Chapter Fifteen: Interfacing
Written by Jeff
There was an uneasy tugging sensation when Danvers swam through the translucent doorway, as if he had passed through a single thread of an enormous spider web. When he crossed the threshold, the shimmering material that separated the building compartments sucked back together behind him in an instant, making a sound like a pebble dropped deep into a well.
This was a bedroom, but there was nothing inside that Danvers could see was obviously a bed, or anything else that would have led him to believe that this was a space intended for resting. There were various tools and strange tubes, fasteners, and components littered across the floor and floating in the water, and against the back wall stood an abnormally large nautilus shell, opened as if bisected and connected on a hinge. Strangely, there were no physical barriers segmenting the chambers inside the shell. Instead, thin, curved rows of light moved up and down the interior, passing each other and overlapping on different trajectories. There was a young boy with dark crimson skin and shaggy white hair, not floating but standing in front of the shell, and it took only a moment for Danvers to realize that the boy was controlling these mechanisms with his mind. A voice spoke up inside of Danvers’ own mind. It was the voice of a grown man, not a child.
“I take it you’re the grandfather, Faullen Danvers?”
“I’m a grandfather,” said Danvers. “But I like to think there’s a little more to me than that.”
The boy turned around and smiled, but his mouth remained closed as he spoke telepathically.
“Of course, my apologies. But that’s the reason why we’re here together now - for this plan the Nemarus have concocted, to co-opt this demon that has hijacked your granddaughter.”
“Yeah, the plan,” said Danvers unenthusiastically. “I had some questions about it, so I thought you and I should probably talk about the specifics. Unless it’s better to keep the bait uninformed.”
Hallister gave the man a curious look. “I can sense from your tone that you’re not a big fan of this plan. Which part of it is rubbing you the wrong way.”
Danvers dug his webbed toe into the ground awkwardly and looked away. “I don’t know, all of it? It doesn’t seem like my place to question it, though. It’s not like I’ve got a better one. I just want to do my part to help, however I can.”
The lights scanning up and down inside the shell suddenly stopped and the crimson boy stepped forward towards Danvers, looking at him with such intensity that Danvers felt compelled to return his gaze.
“May I have a look inside your mind, Faullen?”
“There was a time when a request like that would have seemed strange,” chuckled Danvers. “But these days, what’s inside my head doesn’t feel particularly private anymore. It’s hard to tell where my mind ends and everybody else’s memories begin. Feel free to poke around, Mr. Hallister. But maybe don’t look at everything? Leave the actual private stuff alone, if you will.”
“But you can learn so much about someone by only looking at the private stuff. Bathroom habits paint a vivid picture of a man.” Danvers frowned, and the boy laughed out loud in a squeaky, high-pitched tone that didn’t at all match the voice Hallister projected. “Don’t worry. I’ll leave the private stuff alone.”
Danvers could feel the slightest hint of pressure and a warm sensation radiating in his skull as Hallister mentally scanned him. He looked over the top of the boy’s head during the examination, instinctively trying to stand still as if he was getting an x-ray at the doctor’s office. He could see Hallister’s posture lighten as the Magi finished the probe.
“Faullen, I think it might behoove us to have a frank conversation. I can see that you have many questions, and I believe I have the answers you seek.” Hallister looked around the room with a wary expression. “But I also believe we should have this conversation someplace a bit more private.”
From the surface of Hallister’s body, a barrier began to rise and expand, at first keeping the boy’s shape but then rounding out into a perfect, orange-tinted sphere, enveloping Danvers until the two of them were positioned inside the water-tight bubble.
“If the Nemarus are listening in, which I expect they are, they won’t be able to hear us inside of here,” said Hallister. “I had a look at the memory scale they gave you. I’ve never actually had a chance to scan one before - the Nemarus would never give me access to their minds - but I’m familiar with the general technology. It was given to them by the Settlers, and I’ve spent my life trying to learn everything possible about them. On cursory glance, I can see that large sections of the memory...database, as it were, are blacked out. They’ve censored quite a bit of information from you in an attempt to paint a picture of the past a certain way.”
