---Richard---
Richard felt more sure of himself in the morning. He had taken the second watch and while there was a near constant hoard of creatures assaulting their camp…they had mostly been taken care of with some passive turrets and a rough kinetic barrier. The only monster he had been forced to kill individually had been some ethereal wisp shaped like a twisted sheet of transparent paper. Sadly the ‘fight’ – if you could even call it that – had been as simple as the creature attacking him ineffectively for a few minutes until Richard finally figured out how to strike its slippery body. Turns out, anything moving quickly passed through it, while slow and soft attacks actually landed.
“I’m ready to head back to everyone” he whispered tapping Maddy’s horn the moment the sun began to rise.
“We are on the revealed island. Do you remember where it is?” Maddy responded in a distracted manner as if he had just pulled her away from something.
“Yep, let me wake sleeping beauty and well head that way in a bit.” Richard said then turned to James.
With a slight mischievous look upon his face, Richard started shaping stone into a ball like he was creating a snowball. Dropping the sphere into his fleshy hands and winding back Richard lobbed the ball towards his friend knowing he would be alright.
“I’m up!” James shouted his eyes bolting open and his domain activating as soon as the sphere approached.
Bouncing off his chest the stone flipped off into the distance with a satisfying arc.
“Want to head out?" Richard asked with an exaggerated look of innocence.
…
The trip back was relatively uneventful. There were two large monsters that hadn’t died in the morning but neither put up much of a fight. The planet was slowly changing by their presence – no longer did the horizon look like uniform green. As fast growing as the grass was, there were nearly constant scars upon the ground – signs of monsters having churned up the grass.
There were small hills of dirt and uprooted peat – some created by the conflict between creatures. Some actually contained creatures – the night-marked monsters creating dens to hide in and escape the burning light of the sun. Some formed by monstrous bodies that had decayed slowly instead of melting.
All about the pair, there were game trails that ran back and forth across the grass – meandering paths so downtrodden they were almost permanent.
It was a sign of change. A sign of reality – the blank slate they had been given was shifted more and more as time passed.
And of course, more defining features began to crop up – most far enough away the pair didn’t bother investigating. A towering crystal tower that had to be at least a kilometer tall – flickering beams of light in all directions like a thin lighthouse. A vast forest in the distance, somehow looking menacing and alive. What looked like a regular mountain where James was certain there had been nothing but flat ground before.
Uneventful, but still something to look at as they passed.
Richard drove the whole way on a temporary vehicle with his enhanced parts. He had molded himself a new ride out of his silicone fiber alloy – shoring up the empty points with stone. It was shaped like a children’s wheelbarrow and painted red with monster blood. Most of the way Richard road standing up – but partway through, he took a break to eat some leftover monster meat from the night before.
Simple enough. Just a regular day in their new lives.
The ‘revealed island’ they were arriving at was nothing more than a mound of long grass less than half a kilometer wide – surrounded by sandy mud and topped with half a dozen trees. As the ocean was sucked away, tidepools of water kept the area damp – if there were more vegetation in the almost sterile ground, you could have called it a swamp. As it was, a faint smell of rotting fish filled the air as the small number of trapped fish lost their water and died in the sun.
James walked in the middle of a miniature whirlpool as he spun air about himself and pushed the bad smell away. Richard shifted a few stats to scent defense and then ignored it.
It was as good a place as any to set up camp – the smell wouldn’t prevent anyone from finding them if they were looking, but it was a good enough deterrent to keep them isolated for now.
As far as the final bit of their journey went, Richard’s wagon was shifted once again into something looking like a sled with wide supporting stands to stay above the mud. It looked like a flat ATV – a stand-up quad bike less practical than it sounded.
James in comparison floated – a faint look of concentration upon his face as he kept himself above the ground and blocked the smell simultaneously.
Finally climbing up the revealed island they spotted the telltale tint of Jess’s barrier and rejoined the group once again.
…
“Alright everyone. Let’s review. What are our current plans? What is the state of the world? What do we want to focus on?” Maddy called her voice echoing slightly as if it were a drum she were banging on.
