254, 1/2, Start of Book 9

 

No one really knows what happened that day when the sky closed over and started showing fakery. It was a (curse word) (curse word) Wizard War. That’s how that (curse word) goes. Some people are telling me my father vanished months ago and they had no idea about the Black Gate rescues. Others are telling me they’re from worlds that were on the brink of death, being annihilated by Nothanganathor, and then they weren’t. The minotaur horde is the biggest example of that; there were like 500 and now there’s a (curse word) nation of them half a million strong. They got plans to migrate to the fourth sphere up there; the first empty one, you know. Solomon’s Genesis was more than what it appeared to be. A lot more. It’s all a (curse word) (curse word) mess and we’re still trying to solve it all, and Dad’s not back yet and that’s… That’s worrying.

I’m sure he’s fine.

(Jane Flatt goes silent at this point and this Knowledge Mage cannot help but wonder what she really knows and feels about her father’s disappearance, and how much she is lying to herself versus how much she is lying to the world in the manner that all politicians lie. But Jane is a good sort of person, so I doubt she is lying for any untoward reasoning.)

-excerpt from ‘The Great Genesis of Solomon’, Year One, interviews by Anhelia Kendrithyst, Queen of the Reborn Geode.

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My great, great, ten-times-great grandmother came to dinner on a sixthday feast after the end and rebirth of the world, like, five months after it all went down. She was quite pleasant, actually, even after uncle Wess tried to murder her. He’s an inquisitor so that’s his job, but he wasn’t very effective. ‘Auntie Cloverfield’ is basically a Breach Demon, though, so… I’m glad she turned out to be an okay person. She is a demon though— holy Host is she a demon— and our half of her living descendants —all of us at the party— are celestial-bound, so it was pretty tense for a while. Commiserating and celebrating over the Genesis and the knowledge of the Erased One was a pretty good wallbreaker for more conversation, especially when she broke out all that gold. Turned out we had a lot more in common than we thought, including our hatred of the demons.

The Clover and Cloverfield family gathering of human and incani two months later turned out okay, too.

-excerpt from House Benevolence Report on Angel/Demon relations, case #876 post Genesis.

Investigator note: Wess Clover is the inquisitor who walked with the Wizard Flatt through the Glittering Depths. See cases: Dungeons/Grand Dungeons/Glittering Depths for more

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From the Office of those devoted to the Divinity of Phagar, God of Time and End

In light of recent public events it is my duty as the Head Priest of Phagar to clarify a few things. Yes, the church is recruiting. Yes, we are starting to answer questions regarding the future, which is completely opposite of how we have done things for long, long before the Sundering. Yes, this is because of Nothanganathor and Elemental Malevolence infecting our land, and many other factors.

The main message I wish to impart with this missive is this:

Phagar will not allow Veird to suffer from Nothanganathor ever again, and he will be ensuring that the Unascended Dragon cannot touch our world, forevermore.

If you wish to be a part of that action, then sign up with us now.

– Xerixio, Head Priest of Phagar, God of Time and End, at the Grand Unified Cathedral of Candlepoint

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DUNGEON GUILD ALL CALL

The world is ten times larger than it was before Solomon’s Genesis. The wrought are busy making everything actually work, from waterways to air flows to everything else. They cannot handle the ‘smaller’ tasks, like the monsters, and they especially cannot handle all the dungeons popping up everywhere on those new lands.

We need people. We need you.

– –

– –

House Benevolence, classified document #918, Post Genesis.

Overseer clearance or higher.

This is a copy of a blue box posted by Rozeta and gifted to certain individuals now and again ever since the Genesis of Veird.

We are unsure how many people this box has gone out to, but we do know that the person who gave it to us, ( [REDACTED] ), found the note laying on their desk, hastily drawn on a scrap of paper. This is not the only instance of such an event happening.

Rozeta isn’t talking about what this message means, but she isn’t denying she sent this message, either. Whatever the case, it appears that she doesn’t see the dissemination of this blue box as an operational security risk. It is possible, and highly likely, that she is fully aware that this information is ‘leaking’, and she is allowing it to leak on purpose.

– –

– –

From the office of King Solomon of the Black Gate:

Please stop asking me about the location of Erick Flatt, Wizard of Benevolence.

