Markets and Multiverses

The four of us continued walking, making our way around more and more small scorched patches of land as we continued to walk. However, we remained wary every single step of the way. Now that we knew that the fireball rocks were laying in wait, disguised, and we couldn’t reliably detect them, I felt my heart beat faster with every single step one of us took forward. While the patches of scorched earth were sometimes present to warn us of the fireball rocks, there were plenty of times when they simply weren’t there, as well. Felix was able to catch them by using his high Perception stat and his monocle, but I was always very nervous. 

Felix and Anise, especially, were vulnerable to a fireball suddenly consuming them and sending them back into the ocean of souls, and so I watched them like a hawk as I hoped they didn’t misstep. If they did, I needed to be ready to throw my entire pool of alteration essence at the fireball, buying Sallia as much time as possible to rescue anyone who triggered a trap by accident.

Felix continued to lead our group, since his perception was the best, and Sallia walked right behind him since she could grab him and drag him away if something went catastrophically wrong. Anise and I brought up the rear, since I would also be fast enough to keep Anise safe if something happened, and because my Perception was lower than Sallia’s, meaning I had much slower reaction times.

Felix didn’t make a mistake for over an hour. We were much closer to the nearest outlying facility than before - it would probably only take another hour to reach it. We were making good time.

And then, out of nowhere, I felt a bunch of manifestation essence start to coil around itself, coming from where Felix and Sallia were walking.

“Shi-!” said Felix.

“Felix!” Sallia immediately burned a huge amount of absorption essence and grabbed him, before fleeing as fast as possible.

And then, a ball of shimmering flames began to expand from the dirt Felix had just disturbed, warping the air with its heat as it tried to consume him.

Sallia dragged behind her like a broken kite as she fled for her life. The ball of flame advanced forward, consuming everything in its surroundings, and for a moment, my heart leapt into my throat as I thought that Felix and Sallia were about to get overtaken by the wall of flames.

Hurriedly, I grabbed hold of as much Alteration essence as I could, and forced myself to imagine the range of the ball of fire compressing into as small of an area as possible. Sallia and Felix were very close to the edge of the ball of fire, but they weren’t quite out of range. 

Please don’t get hurt, please don’t get hurt, my mind screamed as I forced all the essence I could into controlling the ball of fire.

And for just a second, the ball of fire halted, failing to expand.

That second provided just enough time for Sallia to finish dragging Felix most of the way out of the way of the ball of fire, before, with a snap, the ball of flames finished expanding into the air.

Felix shrieked and clutched at his hand, before the ball of fire winked out of existence. The two of them collapsed to the ground, panting.

“Are you hurt?” I yelled at them.

Sallia immediately dematerialized her armor and checked over herself, before she started checking Felix.

“I’m fine. I was a little further away, since I was carrying Felix, and my stats are higher, so it’s harder to hurt me. But Felix’s right hand got a bit melted. He needs healing,” said Sallia, shuddering. Her voice carried a strange mixture of fear and calmness - almost as if her training as a noblewoman in her first life and her fear and panic were warring inside of her mind. “A lot of his skin is blistered from the heat, but it doesn’t look anywhere near fatal.” A few moments later, I felt her start pouring some more absorption essence into her healing rune, and Felix’s burn wounds started to stabilize. She shivered, and glanced at the rock that had nearly killed Felix.

“We should be safe in this spot. Miria, thanks for halting the fire for a moment - otherwise Felix and I might not have made it. How much alteration essence do you have left?”

“I used a lot, but I still have around half, I think?”

“Do you have enough to spare for some healing?”

“Absolutely,” I said. As I spoke with Sallia, I started to feel my gut-wrenching anxiety in my stomach start to fade away.

It was close, but we survived. Still, I felt frustrated.

Just a single mistake was nearly enough to send our group toppling over the edge of the abyss. I didn’t want to see any of my friends die. This time, we were all still alive, and as long as I was safe, any injuries we sustained were only temporary. But what if we messed up again?

I quickly made my way over to Felix, followed by Anise, and inspected Felix’s injury. Two of his fingers had been literally melted into ash - about half of each finger had simply disappeared. The rest of his skin was bright red, and felt almost like I could cook my skin when I touched his hand. Sallia was anxiously hovering by his side while throwing absorption essence into his burn wounds. 