“Give me a bit to check all the status sites” Richard called directing his AI to start sending simple anonymous connection messages towards every web he could find.
James started to read off a general update from the first site he found while Richard dug deeper.
“As far as threats go every calamity is dangerous enough it could break the planet. Positive the side effect of our power leveling has done exactly what we hoped and prevented the so-called inevitable war from growing beyond some skirmishes. There's some early signs of people banding together for a common enemy which is beautiful. Exactly what we were hoping for. Negative is literally everything else…Speaking as someone who’s took a blow from the storm calamity, I’m not sure how many could survive that. Not trying to sound arrogant but its hits pack quite a punch…” James trailed off.
“Humanities Alliance is an aether based group forming around a walking city They are currently acting as free PR for our goal – wandering around the planet picking up individuals and telling everyone to put aside their differences long enough to kill the calamities for the good of all.” Richard spoke up a moment later.
“There's several disconnected groups and individuals researching different ways to combat them. One of them is even mana based – somehow slipping into an aether network to share information without damaging it. These groups have some interesting findings, but for the most part haven’t figured out anything actionable. One of the other contributors is the group responsible for creating the forest and has shared tons of relevant information…while refusing to take responsibility for their mess. Big takeaway is that the forest and storm both are on a technical level… less a monster and more a moving nest? They aren’t what we could call sentient or even living. Both can be modelled as a field containing and enhancing what amounts to a continuous complex chain reaction. Destabilizing the reaction in any number of ways will stop whatever effect they are creating…but given enough time the effect will come back as the ‘core’ of each restart’s and snowballs it back into place.”
Troy spoke up – more confident in communicating day by day. “What is the chance of any of these groups stopping them? How much responsibility are we willing to admit to? Should we be helping clean up our messes or working to fix them ourselves?”
“All good questions.” Richard nodded. “Gold star. Eventually I think all of the calamities can be dealt with without our involvement – we aren’t the only people in this world that can do anything after all, especially when there’s so many of them working together. That’s arrogance incarnate. The problem is the timeline… of the three active threats the most pressing is the thirsty fucker removing water and air. Second is the storm slowly irradiating the world. Third is the forest taking over cities and spreading like mold. I really don’t know if the world has enough time or strength to deal with the defensive calamity before it’s ‘too late’. Even though the research squad hasn’t come up with anything I’m pretty sure they can figure out ways of stopping them partially even if not permanently.”
Maddy nodded slowly. “Should we all try attacking it just to see? I feel like there’s only so much we can plan without actually seeing the threat this monster creates…”
James stood up, a smile on his face. “Sure. Want to head out now? Its only a few hundred kilometers that way, we can be back in time for dinner.”
Richard paused his mental scrolling through feeds and started waving his hands around. “Let me hit up my nest real quick for some sandwich materials. Snacks are important, reconvene in an hour! Pause, Pause!”
…
Not everyone shared James’s confidence for traveling such a far distance in the afternoon and so the expedition was inevitably pushed back until the next day. Early morning rose and the group headed out each traveling in their own way.
As they grew closer, they visibly began to notice the air growing thinner.
It was an unnatural gradient – air should nearly instantly normalize and yet, starting several kilometers out and ramping up as they approached, it steadily became harder and harder to breathe.
The air itself was moving in a steady breeze towards the calamity and a faint whistling sound grew louder and louder as they approved.
It was like they had climbed a mountain – and how fitting it was that the massive monster they were approaching was shaped like a mountain.
A small one to be sure – ‘only’ a hundred meters or so tall. Massive and while definitely skyscraper levels… it was also not quite towering mountain levels of scale. The cliff in the fate dungeon was much larger in scale.
The human brain wanted to describe the creature. Wanted to make a connection to an animal, or point to a single defining trait. Four legged creatures became cats and dogs – wolves and foxes. Despite having vastly different shapes the mind liked to generalize. No animal fit the mold this time.
Hence, mountain. It was the shape that fit even if that fit was loose and innacurate.
