---James---
Everyone spent the week leading up to liftoff differently.
Richard made alloys of different metals and material – typically in various vats on the ground. He then spent most of his time physically submerged in the molten materials. “Helps yah think” He claimed while treading lava – although he seemed more distracted by the experience than anything.
Considering Richard then needed to pump materials into vacuum chambers to help purify the metals afterwards, his hands on experience certainly didn’t help their purity…but at least he got to show off?
Everyone ignored the uncomfortable fact his clothes couldn’t withstand the environment, and his butt occasionally popped out when he swam from one side to the other.
Maddy in comparison flipped between melting runes into her various rooms and hunting down monsters she needed to help finalize her spells. She would gather monster parts in a pile and then physically melt them down in dissolution vats before finally feeding that “essence” into different runes to help complete them. It was a way to gain single use concepts she didn’t own, reinforce her magic with ‘death energy’, as well as way to push some mysterious “more” into each spell with all the melted parts she didn’t understand.
Jess practiced creating more and more energy dense blocks – when she wasn’t helping hunt monsters – and Troy was nearly absent with how much time he spent hunting.
Finally, their preparations were complete and everyone found themselves entering the patchwork craft from different hatches.
Less a rocket and more a fat and short plane-cabin-submarine hybrid, the craft was subtly strange. It had dozens of micro wings and a massive round fishbowl on the top to start. It was also way too wide – when looked at from above it was vaguely shaped like stubby triangular prism with bristles. Way less aerodynamic than seemed appropriate. Way too many moving parts than should survive a trip through the atmosphere. It looked closer to a submarine than a rocket at the end of the day but even that was a bit of a stretch.
Unlike old world rockets it didn’t have multistage ejection sections. Instead, almost a quarter of the craft was an incredibly dense layered battery of crystals and goop. Theoretically there were plenty of materials Richard could have made for even more compact storage methods…but his goop had the amazing property of being nearly weightless – despite how much kinetic potential could be stuffed in it. The crystals weighed a bit more, but they were sliced thin and protected with a shock absorbing matrix.
The second biggest reason for the craft’s strange shape had to do with environment. Technically shape didn’t matter in space – and unless there was an atmosphere on the moon it wouldn’t matter there either.
Drag and air resistance theoretically mattered quite a bit in the atmosphere of their planet, but while in the planets aethersphere/manasphere they also had quite a bit more freedom with solutions. Richard had left the kinetic equivalent of a battering ram on the front – the largest source of resistance would hit the shield instead of their craft and the shield transferred near zero force to the craft below it. It was technically based on some of James’s abilities, but Richard was the one to actually replicate it.
As the five entered separate hatches and closed seals behind them, bits of the rocket began to activate in subtle ways. The wings retracted slightly and then pushed out again. A window tinted dark then clear as Troy fiddled with his cockpit. A trail of eyes appeared popping in through a crack in the final hatch – And then a countdown started.
…
James stood in the center of his room the palms of his hands resting against the ‘roof’ above him. The system and changes it had made to his body had finally achieved its main directive. Removing consequences. Preventing permanent injuries and turning the experience into strength. It had taken nearly two full weeks from parrying a nuke for the numerous problems to finally stop. Over the last while he’d been forced to deal with shakes, pins and needles and those weren’t even his least favorite part. Spasms of power being released by his veins and strange wafts of incredibly hot nausea – those were both somehow worse! At least it was over. He was as good as new! Better even – considering his body had almost healed back stronger. As proud as he was of surviving, James wasn’t keen on facing the storm head on again.
No, today they would off on a different type of challenge.
James breathed and noted a countdown begin to tick in the corner of his AI. It was time. One minute to liftoff. With a mental nudge, James opened a hatch below him watching as the floor fell away. As the two sides fell, a small amount of mud he had tracked on slid down the composite floor tumbling into the grass below. James of course was floating – although one hand was currently holding a metal bar giving him the illusion of a great pullup.
Fifty-three seconds to go,
How did you lift yourself up by the self? How did you lift something you were standing on?
How did you complete the neat trick of reaching around, grabbing your shirt and picking yourself up into the sky? What about with weights?
You didn’t.
At least not directly – as fun of a mental trick that was and as flexible as his magical hallucination could be.
James’s original flying method was closer to an air-based hovercraft – or one of those water based jetpacks. He transferred the force down to the ground below – or nearby objects through an ethereal one-way column of continuous ‘pressure’.
Back when he first gained this ability he could only ‘fly’ a tiny bit above a forest by pushing off the trees.