I shuddered, and immediately started pouring cold water onto his hand. Anise immediately began summoning blocks of ice and stuffing them into Felix’s hands, working to cool his skin down as much as possible while I started making every drop of water in contact with Felix heal him. I didn’t worry about his missing fingers yet: I could heal those later. Right now, I wanted to keep the rest of his hand functional.

Felix, whose breath was coming out in ragged gasps of pain, started to stabilize, until finally, he managed to draw in a full, proper breath.

“Well, shit. Guess that serves me right for getting complacent. I dodged a bunch of them earlier, but I guess I still missed one,” Felix said, nearly croaking in pain. “Oh well. Just a minor injury. Hurts like crazy though. Lucky I rolled Grade 7 in Willpower this time, or I would be unconscious now. Fuck!” He said.

However, his voice was growing firmer as he swore, and the skin around his melted fingers was beginning to mend. I felt even more relieved as I poured healing into him.

Felix was going to be just fine.

A few minutes passed, as Felix creatively cussed out the Orthans and their magic traps. Meanwhile, Anise continued to cool down Felix’s hand and Sallia continued to apply emergency treatment, while I tried to get his hand working again. Finally, after I spent most of my alteration essence pool and Sallia and Anise’s abilities became largely useless, Felix regained the ability to flex his fingers a bit. It was obvious his right hand was still stiff, but it could move.

“Well, now I feel like an idiot. Miria, after this, can you and Anise make a bunch of mud? I think if we made a decently sized mud ball and then roll it in front of us, we can trigger traps like this one without nearly dying.” said Felix, after spending a few minutes recuperating.

Sallia blinked for a few moments, and then swore. “That’s a good idea. Why didn’t you think of that earlier?”

“Because I just really wanted to see what having my fingers melted off felt like,” said Felix dryly. “It’s because I just thought of it now. I kept thinking that it would be really neat to see how these things were constructed, and thinking about what traps might be in the facility itself, and just… didn’t think of any tools we could use to make our lives easier.” Felix sighed. “I know that’s kind of my job in the group, so I’m really sorry. I’ll try to think faster next time.”

I started to comfort him, and then stopped.

I wanted my friends to feel better, but would it be worse for them in the long run if I tried to shield them from every mistake? If I didn’t give them the space to grow that they needed?

In the end, I gave Felix a hug, but didn’t say anything to him. Felix just patted me on the back a few times with his good arm and then snorted. 

“Next time, maybe I’ll remember how much this fucking hurt and do better,” he said, chuckling.

“I know you can do better in the future. All of my friends are awesome,” I said, feeling a slight grin tug at my lips. Now that Felix wasn’t in any real danger, I felt a lot better about the situation. “Just like Sallia in her first life. She also struggled, and now she can almost wrestle an Orukthyri by herself and win. You didn’t get many opportunities to grow last world, and this world, we haven’t been exposed to many scenarios where you could put your talents to practical use outside of a shop. This time you messed up, but next time, I know you’ll succeed.”

Felix smiled brightly at me, and the pain and momentary depression disappeared from his face. I realized that he was going to be fine, so I turned to Anise.

“Well, Anise? Wanna help me make a mud boulder?” I asked.

She grinned at me, and the two of us got to work.

About ten minutes later, we started rolling a small, one-meter high ball of mud in front of our group to help test for traps. Sallia continuously shoved it ahead of her and Felix, trying to steer it clear of any traps Felix had already seen, and then our group would catch up to it, drag it back a bit, and then roll it forward again. I realized that we had accidentally stepped over a lot of traps that Felix had missed - with the mud boulder method, we were finding a lot more fire rocks than before. Luckily, none of them actually hurt a member of our group.

Finally, we reached the first facility. It looked quite simple in comparison to the massive ruined palace that was still visible in the distance. This facility looked like it was made out of something kind of similar to iron, although not quite the same. It was a squat building, perhaps a quarter of the size of an overseer’s mansion. It probably had around twenty larger rooms in it in total, not including a basement.

The writing above the door was written in a somewhat odd dialect of Orthanoid writing, and it took me a few moments to puzzle out what it said.

Dimensional Habitat Facility

I wondered what the practical use of a Dimensional Habitat Facility was. Was it for training soldiers in environments they might find in other dimensions? I tried to picture the Orukthyri drilling inside of a training facility, but the only image I could bring up was the monstrous creatures eating dead soldiers as we fled from them.

“Maybe they were trying to test how creatures could survive in different environments?” said Sallia, as if she had recognized my confusion. 