The calamity was a pointy cylinder unlike any animal easily pictured. Its mouth was wide and constantly open – looking more like an incredibly wide and short cave than anything else. Its texture was strange. Greyish and wrinkled like an elephant’s skin and yet scaled like an armadillo or reptile. Countless cracks and scratches covered the creatures back and yet somehow the signs of old wounds made the creature more frightening than an unblemished hide.
How many had tried and failed?
The group was close enough to witness an attack reach the calamity.
A massive cylinder – a rod of god – was dropped from who knows how high in the sky accelerated as it approached. Made of a dark silvery metal, the rod appeared fast enough it looked like a single blurred line.
Barely noticing the rod before it hit, the group was just in time to watch as the massive falling object hit the mountain with a loud crack and deafening screech.
The screech wasn’t from the mountain – the rod itself screamed as it was diverted and deformed – metal scratched with a horrible grating sound as it bent and slid down the rough surface. Less than a second later the cylinder hit the water and vaporized it – the cylinder seemed to disappear as it embedded itself into the ground and caused a massive wave and spray of water.
The rod left a very visible groove upon the calamities skin. A angry greenish slice looking much too shallow for the force of the blow – digging down in near the top and ripping out skin for roughly 20 meters of monster.
With a visible speed the wound closed. The defenses healed and the strike became nothing more than another scar.
More terrifying was the way the creature barely budged – barely shifted from the force. Barely paid it any mind.
A figure dropped duel wielding midnight black blades each over a meter long.
They slashed and spun a with a wild yell – their attacks barely leaving marks.
Jumping off the still distant figure flipped towards the mouth a determined look upon their face. The closer they got to the crevasse, the harder the pull became.
Two blades pointed first they were sucked into the the mouth – a distant yell warped and cutting out by the near vacuum directly in front of the cave.
…
They did not emerge.
…
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
It felt hard to follow that suicidal charge – hard to compare themselves – but all three of their damage dealers made a token effort struggling to deal with the lowered oxygen as they made their moves.
Troy shot an arrow – first a brilliant glowing beam of light holding a dark cone of void, then a dark strike containing a white hot blade of light. Each had such a warp to their ‘contrast’, they looked like they were ripping space itself as they flew. Each he gave a few minutes of time on – slowly building them stronger and stronger before releasing at the stationary target.
The strikes sunk into the calamities shell – one attempting to implode, the other explode. Weaker than the rod and yet stronger than the man duel wielding massive thin blades, they each broke skin and revealed green flesh.
Maddy tried a few different attacks spending the full mana pool of many of her selves… but her spells didn’t even have an effect in comparison.
James approached the creature his domain active despite his still healing body. Visibly fighting the pull of air, he tried to hold as much around him as he could and punched a portion of the back with all his might.
Deep in his domain it was as if he punched then reversed the ‘equal and opposite’ force the punch caused on his fist. This punch now had a greater force generated he could continue to flip into an even greater force – an quickly growing series of practically instantaneous forward vibrations with each flip.
A crack started across the place he hit – jagged breaks shooting out before healing a moment later.
James frowned and punched again beating his hands faster and faster against the shell.
The more he punched with his max strength, the more his stamina faded and the less damage he appeared to do.
Finally he flew back to them, an annoyed look on his face.
“Tough nut?” Richard asked and James shook his head sadly. “The toughest. Let’s go back I can barely keep air near my mouth anymore.”
…
“So…defensive calamity is still the greatest threat. Maybe I’m biased but body defense best stat. If anyone has any plans to deal with it speak up.” Richard commented as soon as they reached their base once again.
Maddy hesitated waved her hand back and forth then responded. “I…have a single idea that might work based on what we saw. I’ll have to make a new spell for it and spend enough time building its meaning to actually get anywhere and there’s…well a good a chance it won’t work.”
Richard nodded. “If you have spare time I say go for it. Seems like a perfect time for me to bring up my new plan if no one else has anything?”
Looking about and seeing nothing, Richard lay down his plan. “Supposedly a bunch of choices and options for customizing our world will appear when either aether or mana ‘wins’. R hinted we can achieve our goal and get some of that capability when the world ranks up. The way he mentioned it it sounds like less a physical law and more a political one. We should be able to affect our world now we just aren’t allowed to.”
