---Richard---
It took nearly an hour of calm maintenance before the strange oddities came to head.
You know the static filled radio? The Spirt box like effect? Yep, it was haunted. 100%. Richard had fucking called it!
It hadn't even been a surprise when the creepy ghost girl crawled out of the wall and tried to bite his head off. She wasn’t very sneaky – kept pretending to be his friends and whispering weird stuff like “open the hatches! We reached land!” In Troys voice or “Try drinking that acid I bet its tasty,” in Maddy’s. All through the speaker. As if his friends could see the stuff he was picking up.
Not very subtle.
She had giggled when he drank the acid in dominance then booed when nothing had happened for fucks sake.
Well, whatever. If anything – finally being able to see the source had brought any initial terror Richard might have had for the unknown way the fuck down.
Richard tried shooting the spectral menace with rubber bullets, but they passed through harmlessly. Same with stabbing random blades – she was incorporeal and kept trying to trick him into smashing his stuff. He wasn’t going to pull out his regular rounds – those thick stone bullets were strong enough to deal serious damage and the inside of his cabin wasn’t quite armored enough to survive countless cannonballs.
Nothing Richard did could hit her – not even swiping his connection hands although he thought he might have almost grabbed the monster once...
The only bright side was the way she couldn’t hurt him in turn. She would either scrape harmlessly against his skin with necrotic talons, or pass through him with barely cold wafts.
She had started to smash his stuff or try and foul up the physical connections to his friends, but Richard had turned to his newest ability – sharing his defense with the surroundings to halt that.
He kind of wished he had started this sooner – it took up the entire regeneration of two connections to maintain over the full room, but the room itself felt better in every way. Even the resistance his aether had had faded.
Even better the longer he ran this effect the less it cost and the stronger it became.
Now they were in a sort of stalemate.
Ghost girl had given up after a while, choosing instead to sneak around with the occasional lunge or swipe. She would jump at him with crazy faces as if she were an actor in a haunted house trying to frighten him.
Annoying.
That was his final verdict. Annoying. “Aren’t you bored of that?” Richard asked after a while staring at the specter’s gaping face – she had unhinged her jaw and filled it with thousands of teeth before rolling her eyes around frantically.
“Were you once a human? I haven’t figured out if ghosts exist or not and it would be great if you’d answer a few questions.” Richard asked.
“Join me and see” The spectre giggled, rotating her head like an owl.
“So... are you a creature existing in a different plane and phasing in and out of this one? Are you like…a memory in the aethersphere? A free-floating soul entity phased out of the skill plane and into this one?” Richard asked grabbing a clipboard.
“Soul. Soul! Rip out your soul. Rip and tear and shred and bleed!” The specter screamed.
"I'll put you down as a maybe." Richard sighed before trying again. He was going to figure this out one way or another.
Sadly the spectre really wasn’t a very good conversationalist or this might even be fun.
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---Jess---
Jess was not having a good time.
The claustrophobic death trap she was on had tried to eat her! Walls shrinking in and growing teeth. Claws and fleshy appendages that tried to scratch or crush her.
Who let walls decide to become mimics? She had a bone to pick with whoever had that bright idea.
Jess kept getting tossed about as strikes smashed into her golden armour, and every time she ‘killed’ a portion of the wall by smashing a fleshy core she was splattered in disgusting gore and slimy residue that refused to wipe off.
She could kill the room and gain some peace but every hour or two it would reappear. Exhausting – she didn’t even hope it would give her more time as the longer the room took to recover the stronger it was when it finally attacked.
Were they going to die here? Had anyone died? Was she all that was left floating in the belly of a beast and far from shore?
Was anything she did important? Jess wiped a layer of slime off one of her finished ‘barrier bars’ and then tossed it into the chute heading to James’s hub. The chute licked its lips and crunched her bar a few times before swallowing it.
Were any of these bars even reaching him? Would anyone care if she stopped?
Flopping down onto a golden chair Jess sighed and began creating another block of barrier. She really didn't like space.
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---Maddy---
The void piranhas nibbling on her connection wire had found her. Following the cord all the way up to her body, they started popping into view every few minutes drawn towards their tasty eyes and unprotected flesh.
It was surprisingly hard to defend herself – hard to kill creatures that teleported up beside her to strike. Hard to kill fish-like creatures without ears or eyes when her attacks moved through vectors of sound and light.
