Willow
Near Camp, Feather-branch Forest, Savriâ
Willow slunk silently through the forest, crunch, snap, thump, yep, entirely silently. Her prey had no idea she was approaching. It was helpless in the face of her absolute quiet and - “Hey Willow, is that you? Did you find any traces of animals?”
She slumped, I was sure I was being quiet enough to at least sneak up on Kent, “Nooo… I did find a few more berry bushes though! Marked them on the shared map.”
Kent turned slightly to look at her from where he lounged on the riverbank, “Nice! So still no animals other than fish?” he gestured at the four near-meter long fish swimming around in the little pool they’d created to temporarily store their catches. Kent had been the only one with any luck catching anything in the last three days they’d been here.
“Nope. Nothing. No scat, or footprints, of tufts of fur, or even birds.”
They’d slowly been getting their bearings. They had found the river and their first berry tree on the second day, which had easily held them over until Naomi managed to make a decent fishing line and hook. All three of them had tried their hand at fishing multiple times, but only Kent seemed to be good at it. He claimed he didn’t do anything, just sat there and moved the drifting line every so often. The haul of four fish in just three or so hours since he left camp this morning gave him away as a secret grand-master of fishing.
Willow flopped down beside him, sighing, “Naomi thinks we’re in some kind of middle point between whatever those pop-hopper’s did to the area with their nasty pot. Her theory is that if we keep moving away from that area, we’ll start seeing what forest is like normally.”
Kent winced, “So you’re still in favor of moving on?”
She nodded eagerly, “Oh yeah, for sure! The lean-to is great and all, don’t get me wrong - And I’m sure you enjoy getting to cuddle with one of two gorgeous women when it’s not your turn to take watch…” She threw her hair and glared at him dramatically.
Her teasing clearly hit a chord as he flushed and refused to look at her, “Come on, I offered to make my own lean-to…”
Her attempt to restrain her amusement failed and a short giggle slipped out, darn it! betrayed by my own body! She saw Kent relax immediately as he realized she was just teasing him. Bah, that could have been a running joke if I could have just stifled that laugh! So THAT’S what ‘you laugh, you lose’ means.
Deciding the joke was spent, she dropped it and moved on, “Anyway, the lean-to is great and we’ve been safe here. However!” She threw up a finger, channeling her best ‘uhm, actually’ energy, “We’re in a world of MAGIC now! We HAVE to figure out how to use it!” Her giddiness at the prospect had been slowly building the longer they wasted time on mundane things like “surviving.” She wanted to throw fireballs and fly!
Chuckling, Kent pointed out, “I’m pretty sure you can already do magic. Isn’t that why Madrick wanted you as a disciple?”
That brought Willow’s fantasies to a SCREECHING halt, “Wait, what?”
“Yeah, when you hit Madrick, that was magic right? You moved way faster than anyone can possibly move within normal limits. You were also complaining about a headache for the first couple days. I think Madrick also said something about you passing out because of mana strain or something? Not 100% sure I remember that right, I was just coming into the room when he was saying something about that.”
“Did Kai not say anything about it?”
“Nah, he mostly spent our time trying to lecture the ‘basics’ of what the UICI can do for us in situations like this. The intro tutorial barely scratches the surface, after all.”
Rolling her eyes at the reminder, and wanting to avoid him trying to dump yet more UICI tips and tricks on her, she quickly pressed forward, “So you think I used magic? And that using magic is what made me pass out?”
“Using too much probably, but yeah.”
They lapsed into silence for a while. Naomi was out picking berries and searching for any sign of animals too. They’d all agreed to meet at the river around 17:00. The UICI clock was a bit weird, it didn’t align with the Earth twenty four hour clock at all. Instead, the UICI clock had one hundred seconds to a minute, and thirty minutes to an hour. Each day was thirty hours long, with fifteen hours for each “half” of the day.
