---Richard---

“We need you to get in the right mindset, the type of aether you have doesn’t matter, it’s all a manner of perspective in the end.” Richard began. Turning, he gestured and then lead her towards a fresh lab. His old one was a bit of a mess and if he was going to be working with company he might as well use the good lab.

“Your teleportation fucking slaps by the way. It makes complete sense that teleportation without dimension shenanigans uses your method. Matter is just energy and information from a reductionist standpoint. Fuck it! Everything is just information and power with various degrees of separation and both can be moved about faster in different forms…It's similar to how I imagine R transported us all here. He sent the information about our bodies and selves, then reconstructed them a huge distance away. Maybe a wormhole or something? We even know he grew our new bodies in vats…

“Even the fact that you got damaged quite a bit with early teleports makes sense. Transporting information in anything less than a perfect manner must have flipped so many atoms in your body –I’m sure you were filled with cancers and maybe even radioactive atoms that didn’t reform well. Fuck. Without your biomanipulation you would have died pretty quickly that first time wouldn’t you have? I’m still surprised you managed to get it right that time, even with all your practice runs on vegetables or whatever.” Richard gave Maddy an enthusiastic thumbs up.

“Now, here’s how you might use this ability like a scientist. Don’t try to change the ability, Just use it a few times in different ways to try and figure out any side effects you might want to address or take advantage of. I can start us off. What I’m wondering is what happens when you teleport a rock a bunch of times? You said you can do it once or twice easily enough but the more you do it, the more damaged the object gets and the less complex of an object it is, the sooner it falls apart or shrinks or something right? Meaning requirement is just information density right? What happens if you teleport a rock, fix it up, teleport it again, fix it up with another rock or something and do that until it stops getting damaged? Will you have made a material that’s structured in such a way that it’s easy to teleport as is? Something similar to your flesh?” Richard asked.

Mady opened her mouth but before she could respond he added more.

“You seem to be using the same fundamental ability to shape material into different objects even if you are explaining it backwards with your “creating an object and then filling it in with the stone afterwards...

“For this type of transformation, have you tried making a material that’s easier to transform? What if you cycle stone a bunch first – does it suddenly make a super material that’s easier or harder for you to transform into different shapes? Put aside goals or ‘not having the right concepts’ or whatever for now. Just the ability you already have. Have you tried…”

…

“Okay, from what I can tell, your personal eye teleportation is even weirder than I first thought. It looks almost like quantum mechanics at a macro scale. When you blip and ‘ride’ the soundwave, it sounds almost as if you are at the edge of it in all directions at the same time. Reforming at the end suddenly collapses the possibility of you being at any of those locations into the one you truly are at…and there’s so much of this I don’t understand. Where is all this dense information even being stored? Okay. That’s okay! It just means we have more to try…”

…

“Now how exactly does my observation break this spell? Remember, I want you to think of a few tests. Don’t just blindly listen to my ideas and clear biases.”

…

“Let’s figure out all the ways we can break your spell just through my involvement! Also we should look in to your stat alignments being locked. That never happens with aether, and it sounds slightly off.”

…

Richard was having fun studying the bases they might use to make an aether language. After he tried to get Maddy into the right headspace – they both agreed to try each others methodologies – the two started. Step one had them move to brainstorming and testing materials and reactions side by side as they talked.

Maddy’s requirement was simple. Magic spells that were separate from existing magic. Not a replacement. Something that both internal and external magic users could use – something that wouldn’t overlap.

High key something that aether users could use as well. Richard wasn’t going to help build a whole system just to get locked out of it.

That meant external mana shaping.

They might be starting off on completely the wrong foot here – the two of them kept coming back to ‘mana’ manipulation as spells were information and power in the form of a chunk of mana…but if their goal could be done completely without mana they would pivot.

As for why external mana shaping got brought up. Richard needed a bit of context to understand. It was based on the current arbitrary rules. Mana users had two main options.

Internal mana users could manipulate their mana with their thoughts. They could flex and direct it with intent. They could eject that mana from their body and – dependent upon the skill involved – they could achieve results at a distance…but as soon as it left their body, that mana was dead to them. They could shoot a fire ball but not call it back to them. Anything complex after the fact was hard to do.

External mana users required physical actions to shape their mana. They used talismans or song or dance. They drew runes and enchanted. They couldn’t effectively direct their mana with their mind or thoughts – at least for more than pointing in a direction or choosing which rune to activate at a time.

Shaping outside of the body was ‘impossible’ unless domains got involved…but Richard knew that was simply a natural law set in place by the system. Maybe there were certain side effects that the current setup gave – a way to prevent others from ‘messing with’ each others spells?

