To say that the time I spent in the Ock Outpost was busy would be a severe understatement.

The initial encounter with the elementals attracted to Fievil's Domain set the pace. Namely: nonstop. While I wasn't totally sure where all the elementals were coming from, it was a frightening amount of them that came in the form of a steady trickle when you didn't let it build up. I'd heard of something called water droplet torture and by the end of the day that was what it felt like. In practicality, that steady trickle was barely survivable. After hours on hours quite literally holding up the sky in a fashion Atlas would have found worthy of acknowledgement, I was forced back to the wall. Death by a thousand cuts would be the lamest way to kick the bucket considering how much abuse my skill set allowed.

Crossing into the Outpost and Gec's area of influence wasn't like shutting off the valve of elementals in the sky, but it made the storm clouds instantly lose some of the targeted cohesion they'd attained while I spent the day beyond the walls. Wordlessly, the three guards that had been posted on the wall ran towards the section where I'd been fighting and dissipated the offending elementals, whether Water or Air Attuned, without a single bit of hesitation. They hadn't landed killing blows, that much my Skill let me confirm, but the glowing cores of the elementals returned with their metaphorical tails between their legs to the cloudy sky overhead.

While it was a little earlier than Sarah and I had discussed, the orc woman had put me off fighting duty for the rest of the evening. The training-mixed-defense had wrung me out so much I didn't even argue against her directive. It had been an optimistic estimate that she'd be able to send out a scouting squad during the second day of my stay, but after my performance she'd made sure they were ready to go the moment I took my post outside of the walls the following day.

Once inside, I found Blobby and myself led to the mess hall where an absurd amount of fish was shoveled in our direction. Some I recognized as the sunfish I'd used for Daniela's Scale Boots and others looked vaguely like fillets of catfish that I'd been lucky to eat during one of the Ock River's monster wave attacks during the bridge construction. Most looked nothing more than roasted by a campfire, but I'd been ignoring my hunger in favor of holding out for the Outpost and training my abilities just a bit too much. As I crunched fish cartilage like it wasn't even there, I enjoyed the flaky insides with gusto while passing every other fish to my steadfast gelatinous companion.

Considering my offer from the previous day I shouldn't have been surprised, but Madeline and Marie caught me halfway through a whole tilapia. I hadn't been paying attention to my vibrosense due to the background ripples produced by the coming and goings of people at the outpost. So, when the two girls placed their hands on my shoulder I inhaled the rest of the fish and nearly died right on the spot. If Limestone Skin didn't extend at least partially into my body, I was sure the half-chewed cartilage would have done a number on my digestive tract.

After the better part of a minute dealing with an eating mishap that did more damage to my Health than some of the elemental's attacks, I was able to hold a conversation with the girls. I'd been so focused on not choking that I'd even missed Madeline run off and get a healer. When I gave them the thumbs up, the satyr just shook its head and went back to its own meal.

It was clear that the pair hadn't been idle while I'd been crunching through clouds. They spent almost an hour catching me up on what they'd been working on, mainly with Water Infusions and Materials thanks to the abundance of them from the River. While the higher Quotient goods were saved for arms and armor, the two of them had almost free rein with the lower level stuff. Frost mitigation, water filtration, 'formed' armor and a number of other small features that made their accessories utility of the highest level. If I didn't need so much focus with Fievil and my two Amplitude Items I would have asked for a set of the stuff for myself.

They spoke about some of the mishaps they'd had using , mainly on the wastage and control front, but a few where the Material seemed to reject the Infusion entirely. It might sound callous, but thankfully it had happened to Madeline while Marie was observing. The dwarfess had only suffered a few cuts on the arm when a fish spine had burst from the cold effects of the Infusion. Marie, on the other hand, would have likely been in much more danger. It was the disparity of Attributes and Traits between their Attunements, and I pointed out as much for them to keep in mind. Even, if necessary, they should consider using some of their own Items to mitigate the dangers of Infusion Artisanry whenever possible. When they brought the same point up for me, I just hit them with the tried and true 'Do as I say, not as I do'.

