082, 1/2

Platinum rain fell upon stone boxes full of sand and seeds, soaking in, turning orange dirt into browns and tans. Bright green shoots erupted from the low-quality soil, stretching into the dim light above. Storm clouds covered the sky, but sunlight still shone through to the city below, to the Gardens, and their workers.

People harvested everything they could, and replaced the plants as necessary. Some of them had been doing this sort of harvesting for months, now. Not every farmer left for the farms of the Greensoil Republic, after all. The ‘old hands’ who chose to stay guided those who had never done this before; those who wanted first pick and free food by the right of work.

Soon enough, rice and potatoes and thirty seven other types of partially processed or raw goods began to stream into the temporary markets erected near the Human District, outside the rain. Most of that food left those markets in large crates, packed full, destined for grocers and restaurants. Tomorrow, the temporary markets would open to the public.

There were quite a few logistical problems and angry words and minor fights happening all around the Gardens, simultaneously, but the goods were cheap, and plentiful, and the Guard was on duty, making sure that nothing too disruptive happened.

In the course of the first harvest, Erick made a few discoveries. The first, was that it was easy to hold his own [Exalted Storm Aura] into the shape it needed to be, in order to rain on the Garden, by itself. The second, much nicer discovery, was that he could set an Ophiel atop his house, inside the Restful air of the [Prismatic Ward], and have that Ophiel cast [Exalted Storm Aura] almost exactly as Erick had done himself.

Without Clarity, or Sculpt Spell, or Erick’s Favored Spell, or even Aurify’s radius bonus to all auras, Ophiel had a lot larger drain on his mana than Erick had on his. For Ophiel, the 1 Mana per second of [Exalted Storm Aura] was 5 Mana per second, taking into account all the necessary shapings to keep the spell in the proper formation. But at Rest, inside the dense air of the [Prismatic Ward], Ophiel regenerated 8 mana per second.

As Erick handed the spell over to Ophiel atop the roof of Erick’s mage tower, Ophiel trilled in happy violins and energized guitars. He sang at the storm above, a hundred eyes wide open across his full, three meter body, taking in all the sights around him, making sure he was casting the spell exactly as needed.

Rain on the Gardens, and nowhere else!

Erick left Ophiel to his assignment then went to speak to Calizi and Rollo about selling his own vegetables and the market prices of various foodstuffs, but the two older incani launched into an immediate argument over the price of potatoes. That was enough of that for Erick, so he went and worked in his own garden; it had gotten some unintentional platinum rain, and needed some pruning because of that.

Erick had never rained platinum across the whole Human District before today. Some problems rapidly appeared with the rain, in light of this experiment. Platinum rain slowly, but surely, collected into puddles around the not-flat-at-all Human District. Some of those puddles became minor lakes. Some of it ran into the sandy soil of Erick’s own green space, so he shored up the [Weather Ward]s around the garden and added small walls of stone at the edges, to keep the water out.

More than a few of the growing spaces out there in the Garden were experiencing the same problems. Ophiel was raining properly, but some plots were ill-designed, or near an unintentional platinum river. People scrambled to divert the rain to where it needed to go. More than a few people raced around, creating ditches, while organizers directed them from [Scry] eyes in the sky. The only council member who seemed to have made his plots well was Kip, the man with all the rice fields. His workers had already drawn ditches into the Human District to collect the rain. Those ditches were quickly connected to the new ditches, solving most of the district’s water problems with one elegant solution.

But even with all the small problems Erick saw, no one asked him to hold off on the rain, so he got down to his own business.

With a thousand telekinetic hands made of air and intent, Erick harvested potatoes, picked tomatoes, plucked carrots, unearthed onions, and grabbed everything else that looked even the slightest bit overgrown.

