“What are we out here for again?” Accalia asked with a long sigh, leaning against a tree as Keliope and Aurivy stood nearby. The ursa goddess appeared equally confused, while Aurivy was just scanning the nearby meadow with unfocused eyes.
“I don’t know.” Keliope shrugged her shoulders. “The shrimp just said she’d let me punch stuff if I came along. Given that she wanted me, I thought that it’d be something interesting.”
“Nope.” Aurivy said, eyes still somewhat unfocused, as if she were purposely doing so. “It’s nothing important.”
“What?” The two goddesses looked at her in confusion, Keliope’s eye twitching. “You brought me all the way out here to punch… nothing? You realize punching is pretty much my thing, right?”
“Right. Absolutely nothing.” She nodded her head, before her eyes picked up a bit of movement. Her body suddenly blurred, rushing into the grass and pulling out a large, black box. “Got you!” She shouted, stunning the two other goddesses as they watched Aurivy holding up the box, having watched her slam it down over an empty patch of grass.
“Okay, Aurivy…” Keliope looked at the pink-haired girl. “You’d better start explaining quickly. I was promised that I’d get to punch something.”
“No, I told you that you might be able to get into an interesting fight.” Aurivy corrected, focusing and causing the box to shrink in her hands. “And you still might, if nothing happens again.”
“What’s in the box?” Accalia asked, knowing that Aurivy rarely did things pointlessly. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was at least somewhat rare.
“Nothing.” Aurivy said proudly. “Absolutely nothing is in the box. Oh, there’s some air, too. But mostly nothing.”
“That’s the same thing.” Keliope grumbled, glaring at the box as if it was the great offender in all of this.
“Wait, I don’t think it is.” Accalia said as she extended a hand to stop Keliope. “Aurivy… what is this ‘nothing’ that you’re talking about? As companions, there’s nothing that should escape our notice. Thus, the fact that we perceive the box as empty means that it should truly be empty.”
“Oh, it is empty.” Aurivy nodded. “And you’re correct, nothing can escape our notice.” There was a grin splitting her face as if she was telling some grand joke that only she understood. “In fact, nothing has been escaping our notice for a long, long time. At least a century, I’d say. Maybe even a thousand years!”
It was Accalia’s turn to have her eye twitching. “Okay, I’m the Goddess of Wisdom, and even I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Aurivy giggled, shaking her head. “I’m talking about nothing. Nothing at all. You can’t see it, not really, because that would make it something. I even had to make sure neither of you could focus on it before I grabbed it, or else you might have killed it by identifying it as ‘something’.”
“Nothing is… well it’s nothing! If I had to put it into common words, it is the most harmless void entity that has ever come into the world, carrying the concept of nonexistence. You can only vaguely see it as visual distortions when your eyes are unfocused, because once you focus on it, you identify it as something. When nothing is identified as something, it ceases to be nothing. Make sense?”
“No!” Keliope called out, though Accalia furrowed her brow, looking out at the field as her eyes began to unfocus as well. It didn’t take long for her to notice the distortions, which appeared to only be a natural part of trying to see with an unfocused gaze.
“You’re saying that all of that is ‘nothing’?” She asked, to which Aurivy shook her head.
“Not all of it. When you see visual distortions like that, it’s more often than not just a trick of the brain trying to fill in information that you’re not actively looking at. Other times, it’ll be because your brain doesn’t know how to process what is really there. Nothing has no color, no identifiable shape, and does not exist on any level that we can consciously recognize.”
“Then how do you even know that it’s in that box?” Keliope challenged, to which Aurivy smiled proudly.
“I don’t! The moment I open the box, the contents within it will become ‘something’, thus eliminating any nothingness that is inside.”
Accalia let out a low, canine-like whine. “Then… what are we here for?”
“Now that’s the million dollar question!” Aurivy said as she pointed to the lycan goddess. “Nothingness has been around for so long. I only discovered it by chance when scrolling through my personal history to try and find some loose change I forgot about. Nothing is what causes stuff that you forget about to disappear. It’s almost always something small. A sock, a coin, maybe an old family trinket.”
“Once there is nobody that is thinking of that item, it becomes food for nothing. After that, nothing can spread. Due to the perception-distorting nature it possesses, it can pass from home to home, move all over an entire city and never be spotted.”
“When enough of nothing is present, it turns an area into nowhere. Nothing is naturally drawn towards nothing, as it is all rejected by everything. Thus, I want to use the nothing I caught to find the door to nowhere, a place that can’t be found unless you know where it is, but is also destroyed when its existence is known.”
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Keliope’s hand came up to grip her forehead when she heard that. “Ow… this talk is making my head hurt. Why do you want to find a place that will just be destroyed once you know it exists?”
“I want to use the moment of its discovery as the basis to create a divine territory!” Aurivy shouted happily. “A realm that cannot be accessed without prior knowledge of its location, but can appear anywhere for those that know where it is.”
“Okay… okay, I can get that… then why are we here?” Keliope followed her question up with another one, causing Aurivy to shrug.