“Yeah, I’d wondered if that was the case,” said Danvers. “It definitely didn’t feel like Adan was giving me the whole story.” Danvers looked at the boy skeptically. “So what, I’m just supposed to trust that you’re going to give me the actual truth of things?”
“I can give you the truth as I see it,” said Hallister plainly. “And you can decide whether you believe it or not. That’s entirely up to you. Ask me whatever you like, and if you don’t like my answers, you’re free to conclude the conversation as you see fit. We don’t owe each other anything but common courtesy.”
“How do you feel about the Nemarus’ plan to destroy the new columns and send the upper platform crashing down onto the world?”
“It’s absolute lunacy,” said Hallister, “and I never had any intention of seeing it through. But when the Nemarus found me I was in a vulnerable state, and it seemed the best option to go along with whatever they proposed until I got myself and my own plans in order.”
“Why do they think that destroying the world above is the only option?”
“Well, there’s a long, long history that led to that sort of belligerent thinking,” said Hallister. “And it’s one that I doubt is conveyed objectively in the memories they gave you, if it is even conveyed at all. I’ve never attempted this before, Faullen, but I’d like to try and interface with your memory scale and send it information from my mind. Reading someone’s mind is a much different thing than attempting to implant ideas inside of it, but I believe I can share some of my knowledge with you through the scale.”
“I don’t know if that’s going to work,” said Danvers skeptically. “The Nemarus didn’t really give me knowledge, so to speak. They gave me vast amounts of memories that I have to sort through to gain knowledge.”
“What is knowledge if not a memory of having learned, hmm? Let me poke around a little. I promise not to break anything, and if I do, I’ll fix it right back up.”
Without explicitly saying yes, Danvers closed his eyes and squinted down, ready for another experience as uncomfortable as when Adan had implanted the scale. But this experience wasn’t painful or particularly unpleasant; it was just a firmer pressure than Hallister had applied before, with the scale on his frontal lobe feeling as if it were radiating heat like a purring engine. The Magi made several “Ohs,” and “Hmms,” and other exploratory noises as he poked around inside Danvers’ skull before proudly exclaiming, “Ah, there it is. I should have guessed. Let’s try a little test, Faullen. I’m going to transmit some of what I know about the Nemarus into your scale. I’m curious to see how your mind processes it.”
The warm sensation heightened and compressed until it felt like a single white-hot pin prick beneath his forehead, and then Danvers experienced Hallister’s knowledge in a way that was completely different than the memories contained within the scale. The Magi was right: his knowledge was similar to a memory, but it didn’t have the same specific sensory qualities. Instead, the knowledge was accompanied by what Danvers could only assume was a general sense of feeling: how Hallister had felt upon learning the information; the picture of it that his mind had painted to accompany the information; the story he told himself that tied it to other pieces of knowledge and filled out the bigger picture. As Danvers internalized the information Hallister had sent, it felt less like a fully-lived experience and more like a purposefully-condensed flashback.
The Nemarus were devout followers of the Settlers. They worshiped them. But it was a completely one-sided and toxic relationship where one was constantly striving for the approval of the other, and the more the Settlers ignored them, the more the Nemarus ached for attention. The Nemarus were originally created as warriors before the first columns were built. Some of the most dangerous creatures in the underworld were killed or imprisoned before the construction of the new world, but many more monstrosities found their way up to the top in the early years. Those who could not be defeated were imprisoned in orbs, eight creatures in total, and all of those aggravated ancient deities were held in containment shrines on the upper level, where they could be monitored. The Settlers had given the Nemarus special abilities to help them fight and imprison these creatures, but once the creatures were captured and the original job was done, the Nemarus became anxious and impatient. They were desperate to continue pleasing their masters.
So the Settlers put them to work again, this time as guardians, protecting the containment shrines. The Nemarus weren’t always aquatic, and if anything, the purpose behind their placement deep underwater was to give them a task as far away as possible from the new world the Settlers had built. Having been hand-chosen by their saviors had led the Nemarus to become clingy, and prideful, and extremely jealous. Once the platforms were in place, the Settlers created the Touched to look after the barrier orbs and protect the surface. Upon learning this, the self-appointed leaders of the Nemarus - one of whom was Adan - demanded that a select group of Nemarus receive these powers as well, and the Settlers acquiesced to pacify them.