Plus, I handed them one of the bits of stone cutlery some clever stoneshaper had made for the mess hall and asked them to stab me. Marie had been the one to finally take it and thrust it at my arm. I didn't even flinch as I clenched my fist and Striated Dermis armored my flesh further. The fork snapped in half. The surprising thing was when Marie snagged another and repeated the move with an astounding amount of force. Enough that the fork still snapped, but two of the tines had managed to penetrate and stick. When I released my Trait, they fell off and two beads of Slurry Ichor sealed the injury in seconds.

"Ouch," I said, tilting my head in confused amazement. I didn't know the little woodshaper had it in her. It hadn't even taken a percent off my Health, but considering the amount of abuse I could take it meant Marie was packing some muscle in her frame... or a clever use of a Trait, but that was her business. Only active squads in the Wild Guard had to disclose their Traits, which is where the growing reference for them I'd meant to create long ago had started to form.

Marie apologized profusely, but I just waved her off. It was good to be determined. Once I finished my meal and scraped the remains right into a jiggling Blobby, the five of us returned to the Davis' workshop. Adeline was as bubbly as ever, reporting that she didn't have any rare specimens for me. While I was tempted to just sweep past her over-generous gifting, I instead adjusted it and put in a request for said Materials. If it was Earth or Air, I would try to make the Item so it would be available to the Guard. The other Attunements... well, I still had my crafting heart's dream.

Adeline was almost more excited at that prospect --probably because it would give her shop more credit with the Wild Guard-- and immediately rushed off. My two pseudo-apprentices worked while I kept watch in the back of the workshop and channeled mana into Fievil's Shard. Occasionally, the two of them would both switch to an Earth Infusion project in order to benefit from my Arcane Sink's stability and I was more than willing to oblige. It left me an opportunity to observe just how much my Totem companion had changed.

The day's efforts had been most evident in him, even if I'd benefited significantly from the grind of enemies. Where the Totem had started out as nothing more than a hazy head and a pair of claws thanks to the abundant contribution of my mana, Fievil had clawed himself a hold in reality--Arcane Sink withstanding. Without need for me to subsidize, the Totem was now 'real' enough to manifest himself within his Domain. While he was still not much more than head and paws, I could hardly see through the earthy tones that made up his body. While I knew he still needed my mana to affect solid matter, the Totem had become an efficient menace for Elementals.

So summoned from the axe-hammer, Fievil explored the various things within the workshop unseen by everyone but me and Blobby. The slime looked positively giddy at having his once invisible buddy now capable of playing and I amused myself with watching them chase each other after Blobby gave it the advantage of only using a Blobite because of the space constraints. The girls asked questions throughout their work and I answered to the best of my ability until the sky grew dark enough that I called it a day.

They thanked me profusely for my time, but this time I did wave them off. Multitasking was the name of the game for my time at the Outpost and there wasn't much I could do while resting in preparation for the following day. When I laid down the second night at the Outpost, I sunk as much as I could into Blobby before securing my feet and one arm into the building itself with a brief flex of ; I could repair the barracks when I was done. After a few deep breaths, I started the process of emptying my mana pool into Fievil and dancing on the border of empty. Just that effort was painful enough. It was as if my body was gasping for air even while I was physically whole. Considering what I knew, and the fact that mana didn't exist anywhere organically that Sam or any of the healers had been able to find, I could hypothesize it was my Pathways trying to suck down the atmosphere and filter it into myself.

I spent a good hour prodding that boundary, becoming entrenched in the feelings and side effects of poking the metaphorical bear that lived within me. It was rabid, really. It didn't like gentle pressure, like spending energy into Items, and it hardly cared for increasing Refinement and Containment because it billed double when the Attribute boosts from my accessories faded. It especially didn't like when I fed Fievil the last few percent of my mana and the Pathways for my Foundational and Turbulent Hemispheres were well and truly empty. Thanks to being so vividly aware of my metaphysical insides, I got the distinct displeasure of feeling it dry-heave because it was totally empty, and then by necessity it started to drown in the energy of the world thanks to the resulting aspiration.

