Morning, First of One, Harvest, 236 CR

After a perfunctory breakfast, I spent the morning after my first Ease in my workshop, feeling especially cranky, gloriously happy, and tremendously inspired.

“It’s fine,” I wound up saying for the third time, fifteen minutes into the workday. “Seriously, everything is fine and more than fine.”

“Sophie, I know that Ketka got pulled away on her day off. But—”

“Kelly, I’m not a teenager. Even if I hadn’t heard Deoro’s tone of voice, I can tell when something’s an emergency.”

“Then…”

“I got like… maybe three hours of sleep by the time Deoro woke us up.” I shot her a smirk, feeling it grow across my face. “And only about two hours of that was consecutive.”

“Sophie!” Kelly was going for scandalized, but a brilliant dissembler she wasn’t, and all she got from me was a waggle of my eyebrows. “Sleep,” she said with stern delight, “is important for brain function, and you should have slept separately if you were going to sleep so little.”

“We split the enchantments, huh.”

“Please tell me you at least hydrated properly!”

“God smite me if I lie, Ketka didn’t even have to make me. I’d have died of—”

“Nope, nope, zip it! Forget I asked, what are we working on?”

I paused at that, taking a deep breath and enjoying the bubbling sense of joy that threatened to make my hips wiggle and my voice break into a random mix of bizarre or dadaist music. “We’ve got two different things, but they both work together. One’s new, one’s a question of scale.”

Kelly made a beckoning gesture, and I obligingly handed her my notebook, flipped open to the appropriate page. I rested my elbows on my workspace as she perused it, humming tunelessly as I deliberately resisted the urge to whistle. Being me, I figure I can do, I told the song that was stuck in my head. Be what I’m like? Done.

“—Sophie, herder calls in the plains, Sophie, hello!”

“Hi, yes, hi!” I jolted to attention, blushing furiously. “Sorry, um. Just, you know. Distracted.”

“Hmph. You don’t need to apologize for that.” Kelly hugged me, a brief sideways sort of hug, almost more just to unnecessarily reinforce the statement than anything else. “This is… ambitious, but really interesting?”

“It should be doable,” I protested. “This is just the broad strokes. Obviously it’s going to take experimentation and iteration to actually get it working, but the principles are all straightforward expansions of what we’ve already proven out. Just… at scale.”

The mechanisms, Spark agreed, appear as simple extensions of the ones previous. But the ultimate purpose is one beyond the Knowledge, so far as available information suggests. Still, even the initial component will result in growth of skill and expertise—and such can be applied to all endeavors, should this present aim falter.

“Okay, Spark, I get it, no need to nip my heels. But why the—hm.” She turned her head back to the notebook, probably-unconsciously turning her body a little bit with the motion. Tucking her back into my side, she murmured to herself, head tilted a little. “It’s connected, isn’t it. If it weren’t connected, if you didn’t need the first one in order to do the second, you wouldn’t have them in the same flow, you wouldn’t have said they work together.”

“I looked up the standard synthesis for multivariate mana battery crystallization, and I’m not trying to compete with it.” I let my Kelly-side hand rest on her hip, pulling her lightly towards me for just that little bit more physical contact; glutted as I was, I was somehow craving it even more.

It wasn’t a sexual thing. In that regard, I was utterly satisfied and content, at least for the moment. It was more just… a need for touch, an anchor in the world of the present.

Even with that, I acknowledged to myself, I was drifting more than a little.

“Okay! I feel like I should be getting this, but I’m not.” Kelly detangled herself from me, almost shoving the notebook into my hands before catching herself and handing it over more gently. “Do the thing!”

I raised an eyebrow at her, then did my best attempt at the Shemmai expression for what I was feeling—a tilt of the shoulders, an inclination back of the head. “The thing?”

“The one where you say something totally ridiculous but also totally reasonable,” Kelly explained with a tone appropriate to teaching small children, “and then we turn a bunch of, okay, totally replaceable equipment into dust, and I keep you from working too much.”

“I’m not gonna say that’s not gonna happen.” I grinned widely at her, dropping the notebook on my desk and starting to pace. “Actually, given the first thing we’re going to do, we’re probably going to do a lot of the turning equipment into dust thing you mentioned. Because I remember studying it back yonder, and… you know what? I can’t just jump straight into this as a practical thing. First, I need to teach you about phase diagrams.

“Because this is going to be…” I paused, smirking. “Supercritical.”

It only took Kelly most of the way through the first stage of the explanation to start glaring at me. A clear win for both of us.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

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“Hitz!”

“Nadash. Avara.”

I paused at the door to the warehouse as Kelly went on ahead of me. Was that… there’d been the obvious warmth in their voice when they’d said her name, but that was only to be expected—it was Kelly, after all. Maybe it was because she possessed that essential and ineffable Kelly-ness that so affected everyone, myself included, but she had a uniquely close relationship with them.

I’d known that from my second day in Kibosh, just under a fortnight ago—or, measured differently, a lifetime ago. Kan’s reaction to the very suggestion that we might borrow Hitz’s workshop had made it abundantly clear that Kelly’s ability to do so was… unusual.

That was what had made it a bigger deal than I’d expected when Waselle, the forge-striker whom I’d barely known before sitting down at the table with her for Ease lunch, had named me one of Hitz’s friends. The taciturn, scarred-to-shit Kandashi hadn’t disagreed with her, either, and now they were smiling at me, even if minutely.