Eventually, hours later, a blushing young orangescale girl interrupted him from the side of his garden, while he was still deep in the herbs and listening to Ophiel sing. It was past noon; he could stop now. Erick nodded to the girl and had Ophiel stop. The winged [Familiar] squawked at being interrupted, but he cut the rain anyway, then gladly trilled in violins as Erick offered up his shoulder as a perch. As Ophiel turned tiny and took his spot, Erick offered the girl some vegetables from his garden, but she silently shook her head and took off running, back to the edge of town.

Poi stood to the side this whole time, under his own [Weather Ward], silent, and observant.

Erick stepped out of the herbs, to stand by his fresh harvest. He asked, “Grilled veggies for dinner?”

“As you wish.” Poi said, “I’d prefer fish, but the lake is not yet carved and it won’t be stable enough to harvest for months, anyway. I think I will miss that part of Oceanside, most of all.”

Erick smiled. “That reminds me. It’s time to start trying to recreate [Teleport].”

As the clouds above wisped away on the northern winds, Poi frowned.

Erick noticed. “It’s not going to be that bad.”

“There will be explosions.” Poi added, “There’s always explosions.”

Erick laughed, as he telekinetically picked up his produce, and said, “Not always!”

 

– – – –

 

In one of the larger rooms on the third floor, where no one lived and nothing was stored and the occasional lesson was taught via conjured blackboards, Erick played around with [Lightwalk].

 

 

Like all of the other ‘minimally described’ spells, [Lightwalk] was deceptively deep. He hadn’t read much on the skill, but he knew about what it was supposed to do, thanks to his talks with his daughter, back before she started sleeping.

Erick flickered into insubstantial light as the spell shifted his entire body into ephemeral illumination. He walked forward—

He stayed in place, but not for lack of trying. He put one foot forward, but his center of gravity didn’t change—

Oh! He was weightless! His back foot pressed against the orange stone underfoot, but instead of touching, his foot sort of puddled against the ground, turning into white light that stretched out from where he touched. He picked his foot up, and it came out of that puddle, the same as it went in…

He picked up both feet, and hovered in the air. He couldn’t move from his original position except to wave his hands and body around. He was a human lightward; stuck in place forever more.

Or at least until he turned the spell off. Which he did. Which caused him to fall to his butt with a little “Oof!” popping out of his mouth, and his [Personal Ward] flickering white light across his skin.

He stood up and sighed out—

He paused. He was breathing. Well, duh. Of course he was breathing. But what was odd—

He turned the spell back on, and the need to breathe… vanished? Yup. That was right. He had not noticed it before, but he did not need to breathe when he was light. Odd! Useful, too? Yes; definitely useful. Jane hadn’t ever mentioned this before.

… There didn’t seem to be a downside to not breathing.

And what was even odder, was that his brain was not telling his body to automatically breathe. He looked down. Oh. No. He had it wrong. He wasn’t exactly breathing; no air seemed to flow through his nose or mouth, but his chest was rising and falling like normal. He was ‘breathing’. Sort of?

He forcefully stopped breathing.

… Nope. His chest continued to gently rise and fall.

He said, “What is going on with that?”

It was only after the words escaped his body —they had not escaped his lips, for sure, but rather his whole self, in some odd sort of way— that he realized something very peculiar, that might have given a hint as to some stranger mystery that had been on Erick’s mind ever since he started really working lightwards.

Back when he was first learning magic, when he tried to apply for a lightwarding license from the Mage Guild, he had accidentally created a lightward that screamed. He had never been able to duplicate that effect after that day. Lightwards did not usually make noise, after all.

Properly made lightwards, anyway?

There was a book in Esoteric Magic that listed the stranger magical effects that had been observed in the world. One of the stranger phenomenon was that of the ‘uneducated lightwarder’. When someone with [Ward] below level 10, who had no formal training, tried to make a lightward, they sometimes failed in weird and spectacular ways. One of those failures was in the creation of a noisy lightward.

Now what did all of that have to do with being able to speak while he was [Lightwalk]ing?

Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot of something. Erick had no idea.

He looked down. “And my chest is still rising and falling… Hmm.”

