Chapter 93: 80: The Chosen

Auratic

Weeks passed in the blink of an eye, for Alicia it felt as if only a few days had passed. Tackling the problems of setting up infrastructure for a settlement however primitive, with knowledge and nigh non-existent tools by modern standards posed a unique challenge for her. Despite the difficulties, her current work was far better than a routine maintenance on roads or doing a safety inspection on some end of life span bridge in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully she didn’t have to confront the undertaking alone now that she had some capable assistants. After considerable difficulties, with help from Gamma she had managed to set up a rudimentary stone cutting operation. Enedra species were already undergrounders, evolved especially to create and maintain their ever growing maze of tunnels and chambers, made easier owing to their inherent gift of Earthen magic. Though they were far from producing the most geometrically accurate creations. The resulting stone blocks needed  thorough sanding before they could even be considered for processing. Nonetheless, minor improvements were made with each iteration. And that’s what mattered the most, to take that first difficult step. It was now only a matter of time before masonry would be something to look up to.

Decidedly, most of Alicia’s familiars preferred to inhabit the subterranean burrows which meant even more workload for the ‘Dungeon Masters’. The settlement within the heart of the forest grew, as above, so below. She didn’t know since when but more and more Elves seemed to have taken up permanent residence, with safety and food security guaranteed they seemed to have started to rekindle their neglected forms of art. As only the eldest generations have the skills, experience, and most crucially, the expertise. The process is long and drawn out as the younger generations who have been completely caught up in surviving the savage forest have to rediscover their culture once again from the standpoint of an outsider. Still some of the day to day arts from the heyday of their kingdom gradually resurfaced after some modernization to fit with the current times. From something trivial as weaving patterns on a loom to more sophisticated applications of magic and Elvish smithing practices.

As per suggestion from Alfred, a small outlying outpost had begun its setup. Though almost without any permanent occupation, it served as a trading depot for the vendors of Albertini’s firm. Beneath the surface however, a vast array of tunnels and chambers linked it to the great oak.

Along with the regular shipment there was a small section of curios and oddities. It had become routine for Alicia to browse them personally when the caravans arrived. Most of them were some failed ‘art pieces’, eye catching trinkets, ersatz magical artifacts, imitations of heirlooms, gadgets with novel ideas but without practical use, gathered from all around the reaches of Pyrinia’s trade partners.

‘You can’t steal someone’s intellectual properties if there are no laws about intellectual properties…’

That being said, from time to time Alicia would chance upon something of interest. Haphazardly packed in padding something akin to a storm lantern caught her attention. The rough hazy glass revealed little about the contents stored therein from the outside. But just for a moment it felt as if she saw a flicker within. Picking it up and holding it in her hands she sensed a tiny, beating flux of mana pulsing from its core, warming up ever so slightly in her palm. Although she had suspected it might be something dangerous, ready to throw it into her void vault, nothing seemed to happen. One of the traders who noticed her interest in the object approached her.

Unlocking the small latch keeping the glass shut revealed a rough crystal dyed in faded copperish color. Faint intermittent pulsing light alongside the gentle warmth felt as if she held a dying heart of glass, metal and stone.

On the surface it looked like she lost interest immediately. She wanted to tinker with it a little but judging that showing any enthusiasm might not be in her best interest she instead veered in the opposite direction. She had learned to keep a straight face from Alice’s impassivity.

Knowing their master's relationship to Alicia, all of the traders who worked for him were eager to please their master's treasured client.

Although she wanted to disassemble it and examine its internals, something bugged her. It appeared as though there was a lesser spirit of fire housed within rough gemstone. Different from the ones she fostered on her head, which had the appearance of fiery monarchs if one concentrated on them enough. She caught glimpses of something like a wisp, like a fragment of the sun.

‘These guys change their appearance based on who created them… Seems that our scholar was also a sorcerer, evidently.’

What bothered her was how weak it was, struggling desperately to stay put inside its home, yet with each passing moment its presence faded. By condolence she tried to take it into herself but… it offered a pitiable resistance. She could extricate it easily but chose not to.

‘If you’re going to refuse that then…’

Directing her internal flow of energy through its outer shell Alicia fed her own magical energy into it. The metal and the glass had certain resistance to the flow but that wasn’t enough to stop it from reaching the crystalline core. At once the spirit within was reinvigorated, and with it the crystal’s lifeless, dull brown hue turned to the radiant glow of the sun in seconds, pulsing with new strength. Closing its latch, the cloudy glass contained its intense glow akin to that of a raging furnace and turned into a much more cozy lucence.