Eventually, the Nemarus decided that their efforts were wasted as guards, and that they should be sheriffs instead, hunting down any creatures that escaped to the surface. But in order to do so, they would need underlings to do their old jobs. To appease them, the Settlers created the abyssal nectar to transform Callans into Aquine. They would now serve as the custodians of the containment shrines, under the direction of the Nemarus, who were thrilled to finally have someone to boss around.
Hallister didn’t see the Nemarus as sheriffs, but rather as overzealous volunteer cops, saddling themselves with the burden of fixing problems they were never asked to fix. After many generations, most Aquine found the Nemarus too haughty and insufferable to continue serving under, choosing instead to take their chances with the Callans above water. As the Aquine adapted to their new lives on land, the Nemarus were infuriated to find that their former subjects had grown to venerate the Touched, freely giving them the adoration that the Nemarus had insisted on but never received. The relationship reminded Hallister of a pet cat: If you demand that it love you, it won’t, and will show love to someone who is indifferent to it instead.
As the Nemarus continued to patrol the border between worlds underwater, they watched through the boko tree as the world above deteriorated, furious that their jurisdiction only included what lay in the depths. When the Shift occurred, and most of the oceans simply disappeared, it was the last straw. In the minds of the Nemarus, for order to return and things to be the way the Settlers originally intended, everything governable needed to move below water. When that happened, everyone who remained alive would be under their dominion. It was the only way to stave off complete collapse.
“They think what they’re doing is right,” said Danvers.
“And that’s what makes them particularly dangerous,” said Hallister. “But it doesn’t change the fact that they have always been hungry for power and desperate for fealty. You were a fisherman on Delvorn, you should know that better than anyone.”
“I should?” Danvers felt particularly dense saying this, knowing he should be able to piece it together for himself. And then, his mind did put it together. His own memories flashed into his mind: the boat graveyard. The look on his father’s face when he was a child, offering the Sea Mothers the Ylvers Bloom. The Nemarus had made his father, and his father before him, fear their power and retribution if those who worked the sea did not offer up memories as tithe. They demanded a tax for keeping the waters safe from threats deep below. He remembered all those sunken boats beneath the surface; generations of wreckage. Those who didn’t pay up were treated as threats themselves.
“How do you know all of this?” asked Danvers.
“I’ve spent my entire life trying to get to the truth of my existence. Several lives, actually. This isn’t the first new body I’ve acquired, though it is the first Touched. All of the others were Magi, of course, by necessity.” He could see from the look on Danvers’ face that the man wasn’t exactly following. “Hmm, I suppose I shouldn’t assume anything when it comes to what others know and don’t know. Would you like a crash course on Magi? Though to be honest, I’ve a lot more knowledge pertaining to that subject than I do on the Nemarus, and there’s quite a bit of background information that’s necessary for it all to make sense.”
Danvers nodded, and this time the sensation was more like a small brand on his brain than a pin prick. He let out an audible gasp when the knowledge entered his mind. Of course. It all made sense.
Magi were descendants of the Settlers.
The Settlers got their namesake by founding the new world, but they didn’t simply create it and then vanish directly after. They were humanoid, like the original Callans, but taller, stronger, smarter, and immensely powerful. It was unsurprising that the Nemarus worshipped them: relatively, they were gods. But they weren’t omniscient, omnipotent, or even intrinsically good. They could be brash, ill-tempered, and irascible. They craved adoration, but not the wrong kind; not the way the Nemarus did it. Their influence and technology pushed the Callans into a new age, and as they progressed and grew, the Settlers simply became bored with their subjects and decided to leave and spread their munificence to other beleaguered worlds that would worship them anew.
At least, most of them left. Some stayed behind, taking the forms of Callans, living as beloved rulers or tyrants or whatever fit their mood. And they took Callan partners, and bred, and throughout the generations some of those offspring learned how to harness their dormant off-world genetics until enough time passed that the Settlers were mere lore and Magi were commonplace.