“R mentioned we can do anything we want to the world as long as we do it with our own power” Maddy offered.
“Point, let me rephrase that. We can build anything we want but only with the tools we have been provided. We will not be given any new tools until we rank up the world. Just remembering the scroll of options R gave, I can’t imagine most of them being available without help from the system. Hence my plan.”
“Get to the point already” Troy waved a hand a friendly grin on his face.
“Well, common knowledge is our version of the system’s mainframe is on the moon, no? I say we head up there and see if we can get any of those capabilities early. Hack the [system] if we can and use some of those tools to fix the situation that’s happening down here.” Richard responded no longer beating around the bush.
“…and why isn’t anyone else heading up there to try and cheat?” Jess asked staring upwards.
“Well. Some might. Knowing humans I’m nearly positive some are trying to get ahead right now. If I thought of it, others have 100%. No one is currently advertising this idea so we can’t really tell how far along any of them are…But if we are being honest? I don’t think you appreciate how hard getting to the moon will be.” Richard sighed. “What do you think the main problems are?”
James blew a gust of wind towards Richard – still playing around with his new capability – then started raising his fingers “Keeping oxygen around us. I can hold oxygen for a bit based on attacking the calamity but I’m not sure how long I can last. I don’t know about everyone else but while I don’t need to breathe as much as I used to I still need air. So we need a shell to keep the air in. Also a method of propulsion and landing and moving around and stuff. Doesn’t sound too bad.”
Richard looked around waiting for more answers. “Food, toilet, way to see the direction we are headed. Stuff like that?” Troy added trying to figure out what Richard was searching for.
“How do you think we are going to do all that?” Richard asked prompting the group.
“Magic” Jess smiled slightly. “I can make a hamster ball barrier. James can fly us up. Something like that”
Richard signed then muttered something rude under his breath. “Listen up. This is one of the big barriers that your mana side seems to face. In R’s wheel of example worlds, he showed some crazy vague mana examples – planets as large as Jupiter or stacked and shaped in frankly unnatural ways. The thing is, I don’t think I saw a single multi planet mana example while over half the aether results have colonized at least their own solar system.
“Simple enough reason for that. All aether based effects are tied in part to the aethersphere. That means they will fade, weaken or become erratic once we leave the planet. The way I see it, the system is doing a majority of the things we take for granted and as soon as we leave the field it is regulating, we lose access.
“We can bring a bit of the athersphere with us so it’s not the end of the world – there’s a good chance we can make a craft that only leaks a small amount of the atmosphere over our trip and potentially even maintains a connection…but it will also affect our ability to move and maintain our craft. A wall made out of pseudo-matter is much more likely to fail as soon as we leave, than something that holds up in a zero aether environment. “
Everyone but Richard got more and more nervous as he described the problem.
“If it's an aether only problem and there are definitely whole groups of aether people working on their space ships…what hope do we have of catching up?” Jess asked after a moment.
“Simple.” Richard responded with a wide grin. “We cheat.”
No one caught on to Richard's goal right away so he finally relented and started explaining what he was hoping for.
“Listen. Your mana is broken in all sorts of inconvenient ways and yet even I will admit it has some positives. It’s much faster and easier to get something working for one. Maddy, do you remember one of the last tests we did?”
“Chained boxes?” Maddy asked suddenly understanding where he was going.
“Yep, linked black boxes.” Richard smiled happily. “Let’s get everyone else on board with our loophole.”
…
Chained boxes as the experiment was called, completely separated out all direct interaction between effects. No side by side goals. No attempt at ‘working together’ directly. Instead descrete areas were nearly completely isolated from one another passing nothing more than a simplified product between them.
It still shouldn’t work. The fact that it did was what shifted it into loophole territory.
Despite how much of a ‘loophole’ it was, just barely understanding the idea didn’t help you take advantage of it.
Both aether and mana dominated an interaction if their fields were allowed to mix. They were also sticky – when placed in a system they slowly tried to corrupt the ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ – each seeking to gain control over the whole ‘system’ in their own way.