I put him on FENRIR’s surface one year ago today, and though many of you expected him to appear because we are ‘over where we lost him’, that’s not how physics works in the universe. That’s not even how magiphysics works. As we’re orbiting FENRIR, FENRIR is also rotating, and the whole thing is flying through the Renew Galaxy, which in turn moves through the larger universe at a fast rate.

The current location of Veird as regards to the initial position of FENRIR’s surface is easy to work out for those of us with the initial sets of information regarding positions and velocities, but for operational security, those numbers will not be published. I can tell you this, though: We will not be over the location where I teleported Erick away for a very long time, and that is on purpose.

We’re still dealing with Nothanganathor’s infection even after all our purges and otherwise, for all the universe seems filled with Malevolence that is crashing down on our New Surface at all times. It might not be Nothanganathor, but it is still Malevolence. And yet, that’s only 25% of our current problems.

Mainly, there’s all these shitty little wars through all these colonies on the upper shells. Those wars take up quite a lot of my time, House Benevolence’s time, and everyone else’s time, too. So stop fucking fighting with each other. I really don’t give a shit if all your dead enemies came back to life. Avandrasolaro is far beyond the point where he is talking to anyone engaged in Forever War actions, and this is the official notice that I am beyond the point of talking, too. I will let you decide what that means for yourselves, but the meaning should be quite clear.

Also, the Dark still gives bounty, and everyone wants a piece of that, and if you’re involved in any of those wars, you’re off the Black Gate lists.

Stop asking me about Erick’s whereabouts. He still has a year before we start to worry.

He is absolutely still alive; Yggdrasil says so.

– –

– –

From the offices of Rozeta and the Pantheon:

ALL NOTICE:

It has come to our attention that the rise of the more intelligent Nothor Beasts is directly tied to a Full Status Reset. We’re still trying to understand how this happens, but for now all Registrars are forbidden from granting a Full Status Reset without Inquisitors and Paladins of Rozeta on standby. Full Status Resets will still be granted, but they will be done under strict controls and monitoring.

More information to follow.

– –

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– – – –

– – – –

Reality was pain, and then it was something softer.

Erick did not open his eyes, for his eyes had never closed this entire time. He had been on Veird. The sky was closing over. And then Solomon had picked him up and threw him at FENRIR, at some distant part of it. Erick survived, somehow. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, or what was happening, though.

All was black.

All was glowing.

The land was a black expanse. The sky was a vista of stars.

Mortality returned in a flashing condensation of Benevolence turning to flesh.

Erick gasped—

He was a human in the vacuum of space. Every single part of him began to expand from within, as oxygen boiled out of blood and his eyes froze over. In that very same second Erick realized he was in outer space right now, so he rapidly transformed back into Benevolence. He did NOT breathe. He did not try to walk anywhere. He just adjusted his senses, to see what he could see.

He did not die.

Good start, all things considered.

Erick’s body was a nebulous flow of Benevolence, pouring out of his core, which was itself ethereal. The ground was black as adamantium, soaking in the light. In every other direction there was nothing.

Nothing above. Only adamantium plates below.

Erick could make out the individual hexes of the long cylinders which made up half of the plate. If Solomon had done the magic right, then a hundred kilometers below this surface there should be a sandwich layer of various platinum metals that acted as the main magical backbone of Fenrir. Beyond that layer there should be another layer of 100-kilometer-thick black adamantium worldplate.

And in there lay magic.

Erick knew the system was working, at least a little, because Erick was not dead due to the vacuum of space pulling him apart. In fact… Erick pushed off of the ‘ground’ like he was a giant slime extending a pseudopod downward… And yup. Erick went up, but a weak, weak gravity pulled him back down.

The better FENRIR systems were coming online.

It should also be a lot stronger than this.

Something was wrong?

Maybe something was a little wrong.

At least Erick hadn’t landed in outer space. He was on the outside of the dyson sphere, and the dyson sphere was beginning to accumulate gravity and other things because the collection systems on the sun-side of the sphere were beginning to work; to gather Nothanganathor’s power and transform it through a [Renew]-based system into mana of better types, and also [Duplicate].