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It wasn't a perfect description of what my body endured, but it was damn close. It was especially the case when I had to hide my own gasps and grinding teeth from the people trying to sleep not far from me in the barracks. If someone had been looking at me under the cover of Blobby they would have worried I'd been having a seizure, but it wasn't far from one. It was the longest push that I had done even compared to the one at the Embassy, or really any of the other times I could remember overdrawing my mana, but it was the gentlest. Dreg flowed steadily into my body. It wasn't a large amount, a few tenths of a percent per minute, but I held on until I couldn't keep my concentration on filling Fievil's seemingly endless reservoir. Not even all my multitasking training for the process had helped when my consciousness faded.

It lasted maybe a few seconds, but I came to with a jerk. The only thing that prevented me from flying up and away were the precautions I'd put in place. My free hand exploded from where it had been resting within Blobby, brandishing Fievil until my senses returned. Fight-or-flight was a hell of a thing. I apologized to Blobby, who sent out a Blobite to collect the slime goop my forceful exit from its body had sheared away. With an appendage swat I could hardly interpret any other way, the slime waved me away. Then, it pushed me back down into a more relaxed posture and I felt myself sink deeper into the slime.

I took a moment to assess how my body was doing, and I was happy to find it wasn't in too bad a shape. Two handfuls of twitching muscles and an eyebrow I was having trouble lowering, but all in all much better than when I'd gone rigid after fighting those spiders to save what would become Danny's pet fire ant. I wouldn't be fighting anything right away, but I wasn't in dire need of medical assistance either. A pleased smile crossed my face, especially when I glanced at my Status.

Subject: Ronan Terrigan

Health: 87% (Shoulder Dislocation)

Mana: 2%

Metier Quotient: 6 (59.75%)

Dreg Accumulation: 0%

LPS: Wildwood Bunker, FL

Communications

Party

Skills

Traits - (65% Banked)

Attributes - Growth Quantified

The fact that my Attributes had grown was a positive, but my eyes zeroed in on the Banked Dregs I had available. The numerous elementals that Fievil and I had defeated left me just over 50% accumulation. It wasn't a factor of fighting level appropriate enemies-- there had only been one Q4 in the whole lot we fought and I hadn't even been able to kill the speedy bastard-- it was more the fact that I was handling a mountain of them. On top of that, even with Fievil gobbling up the creatures like they were going out of style, they gave roughly double the Pith I expected from a creature. It was a numbers game. Even if I only got less than half a percent for each, when you fight almost a hundred elementals?

However, while that was a huge benefit, the fifteen percent that I'd been able to earn thanks to some self-inflicted muscle shock was what took the cake. It was a proof of concept and, honestly, a very scary one. It was like those old fantasy stories where some wise bald guy sat atop a mountain and drank the energy of the world only to turn around and be able to blast said mountain from the face of the earth. I wasn't going to complain, considering I was intending to fight a damn hurricane, but it was the principle of the matter. If I could do this, where did that leave the other people that had survived longer on the surface or had bigger backing.

Of course, I could be said to have some of that very backing myself. Without my grandmother's genius, Alan's genius, and honestly the sacrifice of an ungodly amount of people for the creation of the Bunkers, I wouldn't have made it to this realization in the first place.

So, with thankfulness in mind I dove within while I waited for my mana pool to regenerate. Once more, the beige gradient stood over me like a strange moon housing a mole. While the creature I could see from within my whitespace no longer looked asleep, it was a static rendition of Fievil's Totem. Metaphysically speaking, I thought that the Totem should be able to inhabit that 'body' within my whitespace but it was vacant at the moment.