And yet…the fields were relatively dumb. Easily confused. There was an experiment they had done that proved both that they didn’t understand anything and that isolating areas broke something deep.
As an overview, Maddy could create a magical effect. As a test they had used her creating a beam of light. She barely had to do anything – all she had done was embed as much of her innate light concept into the box as she could shaping it to release in one direction when fed mana. They had then had her create a ‘black box’ – the box had actually been black to help insulate it – hiding all internals far away and leaving it as nothing more than a flashlight powered by pouring mana into it.
Richard had tried and failed to activate it.
Obviously.
Next Richard had created the same effect – light was dead easy to create after all. He set up a coil of wire that transformed raw aether into light at 100% efficiency. It was such a simple effect he barely wanted to bother setting up mirrors or any efficiency for it.
Following the experiment he made an absolutely identical ‘black box’ to Maddy’s.
The two boxes looked identical side by side and released the same amount of light.
Richard could connect to his box but couldn’t connect to Maddy’s. Maddy could pour mana into her box focusing on connecting to her input rune and could not activate Richard's box.
…
Then, the pair had a third party shuffle the two boxes without telling them which one is which.
Each connected to the box they had been given – after an initial confused bit of resistance. They had checked and proven their box was theirs.
They had a third party shuffle them again.
They connected.
Opened up and proved their box was theirs once again. And did the same thing with the same result a third time.
After asking the shuffler – in this case Troy – why he had given them the same box all three times he admitted both the second and third test had been swapped.
Supposedly Richard had received Maddy’s original box for the second test and it had looked like his box when he had opened it.
Either Troy was lying and or confused or…the piece of the puzzle Richard kept trying to work around had come into play.
Belief. He had believed it was his box – had believed it could be his box and been proven right.
Belief was an annoying unscientific variable. It was like the uncertainty principle but scaled up to macro sized objects instead of particles. Thinking about it that way didn’t prevent it from being annoying but did help rationalize it in a way. And yet while the uncertainty principle was similar…it was fundamentally different.
The act of observing microscopic objects was the act of observing fields and wavelengths then applying math and probability to gain a value.
The act of measuring objects to ‘observe’ them was actually manipulating them.
It was an invasive process. It was like measuring someone’s heartbeat with a syringe – or figuring out somethings durability by pushing on it till failure.
Just looking at something with your eyes wasn’t manipulating it…was it? Was the system playing a prank on them by swapping the boxes or the insides of the boxes while no one was looking?
Had the insides of the two boxes been liquified into a strange probability where each were 50% Richards and 50% Maddy’s? The moment they tried to connect, the probability bent towards them forcing it into 100% one or the other? Maybe Maddy’s magic was subconsciously teleporting the two insides when she tried to ‘connect’. Maybe they were mixed when Troy mixed them. Maybe the only thing that mattered was the belief that it might work.
…
Confusing unverifiable mechanics aside. The results proved something and could be repeated as many times as needed. As long as there was some uncertainty towards the mechanics of the internals they could be swapped.
Aether boxes could be chained easily and swapping out a box or two for magic did not effect the system.
This was just one way the barrier between the two sides could be broken and after discovering this one others began to reveal themselves one after another.
When you were inside of the box the entire outside world could be called a black box of sorts.
Maddy could stay inside of a box transforming water into wine and the source of the water slowly faded in importance.
Richard could stay inside a completely enclosed room modifying stone that was passed to him through a shoot and slowly but surely the input could be swapped to fake stone without him noticing.
This convoluted setup was what finally led them to the idea of chained black boxes.
And all of it discounted a final variable. James. James could scrub any logistics line he entered just by existing in it. James could even grab raw mana and manipulate it into raw aether just by his understanding that the two were one and the same.
As far as building a spaceship went. Mana could do some things vastly easier than aether. Aether could achieve some results easier than mana. Adding them together weakened them both and yet picking and choosing the result you wanted and hiding or scrubbing the sources created something larger than either could alone.