Two of her eyes had already ‘died’. Their bits of her ‘soul’ had been captured by a web that couldn’t sustain them for long, then shoved down the cable towards her reincarnation vats so the cost wasn’t permanent. She couldn’t keep them around – not unless she built a physical receptacle for her souls on the ship.
Something she might actually do if she had some free time. Just as an extra safety net in case her ‘cable’ broke.
As is, it took everything in her to stay alive – every moment she spent was on putting out fires. Every eye with life mana in their affinities had a near empty pool with literal drops of their power coursing through the vine network and healing damage to her ethereal cable. She had 8 of those eyes left alive on the ship.
Of the remaining eyes, two were ‘wasted’ on her maintenance job. Her dark-destruction and light-creation eyes.
Coming down a chute, a steady stream of ‘garbage’ trickled and every time it reached a certain point, her dark destruction spent its whole pool melting it down into possibility. Her golden fae eye collected the possibility and created water in its place – feeding a portion of the result back for hydrolysis and a portion towards her oxygen farm for CO2 scrubbing.
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Both eyes did more than just activate the two-sided spell – destruction damaged and erased every concept in the garbage that was detrimental to the reality of water, and creation stretched out and bolstered the resource she was given with her water concept. Both were spending a near optimal amount of their mana and had only needed help and donations near the start.
Of the eyes that remained, she had Light-destruction. Light-death. Pure destruction. Pure Darkness. Pure creation and finally creative-death. The rest of her eyes such as dark-death were back on the planet below, tending her reincarnation vault or currently ‘dead’ and regrowing a body.
Maddy hesitated for a moment then swapped out her two maintenance eyes for pure destruction and pure creation.
The two eyes were happy to take over as if looking to prove themselves…which was a strange thought as they would only be proving themselves to her. She would be proving herself to herself in a way.
The new pair ‘picked up’ the reins of the spell, feeling the momentum it had gained and trying their best to keep it going in their own way. They struggled with their metaphorical reins before slowly but surely shifting the spell bit by bit as they took over.
The pair…felt strange in Maddy’s collective consciousness.
These eyes were simpler in some ways. More instinctual in their actions. They were wholeheartedly her but a combination of a smaller initial slice of her soul and less focus had changed them fundamentally.
They had grown. Grown almost without her noticing them – and yet grown more unique than her other eyes.
All the eyes were affected by their bodies. Each and every eye had an innate sight from her second rank ‘perk’ that synergized with the mind contained in each eye. They saw the world in different ways and let that cloud their opinions and viewpoint. Siblings as she often called them despite their shared mind and soul.
In comparison, her pure eyes felt like they were a step removed from the rest of them. If she had to describe it in a metaphor, her best description was that they were tribal. The rest of her selves wore suits and dresses or skirts, but the pure eyes wore leaves and war paint as they danced in the wilds.
Her void eye wore obsidian jewelry and had a crown like shards of glass. Her reality eye wore white seashells and a necklace of pearls. They looked different and felt different.
That difference made itself known in the way they took over her multi-affinity spell.
A tribal dance and song of purpose. As dark destruction faded, the black box of melting void shifted into a sound isolated and enhanced chamber.
Destruction sat on a simple pedestal rousing her mana and allowing it to slowly flow through her runes.
Pure destruction needed a vector for its effect and sound was her main tool. She destroyed slivers of air allowing the cavitation bubbles to pop and ‘beat’ like a drum. The cavitation bubbles were both the source of sound and a crack into the void – they carried a resonant song of oblivion as they spread through her chamber and the garbage.
Pop, a whisper from the void spoke. Pop, join the sea. Pop join the spray. Pop join us in play. Become us. Become none. Become one.
Each pulse felt like the waves of a rough ocean crashing against the reality of the garbage. They wore everything away, bit by bit shaking loose meaning from the waste of their world. They smoothed over the matter they crashed against – teasing out grains of meaning like sand then drawing them back as the waste melted and decayed. Not even her container was safe – the floor began to melt as she stripped layer after layer of reinforced material off the ground leaving a fine sand in its place.
Beside and yet separate, Creation started up as well. She created sound from nothing – the continuous warbling sounding like flutes one moment and string instruments the next.
The illusion of water fell apart without light mana, but water was clear. Transparent. It should not need light to create – it was a marvelous material required and desired by all! It begged to be created. The simple reality was strong and firm! All it really needed was a push! A nudge!
Together the drums blended together with the wind and string instruments and a key part of the symphony became complete.
Pure water condensed as if out of the air, then flowed away into the unknown as the two eyes danced. From an outside perspective both eyes bounced slightly in place in sync to the music they shared.