“Nothing isn’t always inert. To say that it is would be to identify it with a primary characteristic, thus making it something. Sometimes, nothing can be alive. You hear it sometimes. The chiming of bells in the wind, a door blowing shut. You ask yourself what made that noise, but your mind immediately knows, so it gives you a warning that you so often dismiss. ‘It’s nothing’.”
“Once we find nowhere, there might be large masses of living nothing that try to attack. Even nothing has a survival instinct… usually. If that happens, you’ll need to punch it. Stronger patches of nothing can briefly survive being identified, and will seek to eliminate the being identifying them to maintain their existence. But if they are physically interacted with by a being carrying as much recognition as the three of us, the additional layer of perception will cause them to be destroyed. Hopefully.”
“Hopefully?” Keliope questioned with a raised brow.
“Yup! I’ve never managed to catch a live nothing before, so this is all new to me. That’s why I have Accalia here, too. If you can’t destroy the nothing with one punch, then her power as the Goddess of Wisdom will be able to categorize its existence, further extinguishing its concept.”
Hearing Aurivy’s explanation, the two let out long groans. “You could have told us all of this before, you know?” Accalia pointed out, to which Aurivy shook her head.
“If you knew what you were here for, you would have been on the lookout as well. I can’t catch the nothing if all three of us perceive it at once, even if we’re unfocused.”
“Alright, then… how are you going to use this box to find nowhere if you can’t even open it up to check its contents?” Accalia asked, Keliope nodding her head quickly in agreement.
“That’s the easy part! No matter what is or is not inside, I set the box to travel in a direction determined by the greatest influence.” As she said that, golden mist wrapped around the box, causing it to hover in midair for a brief moment before falling straight to the ground. “Any minute now… if there really is nothing in the box, it will start being drawn towards the nearest nowhere. Once that happens, I’ll need you two to keep your eyes focused behind the box. Don’t stare at it, and for the love of us don’t look ahead of it. Don’t think about what is or is not in the box, just watch its trail and wait for my signal.”
The two shrugged their shoulders, idly watching the box. After a few moments, it seemed to begin twitching, before sliding slowly along the ground. Aurivy squealed with excitement, increasing the box’s speed before moving to chase it. As the box sped up, the three had to push themselves to move faster and faster, hundreds of meters passing with every step..
Along the way, their eyes simply remained focused on the trail dug into the ground by the mysterious box, until suddenly that trail vanished. At that point, they had been running for at least twenty minutes, and had crossed over a thousand kilometers. “Is this the spot?” Accalia asked, not lifting her eyes up from the end of the trail. Clearly, the box had flown into the air after reaching this point.
“We’re nowhere.” Aurivy’s voice spoke up next to Accalia… or maybe behind her? Her voice seemed oddly distorted, though Accalia still refused to lift her eyes, lest she ruin Aurivy’s experiment.
On the other end, Aurivy took a deep breath, closing her eyes and cutting off all of her senses. The only thing that she left active was the Travel domain, using it to detect the world around her. As she did, she felt the distortions gradually clearing up, but that didn’t stop her. She did her best to perceive the imperceptible, understand how it distorted space and perception around itself, and recreate that within her own divine power.
“Two-thirty, twenty degrees up. Six-ten, five degrees down.” She suddenly called out, Keliope turning and throwing out two punches. The first went off to her right, while the other was almost straight behind where she was facing. She felt her fist make contact with something, but… at the moment she recognized the contact, it was like she was punching through static. Whatever it was, or wasn’t, had simply disappeared.
“This is giving me a headache!” Keliope said as she tried her best to understand the situation she was in, though Aurivy kept calling out more directions for her to punch. “I’m not supposed to be able to get headaches!”
“Imagine how any invaders will feel when we turn the nothing into our fortress, then!” Aurivy laughed merrily. “Twelve, straight ahead.”
Keliope briefly hesitated at that, as she was vaguely aware that that was where Aurivy was standing. Still, she trusted the halfling goddess, turning and throwing her fist out for another punch. This one was softer than before, and stopped the moment that it hit Aurivy’s back. Keliope could vaguely feel that there had been something there just behind Aurivy, as if getting ready to attack her from behind.
“How much longer do you need?” Keliope asked, just as Aurivy’s eyes began to open.
“I’m done.” She answered with a grin, the hazy air around them almost instantly clearing. “Thanks, Kel. Since you bought me the time I needed, I was able to fully understand how to recreate the effects of nothing.”
Accalia let out a sigh, lifting her head and allowing her gaze to alternate between focused and unfocused, purposely targeting and identifying any distortions that she saw. “Did you manage to learn how to make your territory?”
“It’ll take some time, but… I think so.” Aurivy nodded her head. “Since I have this information to work as the foundation, I just have to create it within my domain of Travel, and I should be able to link it up with my idea.”
“Does that mean that Traveler is going to have a key to nowhere?” Accalia asked, Aurivy grinning in return.
“Maybe, I haven’t decided that far, yet. I’ll let you two know when I’m done creating it. If I’m right, anything placed inside will be undetectable by anything outside. The perfect place to create a covert base. I might even suggest moving the Citadel there, once I establish special channels. If those special channels don’t cause the breakdown of the area… we’ll find out, I guess!”