At some point James had broken that distance requirement and now the truth was that he was ‘pushing’ off the aethersphere around him. The exact mechanic involved ‘freezing’ chunks of aethersphere in his surroundings and then pushing off those chunks like they were the ground. Essentially, he used something like slow mana or a kinetic drain to prevent a section of space from moving and then used that as a foothold for his original skill which now had a much much smaller range. The foothold was about as sturdy as a ball of water and he was essentially treading water every moment he spent in the sky…but it was still a foothold and he made dozens of them even moment.
If you pretended he was swimming in an ocean, he was doing the equivalent of using ice mana to freeze bits of water and then jumping off them as he ran about. Of course, “freezing” the space wasn’t perfectly accurate – and he wasn’t making a single foothold at a time but dozens of staggered ones. The space was actually less frozen then shifted into a more structured form…but it was still a pretty accurate analogy and helped James’s picture things better.
The only reason he was even able to power this constant effect was by constantly siphoning energy from the gravity around him – he both effectively made himself lighter as well as used the energy to fuel some of the cost of this whole system.
Understanding exactly how his flight worked revealed how hard it was for him to use it to lift a whole craft – especially while inside of it. Technically he was ‘freezing’ the aethersphere – not the air or materials around him…but because of a spacial link between the two it meant if he stood in the middle of this ship and pushed, he would be slowing down the craft below him while trying to speed up the craft in front.
The only way to get around that was to stand at the very bottom of the craft and push his distance to the absolute max to keep pushing off the space below the craft. It was even easier if he removed the floor below him – hence the hatch – and his current position involved him pushing the craft upwards in a superman pose.
Forty seconds. Time seemed to be moving at a glacial pace.
James’s eyes wandered about the grass below him, flicking to the two bay doors then activating them slightly to make sure he could close them at a moment’s notice.
His plan was to shut them as soon as the atmosphere began to drop.
James nervously flipped hands – dropping his first hand to flex his palm slightly as he gripped the other in turn.
This was going to be hard. He could ‘carry’ himself with barely a thought – could float for literal days without stopping but that didn’t scale at all to being able to carry such a heavy load.
The difference between being able to swim and being able to swim with weights.
Knowing exactly what his skill did had helped him train a bit – suppressing each part to Increase the load on each portion of the skill felt a bit like doing triceps and biceps separately…but he was still ages away from being able to carry the whole craft about unaided.
Thirty seconds.
James’s circuits were overstuffed with vibrating power. He had eaten plenty of energy-dense food, as well as stored as much external force as he could in his circuits over the past few days. Then in the past few minutes he had overstuffed those already stuffed stores by absorbing the energy from some spinning dials. It was currently far far beyond his natural regeneration. It felt like he was buzzing – the energy wanting an outlet. It felt like his blood was a raging river swirling around and nearly bursting out of its banks.
There were actually a few points James was certain they had – bits of his bloodstream that had exploded and healed into larger ‘chambers’ where whirlpools of black blood could spin endlessly.
Twenty-five seconds. Had Richard pranked him somehow by making his clock take several times as long to tick?
James bent his neck and held the craft above him grabbing on to both handholds and resting his neck against a soft pad he’d set up for this purpose. He shifted a few times then closed his eyes staring at the countdown in the pinkish black of his vision.
Soon.
You might wonder why he wasn’t just abusing his reflection considering it didn’t care about how heavy things were.
It was fun to say he flipped the direction of a force and should be able to just constantly flip the direction upwards in an infinite power glitch…but the reality of his other potential ability was a bit less practical than that. Essentially when changing the direction of a movement vector, James was creating 100% perfect elastic collisions at an angle of his choice. When using his domain and activating the ‘collision’ before something even touched his skin, none of it even touched him – and activating it without his domain meant the collision lasted as long as his reflexes allowed. Because it was ‘perfect’, none of the energy bled through to him and because it was ‘perfect’ the energy of the collision didn’t even effect whatever was colliding – nothing James flipped crumpled as its direction was forcefully changed.
When picturing the act in a magical haze of control he usually imagined grabbing a ‘vector’ and twisting it into a new direction…but his regular skill use felt closer to a simple ‘push’ directing all movement away.
The skill did have a continuous cost and any constant collision quickly tired it out. Trying to use it to block a squish or acceleration, for example could overwhelm it depending on how strong the constant force behind it was.
