Luca DR
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Accidentally summoned 08
🕑 Added 2024-02-06 14:39:43 +0000 UTC08 – Orb of cracked sky
Melina left to fetch the item she promised would create a mirror space, safe for Ishrin to perform his ritual away from prying eyes and incidentally also used for guild evaluations of power. She claimed she hadn’t brought it with her because it was very valuable guild property, and she had to make sure he was going to agree to undergo evaluation before she could take it out of the vault. She also hinted that he could use it for training, should he gain his B-rank at the end of the evaluation, if he was interested. What that training might entail would be up to his discretion.
As she left, only Ishrin and Lisette were left behind, together with a completely clueless pixie who had no idea about what had just happened. Sometimes Ishrin liked her more this way, pure and naïve, even though perhaps a little more fox in her would do good.
Melina levels of fox?
The pixie simply fluttered about the room, suddenly interested in its mundane furniture, then went to the window, suddenly interested in the rainy weather and the smell of wet earth, and finally she tentatively flew back to Ishrin. On the way to him, Lisette tried to intercept her with a finger like she was trying to boop the nose of a cat, but the pixie swiftly evaded the offending appendage with a twirl and a tongue.
After some time spent in silence, Ishrin decided to try and make small talk. It wasn’t like he was uncomfortable, but he was actively trying to be more social after the god Albert politely encouraged him to do so, and Lisette was awkwardly standing in the middle of the room anyway. He made for the window and looked out, taking a breath of fresh air.
What hit his nose was anything but.
“Smells like rotten eggs,” he said with an exaggerated gag. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the volcano.” Lisette said succinctly. She explained that the mountain to the west of Noctis was actually a volcano that had been thought to be inactive.
“Apparently not.”
The girl simply grunted in affirmation.
“Is anybody going to do anything about it?” Ishrin asked. He wondered how the local forces reacted to things like this. From what he could recall, the mountain was close enough that a violent eruption could destroy the city if they were unlucky.
“There will be a quest at the guild.” Lisette said, yawning. “Pretty high level. Which means me.”
“Oh? Are you a high-ranking adventurer?”
“I am.”
Ishrin waited for her to continue but she didn’t. Apparently outside of talking about battle and magic, she didn’t really care much for conversation. But she answered questions, so he asked her.
“What rank are you? Are there others of your rank or higher?”
Just like I’m interrogating a primitive machine mind. Wonder if Mekano does this all the time with his Artificial Intelligences.
“I am C-rank. There are two others like me in the city, but they were here before I arrived.” She said. Then, as if remembering something, “more will come if the volcano reveals valuable things.”
“I see. Do you have a party or something?”
“No. I do not.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Did you come here alone?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Melina told me to.”
“So you knew her?”
“I do.”
Well, this is getting awkward.
“I do not get along with others,” Lisette added mechanically after the moment of silence, as if realizing that Ishrin was getting uncomfortable or at least that silences this long weren’t supposed to be a part of conversation. “I am different. Other people, they tend to avoid me. Some called me… broken goods.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s better this way.” Life seemed to return to her voice, “It took them a while, but they learned not to mess with me and they keep their distance now. Melina had told me it would take a while for them to respect my rank, and perhaps a couple of shows of violence. I overheard some disgusting comments about me. I think they were disgusting. They said I must have slept with Melina to get it. Would you say it’s a disgusting comment, Ishrin?”
Ishrin laughed awkwardly, and said nothing. With that, the conversation was over.
Melina returned a few minutes after, just enough time for Ishrin to school his thoughts after the unnerving conversation with Lisette. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, in fact he found her candidness quite refreshing after so much time alone – she was much easier to talk to compared to Melina, she didn’t have second motives and she didn’t hide anything.
It’s just that she was weird.
With a shrug, Ishrin opened the door and followed Melina to the street. Noon was close, and despite the rain and rotten smell of sulfur, the road was looking lively with merchants and soldiers, adventurers and farmers returning from the fields with their first haul of the day. In a place of magic or sufficiently advanced technology, farming followed entirely arbitrary rules, and the produce Ishrin was seeing on the farmers’ carts reflected that.
Backwater or not, magic on this planet or at least close to Noctis was advanced enough to allow for that.
Suddenly Melina stopped. She took out a spherical device set upon a brass base, an orb of glass slightly larger than her two hands together. Which wasn’t very big, considering she was shorter than Ishrin by at least twenty centimeters. If Lisette had been holding the orb, it might have looked average.
There was something about the orb, however, that enraptured him. Immediately it was evident to him that it wasn’t just a normal magic item, but that the orb was powerful and cleverly designed. Inside the glass sphere there were two anomalies trapped in an eternal battle, a space and a time corrupt sprites, clashing together over control of a spatial rift. The brass base was etched with runes, stabilizing the rift and making sure the sprites could not gain control of it.
All in all, a solid Tier 6 item. Ishrin was impressed. Even more so when he realized that items, unlike people, couldn’t really be inefficient in their cultivation base. They either were of a certain tier or they were not. The item was Tier 6 according to Ishrin’s own experience, which means that in Melina’s eyes it had to be at least Tier 8. Two full tiers above the strongest person he had ever seen in Noctis.
It only worked for items because items did not have bottlenecks. Melina was Tier 6 even if her power output was much lower than what Ishrin’s would be at the same tier, because for people you could not advance without overcoming the bottleneck. Tier was tier, no matter how inefficient.
Perhaps this place isn’t as backwater as Albert had claimed. Or am I simply making a wrong assumption based on limited experience?
