Millennial Mage

Tala shook her head, feeling only a bit embarrassed by Lupe’s incredulity. “I know about dasgannach, but stating what one is?” She gave a helpless smile. “It’s like I’d have trouble succinctly stating what a human is.”

Lupe hummed in understanding, the sound coming from the entirety of her being. “Well, then. I suppose that I don't have a simple definition for you either, but I can summarize in broad strokes. We are creations of aggregation and sequestering. The only use that our most basic individuals can put to what we acquire is in the acquisition of more. We don’t even defend ourselves in our most basic states.” She gave a tinkling laugh. “Not that most things can harm us.”

Rane frowned, interjecting from the side. “Really? They are quite deadly and harmful… right?”

“Oh, make no mistake, we will fight to keep what we have taken or to re-acquire that which was ripped away despite our efforts. We will even fight to take from you, if you have what we are composed of. That can look quite a bit like defending ourselves or aggression, but imagine if a dasgannach actively tried to shred any host that it was in? Imagine if it tried to destroy that which it infested if any attempt was made to remove it. Even your own situation, if I understand correctly, would have been infinitely worse if the dasgannach had been trying to harm you.”

Tala gave a slow nod. “I see. So, this thing that we just saw… it was an information dasgannach? How does that even make sense?”

Lupe shrugged. “I can’t say that I’ve ever encountered such a thing personally, at least not in my current state so that I’d have memory of it. But the Mages of ages past whom I submitted myself to, made mention of all sorts of esoteric types of my kind. Though, in truth, I don’t know if they spoke from experience or about theoretical existences.”

Lyn gave a half smile. “It sounds like at least one such exists.”

“Indeed. I believe that they were working on a… disabled version of my kind, oriented toward magic but passive in nature and unable to do more than take in power, acting as a reservoir for whatever conscious mind was given charge over it.”

That tickled the back off Tala’s mind, but she would consider it later.

“Regardless, I wished to speak with you because I felt your… resonance and rejection of its hold.”

Rane grinned with pride and placed a hand on Tala’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze.

“Yes?” Tala smiled toward her husband, then frowned toward Lupe. “What of it?”

“I thought it an event of note, and I didn’t want it to pass unremarked.”

“What do you mean? It was a contest of authority, and I won.”

Lupe gave a bark of laughter, before covering her mouth even as she tittered a bit more. “Oh, I’m sorry, but no. First of all, you could never have won a contest of authority with that creature. The nature of our existence makes our authority over our substance absolute. That is one reason why your predecessors have been so fascinated with us. Magic can work on us, but that is mainly because—as I said before—we have no natural fight in us. As long as the magic isn’t taking our material from us, we don’t care, our authority doesn’t oppose it. No. What you encountered is the reason why there is more than a single dasgannach of any given type. It is why the strongest and most able to subsume the others hasn’t swept the world clean and become sole master of each material. We are—at our most fundamental level—designed to leave each other alone, even when there is overlap in scope of our base composition.”

Tala felt her eyes widen. “So, it should have killed us all?”

“Yes.” Lupe said simply. “In your gated hierarchy, only those who are Reforged would have sufficient authority over themselves to resist such a claim at a basic level. Even then, everything else would have been subject to its claiming authority.”

Tala frowned. “I thought we heard of less advanced resisting dasgannach in the past. Even Refined.”

She had blocked the dasgannach by making a bloodstar, but that had more been the creature refusing to willfully accept the bond than actually opposing its authority effectively. That was also an entity that was heavily modified, specifically to keep it from affecting anyone or anything but the target, so her keeping it from claiming stuff outside her body during that time didn’t really count.

Lupe shrugged. “That’s possible, I suppose. I don’t know that method of resisting, though… Maybe by It might be that rather than resisting, Refined can simply survive even without whatever material most dasgannach would claim?” She shrugged again. “I confess that I do not know.”

Rane cleared his throat. “This is interesting and all, but why does it call for this meeting? What is it about what happened that is so important?”

Lupe smiled, her face whitening briefly at the movement. “Of course. The reasoning is this: Iron is not pervasive enough to have protected most of what is in this expanded space, not most of what the other wanted. The authority from your subsumed dasgannach nature simply shouldn’t have allowed what you did.”

Tala’s frown deepened. “What does that mean?”

Lupe gave a helpless expression. “I honestly don’t know, but I thought you should be aware.”

There was a long silence, moving toward becoming awkward.