Erick canceled [Lightwalk]. He held his breath. He activated [Lightwalk]. His chest was not moving up and down. Strange!

“Maybe it puts me in a stasis? That only looks like me? Is that it? But I can still move my limbs… But I can’t walk forward.” He shrugged, and said, “I haven’t even used the skill yet, duh. This is the next test.”

Erick pushed a point of mana and intent into the skill, exactly how he would do to cast any magic, urging himself forward. He immediately began to drift through the air of the room, disturbing nothing at his passing. He watched as the wall on the other side of the room got closer, and closer. When he struck the wall, he struck it arm first. Fingers turned to light puddles, followed closely by hands, legs, and then his face. He fully touched the wall, and became a white layer of ephemeral light upon the orange surface. His eyesight was briefly impaired, but as he thought about what was happening, he wondered why his eyesight was impaired at all. He was literally light, right now.

With that thought, and a mental turn, Erick became a puddle of light on the wall, that looked back the way he came. Another point of intent-filled mana pushed Erick off of the wall. His hands came out of the white puddle first, followed by his knee and then the rest of him. He drifted back into the open air of the room, facing the interior.

He set his feet down to catch himself, and canceled the spell. Weight returned. Breathing came back. His eyesight returned to its normal location of out from his eyes. Normalcy was restored.

He mumbled, “I wonder if shadowspiders even have lungs? Or spiracles… whatever spiders usually have.”

Erick had not really experimented with lightwards in the way he was planning, now, but he felt he should, just to see if he was misunderstanding something. He plucked a pebble from the floor with [Stoneshape], then cast a special ball of blue light around the pebble; the outside of the wardlight was solid blue, but the inside was solid white.

As he held the wardlight in his hand, he could already tell that he was on the right track.

The wardlight flickered blue around his hand, but where it touched the skin of his wrist, it was deformed. Tiny flickers of white light escaped against his skin.

He went to the door of the room, the only surface that was thin enough for this experiment, and pressed the blue wardlight to the surface.

Just as he expected, the wardlight deformed upon contact with the solid surface, turning into a disjointed puddle against the solid door. White flickers escaped at the joining. The radius of the wardlight was more than enough to fully go through the door, too, but the light did not appear on the other side.

It was possible that [Lightwalk] turned a person into something similar to a wardlight version of themselves, at the time of casting. He was able to get a version of himself that breathed, and another that did not, but neither version actually needed to breathe. Neither version needed to actually be physically whole, either, as Erick was able to smush himself against the wall like wardlight with no ill effects afterward.

Erick dismissed the blue wardlight around the stone and set the stone on the windowsill. He turned back to the room and tossed a complete lightmask into the air; blocking out all light in a meter sphere. A darkness appeared, like a black hole. Erick turned himself to light, then touched the darkness.

His lightform body did not deform against the black space, but his fingers touched the darkness, and made it solid. Or maybe his fingers turned solid? Whatever the case, the complete maskward was a barrier, unlike touching the wall, or a floor.

Erick dismissed the maskward. In its place, he conjured a shadowy space, where half of all light was blocked. Touching this dim space was like pressing his hand into wet concrete; he could do it, but he felt resistance…

Erick pulled his hand back, dismissed the shadowy orb, and went through all of his senses.

Touch was the first offender to get scrutinized, because aside from touching the maskward, which he had definitely done, touching anything else felt like a simple pressure that deformed his lightform body based on the degree he pressed into the object. Touching darkness felt like touching something real.

Maybe he could only exist in the light, when he was in lightform?

Ah. Yes. That would make sense. Duh.

But why the difference in his sense of touch, between pressing into a maskward versus pressing into a wall?

Hmm.

Erick left that be for now, then scrutinized his sense of sight. Since he had already proven he wasn’t his physical self, it seemed rather arbitrary that he saw the world through his ‘eyes’ didn’t it? He had already made himself a pressed puddle against a wall, and was able to ‘turn’ his body around in that puddle to see back to the room, so maybe he just needed to see with his feet, or with the back of his head?

