I keep finding answers in the place I’m not looking, Lilijoy thought as she flew through the air. She pulled in her legs to speed her rotation, then extended them as she landed on an unfortunate wirry-squirrel. So Shadow was Emily’s companion. Should I assume it’s the same Shadow who later followed Eskallia? And who might be pulling the strings behind Magpie and Raven? It’s all so tenuous.
She landed a series of jabs, knocking away the squirrel that was leaping for her throat, then rolled to the side. Anda had asked her to refrain from using Qi, and to keep Flash to a minimum so that the others could follow her movements. Lilijoy was happy to oblige, though she was feeling excited to move on with her day. While the Mystic Library was beckoning, she wasn’t in a huge hurry to revisit Eskallia’s somewhat depressing state of mind, so she had decided that she would spend the rest of the day crafting, training, and goofing off. It was the last of those she was most excited about.
In truth, she wasn’t really sure what goofing off might entail, but she was hoping that Attaboy, or maybe Skria would have some ideas. Maybe I can whip up some kind of glider and sneak up to the Academy roof. That might be fun.
She kicked another squirrel as she regained her feet, then spun and ducked, causing two leaping squirrels to collide over her head. Maybe I should wrap this up.
“Hey Anda!” she called. “Anyone else want a turn?”
There were seven wirry-squirrels still attacking her, the others were now strewn about the clearing in various stages of mortality. The creatures were quite single-minded, stupidly aggressive really, and when the first of the Fogeys entered the clearing they were immediately attacked. Lilijoy was impressed, and a little proud, to see them hold off the leaping rodents with wooden buckler shields and clubs, taking stances that were close to balanced. The rest of the battle wasn’t short, and it wasn’t pretty, but ultimately the last wirry-squirrel fell under the combined blows of the entire group.
A rousing cheer went up from the group, followed by groans and complaints about backs and hips.
“A man can take a few scratches and bites,” said Mr. Sennit, “but I haven’t needed to bend like that in twenty years.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Lilijoy whispered to Anda as she watched them hobble around the clearing.
“They just need some experience to prime the pump,” he replied. “After they get a few levels this way, they can get out of their ruts, raise up their crafting skills. They’re never going to be great fighters, but they’re all at least close to Master level in a skill or two. They just need mana, and to raise their magi skills in their main craft, or secondary crafts if they’re topped off in the main one.”
He nodded toward Mr. Sennit. “Take our friend over there. His mana is a third of what he needs to actually use his skill to its full potential, and he’s also a Natural Journeyman herbalist for goodness sake. Once he gets those issues taken care of, he’ll be earning experience from all the new creative avenues that open up for him.”
“I see what you mean about priming the pump,” Lilijoy said. “They need experience to get experience. But it’s going to be slow going for a little while.”
“Not as slow as you might think,” he said. He raised his voice. “Raise your hand if you leveled up!”
Five hands, some shakier than others, made their way upward.
“There, you see,” Anda said, turning back to Lilijoy. “Getting up to level ten won’t take long at all, and for some of them, that will be double where they started. For folks of this age, new experiences allow them to recontextualize what they already know, at least that’s my working theory. Some of them gained a level just by basic weapons training, which I’d never seen before.”
“Be careful Anda,” Lilijoy said with a grin. “If this gets out, suddenly all the clans will start waiting until their kids are seventy before sending them in.”
Anda shrugged. “You never know. They’ve tried some pretty crazy things to game the system over the years. My old clan tried raising a generation almost entirely on the Inside.” He shuddered. “It didn’t work out well.”
“You don’t mean...” Lilijoy was mildly appalled. Then she decided to strike the ‘mildly’.
“Yes… they gave the children systems really young, like five, six. The only time they spent Outside was for eating and exercise. The goal was to make unstoppable warriors for the clan’s Inside development, but instead they got mental illness, stagnated growth and… other weirdness. It’s one of the reasons the Maasai now send in their youth relatively late.”
Lilijoy was almost afraid to ask. “Other weirdness?”
Anda grimaced. “It’s all campfire stories at this point, a forbidden topic. Some of them refused to log out and their Outside bodies eventually died. The rumor is that they became ghosts on the Inside, demons who hunted any young child from the clan who came in. Others became… detached from their Outside bodies, changing their Inside forms in impossible ways. When they would log out, they were violent and unpredictable, and many of them were eventually killed on the Outside.”
“That’s horrible,” Lilijoy said.
“I don’t know the real truth of it,” said Anda. “It happened a couple generations before I was born. In the aftermath the leadership of the clan changed and there was a far more traditional mindset. For the most part the older clan members refuse to speak of it.” He lapsed into silence, watching Mr. Anderson, the tanner’s assistant, and Mrs. Chang process the bodies of the wirry-squirrels.