Her act of ‘repairing’ the torch, although brief, was especially striking and had gathered a number of spectators. Of them, the man who had given her the lamp had his mouth agape with astonishment that had his jaws not been hinged to his skull with flesh and muscle it would have been on the grass, lapping up dirt. Catching himself making such a boorish appearance he quickly composed himself, putting on a friendly smile, to the best of his abilities. In his heart of hearts, he knew he was had,

‘How much could I have had…’ he thought, and that reflected on the performance of his act shown by the recurrent upwards twitching at the edges of his lips. He couldn’t take back his words now, letting go of such fortune. His dear master merchant had warned him of Alicia’s extraordinary inveiglement methods which leads to getting a deal in her terms without one ever wisening up to it before it's too late, or so he said before muttering indiscernible things to himself. Negligent of the forewarning, he had let his guard down for frankly he had his doubts and now he was paying for it. The only silver lining was that he could consider this an investment, it was the only way he could rationalize his loss.

For Alicia she had already made her worthwhile discovery, the lamp itself was of little significance to her now besides few more experiments. The most valuable thing she had gotten out of that was the proof of concept and the existence of magical contraptions. In particular the crystals seemed closely identical to ones she saw before.

Some time later she was shocked by what was in the middle of her room. Though it was her ‘bedchambers’ within the lodge, it ironically lacked the very furniture its name had. In practice the room served as a study and an atelier. Black smokey quartz-like vitreous crystals were piled all the way up to the ceiling of the room.

‘The hell is this…?’

It was still the same crystals she had left behind in the cave, but the amount astonished her. From her memory, there were only enough to fill up a small gunny sack, not fill up a room.

‘Something doesn’t quite add up…’

She had forgotten about it since learning it from imbuing magical energy into her silk, but many materials had mana conductivity to them. Some materials were receptive like her silk and cloth whereas most metals were resistive. There was another property she discovered through an accident, retention. Every material also had an ability to retain their magical charge for some time. Even if she could imbue something into a resistive medium, like iron they would very quickly lose their magical energy. Noting down the various rates of the magic decay Alicia made a correlation with resistivity and retention. Higher the resistivity the lower the retention and vice versa. From her tinkering, the crystals had the highest reception. They could hold onto magical energy far better than anything else she had the opportunity to test with and had the highest retention rate. They did not have any magical decay, at least not one that she could measure.

'Quite like a battery huh?'

Taking a small piece of crystal, she imbued it with a fire spirit with a very simple instruction… to use the spell Flame and fed it the magical energy needed. The lep fluttered into the crystal disappearing into its depths, suffusing it with warm color. It was her first instinct to throw into the floor, hoping that something would happen. Unsurprisingly the crystal shattered, releasing the spirit and the magical energy in a fiery combustion, setting the wooden floor ablaze.

In a panic she doused the entire floor with water, which while putting out the fire meant that it also flooded the room with ankle depth water that was now seeping through the floorboards. Before the damage got out of hand she swiftly froze all of the water with her feet still in it. Sharp sting of gelid ice bit deeply into her, eliciting a crescendo of shriek out of her. After very painfully getting acclimated to the cold, she began the clean up of the aftermath of her impulsive experiment, breaking the ice into chunks before disposing of them…

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Despite the initial hiccup she wanted to try a few more things, infusing more crystal chunks with various spirits and elements she exited her room. Wandering around the lodge she chanced on Alia trying to light the kitchen fireplace with a firestriker. The sparks simply didn’t ignite any of the tinder grass. ‘Note to self… figure out how to make matches…’

Leaning over;

‘You too huh…’

Alicia at this point was done with trying to dissuade the people around her from calling her mistress.

 "Here, try this." She said, handing over a bright red crystal.

 "This… looks expensive, can I really have this?" The village girl asked, doubt clear in her voice.

Lost in confusion she was stunned silent, processing the words uttered.

This time Alicia undercharged the crystal so that a disaster wouldn't repeat. With little pop dry grass set aflame, though it wasn't enough to properly light the firewood. As Alia wasn’t expecting it to pop and burn, a short yelp escaped her lips.

'I think I overdid it with safety… humn… Right, I have that one.'

Pulling out another crystal, this one barely tinted blue, Alicia gave it to the girl.

