you're home in case they have some questions about your class and things like that. Ok get here soon. Your father is making coffee and I'm going to go have some."
Her mother ended the call and Ruventha say back, thinking. No one knew what came first, but long ago, before people even started writing things down, spirits appeared. Along came Mana, classes, skills, attributes and everything else associated with the spirits.
However, not everyone got to enjoy these new benefits. Spiritholme, the only place in the world with the [World's Sanctuary] designation, was the place the spirits first appeared. From there, people chosen by the spirits travelled, some settling in Untethered places people already lived in and making them spirit touched. This gave those places a designation, similar to a class, and spread Mana and all it's benefits to the population. Others went even further and gathered scattered people living at the edge of the Wilds and created new spirit touched places.
These people, with rare exceptions, were men, as the pre-Mana world was one in which men were better placed to travel. Only as Mana spread further, and classes and attributes got better understood, did people learn how Mana helped people break past their Untethered limits. Afterwards, women too took up exploring and combat in the wild.
But in places where like Sarasoor, which became spirit touched only a few decades back, the old attitudes of men being better suited for the outside world still lingered. Even today, people with classes which excelled as guardians as explorers were seen as high status, as they were the ones who brought the miracles of Mana to the Untethered world.
'Ugh. This [Guardian] family would probably be something my parents would only be too happy to snap up as future relatives. There are no women like Maya here to change the people's attitudes.'
Ruventha, like most girls of her generation, idolized figures like the Scylla, the [Zenith of Wind] and Maya, the [Scorching Mirage], legendary women who travelled to arid deserts and ash-choked valleys and established safe zones for both people and wild plants and animals that were much rarer to find. Level 8 and 9 [Sanctuaries] today, which supported hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of domesticated plants and animals were once fledgling Level 1 [Settlements] named after these pioneers.
Ruventha knew that she probably wouldn't ever do things like that, but a girl could dream. 'Even if I have to get married, I need to move away to a higher tier place. Didn't the local town chapter of Upgrade Studies say Sarasoor would take a couple of generations to reach Level 10 and upgrade to [City]? Yeah, there's no way I'm willing to wait that long to experience that life.'
As her spirit bubble took her home, Ruventha wondered what this guy would be like. She had live chatted with potential suitors before, but those times had been a bust.
'I swear, if this one turns out to be anything like that oh-so-successful Level 6 [Soothing Breeze] guy who turned out to be a balding thirty year old, I'm going to run for the hills.' She looked at the towering kilometres high wall of clouds visible to the far north, mirrored by another cloud wall to the far south. These two bands of clouds stretched horizon-to-horizon and were unbroken throughout the known world. [Explorers] had brought images of mountain chains beyond the clouds, separating the civilized world from the unlivable and cataclysmic lands beyond. 'Yup, going there wouldn't be worse than ending up with a guy like that.’
The spirit bubble rippled, making minute adjustments to it's transparency and filtration levels while steadfastly rolling under the glaring sun. Inside, a young woman was moving towards the next step of her exciting future.