Finding reliable texts, hearing oral traditions from people around the world, and learning the true potential of his magical birthright had been the focus of Corrilous Hallister’s life. He had amassed these documents, studied them diligently, and even found a way to transport them to Vlyk when he was exiled, before Laureena had set them all ablaze. Danvers knew that if Hallister hated Värlof and his granddaughter for one reason alone, that was it.
“The Settlers...they weren’t at all what I imagined,” said Danvers. He paused for a moment and wondered to himself how Adan remembered them. His mind filled with memories of the beings, and it was strange seeing visualizations of their actual appearance alongside how Hallister had imagined them based on the texts he had read. There were similarities, but Adan’s memories made the Settlers seem much more regal and grand. She didn’t remember them with any semblance of negativity, or if she did, she had censored those memories from Danvers’ mind.
“As far as higher powers go, they were deeply problematic,” said Hallister. “They had unbelievable power, and yet they still made mistakes like any other living thing.”
“Like what?” asked Danvers.
“Well, the boko tree, to start. That’s about as big of a mistake as they could possibly make, but maybe it was just this world’s way of keeping them in check. Boko roots go all the way down to the bottom of the underworld. The tree was seemingly impervious to the nastiness that went on down there before the Settlers arrived, and when they began to build the original columns, the tree grew up and above the new platform with incredible speed, giving them no choice but to build around it. Do you know what comes out of a boko tree when you cut it open?”
Danvers did know. He had learned it from Adan’s memories.
“Avtimag material.”
“Precisely. They built a world surrounded by a substance that could take away the very thing that made them extraordinary. The boko was an enigma to them when they arrived, and they didn’t discover how to penetrate its bark until after the new world was built. And once they did learn how to cut through it, they didn’t stop when they discovered its sap was the antidote to magic. They were too stubborn, too curious. And then they catalogued that information and left it behind, in case they or someone else like them ever returned. But it wasn’t other off-worlders who found that information. It was the people who already lived here, and they used it to destroy the boko groves in the name of progress, not knowing - or perhaps not caring - that it was destroying a vital cornerstone of the natural world.”
“So Adan wasn’t lying when she said that we caused the Shift,” sighed Danvers. “Sometimes it’s easy to feel like we deserve to be wiped out.”
“Well, again, that’s only part of the truth,” said Hallister. “There’s a humorous irony to the fact that the Nemarus tasked themselves with guarding the platform underwater, because most of the creatures that did find their way to the surface did so above ground, in the holes left by destroyed boko groves.” Hallister’s eyes narrowed, and Danvers could feel more knowledge entering the scale.
This time, the flashback was peppered with some of Hallister’s actual memories, the information seamlessly melding with what the Magi had shared before. Through Hallister’s eyes, Danvers saw and heard the man arguing with Capital politicians, warning them that the deforestation efforts spearheaded by the Tollstrung brothers were causing more - and more dangerous - creatures to appear all around the world. These creatures were naturally drawn to magic. Drawn to Magi. And when the Magi used their powers to fight back, they were deemed as threats themselves and exiled to the Outer Rings. The anti-Magi mandate had been in effect since long before the Tollstrungs figured out how to cut down the boko groves, but the intensity with which the Capital began exiling Magi rose sharply as the trees fell. Before long, the Techniks became an established faction and would be added to the mandate as well: Another group harnessing power that could threaten the Capital, and thus needed to be mitigated and cast away.
Hallister had kept his knowledge of the past close to his chest, knowing that the Capital would likely refute anything that challenged their sovereignty. But at this point, he felt no choice but to tell them the truth as to why they couldn’t continue cutting down the trees. He told them only what he thought they needed to know about the boko; where it went; what it could unleash. He said he had the historical texts to back it up. They responded by blowing up his entire village, blaming him for it, and exiling him to Vlyk.
Though deforestation made the problem more severe, creatures from the underworld had always been able to find ways up top, if only occasionally. The Nemarus were quite good at dealing with threats in the ocean, and Magi and Touched with those on land. But the Vist - the creatures creating the new columns stretching into the sky - weren’t particularly dangerous because they could come up through holes cut through boko groves. Their preferred method of coming up from the underworld was through the original columns themselves. It was unclear how long the Vist had been able to travel up to the surface this way, but there was no record of them passing through, corrupting, and shattering orbs until the Shift began. Something in the orbs had kept them at bay until four years ago, and whatever the Shift truly was, it was the event that allowed the Vist to finally pierce the veil and destroy the orbs’ barriers. Once the Vist could shatter the orbs, it allowed them to destroy islands with their purple smoke and reform the matter into columns stretching into a new world being built above.