It should be creating a few types of mana, too. Stone, Water, Air, Fire, Shadow, Light, and also Genesis, which would turn those Elements into real objects.

Looking in the distant sky, Erick witnessed Light cast down from a cloud-like structure far, far ahead; it was the only thing visible around.

How far was it?

Well.

Hard to know.

Erick was on a damned dyson sphere, he thought, giddily. Even if he flew up and up and up, he would probably never get any true perspective on the lands of this sphere and the size of the lights ahead of him, not until he got very, very high. Like, ‘orbital distance’ high. That seemed like a bad idea, though.

Erick noticed several things in the span of the next few seconds.

His body was a diffuse collection of misty light that was constantly drifting away, probably at the rate of 12 million mana per day, or 138 mana per second, which were the rough numbers associated with how much mana his soul and body naturally produced, as a Wizard. Without a connection to the Script, though, his mana was actually his own, and so here it was, flowing away from him because try as he might, this was outer space and there was nothing holding Erick together except for his own concentrated thoughts. His Benevolence body wasn’t even properly shaped, for the pressures of this existence were too great for him to properly hold onto himself. He estimated his body was about… 5 meters wide? Based on the meter-sized adamantium columns underfoot— under‘cloud’.

His connection to the Script was completely gone. His Stats and such were already starting to fade, and it was getting fractionally harder to hold himself together, but he could manage. His Stats were soul-based, after all, so some of it would remain, even in this existence. This wasn’t the Glittering Depths, after all, where Stats were specifically minimized. His Intelligence was fading somewhat, but he was still smarter than a normal person.

He would be fixing his Intelligence for full benefit once he ascended to True Wizard.

And now that a few seconds had passed and there was no immediate danger of death, Erick recognized a few more facts about himself and his surroundings.

There was an atmosphere here. It was very, very thin. But it existed. It was kinda acting like a buffer against the absolute vacuum of space, too. Which was good. That buffer likely vanished higher up. Erick would not be flying up anytime soon.

There was no manasphere, though. Erick could tell that there was mana inside the adamantium ground, but that sort of mana had a… a ‘sucking’ quality? to itself? Erick wasn’t sure. Hard to sense that sort of thing, and being near the ground seemed to eat away at his Benevolence blob form a little.

The ground was absorbing mana, perhaps.

That seemed a safe assumption.

Erick had expected to land in a place absolutely filled with mana and atmosphere. Where was all the Elemental Genesis? The Elemental Benevolence? Was it already used up? Fighting an unseen war on the other side of the adamantium dyson sphere?

Probably.

Erick Shaped his Benevolence into a Bolt and a little jolt of Benevolence went flying for a grand total of 5 centimeters beyond his blob form before it turned into motes of light that broke and fell to the ground, sucked up like water into a sponge.

… Okay then.

Okay, Erick, he thought to himself, you have a few goals here, and most of those goals need a body in order to function, which means I need to make an atmosphere that can hold me, and some life. I’m not sending out a Call to the Universe until after I become a True Wizard, so that the Call won’t bring down Nothanganathor on my head, or some other thing I cannot fight in this blob form.

He made another few [Benevolence Bolt]s and other mana types, Altering them to suit his needs, before he sent them flying. Only the Benevolence ones lasted more than a few centimeters beyond his body; they lasted 5 to 7 centimeters.

This did not bode well.

If FENRIR wasn’t fully charged, then that meant that Nothanganathor was probably not fully contained. The FENRIR system should be more operational than this. Perhaps the Erased One was operating across different frequencies of this multiverse, trying to get to this God Pact universe—

Ah. Duh. It probably was.

Veird was safe, though. Of course Veird was safe. Or at least this version of Veird was safe.

If Erick had had a body he would have tried to breathe to calm down. Erick had no body, but he could get one… Probably. No. Scratch that. No ‘probably’. He needed a body. And so, he would get one. Soon.

Where to start?

He looked at himself and his fog of Benevolence.

That fog was seeping more in… that way? No. That way? No. The fog was flowing everywhere equally. Hmm. So that was useless for figuring out which way the air might be flowing in this thin atmosphere.

If Erick had had a finger he could wet and hold up to the sky to test the wind, he would have. But he did not have that. There was no way to tell where the wind was coming from, or even if there was a wind out there. But if there was a wind, then that’s where Erick should go, because where there was wind, there was atmosphere.