“Well, I should see if anyone needs healing,” Lilijoy said, feeling a little bad she hadn’t done so immediately.
***
Not much later, Lilijoy sat in the tall grass next to the fields of the Academy. The plants enclosing her whispered gently in the wind, blocking her sight of anything but the sky above. It was a perfect getaway to work on her hand weaving, surrounded as it was by the raw materials she would need. Before starting, she pulled up her character sheet, eager to see any changes. Several days before she had disabled all notifications, deciding that she preferred to interact with the Inside as naturally as possible, and also for moments like these, which she considered small gestures toward the path of joyful anticipation.
----------------------------------------
Name: Emily Level: 16
Defender of the Young
Dark Lady of the Thorns
Blessed of Nandi
Awakener
Free Points: 22* (2 + 20 Direct)
HP: 102
Natural Traits
STR: 23 (44 effective)
END: 59
SPD: 57 (177 effective)
KA: 152
Magical Traits
POW: 18 (+90% STR)
INV: 41
VIT: 20
FLASH: 42 (+210% SPD)
MW: 129
MG: 10%/100 Sec.
Elemental Affinities/Immunities
Fire: 33
Earth: 60
Water: 30
Air: 28
Charm:
People: 34
Plants: 78
Animals: 67
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Abilities
Scan III (Universal)
Echolocation IV (Uncommon)
Infrared Vision III (Uncommon)
Low Light Vision II (Common)
Two Minds One Self (-) (Unique)
Earthen Sense I (Very Rare)
Mana Manipulation (Rare)
Skills (VP)
Nature: Animals: Enhanced Journeyman (25)
Nature: Plants: Enhanced Journeyman (25)
Unarmed Combat: Enhanced Journeyman (25)
Acrobatics: Enhanced Journeyman (25)
Meditation: Upgraded Journeyman (10)
Manipulation: Augmented Apprentice (9)
Stealth: Augmented Apprentice (9)
Medical/Healing: Augmented Apprentice (9)
Weapons: Blade: Short: Augmented Apprentice (9)
Weapons: Blunt: Club: Augmented Apprentice (9)
Climbing: Upgraded Apprentice (6)
Deception: Augmented Apprentice (6)
Hand Weaving: Upgraded Apprentice (6)
Weapons: Projectile: Sling: Upgraded Apprentice (6)
Gliding/Flight: Upgraded Initiate (4)
Teaching: Natural Initiate (2)
Disguise: Natural Novice (1)
Dance: Natural Novice (1)
Magic
Source:
Clades:
Classes: Fused
Spells:
----------------------------------------
Everything was as she had left it, with the exception of the one thing she had hoped to see. Her Sling skill had moved to the Apprentice level, which made her unreasonably happy. She had added the magic categories to her sheet as a reminder of the mystery that was Fused, an orphaned class that shouldn’t be there.
Or it should be there? If Nandi’s Boon is a source of some kind, why doesn’t it show up on my sheet now that I can use it? If it’s not a source, then what the heck is going on?
She had discovered a direct correlation between her ability to use Nandi’s Boon and her diamond-colored mana, or rather the emotions that added that particular color to her soul vortex. She understood that all of her internal visualizations were, in a sense, metaphors. They were symbolic representations of what was actually going on that she had created for herself, and she couldn’t help but feel like her metaphor was becoming a bit disconnected from the truth. It didn’t help that she couldn’t really tell which aspects were from her system, which were from the Inside, and which were from her own imagination.
Let’s see. I have a mana well, or core, which collects mana from the environment. From that I can pull threads and make spindles, which are kind of like specialized sub-cores I need to maintain. I can manipulate the mana from my core in a variety of ways, play with its consistency, spin it, keep in my body or project it, depending on what type it is. The different types of mana have different colors and characteristics, and I can’t tell how much of that was arbitrary.
She knew that everyone seemed to have their own visualization for mana, or even used different sense models altogether. As far as she could tell, some models worked better than others, and she had been able to help her friends use their skills more effectively by helping them adjust how they thought about their mana. It seemed that one’s imaginations of how things worked needed to line up with some underlying reality.
Except it also seemed like the mana system was responsive to the imagination, that the map could affect the territory to some extent. Perhaps it was even possible that different people had entirely different rules, their own unique powers and limitations determined by their own assumptions and creativity. According to what Emily had told her, it wasn’t impossible that the Outside worked that way as well, but with a greatly reduced degree of freedom. The universe was inclined to be flexible until it was pinned down.
She put that speculation to the side and returned her thoughts to the Inside and her understanding of mana. For environmental mana, the ambient energy produced by just about everything around her, it was the same story, or so she assumed, that those who could sense it understood it in differing ways that made sense to them.