Seemingly without transition in his mind’s eye, Danvers re-lived another vivid memory from Hallister, one that made him audibly gasp in horror. He saw his beloved granddaughter, a few years older than the last time they had been together, half-faded from reality and filled with rage, conducting a monstrous creature made of fiery arms and tentacles. He saw from Hallister’s point of view as the girl destroyed a beautiful keep and murdered a man and a woman, both with crimson red skin, only leaving Hallister behind because she assumed he was dead beneath a flaming pile of debris.
“Why would you show me that?” Danvers stuttered. “I didn’t want to see that.”
“But you needed to see that,” said Hallister. “For a number of reasons. I had a long time to think inside of this shell, as my body recuperated and grew. It was at this moment, fighting your granddaughter, watching Värlof poison her mind from inside of a sphere that was supposed to be containing it, that I began to piece together what the Shift really is.
“The notion first took shape when Brinn and I taught Touched from surrounding islands how to make barriers to protect them from the storms. It was not an ability that Brinn was naturally able to act upon. I had to help him discover the capacity deep inside of him, and he in turn helped Touched from other islands to do the same. It took a while for him to get a hang of the process, because he said that creating the barrier - summoning it from the orb itself - felt like the exact opposite process that it should be.
“Faullen, did you know that the polarity of the world can change? That if you waited long enough, a compass pointing due north would say it was pointing due south? We’re talking an incredible amount of time for something like that to occur, but it is an eventual reality.”
“I didn’t know that, no,” said Danvers. “You think that’s what the Shift is?”
“Something like that, yes, but with the orbs that the Settlers left behind. Impenetrable barriers became permeable. Containment orbs no longer contained, but allowed their captives to wreak havoc from the very realms to which they were banished. And who even knows what’s happening with the weather these days! Atrocious. It’s merely a hypothesis, but I believe the Shift could very well be a polarity shift.”
“Was there ever anything before the Shift that could negate the powers of the Nemarus and the Touched?” asked Danvers.
“I suppose if you doused a Touched with avtimag while their barrier was down, perhaps, but otherwise no, not to my knowledge. Why do you ask?”
“The Capital is using purple smoke from the underdwellers to temporarily disable the Touched and relocate them to the mainland. General Caldwell tried to use it on Adan, and she was angry, and afraid.”
“Hmm, well that is a discouraging new development. But it fits in with everything else flipping on its head.”
“So the Shift wasn’t the just fault of everyone on the surface, like Adan said,” Danvers mused aloud.
“Oh it still very well could be,” added Hallister. “There’s no knowing yet exactly what caused it. For now, it seems there are a variety of reasons. I do think that the various pieces are interconnected, but I also believe there’s something else at play here that too many - especially our hosts here in Vandenala - choose to overlook.”
“The Settlers.”
“Now you’ve got it. The Nemarus still blindly believe that the Settlers have a grand plan to save us all, but I personally think that’s as far away from the truth as possible. In fact, if there was any clear direction to point the finger of blame, it’s at them. I simply can’t believe that new columns and a higher platform appearing in the sky just happened without their involvement.”
“I agree,” Danvers sighed. “Everything you’ve said makes sense. But what does this have to do with me? I still don’t know how I’m supposed to factor into any of this. Do you have a different way you’d like to use me as bait to catch my granddaughter than what the Capital and the Nemarus have already suggested?”
“I’m not going to pretend like I need you for anything, Faullen. I might be the most capable individual on this planet to help set things straight again, if that’s even possible. But I could see on your face when you came in here that you’d bitten off more than you could chew with the Nemarus, and then I saw it definitively when I took a look at your mind. Adan doesn’t actually care about saving Laureena; she just wants to control the monster that’s controlling your granddaughter to see her own plans to fruition. I don’t want to try and control Värlof. I want to do what my ancestors couldn’t: I want to destroy it. It used your granddaughter to burn down my library and kill my friends, and that’s what’s driving me now. But looking at the bigger picture, if we are going to try and fix the world-ending problems, then entities like Värlof must be removed from the board as soon as possible. As for why I’m involving you in this, I thought maybe you’d prefer my plan of exterminating the monster, instead of Adan’s plan of attempting to tame it. My plan also won’t cause a catastrophic genocide of everyone living on the surface. Probably.”