Shrugging, I followed the path leading to Harmonic Sinew's bass tone. I barely had to travel any distance before my perspective shifted and I beheld the honestly slightly freaky representation of my own body that was the Trait Paradigm. It was a flesh shell of myself that quivered like a harp with finger-thick strings made of their namesakes whenever the pulses ever-present in the whitespace coursed through it. Dismissing how much my own body could unnerve me, I flexed the muscle I'd been working with Fievil all day. Spell chains whipped through the air, forming a tunneling path in the direction I'd come from at the heart of my whitespace. I wasn't pulling from my own depleted reserves but instead from Fievil's which I'd been feeding constantly.

The stacks upon stacks of and acted like a differential vacuum and the energy I'd gathered from without flowed right into the avatar. With a smug grin I watched the value climb almost to completion even if I knew I would need to assimilate the Trait for it to truly come into effect. Of course, in the normal fashion of any time I spent energy on the Traits, I was still four percent short.

I left my whitespace confident I could bridge that gap before going to bed, but reality proved a cruel mistress. Nothing came from without. Just as usual, mana flowed into Fievil and I even went through the song and dance of feeling at the boundary of empty with my Pathways. Except, when I finally did cross it I only got the gasping sensation without anything to show for it. After thirty minutes of suffering and the edges of my vision fading to black faster than the last time I noted only a single percent increase in my Banked Dregs. It was disheartening for what the revelation I'd made meant.

Of course, I didn't just let things lie and curse my luck. I was born of scientists, kinda, and I would treat the unforeseen like one would. The obvious thing was to compare the experiences and I made a mental list of how my previous overdrawn 'incidents' unfolded. The extent of side effects was much lesser, even with me having anticipated what would happen. My levels had also increased from each event as I went, along with my control over my magic. I didn't think the factor was based around anything I had done differently, which left... "Exterior effects."

I gave up on my goal for the moment and released myself from the wall and floor with help from Fievil's mana. The mole rolled his eyes at my need to tap into his reserves just to be able to think with my hands. Hey! It helps, okay? With a snort, the Totem turned back to where he seemed to be working on using his ethereal form to poke Blobby's slime with zero success. Wait a minute...

"Fievil, has your Arcane Sink been running this whole time?" The mole gave me a look that screamed 'Duh' before turning back to his task.

Just the fact that I had the Mana Shard weapon in the first place threw a number of wrenches into the Dreg absorption process. Unlike other times, I wasn't using a spell chain to forcefully push me past empty. Activating an Item wasn't enough to push the boundary and start absorbing Dreg to feed it--one of the tests I ran while hovering at 1% mana proved as much-- which indicated there was some amount of draw minimum needed either in the form of amount or force. With that thought came a very obvious connection I should have realized: Gradients.

If there were high mana zones generated by Shards, stabilized zones courtesy of the Entity Clusters and even localized areas as a result of mobile Arcane Sinks then the energy in the atmosphere had to be moving. With that assumption, then each person had some gradient of energy within them that they carried with them. It was almost obvious to say that that gradient was relative to their Quotient Level, since Gec had already confirmed that mana densified relative those points so as to link more aspects of the Foundational and Turbulent Hemispheres.

Where does that leave me? "I sucked up everything in the atmosphere at my level? Doubtful... but in the room? The Outpost?"

Does Fievil's Domain help, or hinder with that? It's usually a huge positive for anything Earth Attuned but what if this is the time when it's not? If I go outside and try this again will I get those last three percent I need to get Harmonic Sinews to the Corporeal Limit? Gahhh! "I bet Alan would have a ball with these questions..."

I'll go see him tomorrow. I couldn't quite see steam rising out of my ears, but as soon as the thought crossed my mind it did Fievil's and the mole was more than happy to create a personalized cartoon reel of himself turning into a boiling teapot for a sake of a laugh at my expense.

"It's three percent. If I don't get it tomorrow I'll eat a sock... thankfully I don't wear those anymore." I wiggled my toes as I actually laid back into Blobby with the intent to rest and not push the boundaries of reality for power beyond my ken. Because the more I learned the more I felt like I didn't know jack squat.