To make matters worse, the day-night cycle of this planet was way off from the clock. They’d woken at 12:00, as the sun they still hadn’t seen had risen. The sun remained in the sky for a full twenty hours each day which meant over the last four days, if they included the first day, they’d worked through darkness nearly as often as in light. Once they’d been sure there weren’t any dangerous predators waiting to strike at them, they’d been willing to continue gathering wood and stones during the hours of darkness they didn’t manage to sleep through.
Taking a deep breath, Willow returned her mind to the previous topic. Magic. Did I use magic? I definitely used my focus, and my moment. It felt different though. I didn’t calm my mind and gradually sharpen my focus, I just entered it… That by itself was odd enough to be notable. My moment felt different too, though. It felt most like it was ready for me, expecting that I’d need it. That’s not exactly right either though. It didn’t feel sentient or intelligent or anything. It just felt ready, like I’d prepared it beforehand.
Another few minutes of consideration, then Willow came to the logical conclusion which she announced to Kent, “I need to try it.”
She stood and backed away from the river, not wanting to possibly do something dumb and end up in the water. Once clear, she began working her way into her focus. Now that she was going through the familiar steps, rather than just acting on instinct, she could feel the difference. She could feel her mind pulling something from within her.
It was an a subtle and odd sensation, easily missed in the midst of combat but just as easy to notice now that she was looking for anything off. If she had to describe the sensation, she would say it felt like she was directing a viscus liquid of some kind.
It moved easily from what she was imagining as a kind of floating ball of the slimy material and kind of up through what felt like a peaceful void. Finally, the slime-stuff was pulled into what kind of felt like a funnel of sorts, the mass constricting and bunching up, being pulled in a more uniform line which sped through tunnels and pathways. There was now a thin tendril of goo connecting from the source to the funnel, and going through the entire maze.
She noticed the goo evaporating slowly as it cycled through the maze, following a looping pathway. Each time some of it evaporated, more was fed in from the connecting tendril. Refreshing the evaporated slime was way faster following that connected tendril than it had been to initially pull it to the funnel.
Having been concentrating almost entirely on the odd internal sensations, Willow pulled her attention outside and noted that she was definitely under the same uber-focused kind of state that she’d noticed both when confronting Baav and trying to hit Madrick. Everything more than about four meters away was washed out and a bit blurred around the edges to her sight, while everything inside felt sharp and clear.
As she experimented by looking around, she noticed that as she brought her attention to rest on Kent, or a particular tree, or a fish in the pond, the rest of the things within her perception all grew less detailed, duller, desaturated. The object of her current attention, however, grew incredibly sharp and detailed. Every motion, every expression, every twitch and color were blindingly obvious.
She saw Kent’s mouth moving and watched in fascination, the sound of his words arriving out-of-sync to what her mind expected. As she listened, she guessed that the world around her was moving about half as fast as usual. A dramatic difference, especially in a fight.
“Whoa, I thought Madrick was the one who made the colors disappear before. That was you? You’re the only thing with any color in the area.” The sentences finally finished and Kent slowly moved his head around to take in the area.
“Everything I’m not specifically paying attention to turns grey inside of this area and everything outside looks muted and blurred to me. What about you?”
Kent had, relatively, quickly snapped his head back to look at her. His expression turning to confused. His slow speech came through, “That was too fast, I couldn’t really catch the whole thing. Something about blurred, right? The area around us that’s further than a handful of meters away looks blurry, if that’s what you mean. I can’t really tell what’s going on out there.”
As they talked, Willow started to feel a slight strain. Her eyes unfocused as she turned her attention inward. She saw the ball of slimy liquid was slowly growing smaller. It had gone from softball to baseball sized. She still had another thing she had to at least try.