“So you just want me to tag along?”
“I’m sure you’ll find ways to be helpful. You seem like a good chap, and you’ve got skin in this game. And besides, I’m not sure using you as bait is such a good idea anymore, now that you look like a fish man. There’s a pretty good chance your granddaughter wouldn’t even believe it’s you, although I suppose maybe the confusion she got from seeing you might have been the moment Adan planned to pounce. Hard to know exactly what's on her mind.”
“How are you going to save my granddaughter?” Danvers asked sternly, wanting definitive answers. “The last time you went up against Värlof you didn’t put up much of a fight. I saw your memory of it.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know what to attack then, and by the time I figured it out, there was no chance to actually perform the incantation. I do believe it’s possible to re-flip the polarity on Värlof’s containment orb, causing it to act again as it should, but it’s a very old and very peculiar piece of magic, going as far back as the earliest known spells from the Settlers, or at least the ones that stayed behind and became Magi. The spell itself changes; it can’t be memorized. It is stored inside a very important book, one that I was thankfully able to whisk away to safety before my keep burned to the ground.” Hallister got a sour look on his face. “No other fire than Värlof’s could have burned down my library. It was bloody enchanted. I will destroy that demon.”
The memory replayed in Danvers’ mind, and he saw the book shoot up through the smoke and come to rest in a woman’s hand before Hallister gave her a telekinetic shove out the skylight.
“Who is the woman who has the book?”
Rather than explain, Hallister transmitted everything he knew about Elinea into the man’s memory scale, and the Magi could see his eyes widen when he learned that the woman was brought back to life inside of an orb chamber.
“She’s quite resourceful,” said Hallister, once it was clear Danvers had parsed through the knowledge. “I’m assuming that she’s still traveling with one of my associates from the island, a Dr. Drescel, the one who created this shell behind us that accelerated my growth. I also assume they’re traveling with another man who is...quite peculiar. You asked me before how I knew all of these things about the Settlers. There were many, many sources, but one extremely important one was an information cache of the Settlers that I discovered long ago, hidden away in ruins in the Outer Rings. It was incredibly powerful, and I knew not to touch the thing directly for fear of it frying my brain, and that I should only interface with it telepathically. I learned a great deal from it, and left it behind in the ruins where I found it. Your memory scale is not so incredibly different from that cache, which is how I knew how to interface with yours. Anyway, this man, he saved Elinea from the keep, and I’m sure he saw her safely off the island with Drescel. He was in possession of that very same information cache while he was on Vlyk. If those three are still together, they are the ones we need to seek out and work with to find a solution to the Shift. Not the Nemarus.”
Danvers looked at the strange half-shell, half-machine disassembled all over the room. “What are you doing to the shell now?” he asked. “Trying to get it to work faster?”
“Not exactly,” said Hallister. “In all honesty, Faullen, I did have a bit of a plan for you before deciding to invite you along on my adventure. Nothing nefarious, I assure you. And if you agree, I truly believe it would be to both our benefit.”
***
Danvers and Hallister had gotten about five minutes away from the housing complex, pulling the bulky shell behind them through the water with ropes, before Adan caught up to them in a huff. Before she could speak, Hallister gave her a warm greeting.
“Adan! How wonderful, I’m so glad you could join us for this!”
The Nemarus seemed slightly taken off guard. “Join you for what, exactly?”
“I’ve been tinkering with the shell here, adding some magical elements to accompany the bio-mechanical ones that my associate Drescel originally created. I think I’ve finally gotten it figured out. When you found me stuck in the reef, I had been inside for roughly two years, hmm? And that had grown me from a veritable newborn to the spry young lad you see in front of you today. But if we’re going to face off against Värlof, I’m going to need to be in peak form, and I fear this young body just isn’t going to cut it. I’ve figured out how to speed up the timeline exponentially. The problem is finding a big enough power source to really get it going.”