If someone dropped the entire craft on top of James, he would be able to bounce it back upwards without a problem. This skill didn’t create force however – only changed its direction by rotating it around invisible axles – and it didn’t even fully deal with ‘force’ as much as it felt like it did. It dealt with momentum – with velocity, barely caring for magnitude or mass.
Trying to use it to create movement from nothing was hard and exhausting. It meant punching something and then reflecting the rebound in a double tap.
Trying to fly with that sort of bouncing ability would involve thousands of flips while James only had the stamina for a few dozen every few minutes max.
The only use the skill would have on their trip was steering – James could roughly fix them if they started curving too much or jerk them sideways on the rare chance they might hit something.
Ten.
The countdown in James’s HUD began to blink slightly and suddenly it was ticking way too fast.
Five.
Two.
One.
James shoved – feeling like he was being rushed despite the long countdown. Below his legs began to jerk and kick slightly as he struggled to lift the craft. The energy in his circuit roared at the release and began to calm as soon as it found an outlet.
As streams of power grew in his body James slowly but surely felt the shear wall in front of him begin to bend and break as the craft rose bit by bit – wobbling slightly despite its stabilizers.
They rose almost a meter before the craft began to slow. His skill was switching away from pushing off the ground beginning its push against the magical atmosphere.
Suddenly the force above him lightened. The nearly unbearable weight dropped to a steady pressure as the ship began to help him in dozens of small ways. His gravity syphoning had been impossible to replicate in the time they had – they couldn’t use the gravity acting on the ship to fuel it no matter how much they tried. They could however block gravities touch slightly lightening the load by nearly half. Using a similar concept to most ‘void skills’ they even got to fuel most of the cost with the syphoned energy meaning this ‘weight reducing’ field was incredibly cheap.
Two exhaust vents near James’s feet began to blow steady streams of a cheap aerosolized compound they had discovered helped James’s ‘pushing off’ bit and his skill began to catch a firmer and firmer foothold.
The craft began to rise once again. Slowly but surely moving upwards. Accelerating to start but then quickly settling at a steady pace.
James continued to push – struggling against the wall above him for as long as he could. The craft rose at the speed of a fast hot air balloon – not a rocket. Its ascent was relatively slow in the grand scheme of things and almost laughed at James’s effort.
Two and a half meters per second. A near constant speed that was barely rising no matter how much James pushed. Thanks, ship readings. Didn’t Richard mention old world rockets reaching a speed of 8km/s? James needed to accelerate. He needed to push them faster!
Puuush!
They continued to rise ‘slowly’. James tried to ‘push’ the idea of ‘speed’ into the craft – tried to accelerate them from a different angle. Tied to struggle in different manners like a swimmer switching between breaststroke and backstroke. None of the changes really helped increase their speed.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The craft was just too big for his power to effect. His domain fit tightly around his skin – his range couldn’t wrap around the whole structure even if he tried.
Technically something would affect the entire ship in a reflection? James threw a few exhausting reflection pushes in just to see if he could feel the way they effected the whole craft eating the extra tiredness.
As disappointing as their slow ascent was, every little bit he pushed helped them immensely. It reduced their dependency on the batteries and increased their likelihood of reaching their goal with such a quickly made craft. Sure, they were currently ‘spending’ power to fuel the crafts helpful additions…but those were a fraction of the craft’s kinetic propulsion.
And, As disappointing as stretching his pushes in different ways not increasing their speed was. It did help with endurance. Like switching muscles when working out as soon as one began failing.
An estimate blinked on his HUD showing how long it would take for them to reach space and how likely the battery was able to reach there on its own.
Below him the ground fell away – their green island surrounded by dried mud beginning to recede in his tired vision.
Focusing on the ground below helped distract from the burn of his domain – Even with all the help this was a marathon. A test of endurance if anything.
The estimate flipped yellow showing that – assuming everything continued working as it currently did – they should be able to reach orbit if he stopped now.
James continued – a faint chill beginning to surround him as the atmosphere dropped fast enough for him to notice. The cool temperature felt good on his aching form even if his physical body wasn’t stressed that much. Very quickly James began to notice his breathes were coming up short – even his old breath defense was being overwhelmed as the air pressure dropped quicker than it should.
Activating his domain, James pushed just a bit further with his second wind. He grabbed and held onto air nearby – struggling to hold it as tightly as he could. He did the equivalent of pushing with all the separate ‘muscles’ he had stressed individually – sharing the load between them all.
He roared slightly in the thin air kicking his feet like he was swimming pushing past mental barriers to keep going each and every second more.
