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Unnamed Dungeon, Day Four

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Nellie twirled the mana strings as she thought of what to do with the ice chunk in her hand.

Hmm… What to do, what to do. She unconsciously squeezed it as she was fiddling with it and thinking about what she could do with the ice.

She continued to tighten her grip as she thought, only stopping when she heard a sharp crack echo through the small cave.

Glancing down, Nellie saw that she had done something to the ice. The cracking sound she heard wasn’t the ice cracking apart, but… she somehow compressed it? The ice chunk shrunk to about half its size, but the colour became a lot darker and less transparent. It was like the ice was now the colour of ice found deep within an iceberg or an ice shelf.

The compressed ice was different from the ice of her Outer territory, and when she set the compressed ice down, the single light blue spark within the mana string wrapped around her hand, duplicated.

Why did it duplicate? Thought Nellie as she stared in fascination at the compressed ice.

Grabbing another chunk of ice, squeezed down on it as hard as she could. She exerted as much pressure as she could until she heard that crack again as the ice layered overtop of each other and compressed into itself.

When she released the chunk of compressed ice, another light blue spark glowed into existence, appearing on the same mana string.

Nellie made every little chunk of ice on the floor into compressed ice. And when she let the mana string wrapped around her hand go, she saw that there were now ten light blue sparks circulating on the string. When she let the string go back into circulation, the sparks quickly dissipated to those strings that were circulating through the ice, and one of the sparks seemed to just be solely circulating around the compressed ice pieces.

Leaving the small cave with compressed ice chunks, Nellie chose another small crevice in ice to continue experimenting.

Before she even cracked the ice, Nellie had an idea.

In high school science class, she remembered that the higher the speed at which something goes, the more thermal energy is produced.

Maybe if I speed up the sparks, it will cause a reaction?

In the small one-centimetre crack, she laced one of her mana strings with no light blue sparks around the crack, and Nellie attached both ends of the string together. With the looped string ready, Nellie started spinning the string and urging her purple sparks to go faster and faster. The mana manipulation definitely made spinning and increasing the speed of the moving string and sparks a lot easier. With a bit of urging, the string and sparks were spinning with enough speed that the sparks began to blur together.

Something began to happen to the ice as the sparks and string sped around the crack.

The immediate ice that made up the walls of the crevice slowly began to drip. Kind of like condensation dripping off a glass.

Nellie carefully watched the spinning mana string, and sparks slowly began to melt the ice.

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For over three hours, the string spun. Over time, it seemed to create a faster melting process. And every time the ice melted, Nellie repositioned the spinning string to continue melting the ice. She had completely melted the bottom half of the ice in the North-West portion of her territory. What was left behind was a large cave, about two and a half metres long and two metres deep, that was almost completely filled with water.

Nellie was strategic in the placement of this room. Just above the cave, she melted out of the ice was the small cave with the tiny floating circle plant. Before she let the mana string and sparks stop circulating at rapid speeds and continue to circulate the way they normally do, she directed it directly underneath the room holding the plant.

A trickle of water slowly leaked from the ice before a large crash brought the water and the plant down into the water.

She was quite happy with this. Now, she had two concrete ways of breaking up and manipulating ice. But Nellie was not done. She had figured out how to melt the ice, but she wanted to be able to have the ability to turn the water back to ice.

Nellie chose one of the tiny crevices with just a few millimetres of water to experiment on.

If speeding up a mana string and sparks heats enough area to melt ice, what if I slow down the string?

Really, her idea was to do the exact opposite process of what she did to melt the ice.

Grabbing one of the strings with a single light blue spark, Nellie carefully coiled it within the three millimetres of water before attaching it to each other. Carefully, she slowed down the speed of the string to the point where she could barely notice the sparks moving.

It took a bit of time, but after about thirty minutes of watching the water, it began to slowly freeze from the strings outwards.

Well, that went about as well as I expected. Thought Nellie as she walked back over to the melted ice cave.

Nellie had a vision for the small floating plant. She wanted it to be spread over the top of the water with a bit of space in between the plants.

With a delicate touch, Nellie carefully split the pale green tiny circular plant into five sections. In a feat of multitasking, she inserted different mana strings into each plant and pushed as many purple sparks into the plant as she could.

Quickly, the plants grew over the top of the water. Its once millimetre-wide circular leaves grew until they were two centimetres wide and half a centimetre thick. The plants’ draping roots were the thing that grew the most. The roots grew a metre down and were very tangled up with each other. Though all five plants only took up about a metre of surface space.

Huh, that’s interesting. Murmured Nellie as she spotted something strange.

There was no current in the water, but Nellie noticed that the plants seemed to be moving as if there was. Looking closer, she saw something at the bottom of the light green circular leaves. Tiny hairs stroked back and forth in sync with their brethren on the underside of the other circular leaves that it grew with. The strokes made by the hairs were enough for the plant as a whole to circulate around the available empty space. Surprisingly, though, each of the plants didn’t collide with each other. It was like the plant was aware of the others and actively avoided them.

The swim-stroke-like movement of the plant and the circular floating leaves inspired Nellie.

Let’s call you the Swym Pads.

It was a mixture of the word swim and lily pads that the leaves take after.

Nellie sat down and watched the life and vibrancy of her Outer territory. And when she looked in her Inner, it was empty and lacking. As she looked, something ached inside her.

She stepped back from her Outer territory, walked through the portal back into her Inner, and imagined what she wanted to do with her territory.

Nellie dreamed of an almost swamp-like environment. With the draping lichen and water filled with swym pads, she wanted to have this kind of environment. Obviously, she wasn’t going to use her whole inner territory, but she imagined something about two metres tall and three metres wide.

She chose the very edge of her Inner territory at one of the corner edges of the top part of her Inner territory, along the darkness of the void, to start the construction.

Nellie chose a close mana string, broke it off its path, coiled it, and began to increase its speed around where she decided to build the room.

As soon as the ice began to melt, something happened. It was like the invisible border that completely restricted her movement outside of her Outer territory loosened its hold.

Huh.