Willow mentally pushed herself, and claimed her moment. This time was a bit more like normal, where she had to actively create her moment, rather than feeling like she slipped into it. The internal reaction was interesting to watch. For the fist time she noticed a second ball of something, this one she somehow didn’t really feel like she had a visual representation of so much as a feeling and a sound. She heard something like static and felt pressure.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Instead of the relatively slow draw of substance she’d watched from her first source, this one was almost instantaneous. The static sound dropped to about half of its previous volume, while the pressure became more like a touch. She felt her moment activate. She could feel the barest trace of a pathway between the second source and the same funnel as the slime energy had entered. They were mixed up in there. She examined the two substances as best she could. One of them feeling like a sound and sensation, while the other seemed purely visual, making it really difficult for her to truly understand how they were interacting. Her instinct told her that the sound and feeling energy was wrapped around the slimy energy.
Opening her eyes, Willow saw that the world around her had frozen in that single moment. Everything inside of her little bubble was entirely still. There were a few wispy remnants of feather-branch frond leaves simply sitting in the air, as if a camera had snapped an image.
While she had been still, the wrapped up energy seemed to be just shy of stable. It was depleting, but it felt very slow. She wasn’t passing any new static energy into the funnel and wasn’t planning on it, as she wanted to avoid another huge headache. Even so, the energy was being used extremely slowly. The slime energy’s use had also slowed to nearly nothing, once she’d activated her moment.
Keeping as much focus on her inside little, world? space? Willow took a step forward. A tenth of the energy was burned up in that single motion. She clenched her fist. Another tenth. Is it just any action? She blinked. Seven tenths left. So what all counts as an action? She leapt forward. The entire motion required compressing her body down a little bit, tensing, then exploding her legs upward. The entire thing apparently counted as a single action, as another tenth vanished.
She landed and stumbled a bit, distracted enough by trying to keep track of her internal system that she didn’t notice and account for the large stone her right foot met upon landing. A full four tenths of the remaining energy disappeared. With only two “actions” left, Willow decided to try something else. She ended her moment. The static energy unwound from within the funnel and flowed back into its source. Her focus was still active, so she released it as well and watched it retreat in the same manner.
Kent gasped, when she looked his way his eyes were wide, “You teleported! like, a half meter! Do you have a blink spell? Holy shit, that’d be so cool!” He leapt from where he had been fishing, forgetting about the line entirely in his rush over.
As he headed toward her, she noticed several new scrolls blinking softly in her little notification shelf. She acknowledged them and they stopped blinking. She’d see what that was about in a bit.
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Naomi
Near Camp, Feather-branch Forest, Savriâ
Shouting came from the direction of the river. The tone was excited, not afraid or angry though, so Naomi maintained her deliberate pace. She didn’t really want to tell the others what she’d discovered. It meant things would have to change. They’d have to strike out further into the woods, like Willow had been wanting.
She had confirmed that the strange dead ring around the monsters Willow called pop-hoppers was spreading. They’d only been in the forest for three days, but as far as she could tell, the deadness had spread about two meters into the forest-line. The trees which rested on the area it had encroached upon were already dying.
Although the last few days hadn’t been easy they had been very fulfilling. Naomi couldn’t remember another time in her life when she’d genuinely felt both useful and needed. While she knew Willow and Jonah would have figured things at on their own, they had both thanked her for taking lead and had expressed their appreciation for her knowledge. It was a rare event to be appreciated, though she supposed that was at least partially because she rarely did anything. Much less anything to appreciate. Trudging her way steadily on, she finally reached the little fishing area they’d setup.
Jonah and Willow were animatedly talking together a few feet from the river. It was good that they got along. Things would be way harder if any of them had problems with each other. Though, she imagined it was difficult not to get along with Jonah, given how laid back and relaxed he always seemed. Willow, she could see being more polarizing. She had a lot of personality and displayed her entire incredible range of emotions to the world without hesitation. She couldn’t say Willow wore her heart on her sleeve, so much as she wore an entire outfit comprised of her heart and all of it was in neon.