The estimate flipped green. Now even if the aethersphere disappeared this very moment and killed a lot of their ‘magic cheats’ they would still reach space using nothing but the conjured matter thrusters assuming nothing strange happened.
His 100% line.
James barely had enough energy to flip the bay doors below him closed before he collapsed. As he lay on the ground heaving, he could hear various airtight locks beginning to seal the crack below him from multiple angles. They whirred and clicked in his ear as he lay there fading as soon as he rolled sideways onto his back. Slowly a grin began to stretch across his face.
Pumping a single fist a few times, James lay and revelled in the phantom burn covering his entire body. His physical body hadn’t done much but his soul burned from the exertion. His veins were spent - the roaring power gone as it took focus just to keep moving his stagnant blood about his body manually.
Still...
He had done it!
Others might not consider it as impressive as some of the other things he had done but that wouldn't change the joy filling james! It felt great like pushing himself always did.
After resting a moment without moving to continue propelling them, the system seemed to agree.
🛰️ Achievement get: Big Lift.
Description: Overstressed your domain by lifting a significant mass over nine thousand meters into the air with minimal aid.
----------------------------------------
Stat: Soul power. +9
Stat: Soul speed. +3
Stat: Soul defense. +3
Stingy wasn't it?
----------------------------------------
---Richard---
Richard moved between various physical readings – scrolling his cockpit chair back and forth as he did even if he was physically located near the bottom side of the ship. This was great! Everything seemed to be working just fine – better than fine even! They probably could have spent a few more weeks and gotten a fully automated solution but they just didn’t have the time. This wasn’t like an RPG where you could spend an infinite amount of time trundling around side quests – the bosses would wander away and burn down the world after getting bored of waiting!
Richard received a flickering notification to show James was about to end his kickstart – man was a fucking beast with his stamina – and Richard began to slowly push the kinetic thrusters into an active mode.
A minute later James stopped, and Richard twisted the mental dial to 100% before they began falling.
52 minutes. They should throw James a party for that effort. It couldn’t have been easy!
The rocket lurched upwards and began to accelerate but Richard barely noticed the change with his passive kinetic resistance.
Everything was going as planned, although some of Richard’s sensors were picking up strange readings.
Gravity was dropping faster than it should. Same with atmospheric pressure and a slew of more subtle measurements that should be a smooth curve. What was happening?
Richard stared at one reading that said the gravity acting on their ship was essentially zero not 10 minutes away from the point James had stopped pushing. That…shouldn’t be possible?
The whole craft suddenly lurched as if crashing through something and Richard watched in alarm as the same sensor spiked as if showing they were currently flying above a planet with 9 times as strong a gravity as the earth.
His atmospheric sensor began picking up heavy readings of sulfur for some reason and heavy static began rushing through his analog speaker. A muffled explosion rang out and Richard desperately wished he was the one with a view of the outside.
What was happening?
Just before Richard fully began panicking a scratchy voice came in over the speaker – Troy.
“One of the devices Richard had outsi-----the ship just blew----for no reason.” His voice came through sounding like something out of a bad horror movie’s broken radio. Static cycled and weird artifacts popped in the background – the effect stronger than it should have been. They wanted a tiny bit of noise to help scrub the connection of interference…not this? A weird chittering sound rang in the background and Richard half expected a little ghost girl to start telling them to run or something.
A device blew. Shit. Okay.
Richard finally calmed as he understood what had happened – the aethersphere was gone. Simple answer really. The sulfur reading must have been the sensors tetra-erbium and di-terbium ardor-sulphides breaking apart. Richard knew most of the simple sensors would fail without the athersphere keeping some of the more complex chemical bonds stable… but he hadn’t imagined it would be that quick! Didn’t he have a sensor that was supposed to tell him when the aethersphere disappeared? What was it doing?
Richard looked at the ‘okay’ signal querying the device a few times before frowning slightly. Nothing. It was dead – dead and forced into an ‘on’ position where it constantly fed him back a positive signal. The signal itself was a small repeating pattern – it should not ‘fail’ in a stable position. He’d specifically built that sensor to account for all sorts of problem! Sure it was untested but Richard had been confident!
Suddenly Richard froze.
If that failed…what else was failing? He made to check something his eyes widening when his instinctual connection to a new receiving node felt off.
Pushing aether through the node…took a bit of effort. It felt like he was used to dumping water down his connection arms and now he was dumping molasses down them!
