Chapter 120: 123.

"Ah-ah-ah!" - I interrupt loudly, - "My apologies for butting in, but don't do that."

Viscount sputters mid-word, turning to me curiously - "...What's the matter, my dear?"

"I think we will need to do something more thorough than just collect the big body parts and wash the rest off." - I explain - "This man, mad as he was, had some odd magic at his disposal. And while I'm confident I have exploded him rather thoroughly, it wouldn't hurt to make sure there are no last minute problems. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if that man took advantage of his curious invulnerability had soaked his clothes in contact poison as a last 'damn you' to whoever managed to kill him."

Servants collectively take a step back, as they all glance at the remains uneasily. Carolus strokes his chin thoughtfully. "...A sensible worry, my lady." - he then rumbles - "It is, indeed, hard to fathom what kind of nonsense might come from a lunatic. I imagine you have a suggestion?"

"Fire's a good idea when you are getting rid of unnatural." - I suggest - "If you don't mind, I can just set the area splattered with remains on fire for a while. Then we can sweep up the ashes and have them buried in a clay pot somewhere."

He grins. "Thorough, but inexpensive! I like that." - he offers - "Then if you would, please? And after that, a dinner. A feast is the least I owe the house Gillespie for coming to my aid with this peculiar trouble."

I step past the visibly relieved servants and consider the area critically. A quick detection spell highlights the splatter, which is a sizeable area about ten touse in diameter, roughly circular. Thankfully, our interaction happened in the middle of a plaza of sorts in front of the manor gates, so it was remarkably free of any construction. Less hassle than I expected, good. I raise a waist-high barrier of the earth around the perimeter nonetheless. They shouldn't need to cross it, it will serve as a firepit reasonably well. Now, let's see about igniting. I could just use good old fire magic, but I'd have to fuel the reaction with my power all the way, and it will be, uh... odd. Magical fire has some weird properties compared to regular conflagration, and if at all possible, I prefer to make the majority of fire basic old fast exothermic oxidation. Cover the place with a layer of conjured gasoline? Now that's an idea... Hrm. Or better yet, transform some air into gasoline.

...I think I'm flubbing it. I mean, it started just fine, but then I realized I could cut some corners and save some time if I just use my shoggoth bullshit to nudge the atoms around to make things happen faster, and... this is gonna be a runaway chain reaction, I think. I... HOLY SHIT, IT IS!... I barely manage to extend the "firewall" and curve it in before the whole mess of fusion-fission in front of me goes critical.

...So. Good points. I can, apparently, survive some pretty harsh conditions. Bad points - I still burned the fuck out of my surface layer, it's just a layer of fine ash on top of me. Owie. Useful point - the remains of jackass are fucking disintegrated on a nuclear level. Bullshit point - I just stellarated the fuck out of the plaza. The surface within the area is a uniform concave layer of glass. On sunny days, it would probably roast birds in flight, if any of them are stupid enough to pass through the focal point. Which is gonna be, uh... approximately 250 meters up in the air.

"Oh my gods, are you alright?" - is the first thing I hear when I drop the wall. Or, well, try to drop it. It had been glassed as well. So I settle for floating up and over it instead via self-applied telekinesis. Call me weird, but I'm feeling a little bit fragile right now. Apparently, I remained walled off long enough for everyone to gather in to gawk and be worried. Initial flash and boom were a good attention-getter, as well. I turn around, cringe and swipe the ash off my face, prompting a number of horrified gasps, because for a second it looked like I just swept my whole face off. "Pthui." - I am, as always, the paragon of eloquence - "I think I overdid it. Slightly."

"...I'd say so, daughter. Ever so slightly." - dad's on the point with his sarcasm today - "So what was that you actually did?"

I pause to collect my thoughts. I'm freaking out here, cut me some slack. I'm not fucking supposed to be capable of stellar ignition under my own power, damn it! This is absolutely bullshit levels of power.

"I think I just tried to ignite a new star by mistake." - I offer slowly - "...I'm sorry, I'm freaking out a little. Everything I know suggests I should be unconscious from magical exhaustion right now at the very least."

"Star?" - lord la Valliere repeats - "I doubt that. I mean, the latest theory among the astronomers is that stars are akin to our very own Sun, just much further from us... Though you did scorch the ground to the point of melting stones... still..."

"Why do you think I'm freaking out a little?" - I snark back - "I'm not actually supposed to be able to do that, insofar as conventional wisdom goes. At least, not THAT easy. Good grief."

He looks unconvinced, but then brightens up - "Perhaps you have only barely begun the process before dropping the spell? I imagine the heat... aaaactually, how come your clothes survived the conflagration if your very skin did not?"