She watched and listened for a bit, realizing that they were apparently discussing magic. In particular, that Willow had magic. Maybe she could wait for a little bit to tell them they’d need to move. Just long enough to enjoy some of their enthusiastic and gleeful conversation. Maybe even join in.
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Willow
Camp, Feather-branch Forest, Savriâ
The rest of the day had been spent discussing and theorizing magic with Jonah and Naomi, the latter of which had popped up almost out of nowhere to join in their conversation. They’d still been chatting as they brought the fish back to camp and prepared them for dinner. A skill they’d mostly gained through trial and error on their second day here, given Naomi had only known barely more about the process than Willow herself.
After dinner and the excitement of Willow’s discovery, Naomi had explained her findings. It wasn’t entirely surprising to Willow that something like that was going on. It was clear Madrick had dropped them in the location for some sort of reason and she thought it unlikely it was to force her to kill some weak little monsters. The reason was more than likely tied to the dead land itself. Whether he expected her to somehow fix it, or was just using it as a way to push her into action and avoiding creating a more permanent base, she wasn’t really sure. It ultimately didn’t matter all that much anyway, she really wanted to keep exploring.
The trees here were so cool, the mist in the sky was a mystery, the berries and fish were even odd and interesting. The fish weren’t any kind she’d ever seen back home, though granted she’d seen more fish after they were cooked than while they were swimming, but still! The berries tasted kind of reminiscent of a banana, but with the texture and mouth numbing properties of a guava. She wanted to see what else this wild alien planet had to offer and had been trying to convince Jonah and Naomi to go with her since the morning of the second day. Instead, they’d convinced her to stick around and “get her bearings” for a bit with them.
Now they had to leave and she couldn’t be happier! Although they hadn’t known each other long, Willow would already call both Kent and Naomi friends. New friends, which she didn’t know super well yet, but still friends. She didn’t want to leave them and go off to adventure on her own, she wanted to go off and adventure with them. Now, she could! Without having to beg, plead, or demand. AND I confirmed I have magic!!! Best. Day. Ever.
As she thought back to her little bout of testing earlier, Willow remembered the notification she had pending in the shelf. She quickly willed the UICI to show them to her in order.
FIRST INSIGHT CONFIRMED!
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CONGRATULATIONS!
You have developed your first insight!
. . . .
Insight not cataloged in UICI database.
Please name your insight by focusing on the particular insight and directing your intention to name it. Alternatively, focus on your insight and say, “Name insight: [My insight name]” out-loud.
MANA ASPECT CONFIRMED!
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CONGRATULATIONS!
You have successfully used mana processed into a new aspect by your soul nexus!
. . . .
Aspect not cataloged in UICI database.
Please name your aspect by focusing on the particular mana aspect and directing your intention to name it. Alternatively, focus on your mana aspect and say, “Name aspect: [My insight name]” out-loud.
MANA ASPECT CONFIRMED!
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CONGRATULATIONS!
You have successfully mana processed into a new aspect by your soul nexus!
. . . .
Aspect not cataloged in UICI database.
Please name your aspect by focusing on the particular mana aspect and directing your intention to name it. Alternatively, focus on your mana aspect and say, “Name aspect: [My aspect name]” out-loud.
MANA ASPECT CONFIRMED!
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CONGRATULATIONS!
You have successfully used mana processed into a new aspect by your soul nexus!
. . . .
Aspect not cataloged in UICI database.
Please name your aspect by focusing on the particular mana aspect and directing your intention to name it. Alternatively, focus on your mana aspect and say, “Name aspect: [My aspect name]” out-loud.
NEW ABILITY CONFIRMED!
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CONGRATULATIONS!
You have successfully used a new ability etched into your nexus shell!
. . . .
Ability not cataloged in UICI database.
Please name your ability by focusing on the particular ability and directing your intention to name it. Alternatively, focus on your ability and say, “Name ability: [My ability name]” out-loud.
Ehhhhh… Whatnow?