“So where are you taking it?” she asked suspiciously. “The power at the housing complex wasn’t sufficient?”
“Oh heavens no!” laughed Hallister. “We’d have blacked out the city entirely. No, we’re going to need to interface with truly remarkable power.”
Vandenala existed within a giant bulb produced from the roots of the boko tree. At the very bottom of the bulb sat a bright blue glowing light that illuminated the entire city, like a sky positioned upside-down. Hallister pointed down at it. “That ought to do just the trick.”
“You will do no such thing!” she scoffed.
“Do you know exactly what it is?” asked Hallister.
Danvers smirked. He knew from Adan’s memories that she most definitely did not. None of the Nemarus knew exactly what it was, other than an energy source and a protective ward. It was simply there, and always had been.
Adan knew better than to try and bluff. “And I suppose you do?”
“More or less,” said the Magi casually. “I do know that it’s a great source of power, and it was put here by my ancestors.” Hallister knew that referring to the Settlers in this way would get her riled up, and he was right. Her eyes flared, but her voice stayed calm.
“Yes, we know that it is an energy source,” she said. “It powers all of Vandenala through an electromagnetic grid that we control. But that shell is not set up to receive power through the grid.”
“I know,” said Hallister. “I’m going to plug it straight in.”
Adan gave him a condescending laugh. “You are more than welcome to try.”
And so she swam down and down with them until they were at the surface of the blue glowing light, the brightness of which seemed strangely less intense the closer they became. Danvers was surprised to feel that the surface was slightly springy as they touched down on it, and not hard like the outside of a glass bulb as he had imagined. Adan looked on at Hallister with an equal mix of curiosity and annoyance as he got down on his knees and put his palms directly above the glowing blue ground, eyes closed in deep concentration. His demeanor softened into a smile, and with his right hand, Hallister began to pinch with his thumb and forefinger and then pull. The glowing blue surface rippled and pulsated and a long, thin protrusion rose up into the air and positioned itself in his hand.
“What is that?” Adan asked, astonished.
“An interface,” said Hallister. “A direct power source.” He pulled the protrusion up and out of the blue surface like a cord and attached its end over a nodule on the shell’s exterior. “It’s always been there. You just have to know how to look for it.”
Adan was at a loss for words. She felt like she should say something to discourage the man from tapping into Vandenala’s power source, but clearly he knew more about the situation than she did.
“And now comes the point where I am glad you are here,” said Hallister, looking up at the Nemarus. “Mr. Danvers and I need to go inside of this machine together for it to work properly, but I do not know exactly for how long. It could be a day, it could be a week. The important thing is that the process is not interrupted. I am aware that it is quite strange that someone would jack directly into your glowing light here. Please ensure no one unplugs it until the transformation is complete.”
“Ok,” said Adan. “I will make sure you are not interrupted. And when you are done, you will have what you need to capture and control Värlof?”
“When we are done,” said Hallister, “That monster won’t stand a chance against me.”
In the end, it required three and a half days for the transformation inside of the shell to complete. Adan didn’t personally stay there overseeing the operation the entire time, bringing in others in shifts so she could sleep and eat, but she was present when bubbles began to jettison along the shell’s edges and it seemed to separate vertically in a perfect line and spread open.
Inside, two fully-grown men awoke, curled up back to back in the fetal position. Hallister was the first to regain his faculties. The small child’s outfit that the Nemarus had given him when he arrived in Vandenala was completely ripped apart, and he stepped out of the shell naked and covered in tatters. He was tall and lean and surprisingly muscular for someone who had aged twenty years in a matter of days. Strangely, his white hair looked virtually the same as it had when he entered the shell as a boy, with shaggy bangs and small curls around the ears. Adan assumed it would have grown all the way down to his knees.
Danvers stepped out next, and though he was still Aquine, he did not look at all like the old man who had entered the device. The twenty years he had transferred to Hallister made an enormous impact on his appearance. Like many who drink, Danvers had gotten old hard and fast. He stepped lightly out of the shell and did a big stretch, nimbly bending down and touching his toes.
