While the people within the wagon circle had gotten out unscathed, the wagons were another matter entirely. Several quills were stuck into the side of them, and a few had broken the wooden wheels wrapped in iron.

They had the spare parts to replace the wheels, but it would take hours to replace. So with some time to spare Seras decided now was a good time to ask a few questions.

Seeing real magic, something more impressive than her glowing finger, had somewhat shifted her opinion on the matter. If nothing else she needed to learn more about this world.

She approached Dustin and Flint who were resting to recover from their short battle, Flint more than Dustin.

“Something wrong?” Dustin asked as he saw Seras approaching.

“No, I just realized after your fight that I know nothing about magic. Nothing substantial anyway. I was hoping you might answer a few questions.” She said.

Flint scowled at her but Dustin nodded before Flint could say anything. “Alright, what’s on your mind?”

“I need to know more about essences, and our previous conversation was rudely interrupted.”

“Fair, what about’em?”

“Well for starters what are yours?”

“I’ve got Fire, scimitar, and Heidal. For the Outrider confluence. It’s a common essence for calvary men.”

“Were you a calvary man?” Seras asked, interrupting his explanation.

“No, I was just mentioning it offhand. I went for whatever common essences or awakening stone I could get my hands on, a lot of one stars, with a couple two stars. My first was the fire essence, my home kingdom is located within the caldera of a massive volcano so they’re common enough. I was lucky enough to get a storage ability which started me down my current career.”

Seras nodded “That’s what the sparks are? You using your storage power?”

“Yup.”

Seras thought about that. He could just summon things to himself without opening it up. Could she do the same. The thought had never occurred to her. She concentrated on one particular item, pale blue lines appeared in her hand forming the outline of a shard, the space within the lines filled in and Seras was holding the Celestial book awakening stone.

“What’s that?” Dustin asked.

“Its that awakening stone I mentioned before.”

“Strange looking awakening stone.” He said suspiciously.

“One of my Outworlder things lets me convert essences and awakening into shards, I can then slot it in and absorb it.”

“What’s a shard?” Flint asked, no longer capable of maintaining his silence.

Seras sent a mental command to her smart skin and it revealed a seam in her forearm.

Dustin and Flint flinched.

The compartment in her arm opened up the reveal rows of tightly packed shards emitting a soft blue light. She ordered one to be ejected from its slot.

Seras had once had a job that went so bad needed to lay low with no net access to prevent tracking. It had been three weeks of boredom that drove her mad. She had listened to all her downloaded music until she got sick of it, watched every movie and show until she knew all the lines, and even tried reading. After that she had decided to never again be in position like that again and had Petabytes of solid storage installed. She had storage in her arms, calves, neck, and behind her ribs.

She passed the shard to Dustin, who then handed it to Flint.

“Hard light storage, that there contains about a quarter of the music I have downloaded. I can pull that information up whenever I want to access it. Think of it as an entire library in the palm of your hand.”

“Library?”

“Hard light?”

Dustin and Flint both asked at the same time.

“Yeah, whole library, and a pretty large one too.”

“You said hard light,” Flint reiterated. “Like light, but hard?”

She nodded “Yeah, solid light, its super good at storing information. Most of the light you see is what we call soft-light, its got zero rest mass and bounces around a bunch. Hard light is light forcibly packed together into a solid form. On its own it would just fade away as soft light, but in a special container it stays put. The growth of the net and information outpaced silicon storage so we’ve been slowly switching over to hard-light over the last few years. I sprung for the Hard light shards because they could hold more a load data way faster than a normal shard.”

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Flint shook his head “I only understood a quarter of that.”

Dustin looked at the shard. “This is more of that Technology stuff you were talking about.”

“Yup. Anyway we take in new information with shards, I’ve got quick access slots on my neck that I use for new ones. My Outworlder abilities transform essences and awakening stones into shards so I can slot them in. How do you absorb them?”

“With a ritual” Flint accused, as if magic rituals were normal and not something that defied logic.

“We’re off topic again.” Dustin pointed out.