The rain dance continued and the rest of Maddy’s focus pulled back, shaking her mental focus as she tried to clear her fascination and focus on the practical.
She needed defense. Offense was the best defense for her, and together her eyes hatched a plan.
Light-Destruction and Light-Death each created orbs of deadly light combining and splitting them into dozens of weak but constant fields of danger strong enough to bleach all her rooms. Dark Maddy and Dark Creation Maddy worked together to wrap all her surviving eyes with protective shrouds of darkness – this was part of an old, abandoned spell. It didn’t work well when she tried to protect her allies from her own spell and the pairs of deadly light were otherwise too indiscriminate to otherwise deal with around friends.
Monsters popped into reality then burned. They stayed alive for several minutes at a time, but Maddy’s shroud blocked and hid her enough she survived the assault.
Light creation. Death creation. The only two eyes left mostly free to deal with future problems.
Both flitted about the ship repairing damage her other eyes were doing. They only spent small amounts of their mana pools to repair and reinforce anything and everything they could.
Hopefully they would reach their destination soon.
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--- Troy ---
The monsters that came for Troy were shaped like rocks. Sharp meteors that flew towards them unnaturally as if flung by something hiding just out of sight.
They were infrequent dangers – one appeared anywhere from minutes after the last to hours after…and each required Troy to hit them with a fully charged powershot.
They came from different directions – as if testing to see if he had blind spots. Troy hoped they didn’t find the absolute back of the ship as he wasn’t fully confident on curving a shot around in the vacuum the same way he could curve or bounce an arrow through the air.
He had tried a clever glancing shot infused with a reflective payload to try and divert the meteor away from their craft…but that meteor curved back towards them, shifting its form slightly as it did. Troy had to rush as fast as he could to pull a second shot on that meteor and the strange resistance his mana had outside of their planet had damaged his arms with how hard he had pushed through it.
It was exhausting – Troy was near certain allowing a single meteor to hit their craft might damage them permanently and with how hostile space was while safe in a vehicle, he did not like their chances without it.
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---James---
James sighed as premonition twinged and his shield pulsed into place, blocking an attack from behind.
Turning he regarded the monster in curiosity. Where were they coming from? They appeared from different sides each time – so there wasn’t a single hole they were sneaking through.
Maybe the simplest answer was the correct one. They appeared where he wasn’t looking. In the corner of rooms – in his blind spots.
The creature looked like a lamprey with legs. Its front stood upright, and its back curled around it as it lunged towards him springing across the room at the speed of sound.
James punched its head off and threw its corpse in his corpse pile. It was starting to overflow.
All of these bodies deflated after death – hours later the first creature he had killed was nothing more than a sack of leathery skin while ones from an hour or two ago looked like blow up dolls with half their air gone.
From the corner of his eye an instant pulse of light. It was instant.
But James had his domain active after the first premonition and the lazer bounced harmlessly. It refracted off his cheek then began to burn a hole in the wall beside him.
"Shit, stop that." James yelped then lunged forward reaching out into an empty space and grabbing the throat of a second monster this one invisible and full of lasers.
Crack.
Another assassin for the body pile. They should have designed their spaceship with better monster disposal – should he dump them down Richard's chute? Make them someone else’s problem? Richard could pass them along to Maddy?
No they might gunk up the chutes. James could deal with a little mess.
With a series of clunks one of Jess’s drop-offs landed at the end of her chute. Wandering over James noted this one looked chewed on.
Hefting the block a few times James shrugged then tossed it in a second chute headed towards Richard. Probably fine even if it was slightly nibbled on.
Now that he had killed a pair, maybe he could finally have a moment to study the strange way his power was moving about. He felt on the verge of an epiphany.
This hard to move power…It felt…strangely good?
James might be weird but he liked how physical his mana now felt. He liked the extra weight his aether gathered as he struggled to pull it towards his AI. It…it might be strange but somehow it felt almost more… more ‘real’ the harder it became to use. More realistic. It had a weight. A physicality that proved to him it existed even as he threw his internal manipulation at it with all his might just to achieve things he could do without a care before.
He could feel flesh inside his body rip and tear as mana refused to pass through solid flesh smoothly.
He could feel new capillaries form as his circuit bled through new passages.
Feel the way his body became stronger the more it struggled against his power.
This was mana in its natural habitat? This was aether without the system giving him training wheels?
James…James didn’t know if he wanted to go back.