I paused, turning her words over and over again in my mind, and then nodded. That made much more sense to me.

“Or they could have been trying to modify the Orukthyri to better fight in other dimensions,” said Felix. “I mean, all Orthanoid species were originally Ortha, before a bunch of modification turned the Orthanoids into a bunch of different species. If they managed to create five different subspecies, it’s obvious they had a pretty good understanding of how to manipulate biology using magic. I imagine that they would probably want to develop new breeds of Orukthyri for different environments, assuming they went into other dimensions frequently.”

“Did they go into other dimensions frequently?” I asked, glancing at the palace in the distance. I could feel the taint from the black sun, beating down on me from overhead, and I could also feel my connection to the Ocean of Souls, stronger than it had ever been before. My runes were strengthening my body more than ever before, nearly pushing me up an extra grade just from the power of my Keywords being activated, and my absorption essence was regenerating faster than ever before. I could probably refill my absorption essence in a mere eight or nine hours right now, instead of the 24 hours I usually needed.

However, even though I could feel the black sun and my connection to the ocean of souls, I hadn’t heard about the second Orthan empire experimenting with other dimensions before the day of the black sun.

“I mean, the dimension of the black sun might not have been the first attempt to cross from one dimension to another,” said Felix. “It might have just been the first successful one, or might have been the famous incident that ended the era of dimensional travel, or something. As far as I know, while we have decent records of some parts of life during the second Orthan empire, a lot of historical records are pretty spotty because of how much was destroyed during the dawn of the black sun. Who knows what information we’re missing?”

“So we should be ready for absolutely anything to exist within the facility?” I said, starting to feel a little more nervous. “If this is a dimensional habitat facility, and it’s built to replicate any dimension the Orthans might have come into contact with, we have no way at all of predicting what might be inside.”

“Maybe,” said Sallia. “I’ve never thought about this before, but… how does stuff hold together from one dimension to the next?”

“Hold together?”

“Well, the way the laws of physics change from one dimension to the next can vary pretty wildly. The biology of creatures from the dimension of the black sun doesn’t really match up with stuff from this dimension in any meaningful way - it’s almost like their dimension is some sort of… plane of ideas, or something. I don’t know, but either way, they’re very strange and different. And in Felix’s first world, it was a well-known scientific theory that space was cold and the sun was hot, while in this world, the sun is cold and space is hot. Suppose the laws of gravity change ever so slightly from one dimension to the next… how do organs like hearts and stuff keep functioning? After all, our organs and bodies are very delicate pieces of machinery built to work under a very specific set of circumstances. I imagine most life would just implode as it tries to transition from one dimension’s laws of reality to another.”

I thought about it, before I nodded. That actually made a lot of sense.

Anise also thought about Sallia’s question, before shrugging. “I never thought about that before.”

“It’s a really good question,” said Felix, nodding thoughtfully. 

“So maybe there’s nothing dangerous in the facility, since it might be an attempt to create areas where life forms they captured can live and be studied without imploding?” said Sallia. “Or alternately, the facility is a place where the Ortha tried to simulate different laws of reality to see what was needed to survive in them. Maybe they were trying to create a new breed of Orukthyri to invade the dimension of the black sun, or something.”

“Do we want to hit it up?” asked Felix. “If we step into an area that simulates some really wacky laws of reality and then implode, that would be very dangerous.”

I paused, and then nodded. “I think it’s worth looking at. I imagine it won’t be too hard to notice spots where the laws of gravity are wildly different, as long as we’re careful. And if we could see how the Ortha simulated other dimensions, I might get a lot of inspiration for how to improve my Alteration essence Keyword Ability, even though I haven’t bought it yet. And I think that the dangers should be… lesser than in other facilities, or at least that’s my current assumption. We might also find some more weird materials, like the one Felix found. Those would be excellent discoveries,” I said. “If we just stumbled onto a huge variety of that kind of material, the three of us could probably have enough Achievement to take a bath in it when we get back. It could be really rewarding.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” said Felix. “Who’s going first? Sallia or Miria?”

I hesitated, before I grinned. “Let me go first - I might be able to respond fast enough to heal myself if something goes terribly wrong and my biology starts to crumple like a tin can or something. I’ll make sure I’m ready to heal myself at a moment’s notice.”

Then, I gently pushed on the door to the Dimensional Habitat Facility and took my first step inside.

 

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