I sigh. "They didn't. What I'm wearing right now is hastily conjured copies. So, if no one minds, I shall abscond to rinse off and change on my airship before the conjuration expires." - I explain as I turn around and march away towards the zeppelin in question, ignoring the shocked looks following my casual admission that I just held a conversation being technically naked.

___

Thankfully, the rinsing, changing and dinner all go without a hitch. La Vallieres have a capable cook, it looks like. Nothing all that exotic, but everything that's on the table is juuuust so. This suits me just fine, I direly need a slice of normality after the revelation that I'm apparently orders of magnitude more powerful than I presumed. I'm still mildly freaked out because I'm pretty certain I COULD have continued the ignition and it would have worked. Well, right until the moment when I'd run out of available matter by subsuming all of the planetary mass... but on the flip side, this would also count as a sacrifice of everything living on the planet, which can be easily parlayed into permanent conjuration of enough elementary particles to create a second star out of the planet. Which, depending on where it is in relation to the existing sun will either subsume the existing sun explosively, spawning a whole new solar system to work with or become a binary star, which is even freakier. So, technically speaking, I have the reset button for the civilization... with an option of making really impressive tombstone instead of restart, if so desired. Freeeeeeeaky. Real freaky. I'm presuming gods will step in before I start stellarating things on an astronomical scale, though... I hope they will, at least. Brr. Honestly, I'm kinda unnerved by the fact I am a walking WK-class end-of-the-world trigger.

Additionally, I figured something out about myself that... well. The top layer that got singed? Apparently, unless I intend to split, I am a reverse nesting doll of layers, each underlying one thicker and harder and more resistant than one above it. Dimensionally compressed, while at it. Pretty sure my core layers are at the neutronium density or some such. Or even beyond that. It makes a perverse kind of sense that I'm actually made out of degenerate matter. Oh, but it is to laugh... Fuck.

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Equally thankfully, dinner and conversation over it do mellow me out enough to stop mentally wallowing in existential dread. Insofar as I could experience existential dread, anyway. To the best of my knowledge, shoggoths don't really... well, they don't seem to have a subjective sense of self-worth altogether, instead considering their own value by a grand total of resources stored, memory capacity, computational power and comparative volume of pseudobiomass that makes them up, which is a surprisingly objective and quantifiable method. And since I'm hooked up to the internet of higher reality, my shoggothly perception of selfworth is roughly at the levels of "whoa momma, check out how fukken important I am". That leaves the self-worth as experienced by the human-minded components of me, of which Alyssa-Local's selfworth is on the levels of "I am a noble and therefore divinely chosen to lead, protect and enlighten all the people under my aegis" and Alyssa-Prime's is her usual psychopathic "I'mma the most important piece of existence ever". On one hand, it's pleasant to have unflaggingly soaring self-esteem, on the other I am somewhat worried about getting over my head at times. At least that makes wallowing in existential dread a surprisingly mild experience altogether.

And now, I'm poking around the glass basin I have inadvertently created. It's actually pretty nice after I hit it with a bunch of spells imitating a sandblasting of assorted fineness. Gleamy. Still, it kind of...

"You know, I quite like it like this, I believe." - lady la Valliere comments suddenly - "Add some benches along the sides, pour some water in, and it would be a nice basin."

Viscount makes a thoughtful face as he prowls around slowly. "...I do believe you are quite right, my dear. Assuming, of course..." - he mutters, as he approaches one of the walls and tugs on it, carefully at first, then with force. It's a mineral glass of considerable thickness, easily a palm's width. It does not budge. "Oh my. Sturdy, isn't it?" - he quips, as he tries several different places - "What would you say, lady Gillespie? Would it be feasible to keep it as a basin?"

I shrug. "Alright." - I tell him simply. Basin, huh? I can fill it with water, but... Making it a refillable basin doesn't sound right to me. The aquifer is pretty close in this area. So I jump into the basin, ignoring the gasps some people make when I clear the top edge at a leap. Wonder why. The center of the basin seems like a good place to drill in... And I have prior experience with stellaration, I should be able to control the reaction more precisely this time... YES, it makes a nice glazed pipe right down the... Oh. Shit. I barely manage to leap back out when a pillar of water and steam erupts out of the hole, falling down into the basin with a roar. Oh, oh oh fucking shit, I forgot that drilling with star-grade heat would create a temporary geyser as my heat lance went into the aquifer itself. I think I fracked the thing a little with a steam explosion. Well, it should cool down quickly enough, and the pressure should be enough to keep the basin topped up properly... Actually, I need to deal with this! A few quick pokes create drainage slits along the sides of the basin, four of them at cardinal directions, a quick minimoat around it all for the water to drain in, connect it to these ditches, now let's pull up some excavated stone and make some grating to cover the ditches and the geyser, which is thankfully cooling down already... Tres bien, I like the effect. Now benches, oh just melt and shape out the resulting quadrants a little like this, and... and... Aaaand I got distracted crafting stuff again.

