‘Ready for the next experiment?’

“Do you have any idea what might happen?”

‘Not a clue, and I love it.’

I sighed and shook my head. Was I the weird one out for being nervous? Of course I was curious, but also apprehensive. Miles was excited, Riala was as well. Only Berla... looked at me in confusion.

“What are you going to try now?” she said.

I pulled a stone out of my pocket and showed it to her. “We found this in the woods yesterday.”

“A black stone,” Berla marveled.

‘We should call these things something else. It sounds kind of silly to say “oh my, a stone!”’

“Let’s discuss that later,” I said to Miles and continued talking to Berla. “I’ve heard about black stones at the stoner agency, but I hadn’t seen one before, so I’m not sure if it is one. It looks like it though, right?”

“It does. But you don’t know what it will do?” she asked.

“No. You can imagine what a certain someone wants to do though. I imagine that, if he were here, he would look like that,” I said and looked down at Riala, who was staring at me with wide, expectant eyes and a big grin.

Berla looked less enthused and glanced back at the treeline behind her, where two trees laid on the ground. “Is that what your experiments usually go like?”

“‘Hey, that was my first— okay, maybe second miscalculation,’” Miles said through me. “‘But we would never learn anything new if we didn’t try new things.’”

You could hardly argue against that. It was unlikely that we would find someone who would be able and willing to just tell us what this stone would do. Though it didn’t mean we should be reckless.

“Still, let’s be more careful, okay?”

‘Don’t worry, I’m not crazy enough to suggest that we use an unknown stone without any safety precautions,’ Miles said. ‘I’d say we look for a low hanging branch, draw the script on its surface, put down the stone, and then leg it.’

I was honestly a little surprised at his reasonable plan. Then again, thinking back, Miles had also been careful to not damage or otherwise negatively impact the water source in the beginning, until he was sure he would be able to fix whatever he broke. I should probably explain this way of approaching experiments to Riala later.

“Alright,” I said and stood up to search for a rock, to break the black stone into smaller fragments. Splitting up stones reduced the time scripts could run, but otherwise we would’ve used up the entire stone for one attempt, and I doubted that would be enough. I carefully smashed the black stone into half a dozen smaller pebbles.

Finding a low hanging branch wasn’t a difficult task at all when you were surrounded by trees, and I quickly found one with a decently sized branch, that would be big enough to script on. While I was preparing, the girls waited at a safe distance.

“Low power, right?” I asked Miles as I arrived at the tree.

‘Yup. Like the first ones we used on you and Riala I’d say.’

“Sounds good.”

I drew the script onto the branch with chalk. If we were to use a blue stone with it, all we’d get is a very small stream of water, falling down from the underside of the branch. With an unknown stone, however, we couldn’t even hope to predict what would happen. If blue stones make water, and white stones give Callings, what will a black one do?

I dropped the stone onto the branch and quickly stepped back several meters. A second passed, then several, but nothing happened. I thought that maybe it hadn’t been an actual stone after all, but when I walked closer to the tree again, the piece I had dropped on the branch had disappeared.

“Huh. So it is a stone, but it doesn’t work with this script?” I said.

‘Seems like it... Let’s try it without conversion.’

I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to do, given that it was my understanding that the conversation plus the stone equaled something other than mana appearing, but I still did as Miles suggested.

After adjusting the script, I dropped a piece of black stone onto the branch once more and then stepped away from the tree. Just like before, nothing seemed to happen, but the stone had disappeared.

“Wasn’t that a pointless test?”

‘If you don’t know anything, you might as well test everything. Who knows, right? I’d like to test it without force.’

“But with conversion?” I asked.

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‘That’s right.’

Even though I had a fairly solid understanding of what our scripts usually did by this point, Mile’s process for figuring out new functions still felt random to me. I wish there were more scripts that we could study.

I adjusted the script a second time, dropped the stone, and quickly turned around to jog away a few meters. While distancing myself from the tree, I could already see Riala’s and Berla’s eyes widen, and when I turned back around I could see something happening.

“... what is that?” I asked in a daze.

‘I have no idea...’

Neither water nor Callings were falling from the branch. Instead, sparkling, colorful flakes rained down to the floor. With every move, they changed color, and they were clearly visible, even in the dim light of only the moon and the campfire in the distance. They looked like they were glowing, yet they didn’t illuminate their surroundings.