Frantically activating different devices Richard nodded to each that worked and frowned at each with problems. The ones with problems still worked relatively well – but had a few standard deviations of error from their expected results. Each ‘problem’ tool went in a separate pile. Time out for the tools to think about what they had done wrong!
Richard would study them to see what was different – Hey! Were the insulating layers still in place?
Richard had made several layers of insulation – each with their own methodology. One was an ‘extra dimensional’ layer comprising of skill shifted sheets bonded to regular sheets and overlapped around the entire outside. He had also created a near molecule thick layer of insanely compressed carbon placed in a pattern mathematically designed to prevent flow through it – and those were just two of his barriers with the highest chance of success! There were pure aether ones that should work on their own even if the barriers themselves were created from aether…they should all work! They were attached to projectors on the inside of their bubble not the outside!
The diamond sponge alone was based on a formula saved from the previous zone – one specifically designed for isolating aether from the surroundings.
Was there a leak? Was the barrier not aethertight?
What about the cockpit? The ‘window’ had a few of the stronger insulations on a retractable cover…was that the leak?
Was it working and this was just the natural result of leaving the planet?
What about James’s hatch. Had it shut properly? What if something caught in it leaving a microscopic hole?
Richard moved to his microphone and began warning everyone to keep an eye out for leaks or strange side effects.
They needed to stay on top of things. It wasn’t too late to turn around but that was coward speak – This whole trip suddenly began to feel a bit more dangerous and Richard felt nervous even if his mouth kept flicking into a grin.
This was exciting!
----------------------------------------
---Jess---
Jess sat in a room alone. It was stuffy and she was bored – she understood…but she also didn’t fully ‘get’ why she couldn’t spend the trip with Maddy. Troy too if she were generous. Even if mana and aether didn’t work together shouldn’t it be fine if two magic users bunked? Even if they didn’t work together, they shouldn’t break each other…right?
Jess had spent plenty of time with her friend before after all and it had never been a problem till now.
Suddenly Jess felt an uncomfortable tingling fill her body and the newest bar of energy dense barrier she was creating began to twist and expand out of her control.
She stopped when it was ten times as big as it should be and the consistency of sandy sponge. What was going wrong?
Jess reached out and began to slowly extrude a single disk of barrier – noticing the way her mana almost strained to keep its form. Maybe if she activated her domain?
She tried tugging her regalia into existence, straining to materialize the comforting golden armor – bit by bit a liquid barrier began to drip down her chest as the breastplate materialized first.
It should have been near instant – the whole armour should have appeared!
Leaving just the breastplate activated Jess tried forming a barrier again all of her protective concepts pulling and stretching it as her mana
Suddenly it buckled as if it had a mind of its own.
Struggling Jess slowly began to regain her control – the breastplate helped her but not as much as it should have.
For now, fuel creation could wait. She needed to practice as much as possible in this strange state.
If they were attacked, she needed to be ready.
----------------------------------------
---Troy---
Troy stared out at the darkness of space. His ‘cockpit’ was a dome that came down past his feet giving him a wide view of the entire surroundings. There was a cover he could pull up over it, but the sheet currently lay crinkled on two sides. His eyes flickered between the pane of magic glass and a few magic monitors that showed views of the back and bottom sides.
Everything was silent.
It felt like space was sucking the sound out of his surroundings – muffling everything into an almost painfully silent stillness.
Turning on his shoddy radio, Troy pressed a ‘speak’ button then sent a message to Jess. “How are you holding up?”.
The radio blared with static for a moment before he heard her familiar voice. “---control is get--g harder. I’m surviving.”
Troy frowned slightly, rousing his mana and forming a light arrow. It took a bit longer and sparked occasionally but other than that looked fine.
Drawing his mana up towards his eyes he focused, allowing the light mana to enhance his sight. It hurt slightly – a pain that wasn’t usually there – but the change was minimal. Cycling through the rest of his regular abilities he nodded at the change.
Yep.
Surviving was a good description.
Far away and to the side he could see the edge of their planet. Squished in on the other end of his view he could see the moon in sharp relief. Countless Individual craters were visible to his eyes – despite being hundreds of kilometers away he could see all sorts of strange activity on the planetary body.
Like objects had been dragged about in a desert – massive scars of movement littered the place and near one end he could actually see what looked like a large structure just barely peaking over the edge of its horizon.
That was their goal and yet he couldn’t help but stare down at their planet instead. It drew the eye – It looked so strange. Nothing like pictures of earth.
So incredibly green – even with the massive brown desert that used to be their ocean. There was no sign of any water left.