“This device creates a mirror dimension, identical to our own but empty of all people. Any damage that happens to the world isn’t carried over to the real world, but any effect to the people in it is.” Melina said, holding the orb with reverence. “You can heal yourself without anyone else seeing what you are doing, and then you can show me your destructive potential without leveling the city.”
She knows it’s more powerful that she is. Let’s see.
“What tier is it?” Ishrin asked.
Melina smirked. “You can’t tell?”
She was fishing for data, but Ishrin too had an angle. “By my system, it would be Tier 6. What tier is it for you?”
Melina paused. Got her. “…upper Tier 8.” She said. “Wait, are serious? You didn’t make it up just to impress me, did you? You could really have a Tier 6 person make this orb?”
“Items don’t have bottlenecks like people do.” He said with a shrug. “So tier classification is entirely based on their power output and reality bending potential, is it not?”
“I… think so?” She said uncertainly.
“Oh, it makes so much sense!” Yelled Lisette, who had perked up significantly after Ishrin had started talking.
It was at that moment that Liù chirped unhappily. She circled around Ishrin’s head and dove into his pockets, hiding away from a rather large crowd that had gathered to see what three strange people – two of which were powerful adventurers – were doing in the middle of the street.
“Perhaps it’s best if you activate it first.” Ishrin said.
These two… mention magic once and they both lose their marbles. Are they relatives or something?
“Right,” Melina said, hiding her face. “Sorry.”
Melina activated the orb by letting it fall. As soon as she let go of the sphere, it began to float in the air on its own. It lit up internally and the glow grew from barely noticeable in the grey light of the overcast day, to blindingly bright. A spiderweb of cracks spread out from the sphere and into the surrounding air to the sound of breaking glass, and the sky turned from cloudy and threatening rain to an indistinct blue-grey. Ishrin, Liù, Lisette and Melina found themselves in this new space that was created, but all the other people that were roaming around the streets were gone.
The spiderweb cracks retreated back into the device, leaving the sky grey but unmarked.
“Very handy.” Ishrin said.
“It’s guild property,” Melina said automatically.
“It would be really handy in a fight.” Lisette added. “What were you saying about tiers?”
“Nothing too weird, I hope.” He said with a laugh. “Just that items only have tiers because they are a handy way to classify them. Back in my…” was about to say universe… “hometown, we classified them by the minimum tier an artisan needed to make them. Is it the same here?”
“It is. Oh, I get it.” Melina said.
“A stronger cultivation base means that each tier is more powerful, which in turn means that you can make more powerful items at a lower tier.” Lisette said. “Wait, doesn’t this mean that the whole tier system for classifying items is busted?”
“No,” said Melina, shaking her head, “there is no force on the planet…” she looked at Ishrin in the eye, “who can improve a cultivation base so much it messes up with the tiers. Nobody can.”
Lisette didn’t seem to care about the jab. “He says he can.”
“And I haven’t seen it yet.” Melina glared at her, then looked at Ishrin. “So, do you need help to perform the ritual?”
“No need. Watch carefully. I’ll try to explain the steps so you can understand them, but I won’t slow down or alter the ritual in any way or I might risk crippling myself for good.”
“Fair enough.”
He began to take out the items. He had a whole set of Tier 2 healing items, herbs and crystals, and a single Tier 4 mana core from an undisclosed beast. It glowed a faint green, revealing its nature/healing affinity even to untrained eyes, which was among the best he could use for the ritual.
“The first step is always to draw the ritual circle. Are you familiar with rituals?”
Both Melina and Lisette shook their heads. Lisette was back to her lively self, and Melina was watching with rapt interest. No doubt trying to spot the moment Ishrin caught himself in a lie. Too bad he was not lying.
“Rituals are just another form of magic among many. While spells are internal, rituals are external and can draw upon any source of mana you feed them. They can also consume any items you want them to produce an almost infinite array of effects. The advantages over spellcasting are clear: you can use items without having to absorb potentially dangerous essences into your body or soul, you can use as many as you want, you can use external batteries without risking a core crack and you can join-cast with many other ritualists to increase the output by huge factors.”
He started to draw complex lines.
“The drawbacks are just as severe. For starters, you require precise, complex ritual circles. As you can see, they aren’t really circles but just a set of lines that define the flow of power from the items, from the battery and from the caster into the ether itself.”
“The ether exists?” Asked Lisette, mouth hanging open.
“There are theories but… I thought they were just speculation.” Melina added, not convinced.
“It has been proven and recorded. At least in my… hometown.”
More like in my universe. Melina thinks I’m from off-planet, and I don’t know if I want to tilt my hand yet. In any case, the ether seems to behave the same here, and I suspect it does behave consistently throughout all of Albert’s domain. Perhaps the whole local multiverse.
He continued. “Some call it ether, others essence, others again call it the energy of heaven and earth. Tech savvy people like a friend I know call it the Dirac Sea. It doesn’t really matter. It’s the tapestry all magic is written upon, and ritual circles are one of the languages.”
After he was done with the lines, he began to place the items in their respective places.
“Another problem with rituals is that they are very hard to master. They require control and knowledge, and often times to gather that knowledge one has to uncover the deep truths of the universe and then mostly try his luck with random combinations anyway. Most of which, mind you, have catastrophic consequences. A ritual that goes out of control and uses your life essence as fuel? You die. It starts to tap into the very Dirac Sea of your universe to fuel itself? You just doomed a whole universe and a literal god had to step in to undo the damage, and still your planet is fucked. You get it?”
Nods.
“It seemed weirdly specific.” Melina said.
“I’m ready, watch carefully.”