“Right, I just wanted to see if I could pull things out of my pocket space like you could.”

Dustin gave her a look. “You realize that its usually one way or another, not both. You can either open a hole into nowhere or summon and store things directly, I’ve not heard of an ability that does both.”

Seras shrugged “guess that’s just a me thing then, good thing I tried, or we might never know.”

“Right” Dustin said slowly. He passed back the shard and Seras popped it back in. They both looked noticeably less uncomfortable with it closed.

“So, the first two I get, but the Heidel essence-?” Seras inquired.

“All normal animals have an essence, mine funnily enough manifested in Jesse’s saddle while we were riding. Danm near threw me off because of it. I was five years into my career and had only made enough to buy the scimitar essence, getting another essence would mean a confluence essence and that would greatly boost my prospects as a trader. And as far as essences go, Heidel, is a danm good one for a man who essentially lives in the saddle. I got a familiar bonding essence power and formed a connection with Jesse. After that the awakening stones came much easier.”

Seras was beginning to notice that Dustin was much less a teacher and more a storyteller. His lessons coming through the experiences of his long and storied life.

“You said it manifested. How does that work?”

They exchanged a glance. This time Flint spoke up “Our world is full of magic, so full that it manifests directly. Mostly it manifests into unstable forms, monsters.”

Seras blinked “They’re not just really big, mutated animals?”

“No, they’re direct manifestations of pure magic. Like you, except they didn’t have a soul to form around when they came into being so they break down after a while.”

“Like me?” Seras asked.

Another glance. Dustin leaned in “Seras, when we had a whole conversation about you being reborn into our world, what did you think your body was made of?”

Seras frowned “Either my original matter that had been atomized and pulled through to this world with my soul, or spare atoms leached from the room I was in.”

Dustin frowned “I only got a bit of that, but no. Nothing can exist in the astral that isn’t either a soul or purely magical. Your original body stopped existing the moment you went in. and when you came out your soul needed a new vessel, so it pulled on a bunch of loose magic to rebuild your body.”

“How’s that possible I’m made of metal, are my limbs suddenly magical? Is there magic copper running through me now?”

“Don’t ask us, we’re just simple merchants.” Dustin held his hands up.

Flint nodded gravely. “In fact I think your mere existence would cause the magic society a greet deal of trouble since your particular manifestation would disprove about half of our magical theories.”

“You’re telling me. I just gave you a shard full of more information than you can imagine, it and all its data are still intact.” Seras considered the implications and then realized she had been holding something when she woke up “What about the Tech shard? Are you saying that it also reconstituted itself from a soul?” She had let that thing into her soul! Can a soul go into another soul?

Flint shook his head. “You’re not listening, essences are pure magic in a stable form. It wouldn’t have been effected.”

Seras felt her face flush, “oh. Right. Sorry that’s just one hell of a bomb shell to drop on a girl.”

“What’s a bomb shell?” Dustin asked.

“A multi-ton explosive you can drop from the air to kill a whole crowd of people.”

Flint scowled “That’s awful!”

“That’s war” Seras said bluntly. She was glad she was too young to remember the corpo wars.

Flint didn’t want to let it go “You said ‘people’ not soldiers. Are the people of your world so depraved to needlessly kill civilians?” he accused.

Seras met his eyes. “Yes, yes we are. We have singular weapons that can wipe out whole cities in the blink of an eye.” She pointed to the pass that had been carved by the power of a diamond ranker. “We make shit like that look small in comparison.”

Flint huffed and looked ready to burst. Dustin put a hand up to stop him. “Lets try to stay on track.” He said firmly.

Flint glared at Dustin, but shied away when Dustin met it with unyielding fortitude.

Dustin turned back to Seras “Your reaction is pretty typical from what I’m told, you’re the first ‘fresh’ Outworlder I’ve seen so I’m still a bit shaky on how to fully get you up to speed.”

“Yeah, that reminds me. You’ve mentioned knowing other Outworlder’s, and hearing the stories of other. Are we really that common?”