Maybe it was simply the system randomizing something and trying out a new setup just for the hell of it?

Richard didn’t care, all he knew was that external manipulation was free real estate.

The manipulation was solely designed to convey information – static information that would not change in the future and would never change pending entire system resets.

“First we have to confirm origin energy acts as a viable base. I’m going to try the others as well then start playing with easy to access properties” Richard began.

“We need to make a uniform sample that doesn’t care about its owner and then build the tools to manipulate that sample from scratch. As long as I’m manipulating the simple properties of this base without caring about it actually doing anything, this part should be easy.” Maddy nodded – she was wearing a white lab coat and large fake glasses. Good to see she was finally getting into the spirit of things.

Richard swooshed his lab coat a few times before nodding. “Feel free to play around as much as possible as I do this. It will be a good idea for you to experience the different laws and provide a second opinion.

“In a bit I’m going to need you to provide mana. A small donation once I set up the field. Other than that…knock yourself out I don’t know. I’m going to play around with as many settings as possible. Might need to recharge – I have to stay inside of the field but if you can step in and out it will greatly speed up how fast we can test things”

Maddy nodded holding a clipboard and pen. “I’ll write some simple spells to see how they differ in that case.”

Richard gave her a thumbs up glad she planned to be productive. He then began to walk around the room in a circle activating his skill several times and feeling it fail as he did so. Over the past few days he’d discovered this helped speed up his spread ever so slightly – theoretically he needed to be stationary for the effect to solidify properly, but if he walked about beforehand he primed an area in a way that let his expansion have less obstruction.

Not really important but it did save him a minute or two so might as well?

And so began a long day of iterative testing. Richard was incredibly quick to confirm that Origin energy was the best base for their goals for a few reasons. For one, it didn’t take long for both his aether and Maddy’s mana – no matter what ‘affinity’ she used – to look the same. For two it stayed around quite a bit longer – this was either because the system was not siphoning it away or simply because it had a longer stable stage.

It was as if the ‘information and power’ making up their separate pools were split and recombined in a new configuration.

It took very little time for them to achieve a few of the ideal ideas they had as well.

The two actually got quite far along in this initial session. Ignoring problems as they appeared and plowing forward let the two of them slowly get a feel for the entire process start to finish. They were well on their way towards creating a spell that actually activated in the altered state when slowly the problems caught up to them.

Maddy made a ‘light spell’ that created a single small orb of light when fed origin mana. Richard fed the same construct origin aether and got the same result, although the ‘spell’ immediately broke apart afterwards like a car fed on vegetable oil.

Richard made a simple aether attuned resistor that radiated light when fed aether. He fed it origin energy. Maddy fed it origin mana. It was stable no matter how much they abused it.

...but that was just a single component. He tried to get maddy to activate a few complex devices and they were better able to spot the increased wear from some invisible component of her origin energy they hadn't addressed.

And then all of their goals were reset to zero as soon as they tried to make ‘mana/aether’ and origin energy exist at the same time.

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Considering Maddy’s discovery of faith energy existing at the same time as mana it was obviously possible…and yet right now, nothing they were doing was really ‘converting’ ‘energies’ as Richard would understand it.

For one, it bore repeating, but no matter how many times Richard accidentally fell into the fallacy, aether was not energy. It was closer to energy like heat or electricity than it was to matter, but it wasn’t the same on a fundamental level. Closer was all it would ever be.

Aether could certainly appear to create or turn into energy – it could create effects…but all accurate models of the enr…and there Richard went nearly calling it an energy once again. All accurate models of the phenomenon were closer to gravity holding an atmosphere near a planet. Certain things like super dense esoteric elements created wells of ‘power’ around them. Aether pooled in those wells and created an effect as they interacted with ‘stuff’ in their surroundings. And yet Aether itself was nearly always a catalyst in situations where it appeared to be an energy – instead of aether turning into heat it was aether manipulating the properties of matter in an area to cause that matter to create heat…

Richard paused.

At least when he thought of stats, aether was stronger when pure and isolated – point for point, stats synergized with themselves to a higher degree than anything else…but they still existed beside one another?

And the field full of ‘something’ model seemed specifically different in the case of slots. Sure the ‘pool’ functioned in a similar manner. A single point that pulled aether in and kept it ready to use…but if it was strong enough to pull aether in how was it so easy to pull out and send through his connection arms?