As we watched on, I realized that several seconds had passed already. That script would not usually run for this long, especially not with a stone that small.

“Miles... why hasn't it stopped yet?” I asked with worry.

‘I have no idea,’ Miles said in fascination.

After well over a minute, the amount of flakes the tree was emitting started to slowly lessen, until the last one dropped from the branch and fell to the dirt floor, disappearing into the ground.

“What was that...? It was beautiful,” Berla said from beside me. Riala was with her, both just as much in wonder as Miles and I were. I hadn’t even realized that they had come over.

All I could get out was, “We don’t know either.”

***

Some Time, Somewhere

A translucent, humanoid figure was standing on a wide, open grass field that went on as far as the eye could see, all the way to the horizon. The sun was shining a light purple in the sky and there were no clouds in sight.

The figure began drawing scripture sigils in the air with their fingers, starting with a large one in the center and branching off into a web of smaller ones until their entire vision was filled with them. They looked them over carefully, corrected a mistake here and there, and then snapped their fingers. The sigils started to glow, and with a loud rumbling, the ground slowly changed shape, as hills and ravines started to form. The ground below their feet started to rise as well, and when it stopped moving, they were able to oversee their work from a higher position.

They looked around with a wide smile on their face. “So far so good.”

While they started drawing more scripture sigils, the air at their side started to break and deform, until another translucent figure appeared. They looked around appraisingly, squatted down to look at the grass, and up at the purple sun.

“How is it going?” they asked.

“I finally got it working. Want to see?”

The first figure finished the scripture sigils they had been drawing, which were even more intricate than the previous ones. Again, they snapped their fingers and an empty river bed formed, winding through the terrain.

“What do you say? A river with a single snap.”

The second figure tilted their head and looked at the “river” in confusion. “You know a river is supposed to carry water, right?” They then looked up at the unusual looking sky again. “And what is that exactly? Why is your sun purple?”

“Can we concentrate on what’s working, please? I created a river! Just like that!” they said in exasperation.

“It’s a very nice party trick, but I fail to see how that’s going to be useful to anyone. You shouldn’t even bother with shaping the world, let a few gods handle it.”

“I fail to see how that would be any fun,” they said, mimicking the second figure. “If I’m going to create a world, I will actually create it.”

“Please tell me you’re going to have gods. You can’t just let nature take its course. Didn’t they show you what happened to that one universe that only had a single god? There’s like two planets with intelligent life and they’re a mess.”

“Don’t worry. There will be ‘gods,’ but they won’t be the traditional kind.”

The second figure looked down at the grass, tinted purple by the sun. They were frustrated and irritated at the newcomer they had become responsible for. Usually, new architects would be eager, but less bold. Over eons, all the building blocks one needed had been painstakingly created to be fast and simple to use, and even though some architects chose to mix things up from time to time, most of them didn’t attempt to restructure the fabric of time and space on their first try. Beginners would usually play it safe, build their first world, and then marvel at their creation.

“If you scrapped this new system you could be done in no time. You know it will fall back on me if you dawdle too much, right? I won’t let that happen.”

“I spent the last forty years creating it, I’m not going to remove it now. What would be the point in that?”

“I’m certain that you do know what the point would be, though you don’t seem to care for some reason. You have about five hundred years left, will you be able to fix everything by then?”

“Of course,” the first figure said, as if it was only natural. They then went on to snap their fingers again, activating the scripture they had been drawing while the two were talking. However, instead of the world further taking shape, flakes of shifting light started to rain down from the cloudless sky.

“Tsk, that stupid glitch...” the first figure said.

The translucent shapes that made up the second figure’s eyes went wide at the display. “Tell me you didn’t seriously put that into your system...”

The first figure looked away, as if they had been caught during a prank. “I didn’t ‘put it in’... I completely integrated the system into the universe. Technically it has access to everything, that’s how it can do what it does.”

The second figure was getting noticeably mad at this point. “You’re going to lock that away, you hear me? I don’t care too much what kind of a mess you make here, it’s your first world after all, but that is dangerous!”

“Please don’t act as if I didn’t know that. Of course that energy is not going to be accessible.”

“It better not be. I’ll check back in later,” the second figure said, and as the air distorted once more, they disappeared.

The first figure drew a new scripture in the air and snapped their fingers once more, making the rain stop. “It definitely won’t be accessible,” they said. “As soon as I figure out how to make it stop appearing randomly.”