In their talks, Jane had briefly spoken of how she was able to see and hear with her [Greater Shadowalk].

Maybe a part of unlocking [Greater Shadowalk] was tuning all of your senses into your new, magical form? Or was that the bonus of the ‘greater’ title at work? There was probably a ‘chicken-egg’ thing happening there, but just as with that old saying, there was one thing that had to come first.

… But this was a world of magic! Maybe the chicken truly did come first? Wouldn’t that be something.

Erick pinged intent-filled mana into [Lightwalk], trying to ‘see through his feet’, for the next minute, but got nowhere. He would come back to this, later.

Taste would have to be scrutinized later, too. How would he do that, though?

Hearing worked perfectly fine, but he was not really hearing with his ears, was he?

… He turned on [Hunter’s Instincts].

He tasted the air floating through his body, smelling baking bread wafting up from downstairs. He knew Kiri was working on something in the kitchen, so that made sense. Erick heard heartbeats nearby; only two of them. One belonged to Kiri, the other to Poi. Erick’s head guard was standing outside of the open door to this room, exactly as he had been since Erick started his experiments.

But stronger than taste and sound, Erick saw all around him as though he was a light slime; 360 degree full, clear vision.

Erice drew his senses back to himself, and smiled. He even saw himself smile, like he was both inside his body, and outside, at the same time.

“Gods,” Erick said, “That’s trippy.”

He dropped [Hunter’s Instincts] and was suddenly back inside his ‘body’.

“Also trippy,” he said, to himself. He pulled up his Status, just to see if he could. It came up easy enough. He put it away, saying, “No accidental [Hunter’s Instincts] [Lightwalk] spell.” He decided, right then, that he was going to try for just such a spell, just to see what he would get…

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… When he understood what he was going for better; later.

He flexed his shoulders, and paused to marvel at how he didn’t actually flex his shoulders at all. He just moved a lightward version of himself around a bit, mimicking what he would have done if he had a real body. Ah, well, whatever!

He popped 10 intent-filled mana into [Lightwalk], trying to move across the room.

He splattered against the wall five meters away, briefly turning into a puddle of light, before plopping back into the air just before the wall. It was only slightly embarrassing. Reorienting back to the room, he experimented with amounts of mana and the distance it would gain him. One point of mana, gently cast, moved him forward at a slow, walking pace. Two points of mana was running. More mana was required to change direction, but that was also trivial; Erick’s mana never went much under ‘full’. Soon, Erick was rushing around the room, silently flying fast and reckless. He would have been puking if he were in his normal body.

He was disoriented, for sure, and he silently crashed into walls over and over again, but he took no damage, and there was no pain.

Erick continued to zip around. And then he canceled the spell, running full tilt forward, just to see what would happen. He instantly realized his mistake. He crashed into the stone wall with a loud whap.

He opened his eyes to see Poi standing over him, holding the rod of [Treat Wounds].

“You’re already up.” Poi said, “Only one use of the rod, too.”

Erick tried to smile, but ended up groaning a bit. He sat up. He breathed. Whatever pain there had been, quickly passed. He said, “I’m fine?” He declared, “Of course I’m fine.”

Poi asked, “Having fun hurting yourself?”

Erick laughed, and that briefly hurt, but no part of him felt injured enough to need a [Treat Wounds]. He stumbled to his feet, saying, “It’s kinda fun. Yeah. But it’s time to take this experiment outside.”

 

– – – –

 

Erick and Poi blipped into the center of an unimportant and unremarkable stretch of the Crystal Forest, where the agave were few, the mimics were of average density, and the sun beat down from a clear, blue sky. A hot wind blew into Erick’s clothes, as Ophiel blipped into the air above. Erick began using [Lightwalk].

In this bright, windy place, Ophiel trilled to ride the breeze, and Erick discovered a quick truth about [Lightwalk]; it was easier to walk around in the sun. So easy, in fact, that he was doing just that. Without spending mana to move.