Presumably.

Erick prepared for some pain, to let some of his Benevolence Body slip out of his control, to see if the fog spilling off of him equally was because of him, subconsciously controlling it, or if there truly was no wind out there. With a certain amount of resignation to the pain, Erick let go—

It was like opening a hole in his soul. Everything flew out—

Erick put his barriers back up and regained himself.

His briefly uncontrolled fog… seemed to flow… Away from the planet-sized storm in the distance?

Welp! That made a certain amount of easily-understood sense. When in doubt, always run toward the planet-sized storm! Of course!

… Erick was hesitant to do that, for obvious reasons. He still needed to do that, though. He had the choice of either building a True Wizard existence out here in the near-void, or flying toward the world-sized magical storm and having at least some air pressure that might allow him a fleshy existence. Might just evaporate him, though.

Erick started moving.

If the storm proved to be a bad idea, then Erick would simply turn around and try to Wizard up a shelter solution somewhere closer.

– – – –

Erick discovered a few more things as he flew over the land.

Flying over the flat worldplate of FENRIR was an exercise in meditation, and concentration, for if Erick got too close to the land, or if his mind started to wander, he’d fall into the worldplate and get sucked into it, his very being subject to the Siphon of FENRIR. It was a lot worse once he got away from his landing zone, too.

There was no manasphere at all, anywhere, because of that Siphon.

Erick wondered if the only reason he had thought that there was a manasphere, was because the place that he had landed had placed him there with a great amount of mana in the first place, and thus it took some time for that mana to sink into the plate.

And so, because there was no manasphere at all, Erick’s edges were falling away, constantly.

Also, Erick could not benevolencestep forward, for stepping through any sort of Element required aligned mana of a stepping type in both locations, and there was nothing out here at all except for sucking death.

So flying was the only way.

But not too high! If Erick got too high then the complete lack of atmosphere made Erick’s blob body even harder to control and maintain.

Erick was already exhausted.

Also, that storm seemed smaller. Like it was flying away from Erick. It had seemed like a stack of clouds with various normal features, occupying a moon-sized bit of the sky upon the horizon. It seemed like a smaller moon, now, and Erick had been staring at it for a while, so he was able to make out a few things in the last three hours of high-speed flying, besides the fact that it was getting fractionally smaller.

The cloud had many layers, first of all. From far away it seemed like just a normal, perhaps 4 or 5 layered thunderhead. But it was more like a thousand-layer cake that bunched and stretched in a few places. Looking at those layers was like trying to count rings on a slice of tree trunk from a thousand-year-old tree; too many to easily count. The lightning looked like microscopic hairs, too, stretched here and there, barely visible until they were surely visible, as if there were little white cracks opening and closing in the cloud and spreading everywhere.

There was absolutely no sound.

Erick did not realize that being in the absolute silence of space was going to be the first thing to drive him bonkers. Obviously, in retrospect, absolute silence was pretty much torture to all normal beings.

All of that made Erick realize what he needed to do.

He couldn’t chase the storm.

He needed to build right here, right now, and fast. That meant Script-magic; specifically [Duplicate]. Using Script-based soul-implanted magic outside of the Script was not an easy feat. Erick had mastered this, though, because it was a necessary thing to master. Even still, [Duplicate] was one of those spells that used the Script to function properly, like Healing Magic and [Cleanse] and other incredibly precise spellwork with a ton of moving or very precise parts.

Before Erick [Duplicate]d what he needed to [Duplicate], Erick checked his Lightning Path. It was difficult and took him longer to see than normal. Erick’s Lightning Path to the best possible future wasn’t working at 100% right now, but it was working well enough.

Erick was 99% sure that using [Duplicate] wasn’t about to blow himself up with an accidental atomic blast.

Which was possible now. The Atomic Ban did not exist out here.