Visible as an offset ring below them, Troy could see the barrier splitting the planet in two reaching up kilometers in the air and slowly curving away towards the unknown half of the planet. Supposedly the location where their tutorial and subsequent trials had been kept.
Strange that – how had that even worked? If different dimensions were possible, why hadn’t they just shoved every instance in a different dimension?
Troy stared down, noting the different landmarks from above. The clearest two were the storm and forest. A massive black splotch that flashed occasionally and a patch of darker green. The storm followed an erratic aimless path without rhyme or reason. The forest spread after it like mold. Together they looked like someone had drawn a scribble on some software – a special effect brush following the point of a stylus.
There was what looked like a dark red desert in a triangular shape revealed by the disappearing water and a mountain range large enough to be visible as a clump of grey.
It was mainly just green.
The majority of structures were too small to see from this height – even when enhancing his sight.
The planet looked scarred. That was Troy’s main take away. If he had to describe the planet he had one word for it. Abused.
It felt faintly sad. Hopefully this was just a period of growth and the planet would start looking healthier in the future.
Troy dragged his sight away and went back to keeping watch. Nothing could sneak up on them while he was scouting. Nothing.
----------------------------------------
---Maddy---
Maddy felt like she was suffocating. It felt like she was a fish thrown out of water – Maybe that was melodramatic. It didn’t feel like she was dying but the feeling was still incredibly uncomfortable.
Even as the suffocation fell, and she got used to the feeling, bits of her fell away in a new horror. It felt like she were a cloth doll slowly being unraveled. Like she were melting – and when she observed herself from another perspective, she noticed most of her eyes were glowing or smearing a residue on her various rooms.
That too was a feeling that started to fade – if anything it felt like the more Maddy coated the physical rooms in her ‘body’, the less damage hit her eyes behind them. It didn’t change the fact that bits of her kept getting peeled off and rubbed on the walls and floor – didn’t change the way it hurt or felt existentially terrifying as bits of her were lost against her will.
The only two ‘eyes’ that felt ‘safe’ were the two puppeting her body and even those felt strange and uncomfortable. Itchy. Dry.
Out of place.
The connection between her eyes was strained – it wasn’t cut off cleanly like when one eye had entered a dungeon. It was closer to being damaged. To being constantly injured and healed – an incredibly small damage between all the eyes on the ship but a massive one towards her eyes back on the planet below. It was as if she had made pipes between her eyes and those pipes had just been dipped in vats of acid – like her connections were fleshy tubes laid between continents and tiny piranhas had just found them. Tiny chunks of her skill were broken – something was nibbling on lines she had taken for granted. Something was grabbing strips of it and pealing them away microscopic hair by hair at a time.
Instead of cutting the cords off to keep her sanity, Maddy clung to the damaged lines – pumping life mana into them from every single life eye as she struggled to keep it safe. If the lines to the planet were cut, could she still reincarnate? The eyes with her resurrection pool were down on the planet below. If she lost this link was her safety net gone?
Besides the pain and obvious damage, there was a delay.
A delay between when one part of her mind started a thought and another finished it. A delay between communication and a sense of resistance with each message.
As her connections were healed and her transference concept was stressed, the ethereal wires between her eyes began to drift closer to ‘reality’. The closer they came to physicality the less damage she received. As soon as she realized that Maddy began writing. She melted half her pile of garbage and fed the essence into her skill dragging the spell into an unstable editable layer and tacking on her rough addition.
Tiny fleshy wires began to grow throughout the ship as Maddy worked – purple roots that connected each eye through tunnels originally meant for sound and teleportation. The roots glowed slightly as she ran light through them – like fiber optic cables containing her thoughts and soul.
She had to break a few physical barriers to complete it, but finally the web was done and damage faded. There was still a massive amount of ‘damage’ happening to the connection between the web on this ship and her eyes below but by combining all her separate threads into one, the ‘cost’ fell away to a more manageable level. Every single eye was connected to every single other eye but Maddy braded the connection between her spaceship eyes and her ground eyes into a single cable in a painful panicked few minutes of self-surgery.
It was strange.
Her new cable was a personal connection and yet it almost ‘looked’ like more was being transferred through it? Microscopic motes of concepts and essence only visible to her reality sight – lines of information piggybacking between the planet and ship, entering and disappearing into the atmosphere of each as they arrived?
Maddy hesitated before picking up the radio with her body and sending a quick message to Richard. He might have a better solution. If anything, he needed to know the situation – aether could handle this stress in a way that mana could not.