Chapter 43: Competing Core Directives

She hadn’t told anyone about Maus. Why would she tell him about Maus? The little guy would show up when he showed up, in the meantime it hadn’t felt prudent to reveal a potential weakness, or information about a skill entirely unrelated to the work they were supposed to be doing.

Ignorance made her cautious; it also made her vulnerable. She hadn’t known the pools would affect her bond. Of course she hadn’t, and now she was trying to stop a tidal wave before it washed it away.

Only, how did you convince a hurricane not to sweep by and take with it those things you hold most dear?

Scarlet’s first thought was that she would get out. Whatever this alignment process was, it hadn’t started yet, right? She couldn’t speak through the pain, but she could sort of thrash to indicate distress.

She could vaguely make out the expression on the Historian’s face as it was obvious something unexpected was happening to her.

“What is it? What is going on?” He asked. Voice urgent as he padded, shoeless, closer to the edge.

For all his power, the Historian could not intercede with the process. Once a participant entered The Pools they surrendered to the energy.

Inside the Pools Scarlet found that her legs wouldn’t quite cooperate, the moment she tried to walk towards the edge the energy would seize her locking down her body as though it could sense her intentions.

Then there was the pain.

What had begun as discomfort had slowly transformed into something much more invasive, infinitely more painful, and terrifying to deal with.

It wasn’t just that the energy had permeated her body, it was that it had begun the process of alignment immediately. Scarlet could feel the energy suffusing her muscles, her bones. She could follow the flows as they engulphed her head and flooded deeper, past the metaphysical and into the realm of the soul.

In a bid to understand just what was happening Scarlet sunk into the information layer. Here, the world was the interplay between energies, reality revealed for anyone able to read it. Scarlet could only understand fragments and glimpses of what was going on, but what she did know was that it wasn’t good.

She could see the trajectory of the changes, how the energy was actively re-writing the information, as though trying to edit reality.

It was so much more elegant than the rippling of the bath water. She could see just how crude her attempts at psionic manipulation had been. Wasteful, and ugly. Like punching a hole in the wall instead of unlocking the door. Sure, both technically got you to the other side.

It might have been the most beautiful thing she’d seen, if only it wasn’t actively trying to edit her best friend out of reality.

No. Scarlet thought. Desperately trying to prevent the energy from touching the bond, to middling success.

Bit by bit she felt her connection to him, eroding. Like a virus, reprogramming her against her will.

The constant burning pain wasn’t helping her concentration much either. It felt like someone was attempting to cook her alive, low and slow. The pain was searing, and it was everywhere.

She was sure her expression was uglier than the vulpian in the other pool as she struggled to breathe through the pain while fending off the energy from attacking her bond. Only, she couldn’t fight precision with force. Even if she could stop any one of the simultaneous ‘alignment’ processes, she simply couldn’t control the quantity of information the pool was working with. It was like trying to put out a house fire with a cup of water.

Of course she wasn’t entirely useless. The energy in the pools was obviously potent and malleable in a way Scarlet hadn’t experienced before. Unlike when she was trying to make the water ripple the night before, something about the pools themselves made manipulating the energy, not easier, but more intuitive? It was like reality wanted to be changed.

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She had almost forgotten why she’d entered the Pool at all. Stats, alignment, future development. She could still achieve all of it if she devoted herself to the process. All she needed to do was stop defending the bond. It would be beyond difficult, but the Historian had been right, it was doable.

All it would cost her was Maus.

That’s when the energy reached her mind. While the burning in her body was awful to a point that she knew she’d have nightmares about it, the feeling of the energy trying to strip her mind, strip her of her senses, of her true strength, it was terrifying in a way she couldn’t describe.

In trying to defend both her mind and her bond, she was doing both poorly, and losing the struggle twice as fast.