Dustin chuckled “Anywhere else in the world and you would be considered a once in a lifetime oddity. But here in the Five Deserts you’re just one more visitor from another world. You’re still uncommon, but here enough people have heard about Outworlders to know a thing or two.” He explained.

“Why here, what’s so special about this place?”

Dustin glanced to Flint who still looked upset. “You mind explaining this one?”

Flint sighed “Fine, your bad at the magic fundamentals anyway.” He turned a sour look on Seras “The five deserts and some of the surrounding land have a higher concentration of Outworlders because the dimensional membrane here is more malleable. It means we get more Outworlders, Astral spaces, and other dimensional oddity’s.”

“Why?” Seras asked, her curiosity peaked.

“You saw it for yourself, that cave system you explored outside the astral space is a special region we call the Labyrinth. It’s a vast cave system beneath our feet that’s impossible to map because the tunnels are always changing. Its an ancient natural formation that appeared some ten million years ago. It’s one of the reasons this region is as settled as it is, and as dangerous as it is.” Flint explained, becoming more animated despite his obvious dislike for Seras.

Seras frowned as she tried to recall the tunnels she had explored. “I didn’t notice any shifting tunnels.”

“It takes months for caves to close off or open up.” Dustin clarified “But it’s happening all the time, and everywhere so mapping is pointless.”

Flint nodded “A century ago the magic society tried to map out all the changes over the course of a decade, they said the end results bared a disconcerting resemblance to the patterns of the astral forces hitting bouncing off our universe. I barely understood one in ten of the words from that paper, but apparently it was big news for magic researchers.”

Seras thought about that. “So this labyrinth thing pulls in more Outworlders than anywhere else?”

“Yes” Dustin said.

“No” Flint said at the same time.

They glared at each other.

“What do you mean no? It does just so.” Dustin said.

“No it doesn’t. The Labyrinth is just a more likely place for stray souls to enter our world because its more permeable to loose souls, it doesn’t pull anything.”

“Semantics” Dustin spat.

“Semantics are everything in the discussion of higher magical forces.”

Seras laughed “I’m very aware of how contentious terminology can be. Back to the discussion at hand, this region has more Outworlders than any where else, what does that mean for me. Is there some sort of Outworlder Society I can go check in with to get situated?”

Dustin grimaced. “Not enough of you to form any society’s, but there are enough to cause trouble. This region more than any other has seen plenty of Outworlders and the trouble they cause, a lot of places tend to have a harsh policy when it comes to Outworlders and trouble.”

“Would the city we’re about to visit happen to be one of those.”

Dustin looked apologetic “Yes, Karstess has one of the harshest outlooks on Outworlders around. About a century back an Elvin Outworlder exposed a massive ring of corrupt officials and nobles. Bad enough that the Adventurer society took a rare personal interest in Karstess. Afterwards the bitter nobles tried to have all Outworlders killed on sight.”

“Which brought around even more trouble.” Seras surmised.

“Yup, the Adventuring society stepped in a second time and actually started beheading the bad actors. After that the only thing Karstess could get away with were harsh sentences targeted at Outworlders who break the law.”

“No loitering or jay-walking got it.”

Dustin looked sympathetic “Sorry, if I had any other options I would be taking you somewhere else. But this shipment needs to get to Karstess before the months end and we’re already behind.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m just happy you came along and have been so understanding. I couldn’t possibly ask for more. ‘Sides, I just need to keep my nose clean while I look for work in Karstess, can’t be that hard.”

They exchanged another look, maybe that should be her new drinking game?

“Look for work?” Flint asked.

“Well yeah, I can’t leech off your generosity forever. Need to find work to survive while I get my bearings.”

Dustin looked confused. “I thought you were going to work for me?”

Seras shied away from Dustin’s hurt expression “I… thought about it. I appreciate the option, but I think I need to find my own way.”

They had been nice, but Seras needed to get her own game going, and she couldn’t do that wandering the desert. She was a Merc, not a Badlander. She had already rejected that life once before.