Slowly the group began to build their spaceship piece by piece. Every individual would have their own room – Maddy ended up having more and more as she kept claiming smaller and smaller ‘boxes’ to keep individual eyes in.
These rooms were completely separate from each other. Soundproofed. Visually isolated. Maddy enforced her isolation chambers and their connections with delineation spells and Richard created mechanical ‘airlocks’ for passing items back and forth.
It wasn’t just for the interchange between mana and aether – this isolation setup also helped magic play nice with itself. All the magic users in the group felt their domains relax and fill their rooms – as long as they kept the changes to simple materials this was actually a way for magic users to collaborate.
The group then recreated a ‘fuzzy’ connection – adding in some uncertainty to its source. All rooms had a walkie talky black box with a purposeful low quality to its signal – letting them speak to each other and exchange how and what they were doing but removing an interfering variable with the device. Maddy made some with her sound and connection concepts while Richard made the others.
This ‘bad’ connection let them talk without messing up the magic – They could be lying after all – and there was enough background noise and interference it might not even be them.
Finally they actually had to start making all the components and machines or spells for their rooms. Everyone distributed jobs and began slowly building what they could as needed.
One of the most important loops ‘as created’, was centered around the way mana could create matter with a higher degree of efficiency. Magic cared about ‘meaning’ quite a bit more than ‘mass’ and simple raw elements with no direct purpose were relatively ‘meaningless’ at the end of the day. Jess was their forge – creating more and more effective raw materials in her bubble.
Aether didn’t care about anything as silly as meaning. Matter is matter! It claimed – the amount of energy contained in a gram of iron was the same in both spoon and block form. The amount of physical energy contained in a block of wood was greater than a thin phone, no matter how much more complex the phone was, the wood burned better at the end of the day.
After passing blocks of raw ‘matter’ from Jess through James and then towards Richard, he could begin extracting energy from the elements converting mass to energy in various chemical processes. The goal was something akin to fission or even fusion… but he hadn’t figured out how to make nuclear energy sources from her blocks just yet.
Maddy on the other hand was dreadful at creating raw mass from nothing – the way she had bent her magic did not lend well to creating something from nothing even with her creation affinity. What she could do with increasing efficiency was destructive transformation. She could convert the ‘physical’ weight of Richard's chemical byproducts (or even Jesse’s blocks) into various substances using their ‘weight’ to help fill in her ‘reality’ requirement. Or in scientific terms she used converted the raw energy from the matter she was given into more complex but less energy dense forms.
In more concrete terms. Maddy’s main export was water. With her water concept and experience she could create small amounts of near pure water from nearly any matter she was given by stripping out physical concepts that didn’t work and shoving in her own.
Passing that ‘product’ back to Richard he could turn it into oxygen and hydrogen with cheap Electrolysis – and this whole loop was a net positive loop meaning they had a slow but steady source of oxygen as needed and hydrogen that could be burned to recoup costs or jetsoned as needed.
Of course Maddy could also create plants and convert carbon dioxide to oxygen in a small greenhouse-like room which gave them a very slow but steady source of food – and she could ‘upscale’ that food by melting it with raw materials to create ‘more’ of a blander food source or transfer excess plant matter to Richard for burning or processing.
Troy had less interlocking system potential and so his job shifted towards being their scout. His was the only room with a clear window and he was practiced at shooting light through the window at any enemies they might face.
He could also create matter for any of the resource loops as needed but his creations cost him a lot more than Jess and were unstable enough they were less useful for conversion. Some of his light arrows packed a heavy amount of energy Richard could measure and his importance would jump if Richard figured out how to get nuclear power from them.
Finally there was James.
The most important hub point in terms of transferring the dozens of different materials between each area, his other job was in the thrust department. Sure his power might completely fail to move them in the depths of space, but at least on planet he could remove most of the initial struggle. The amount of energy needed to move about in space or even land and lift off the moon was drastically smaller than the amount needed for liftoff. James helping them gain a escape velocity drastically reduced the difficulty of their goal. They had a parashoot just in case but James would presumably help them land on planet as well.
Days upon days passed as they worked and soon they were ready.
They were heading for the moon.
They were heading for the system.