Then there was her soul vortex, which started out entirely within the Tao System, or between her system and her imagination anyway. Now it seemed to be crossing over to the Inside as well, presenting a kind of three-body problem of mutual influence. Except the distinction between the Tao System and the Inside no longer seemed so clear. After all, if Guardian had originally shaped the Inside for Emily, that could explain why Lilijoy could send messages and check external feeds and do all the other things the other users couldn’t.
That’s it, she realized. The soul vortex has been a part of the Inside since the beginning. In fact, the way the Insiders work is probably modeled on many aspects of the Tao System. I’m not special; the other Outsiders just don’t fit as well as I do. Except that still doesn’t explain why Henry and Gabriella and whoever put a soul vortex into the Tao System in the first place.
Her thoughts kept returning to the biggest problems, but she refused to get trapped in speculation.
Whatever. They had their reasons. I just want to figure out how to use it for my own. So all my experiences get pulled in… no that’s not quite right. It’s collecting the experiences that match the Inside’s criteria for Experience, or something like it. Emotional experience. Meaningful experience. And then I can pull it out again and do… what? What am I even pulling out? More mana?
She thought about it for a moment, and then decided to call the energy in her soul vortex something different. Soul energy. It’s a little on the nose, but who cares? It’s related to using my mana. I can’t use the Boon without both. Does soul energy somehow unlock the Boon and allow me to use my mana to look in and pull things out?
Something didn’t feel right about that model, as if she had all the parts and labels mixed up. There were three things, or rather two kinds of related energy and a thing. Soul energy, the Boon and mana. Key, lock and action. Once she got rid of the parts and focused on the labels, her memory triggered, recalling the first class she had ever attended.
A key and a lock are used to open a door. For elemental magic, the mana is the key, or the thing that helps open the door, anyway. It determines how much energy can emerge and shapes it.The Source is, well the source of the energy.
It took her one more moment to realize where she had gone wrong. Nandi’s Boon acted like a door, a gate, so naturally her mind had assigned that label to it. But if she flipped it around…
The mana opens the soul vortex. The soul vortex is the source of the energy to power Nandi’s boon.
The soul vortex was a Source.
***
An hour passed, during which Lilijoy refined and tested her new model. Once she started looking at the soul vortex as a kind of Source, she realized that the Boon was acting as the Clade, Class, and Spell all rolled into one, that it was guiding her mana into different configurations to channel her Source energy. She also realized that this way of looking at things was still not exactly right, or rather that the comparison with elemental magic was a bit flawed.
For one, it seemed that in elemental magic, the Source simply was. A fire Source had an inate and endless supply of raw fire energy, while in the case of her soul vortex, she was responsible for getting the energy in the first place, refining, storing and extracting it. Another obvious difference was that her soul vortex held many different types of emotional energy. Her best guess looking forward was that there would be incentives to specialize.
Actually, I guess I already have an incentive. Nandi’s Boon works with joyful anticipation, so of course I’m going to want to focus on that, she realized. There’s probably something like affinities too. I wonder if the other emotions just go to waste, or if they can be used, converted or something.
She could already tell there was a great deal to learn, but that only kindled her excitement. It made her wonder how anyone could cultivate something like apathy. Maybe Mumo could give me some insight on that one? There were so many new things to think about and to try, she was practically vibrating. Could she learn to use her Fused class to visit her Trial space? Was there any way to quantify how much energy she could use? Why didn’t using the Boon use up her own mana? Would she be able to duplicate some of the Boon’s powers on her own?
She opened her eyes after a long period of introspection and spent a few minutes enjoying her peaceful setting. Laying down on her back she could see the clear blue sky framed by the waving grass, and hear the distant voices at the various arenas.
Emily was right, she decided. It is magical. Even with its dark and disgusting side, the mysteries and the intrigue, the Inside is magical.
The contrast with the Outside couldn’t be more clear at moments like these. With one set of eyes she looked through the clear canopy of the hovercar, at dun clouds and twisted, scrubby vegetation, while her other eyes traced a yellow butterfly dancing across her view. She took a deep breath of fresh air, while monitoring her system as it worked to remove environmental toxins and repair cellular damage from her trip across the blighted plain of the former space port.
Is it even worth it? she wondered. What if we could all just move here, do whatever was needed to turn this into a self-sustaining universe? Is that what Guardian is trying to do while it maintains the Outside?
It was an intriguing notion, as an idle fantasy anyway. If it was presented to her as a choice, she knew she couldn’t abandon the Outside, the plants and animals who valiantly struggled to survive, the millions of humans who didn’t have systems. She reached out and plucked a long green blade of grass and wound it around her finger as she thought.
Is that why Guardian hasn’t done more to help the Outside? Does it consider it a waste of effort?
She knew there was one place she could go if she wanted the answer to that question, and so many of the other questions that had arisen from her talk with Emily. Fifteen hundred miles to the north there was a terminal.
All right, Attaboy, she thought. Looks like I’m joining your quest.