Still unsure about the whole ordeal she only did as she was told, whispering something like a prayer to the stone before tossing it into the fire. The fire roared  with vigor as flow of air burst inside the fire pit bringing in an influx of oxygen. Its outburst lasted for a brief moment before mellowing out. Both girls were enamored with the result, one for the fantastical side of things, the other for the march of progress. Pleased with the outcome,  Alicia left a few more ember crystals with her.

Once Alpha had returned Alicia thoroughly questioned her on her small expedition before going back there by herself. The crystals had a faint tingling of unworldly energy. Her adjutant Alfred used it to locate the chamber where Alicia first made contact with the void. However the true nature of the situation had eluded her. When Alicia returned to the cavern at the peak, the entire geometry of the place had been drastically changed, enough for her to have a double take questioning whether or not it was the same cave system, yet instincts told her it was the very same place. Instead of some forgotten ruins in a collapsing cave it was now something akin to a temple.

She was expecting to scale walls as she did the first time and had changed into her hybrid form. Gone was the rough indurate ground, replaced by smooth and polished floors. The walls were adorned with pictorial images resembling the depths of a realm she sees only in her unwaking mind. The images seemed to shift into another scene, slowly, slow enough that one couldn’t tell if it was moving or not. Her mind was plagued by the paranoia that the inanimate images displayed on the walls were flowing into another shape when she wasn’t looking. Without the difficulty of the terrain, she could move much faster into its depths and as her destination grew near, a faint whistling became more and more audible, like that of the wind. Yet her trichobothria hadn’t picked up the faintest movement in air. An unnatural wind beckoned her. All the way until she reached the deepest parts of the caverns, indescribable voices followed her. It was as if someone just out of sight was talking to her. The voices and their messages all overlapped where no meaning could be gleaned from them.

Domed chamber where she met an ancient fire spirit in the form of a dragon remained the same for the most part, spare for the sprawling crystalline growth in the middle of it. Within the heart of the crystal she noticed a pinprick of a hole from where the void seeped out, the pervasive influence of which terraforming the very world around it.

>Notice. Volitant particles detected.

>Alert. Non-Euclidean space detected.

>Caution. Anomalous gravitational field detected.

‘You’re worried…? That makes the two of us then.’

Alicia had long since lost her fear of the void. What she feared now was how familiar void felt.

Approaching the crystal it seemed to react to her presence fracturing into smaller pieces, yet instead of falling it defied gravity, suspended in air. Reaching into the perforation in the world she gently nudged it close. But as she did, from the point of contact with the void something surged through her arms and into her, searing, agonizing pain stung through her chest, reminding her of her first encounter with the void. With the source of abnormality gone, the floating crystal chunks around her fell to the ground all at once. With its closure the perturbing voices went with it. Though she wanted to believe the sealing of the rupture was her doing, it felt as if it closed itself on its own.

From the small camp made for visitors created outside the world infamous forest, a caravan of merchants and their guards set out for Viveria, homebound, carrying highly sought after items. Unknown to them, a mysterious stowaway came riding along with their goods. A blonde haired child sitting on a wagon roof at the end of the line, swinging her little legs back and forth to a berceuse tune that she hums, her hair bobbing with each small bump the carriage passes over. Malachite greens peer out of her xanthic locks. Not many would suspect the mortiferous intentions underneath her lightheartedness. Yet her cheer, however, came not from the coming hecatomb she will cause but from her earnest service to her  mistresses.

Auratic

Crystals that hold onto charge. Clearly something fictitious, right? I present you, piezoelectricity. Crystals, particularly quartz when exposed to stress (Mechanical stress not anxiety or the crippling depression you have.) release electricity. This can be created through number of methods but most common are applying charge, causing physical stress (not damage) or high heat. Such piezoelectric crystals are quite crucial in creation of crystal oscillators which are a common component for devices, from the simplest of clocks to the most complicated computer systems. In fact the very device you're using to read this, probably has an oscillator in it somewhere. Ever wondered how your  computer is able to accurately tell how long its been off for and what time it is right now when booting up despite being completely cut off from electricity ? Again, the crystal oscillator within it use a small battery to create a periodic electric signal at a regular interval. By, quite literally counting these signals, they can keep track of time, even when cut off from the world. It is not the most accurate of clocks but for most people, that's that big of a deal.

Anyway, last time I checked the main page I saw this, here's someone having a very good time... I think...?

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