…on that note, how come even while changing rules his connection arms still worked? Even if everything else broke he was still able to send aether towards something using them…

And! And! While he was questioning things - wasn't the definition of 'energy' the ability to do work on an object? Height gave gravitational potential energy after all. From that standpoint was aether not some measure of the amount of effect that could be created? Just energy after all?

Richard felt like that meme with an acceptance bell curve, both the bottom and top end claimed aether was energy while the middle cried foul.

…

Richard went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole as he tried to better understand the state of the universe.

Some things were reaffirmed. Some misconceptions he had had were tossed. And still more theories were made without any real way of confirming them.

One ‘fact’ he had discovered was the existence of something that wasn’t aether and how it came about.

Essence. Yes, Richard ended up studying it after all when by accident he stumbled into the big secret head first.

One of the most accurate descriptions of the second entire field was ‘anti aether’. This wasn’t like mana and aether both being the same – it was like plasma showing up to an electricity and magnetism convention in a trench coat. Sure ionized gas conducted electricity and electricity in turn could create plasma but…Are you lost? Did you misunderstand what type of place this was?

No, you are not just like magnetism – sit down my good sir. You are are on this council of energies but we do not grant you the rank of electromagnetism! Hah, is that funny enough to send to james or do you have to be this deep in my head to laugh...I'll message him anyways.

Essence blew Richard’s mind in a few different ways. It obviously existed and it answered some questions he had purposfully…but fuck was it ever a crazy side effect. Essence was the sort of discovery that made you toss your hands and declare you understood ‘none of this’.

Let's see, to start you had to consider where aether came from. Something couldn’t be ‘created’ from nothing – at least without cost. Aether was power dense to the point a lot of the effects it could create were improbable when compared to the effort involved. Conjuring matter? Transmuting matter? To speak planly. Aether wasn’t generated from food. It wasn’t syphoned from the bodies calories as was first theorized. It wasn’t some background force that was then pulled towards pools – at least not fully. Aether wasn’t even held in some collective tank somewhere and pumped to everyone by the system!

No, the truth was so far outside of the bounds Richard was operating in it felt hard to infer. How would he even have discovered this considering how much the system was ‘hiding’?

The Truth was that Inside each and every living creature with an active amount of aether, there was something like a miniature hadron collider.

‘Something’ was ‘somehow’ broken and ripped in two like an atom being split. Maybe that ‘something’ was actually ‘nothing’ – the only part Richard could confirm was the end result. In that moment ‘proto-aether’ and ‘proto-anti aether’ were created. If the two interacted, they would cancel each other out perfectly like matter and anti matter. Proto aether was then lightly refined into the aether he knew. This was a step that converted the 'not energy' into a very specific band that matched everyone else who used aether and let them collaborate for free.

‘Somehow’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting now – Richard didn’t exactly have a blueprint of whatever ‘device’ was doing this, just several ways of manipulating the surroundings and studying the results.

For corrupted aether, presumably this step converted them into a ‘different’ band and presumably affinity…although Richard could only really study his own body and from what he could tell, all of his slots generated ‘chaos’ proto-aether as his natural default which was then converted into standard ‘pure-aether’ so it could run or be converted into anything. Every single one of his natural skills got something closer to the chaos flavored aether while his slots were perfectly scrubbed.

On the other side of the spectrum was proto anti-aether. Anti aether seemed to be called essence by the system.

While aether was beneficial for the body – if Richard had to give emotions and intent to aether he would say it almost loved the person it was created by. Aether actually seemed already primed to be as easy for a person to use as possible – all the way back from the beginning with genesis energy or similar ‘original bases’.

While aether loved the person who created it, anti aether hated it. Trying to keep the essence Richard created inside of his body, caused the force to run wild. When Richard prevented the system from removing the essence for a test, it damaged or attempted to damage him in thousands of different ways. As soon as his natural defense started to adapt to a source of damage the essence switched to something else. The longer he left it the worse it became – like a reverse of his aether adaption where his body got less and less resistant to it as time went on.

Trying to direct essence down his connection hands with a ‘reversed aether and essence’ natural law, caused his 'hands' to spasm and rip apart as if he were holding a fire hose or live snake.

That was all probably personifying the force a bit too much.

Fire didn’t hate for example, it just existed and grew and consumed according to its non-personified nature. For now Richard was going to operate under the assumption essence just existed as a sort of poison...but based on what it was doing it might be closer to a virus?

The essence created by someone else – Maddy’s essence for example – still damaged and fought his body but not to the same degree. This was presumably why the system was able to direct essence so well – it was directing other peoples essence not its own.