Erick gathered his Benevolence form into a proper body shape, concentrating his Domain and focus to bring forth himself from the vacuum. It wasn’t too difficult, but it was a lot like sucking his stomach all the way into his throat; not comfortable, and not something anyone could do without magic coming into play. He stuck out his bloated right leg. A flicker of intent and control on his right shoe was enough to dislodge a rock he had purposefully stuck into the tread, onto the ground—

The tiny speck of speckled-grey stone went flying into the near-vacuum, near zero-g ‘atmosphere’ of space. It pinged off the ground and Erick struggled to catch it before it flew way out of perception. He managed. And now a bit of granite the size of Erick’s pinky finger hovered inside of his Benevolence form.

With a concentrated flex of his soul and a mental harmonization with the sound of [Duplicate], long since memorized for this instance, Erick focused a Script-spell on the little bit of granite.

And now he had two bits of granite.

Erick almost giggled, but then he felt himself almost lose control of his Benevolence body in order to let that frantic emotion happen, so he focused again. No giggling. No joy until he was at least temporarily safe.

But [Duplicate] had worked! Mostly. The second granite pebble wasn’t exactly the same as the first pebble, so that was a failure that Erick would need to figure out, but not right now. It was still a stone-like solid, so it was fine.

Two bits of granite fused into one as Erick applied pressure and focus, mentally tagging the crumbling, broken object as one object. It wasn’t much of a mental leap to do that, but the spell required 1 target, and Erick was already running without a Script here. He didn’t want to try any of his more complicated [Duplicate] variants right now.

One crumble of granite became a larger crumble.

Erick tried to apply basic heat to the crumble, fusing it into one crumble, but it cracked and shattered, pieces going everywhere in the near-zero-g environment before Erick gathered them up again. He stuck with the mental-tagging option, and when he got a brick-sized bit of granite, he tried a Script-based [Stoneshape].

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

It barely worked. The crumble of stone became sandstone with big bits to it.

Erick turned his frustration at inadequate magic into fuel for the fire, focusing hard. He had a reason for doing all this. All of Veird was counting on him to get help; not to fuck around out here playing with magic and getting mad that it didn’t work right in the vacuum of space.

Erick mentally took a breath, and then he focused.

Triggering Script-magic outside of the Script was already Wizardry, if minor. Now, Erick did something larger, mentally humming a little ditty about stone and purpose, doing real Wizardry.

The stone in hand protects because protection is as protection does.

The broken granite turned solid, suddenly becoming a meter-cubed brick of white and grey marble that silently popped into existence. Erick contained his elation as he lowered the marble to the ground, securing it against nothing, but it was heavy, and the ground had some gravity to it, so this was fine.

[Duplicate] made a second cube that was not nearly as good as the first one, but it was good enough. Erick started laying cubes next to each other, always copying the first one, and none of the secondary ones. This was already going to be a near-disaster that he’d have to fix with Wizardry, anyway, so he didn’t want to compound this disaster with [Duplicate]-copy degradation problems. Within minutes, Erick had a nice 10 meter by 10 meter square base, with half-walls all around.

And then one of the copied cubes in a wall cracked and that wall tumbled down, completely silent in its destruction.

Erick left that destruction and piled up more cubes until he reached ten meter tall walls. Some of those walls were truly just piles.

I can see through cracks in every wall and the roof is still non-existent, but this is a good starting point.

Erick focused on the entire structure, expanding his foggy body to touch every cube and to get between every crack. He filled up the space and formed a little dome of foggy Benevolence body on top. He probably looked like a muffin, baking out of its bread tin… Or bread rising out of a muffin tin. Wait. A muffin top? No. That meant something else. That’s not how the saying would go—

Erick focused.

He tried another reson-empowered [Stoneshape], to pull forth a protected space out of infinity and his own mana, as he hummed the same tune as before, but different.

The stone surrounds and protects because protection is as protection does.

The ten cubic meter little room plopped around Erick, like so much stone shell forming around a very large benevolence slime. Erick was completely in the dark under a dome of stone, now.

He almost flickered back to his human body, for the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by anything at all after being out in the Great Big Nothing was a palpable relief, even though Erick wasn’t wearing his biology right now. He maintained, though.

He flickered power, creating a common lightward that glowed in the middle of the room like so much ball lightning, softly sparking upon itself and sending warmth into the air. It would have died almost instantly, of course, if Erick wasn’t actively holding onto the mana in the space. None of this would have worked at all if Erick wasn’t struggling to maintain his very mind and—