La Vallieres are all watching me with round eyes, while my dad and wives are facepalming. Whoops?

"...I... believe we've just seen just how the recent prosperity of house Gillespie came into existence." - viscount offers slowly, eyeing the resulting fountain incredulously - "I.. This..." He comes over and dips his hand into the basin. "This water comes from the underground springs, does it not? How did you know there is a spring down there, even?"

I shrug. "I, well... bored down until I hit the aquifer?" - I offer - "It's pretty close to the surface here, only slightly more than twenty-seven touse."

Facepalms and round-eyed staring continue unabated. "How do you even stand channeling that much though facsimiles?" - offers lady la Valliere dazedly. Huh.

It takes a bit for the astonishment to wear off, but once it does, everyone pokes around the newly made fountain. I think everyone likes it. Given it's subterranean water and it's running, it should not freeze easily. Not quite volcanic springs, though. It's just liquid, not hot. I think we're done here. They can plant shrubbery around it later, I'm not going to do absolutely everything for them. I'm pondering the merits of taking my harem out for a walk, given that la Vallieres offered and father accepted to stay overnight when I'm waylaid by a curious appeal.

"I... believe I owe you apologies, lady Gillespie." - Louise stammers. She's agitated. I wonder what it's all about. That fellow?

"Why?" - is my rather blunt reply. I am genuinely unsure why she would think so. Gratitude, yes, that much is understandable, but apologies? What does she think she did?

"...Please do not think ill of me for that, lady Gillespie, but... I happen to have a certain gift... a skill of vision, you might say." - she begins softly - "You might have heard about me drawing portraits of people. Well, when I do that, my gift permits me to paint them as they truly are, not as they appear like. Sometimes, those portraits come out beautiful. Sometimes, the truths are repulsive. Sometimes, even unremarkable. But... For the first time in my life, a portrait came out... eldritch. Terrifying. Otherworldly. And it was yours."

She pauses, collects her thoughts then continues - "I have drawn it in the last days of summer, as we were all waiting at the Academy for the studies to begin. I... Well... I hid what I have wrought upon the canvas and have never dared to paint another living being again for fear of... of..."

She is getting considerably nervous and agitated. I need to calm her down a little.

"Perhaps you can simply show me what had unnerved you so?" - I suggest, and she gulps, but nods timidly, motioning me to follow as she leads me deeper into the house, towards what I suspect are her private rooms.

She brings me to her sitting room and then disappears further in. It takes a while and some rummaging, but then she comes back with a canvas on a frame, covered with the linen. Squeezing her eyes shut, she removes the linen and turns the portrait around, showing it to me. Remarkable likeliness. Of course, it also looks singularly creepy because it's a superposition of TWO faces, one of which is the one I consider current and one which I wore in my past life. And both of them are then superimposed over a star that... wriggles, regardless of the fact it's just an ordinary oil painting. "Ah. I see what made you unnerved now." - I agree slowly - "To explain why you saw me like this... this is the consequence of being very highly defiled. I did not just peer beyond the edge, I have subsumed a LOT from out there. Up to and including, a full collection of memories from someone who lived in an utterly different world."

She lets out a small sigh - "And this is why I owe you apologies, lady Gillespie. Even though I have never shown this picture to anyone but you, I have become wary of you back then, and I am afraid my new attitude had not gone unnoticed or uncommented. I believe I deflected with generic assertions that you seem to give mysterious and eldritch airs, but looking back on how it was taken, I feel like more than a few persons had taken my incautious admissions as a sign there is something... wrong about you."

I shrug. "Don't think you're the only one who arrived to the same conclusions." - I toss back at her - "Why, I've been told by my entire harem that I tend to be a little creepy when I'm talking to people I don't know or care much for. Given my usual level of care for a majority of Academy students was 'so you exist, jolly good for you, bubba', well... I would hardly attribute the entirety of attitudes towards me to your artwork. A drop in the bucket, that's all that it was."

Aaand she promptly pinks up heavily at the word harem. Honestly, she should find herself a girlfriend once she's back to Academy. Maybe I should introduce students to the wonderful concept of lesbian until graduation?

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