Lupe stood. “That is all. Can you please send me back? I am… I am feeling the distance from most of my substance more keenly after having to resonate with one of my kind for the first time in so long.”

Tala nodded, and Lupe vanished. She saw her arrive back at her pane of glass in Irondale, where the woman stepped forward and remerged with the rest of herself.

Rane and Lyn exchanged a look, and Tala smiled at each of them in turn. “Well, I suppose I should check in with Lisa and Walden, then we can get back to the test. Do you wish to observe?”

Lyn huffed a laugh, shook her head, and sighed. “I should probably get back to work.” After a moment, she locked gazes with Tala. “Be careful. Please?”

Tala hesitated for but a breath, then nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Then, Lyn was gone, back in her office.

Rane shook himself. “So, talk with Lisa and Walden?”

“-Lisa said he has no need to chat. Apparently, his home's defenses negated the… whatever it was, so he has no concerns. Moreover, in his words, ‘I’m not interested in delving deeper into Reality curses, whether that’s actually what they are or not.’-”

“That’s… not very helpful, but I guess I’m glad he is fine?” She frowned. “His defenses?”

“-He said he is not willing to share the details without cause or compensation, but he also added that given the results of this encounter, they wouldn’t be needed or useful for you, regardless. He then reminded us that he is ready to continue instructing you in fourth dimensional construction at our convenience.-”

Right… I’ll get to learning that… eventually.

Rane shook his head, clearly responding to the first part. “I’d say we should be irritated that he didn’t warn us about something which he actively defended against, but I get the impression that if he doesn’t have a defensive measure in place for something, it’s because that thing doesn’t exist.”

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Tala chuckled. “Likely, even if the defensive measure in question is just a delay so he can run.”

“Indeed.”

Tala and Rane dropped in on Walden, but the elk was a bit ambivalent. Apparently such a ‘natural’ death would not have bothered him, but Tala also got the odd impression that the elk didn’t believe he’d actually have died?

It wasn’t worth arguing with him about, however.

That left both Rane and Tala contemplative as they returned to their thrones.

Rane broke the silence first. “So… if this works as I think it does, why wouldn’t we dispose of prisoners by attaching a lure of sorts and tossing them out here? The dasgannach would subsume them, and there would be no cell to maintain.”

Tala shrugged. “I don’t know. It must not be as destructive as we are assuming, or it might be that the immortality of most of the prisoners would be able to overcome the threat? Or that it’s too dangerous?”

Rane grunted. “I suppose, sure.” He then got a far off look. “Or… maybe if it absorbed such powerful beings—or at least their information—that would make it stronger, so it would have a greater reach? Using it for disposal might actually create a bigger problem than it destroyed.”

“That could be, yeah…”

Then, he sighed and shook his head.

A moment later, his smile returned. “Well, then, shall we get back to it?”

Tala grinned in return, turning her mind from the uncertain topic. “Yes. Let’s get another flier in place to see how we can make this work…”

She gave a brief frown.

“But first, let’s head back to the edge of the forest. No need to do our test here.”

Rane regarded her for a long moment, eyes narrowed. Finally, he asked in a mock serious tone, “Who are you?”

Tala grimaced, smacked his shoulder, and laughed. “Stop that. I’m trying to be more careful, more thoughtful about the risks I take.”

He smiled again, then. “I know, I know. Yeah. That sounds like a good plan.”

An hour later, Tala and Rane were back in their thrones, with their superficial position now a good half mile inside the northern forest… well, it was south of where they had been… Anatalis’ forest?

Yeah, that works.

They were half a mile south of the northern edge of Anatalis’ forest. Additionally, Tala had very carefully inspected the region stoneward of them.

It was incredibly hard to tell—especially given that there was nothing there to provide perspective—but she believed that there was no physical contraction, nor dimensional funneling going on in that dimension.

Even so, Tala watched incredibly carefully as Alat restarted all the Archive interactions that had been queued up.

After half an hour more, they were satisfied. “Alright, let’s do this.”

Rane jerked slightly, pulling back from the little rock that he had been inspecting.

No… not just inspecting.

Rane had been carving with truly insane precision into a rock no bigger than the end of his thumb.

He wasn’t doing anything of crazy complexity, but he was creating a regular pattern of shapes, honing his skill on a minute level.

He focused on her and then smiled. “Right. Let’s do this.”

The flier was in a clearing, and the same perspective as before was displayed on the large, thin slab of stone. “Alright. I think we can go straight up to a slow jog…” Tala grimaced, then sighed. “But even though we could, we will repeat the slower test, just to be safe.”