Essence wasn’t some secret power he could harness, it very specifically felt like it worked to undermine any attempt at controlling it.

No personification. It’s not intelligent.

The default ‘goal’ of essence seemed to be sink into and through physical matter. It then, very slowly mutated that matter. While hidden and incubating, the essence rapidly increased the complexity of elements in a physical object using several different hard to observe or confirm methods. Basically essence performed atomic transmutation and some of the most insanely improbably chemical reactions over and over again alongside several aether specific reactions.

Stone could be turned into literal organic matter…but not just stone. Water, air, bits of garbage. A sandwich. Two sticks tied together with a piece of string.

Physical matter definitely seemed to be required but considering how they had been attacked in their space ship, he wasn’t sure how safe trying to toss it into the vacuum of space really was.

Because yes, then after mutating matter, and a period of time, a monster was ‘born’. If it had sunk into the ground, the monster burst out like a zombie digging itself out of a grave. If it had sunk into a rock that rock grew legs and hair before skuttling away. If it sunk into a tree or something living and was allowed to fester…well than sometimes the tree monsterized, sometimes the essence incubated a parasite that burst out of it after feeding on the tree’s nutrients and sometimes the essence simply disappeared before a monster came from some entirely different direction.

The exact monster being ‘born’ was heavily tied into the environment around the essence infusion – A high temperature created fire monsters and a complete absence of light created monsters that were weak to light. This was exactly what the system was doing. Somehow the system shoved most of the worlds essence generation into a dark dimension – a complement to the light dimension? The system then allowed monsters to be born with a high chance of being weak to light. After some time passed the system dumped the monsters out on the planet during the ‘night’.

Learning all this affected Maddy quite a bit more than it did Richard. After leaving for a bit she came back with opinions. Richard was quick to notice both her eyes were incredibly dark this time.

“I don’t like the current system, darkness…Darkness is comforting. Darkness is natural. And Darkness is above all else being unfairly linked with monsters. The system is seeping monsters into the very concept of darkness and…if I have a vote I want to change that.” Maddy started.

Richard paused what he was doing then turned to her. What?

He blinked a few times as he processed the statement then responded. “I don’t care either way. The current system works well enough, but I’m not attached to it. It does seem to be useful especially when culling vast groups of monsters in the morning. If you care about it, I’ll vote with you but you’re going have to convince other people more than me.” Richard shrugged. “Especially if they know the benefit to the current system. What’s your alternative? The essence has to go somewhere. There might be better options but this seems better than just letting them pop out anywhere…”

Maddy paused then deflated slightly. “I’m not sure, I’ll think about things. Besides, with how much essence hates being tricked or controlled, I’m sure the monsters are worse than they would be if the system wasn’t trying to cobble them this way!”

…

Maddy was correct in how strongly essence fought against being taken advantage of. It was hard to control how specific monsters were spawned – true – but the ‘force’ actively fought against attempts to control it.

Presumably no two spots or environments were the same because even when Richard tried to control every single variable he could, the ‘monster’ that was created was different every time.

The second point was even harder to come to grips with. While at first it seemed like this was a free way to replicate nests, nests were many times easier to farm or control. Any ‘exploit’ you could think of for nests was conveniently patched when you moved to raw essence. You couldn’t use essence to fuel an aether machine – not without monsterizing the machine or having it blow up in the worst possible way.

You couldn’t use essence to fuel a spell, at least Maddy couldn’t figure it out in the time they had.

Richard shook off the disappointment. Obviously, a specialized tool linked to the system was beyond what Richard could do with a few days of effort… and admittedly heavy handholding by using the sandbox.

You might think a monster being ‘born’ in a place with essence meant you could kill it while it was still forming. Like crushing eggs before they hatched! And…In some cases that was true but in the vast majority of attempts, anything anyone did to a monster or essence active area made all final results measurably worse.

Stabbing a spot would make a monster more violent and usually gave it sharper weapons…as well as creating monsters immune or resistant to stabbing. Burning a half formed monster made monsters that could burn the surroundings and made them immune to fire.

Trying to direct essence into a ‘kill box’ sometimes worked, but very quickly caused monsters that were more likely to be able to escape to form. Sometimes the very kill box itself monsterized and more often than not, something like a kill box just gave you a false sense of security.

Richard was surprised how well the system seemed to be controlling essence. There were nest kill boxes after all with farmed monsters locked into a few preset shapes. How did that work?

All of this gave him a lot to think of – and had some promising ideas when it came to terraforming the stone dimension but he had to return to his main goals soon enough.

The discoveries continued…

…