“Hitz.” I lingered outside, grinning at them and letting the happiness of knowing that I had friends—amazing, wonderful friends—mix with the rest of it all. “It’s good to see you, too.”

They grunted, one side of their face turning up a little bit more. “Seeker, huh. Heard worse names.”

Did they but levy bare featherweights more approbation upon us, the Demiurge might well open long-absent eyes to bear witness.

“From you,” I said, “that’s a mighty compliment. Spark and I both are deeply touched that you think we did well.”

“Zing’s playing tonight.”

The seeming non-sequitur grabbed my attention like a magnesium flare. “Seriously? I thought she was already gone. Ketka said that the warmup song was the most any of us would hear from her.”

“Changed her mind, didn’t say why. Hour before sunset, dead zone ‘round the dungeon. Got me’n that Bard boy with her.”

“The dead zone around the dungeon. Just to make sure I understand right, we’re talking about the place inside the walls of the five Pillars, the one place I was told I should never go under any circumstances.”

The logistics expert who was also the best drummer whose music I’d ever experienced shrugged at me, smirking as wide as their usual scowl. “Go or don’t. Tell Avara, I’m busy.”

“I, uh, wanted to buy—”

“The fuck I just say?” Their usual scowl reformed on their face, though it seemed a little forced. “She knows what’s priced, and the rest ain’t for selling today.”

“Gotcha.”

I hesitated before taking that last step towards the door. A careful glance at Hitz as they settled back onto the bench they were sitting on was… worrying. There was a strain to them, leaving them visibly stiffer than they’d been anytime I’d seen them before and in a degree of pain that they weren’t perfectly masking.

Still, that was their business, and by the narrowing of their eyes, they absolutely didn’t want me prying. I wasn’t about to disrespect that; I’d lived with chronic pain, and I knew how pissy it could make a person… and how much peoples’ unwelcome insistence on talking about it grated.

“In a few days,” I said instead, “I’m gonna have a few questions about the effects of magical reagents on phase transitions. Not urgent ones, but it’d save a bunch of reagents if I could verify instead of explore.”

I didn’t wait to see or hear their response; it felt right to just drop that and step through, like I was downplaying things as part of apologizing for staring. Which I am, I guess, I thought to myself in the infinitesimal moment of total disorientation as I stepped through.

As always, there wasn’t even a heartbeat of dizziness or nausea after I finished getting through the door. There was only the memory of it, compressed into a timeless flash whose experience defined my knowledge that it didn’t last—a chronon’s breadth when a dozen or so warehouses were superimposed into one and I had to scan through them and choose.

I chose the one that Kelly was in, which was very convenient of her.

As with all of the others, it was a vast, sprawling building about ten times the size of the exterior. This one was one open space with rows upon rows of storage units, most shoved up against each other without any ability to get at the ones behind them. There were thousands of them, most of them racks of bins that were angled just enough to be able to see through their transparent tops, but there was no small amount of stuff being racked vertically or horizontally.

What there wasn’t was a lot of books, which was extremely convenient.

“Over here!”

I grinned at Kelly—she’d felt me come in somehow, but she hadn’t bothered looking back, just waved at me without turning and called out.

“As obvious as the index is, even I can see where we’re headed.” I drifted over, trying to stifle the impulse to just go wander and look at everything in no particular order—we were on a schedule, and I was already getting hungry. “So, you’ve been around me for a bit, and you’ve been there for all my experiments.”

She glanced over at me, then huffed disdainfully, tilting her head back and to the side—I hadn’t seen that one before. “Yes, Sophie?”

“Care to guess what we’re looking for first?”

“I thought that’s what you were gonna say!” Her voice was a mix of pep and grumbling, forced and otherwise. An awareness of that odd blend showed on her face, and she took a deep breath, paused for a moment, and let it out. “Not sure,” she said in a more normal, or normally Kelly, tone of voice. “I know we need a compressor for the next stage that you were talking about. I thought that’s what we were here for?”

“Yeah, I mean, we do need the compressor, but that stage is gonna involve some precursor work. It’s more like two stages from now, we need to grow our seed crop a bit bigger before we experiment with it. We’ve got a sun to do it with; let’s fill our… bellies?”

I could see the understanding start to spark across her face even as she snickered. “We need to teach you better metaphors,” she chided me. “But yeah! Are they…” Kelly paused, a genuine concern flashing in her eyes. “Are they going to be okay with that?”

“If there’s anything I know about the Tricksters,” I said with a shrug, “it’s that they all appreciate a good joke, even if it’s played on them. I could still give them a chance to object?”

“A chance to—Sophie. Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.” Kelly flipped through the index, beckoning me over. Her finger hand landed on essence channel (pumped, directional), and she was grinning properly at me for the first time that day. “Before we go even a single step further in this latest experiment, before we move an inch beyond just getting this gear to the workshop?

“Sitting in a circle, I think you said to Mera. That’s how we do it right, and that’s what we’re going to do—talk to your Tricksters, and talk to our Ascended. And if any of them don’t want to be part of what you want done…”

“Then I find a different way.” I grinned at her, glad to see her back; I’d missed her, even if it had been only one morning of a different, less intensely present Kelly. “I have backup plans, and even leaving the Tricksters aside, you’re absolutely right.

“Shmida, who annihilates, isn’t a God to be fucking around with.”