“How do you feel, old chap?” asked Hallister. The Magi still spoke using his mind, but his voice was now much better-suited for his body.
Danvers looked himself over and smiled. “I feel...refreshed.”
“I see now why you felt this was a necessary experiment,” said Adan. “I must admit, you both look much more up to the task ahead than you did a few days ago.”
“Yes, this power source turned out to be more than adequate,” said Hallister, looking down at the glowing blue ground. “I had learned about it in my studies, but it’s always hard to know what really exists and what is merely tall tales.”
“I still can’t believe you were able to interface with it like that,” said Adan. “I suppose you truly are a descendent of the Settlers.” It was as high of a compliment as she was likely to ever give the man.
“What do you remember of the Settlers creating it?” asked Hallister. “Did you see them build it?”
“I did not. It was here before Vandenala was constructed, before the Nemarus made this our home. When we arrived, it was already in place.”
“It must have been tedious for the Settlers to set up a base within a bulb of the great boko roots,” said Hallister, not addressing Adan but continuing to look down at the glowing blue light.
“How do you mean?”
“Well isn’t it tedious for you to live here?” he asked. “You can’t teleport through the roots. Nothing magical can. If you want to go somewhere, you have to leave the bulb entirely.”
“True,” she said. “But it’s not that big of an inconvenience to leave the bulb before teleporting. The bigger annoyance is instances in which we need to teleport into an orb chamber that is completely surrounded by the roots. It’s impossible, and there are several orb chambers around the world that are inaccessible this way. You have to teleport to the nearest island instead.”
“And doing so temporarily sucks all of the power out of the orb, leaving it open for attack.” Hallister didn’t say it as an accusation, but it was easy to construe as one.
“It is an imperfect system, yes,” Adan admitted begrudgingly. “But one that wasn’t particularly problematic before the Shift.”
“Did the Settlers teach you how to teleport?” asked Hallister. “Or was that something you figured out after they left?”
Adan’s bulbous eyes glared at the man. Her hackles were up completely, unsure why the Magi was asking her these infuriating questions, but her voice stayed forcefully calm.
“After. We learned of the possibility of teleporting between the orbs without their supreme guidance, as they knew we would.”
“Yes, that makes sense,” said the Magi. “Although it seems to me that they probably had a different system setup. One that would have let them move directly in and out of this place, regardless of the roots. I could sense it before, just barely, when my body was young and imprecise. But now that I’ve got a proper adult body, there are things I can see as a Touched that I simply couldn’t before.”
“Are you implying,” fumed Adan, “that there are fundamental secrets about Vandenala that the Settlers hid from their most loyal servants?”
“Oh dear,” said Hallister. “I’m not explicitly saying that they hid them from you.” He reached out his right hand and Danvers stepped up from behind and grasped it. “I’m just saying you didn’t know how to look.”
The surface of the blue light began to pulsate rapidly, and Adan shot forward at the two men to grab them. But before her webbed hands could make contact, Danvers and Hallister had vanished in a flash of blue light, transported far away from the underwater hub of Vandenala.
Fate Index:
1. Interspecies relationship becomes a little one-sided
2. Protagonist’s hangover leads to some incredibly fortuitous turn of events
3. Extended stream of consciousness
4. Someone gets refueled
5. Protagonist’s identity is thrown into question
6. Flashback episode
7. Protagonist gets overzealous and makes a major mistake
8. A creature’s weak spot gets found by accident
9. A great artifact of the past is found, calling to a new owner
10. Something consequential turns out to be an illusion
11. An antagonist is offered a moment of possible redemption but must decide to act on it
12. Betrayal
13. Protagonist finds powerful item or treasure
14. Magic finger traps, but for the brain or heart
15. Millions of insects start their march to devour everything in their path
16. After a long string of losses, a character begins to succeed only to jeopardize someone else's success
17. Protagonist takes up cause of beleaguered
18. Razor clams
19. Virtue of protagonist is tested by an ally
20. Nothing happens when something is supposed to happen
Outcomes Used:
4. Someone gets refueled
6. Flashback episode
Added outcomes:
Fantasy deathmatch
(thanks to @scam_dnb on Instagram)
People begin to question their belief system
(thanks to Bariş)