Rane gave a half-smile but didn’t comment.

Tala and Alat went through the incredibly slow speed tests, getting the same results as the previous attempt.

In order to perform the tests, they’d had to lift up above the trees, and they were skimming along some twenty feet above the highest tree they could see in the surrounding area.

“Alright, speeding up.”

Rane was leaning forward, expression wrapt as he watched the display before them.

They reached a comfortable jogging speed for a mundane. There was some magical resonance beginning to build, but not nearly as much as they’d have had if they were running that fast without mitigations in place.

“-No damage detected, but I am sensing some… abrasion? I think at the moment it’s like a smudge that will wipe off. It’s noticeable but not actually damaging anything.-”

Tala nodded. “Shaping aura to mitigate resonance.”

She did so, taking what little aura she had via her bloodstars and the portal within the flier’s center and molded it into the shape that Master Grediv had shown her so long ago.

What little magical resonance there had been immediately died away. “Alright, increasing speed.”

Rane was frowning. “How fast are you going?”

“-Oh, here.-”

In the bottom right corner of the display, a number appeared.

“-That is the speed we are traveling in miles per hour.-”

“Thank you.”

“-But of course.-”

They slowly increased their pace, rising through the teens until they entered the low twenties and passed human sprinting speed.

They leveled out at twenty-five miles an hour while both Tala and Alat did in-depth examinations of all that they could see around them.

The ambient zeme was calm, seemingly unaffected by their passage. Reality nodes that they passed shifted to allow the passage of the flier, but that was expected.

Nothing was out of the ordinary.

Rane was fiddling with his little rock absentmindedly, but his eyes were still locked on the display, clearly fascinated by what he was seeing. Tala caught the words that he said as he whispered to himself, “It’s practically like I’m there myself, looking out at the forest top.”

“It is indeed.”

He glanced her way and smiled. “This is really exciting.”

“Right?” Her smile widened, crinkling the skin next to her eyes. “This is just the start.”

They both returned their attention to the flier, and Tala increased the pace to thirty miles per hour.

“-Some mild scraping on existence.-”

Tala grunted agreement. To follow Alat’s earlier analogy, this was like someone was giving a single swipe with coarse sandpaper across a varnished surface.

There was a ‘visible’ effect, and some damage being done, but the actual substance of reality seemed unaffected.

Tala and Alat had been briefed on such damage as a part of all the experiments they’d been in charge of conducting at the site of old Makinaven.

It would heal very quickly, but it was also unquestionably damage.

They sped up further, essentially taking a more gouging pass with the sandpaper.

“How fast can we usually go with resonance?” Rane asked in sudden curiosity. “I can’t say that I’ve ever really measured.”

“-We usually find our comfortable speed in the low thirties, but it fluctuates as we go through differing regions of magical density.-”

Tala grunted at that. They were currently going in the low to mid-thirties, and with her aura shaped to the ideal configuration, there was all but no magical resonance.

From there, every bit that they sped up dug deeper into existence, approaching a more substantive—harder to heal—level.

Tala grimaced. “We’re near the safe cap, here.”

Rane was nodding. “So, faster, but not by much. The main improvement will be quality of life.”

“Oh?” She was a bit confused. “How so?”

He turned to regard her skeptically. “Well, Alat or Enar can fly this while we train or eat or sleep?”

She blinked a few times. “Oh.” Then she rubbed her own eyes. “Maybe I do need to go back to sleep. That was insultingly obvious.”

Rane shrugged. “It’s fine, love. We all miss things sometimes.” He grinned. “Regardless, we can go non-stop now, too.”

“True enough.” As she examined what was happening to reality as they passed by, she was nodding to herself. “We need to test having Kit oscillating in the stoneward side of superficial, hopefully making any damage done more disparate.”

Rane nodded. “And you need to test if you can briefly touch faster speeds to create little ‘blips’ of deeper damage that should heal faster than a long line of it.”

She grunted at that. “Right.” Her grin returned in full force. “More testing?”

“More testing.”

“-And I’m going to loop in the requisite experts. At this point, they can’t stop us for fear of an immediate catastrophe, and their input could be useful.-”

“Agreed.”

Rane gave her an arched look. “Yeah. It’s good that we proved no disaster could possibly come from doing this.”

Tala waved him off. “I already told you that the dasgannach doesn’t count. That wasn’t because we were using the flier. That incident was ancillary.”

He chuckled. “Fair enough. To testing!”

She laughed in turn. “To testing!”