The Star 21

The ride wasn't particularly smooth. The saucer hadn't fully repaired, nor was it well 'fueled'. It was a jumpy, somewhat terrifying journey with a pilot who wasn't completely qualified to operate it. Despite all that, it only took five days and Sonny had a decent idea of what he was doing by the time he arrived near the massive planar sprawl that was the Enigma Field.

Surprisingly, the increased gravitational pull by the large stretch of spatially strange landscape only served to increase the smooth functioning of the saucer's electromagnetic propulsion. His only complaint on that part was the attraction of cloud to cloud lightning the ship seemed to attract at the detriment of its inhabitant's nerves and sanity. At least by the time he had reached the future site of EF 23, it no longer had a nearly transparent and unsoundproofed 'sun roof'. With a few days down time, the internal life support would be back online too.

Slowly but steadily, he made his way into the tributary cavern of the caldera as he munched on one of the few remaining super food bars to help him quick adjust to the harshly heavier environment. The more hazy memories of another life returned to him, the less he cherished the old special resources he had. The land inside the snow globe artifact had patches of special crops capable of creating fresh and far more potent alchemical supplements.

With a beefed up version of the lake house from Avalon and a few mile diameter property rich with supernatural resources, caring for the personal needs and wants of a small village of beginning climbers wouldn't be a difficult task. The problem was trust and desire. He lacked both.

What he didn't lack was an industrious spirit. As a tribute to the original, he had a fairly decent amount of still aging Nurse Blue to replace the extinct supply of Doc Agave among others. And though he couldn't replicate the nutrition bars he still didn't know the origin of, he had a decent selection of medicine and preserved foodstuffs that covered the spectrum of its properties. That was important as their near ancient status was starting to deteriorate their usefulness.

He chuckled to himself over how many different times he'd probably consumed the very same supplies over and over again. The revealed snippets of his greater self's experiences were baffling and darkly humorous. He marveled over them even as he inwardly cringed at the frustration of needing to redo the same events multiple times. Being vaguely aware that he had the sneak peek of a condensed version nearly made him break out in cold sweats.

Only the soul's resilient and memory abandoning nature stood between that and total insanity. For the first time, he felt privileged to be the inheritor rather than the active 'doer'. It was at that moment he realized what he represented. The fear he had of being lost within Orison was a joke. One day, perhaps even soon, he would be Orison but Sonny would become the center. His greater self required him to shed the long and weighty chain of the soul's past karma.

The physical vessel was almost a negligent part of the real process. Orison's dark night of the soul was a spiritual rebirth. Cultivators understood such vague things more properly than espers and a majority of mystics.

He was going through the process of cutting attachments to spiritual origins, freeing his soul from the cycles of previous mortal karma in the process. Unlike the astute observers of Dao, mystics and mutants didn't need to complete the process entirely but had to face it earlier in their climb. This was likely due to a more specialized focus on consciousness or soul over the body rather than seeking a continuous balance between at least two, possibly all three.

Very few had to face as severe a process as Orison did, however. Part of that was due to his outsider origins. Another was due to the influence of the Tower of Ruin. The largest part was due to embracing a future path of power free of obligation to a Greater Reality. To accomplish that, he had exposed himself to the laws of three separate ones in an attempt to condense understanding well beyond his soul's capacity to contain otherwise.

The odd thing about that was, it wouldn't actually give him more or greater abilities than an average tier five. It possibly would equal to less. But, what he did have would be undeniably more real. Although, it might be more accurate to call it simply 'undeniable'. In the process of reconciling law comprehension that three separate Greater Realities had in common, such a set of consequences and advantages were unavoidable. The spiral of interconnected laws unfolding into a nautilus shell of blossoming fractals, rather than a clean and simple layered spiritual pearl of a domain, was evidence of that fundamental difference.

Sonny fought to clear his thoughts of distractions. The habit for his mind to wander and struggle for focus when he wasn't meditating was a sign of how dangerous things had become from his brush with his greater self. The artifact ring that was holding the bulk of him from rushing too quickly into the smaller spiritual reflection of himself was weakening. The fight for clarity and integrity of his tightly inflated consciousness was only going to get worse before it got better.

He suddenly felt dumb for the time he had wasted in stasis. Had he spent it living and experiencing, he would have had more of a head start in trying to adapt the incoming rush of memories and comprehensions into his own. But, what was done, was done.

Coping with minor but potentially deadly mistakes made in ignorance, the young adept reached the underground shallow lake. To his right, he could see the essence saturated opening leading to something powerful. He was tempted to go straight to it but withheld his curiosity for a few minutes longer to finish the walk to where Wade had perished in deep VR. What he found gave him chills.

In spiritual sight, he saw a specter of nebulous and fuzzy consciousness wandering around in a tight, circling pattern. It was confused and scared to leave, searching for something that couldn't be found in the only place it could look. The problem was that quite some time had passed and it was losing integrity despite loyally staying close to the diminishing connection it could feel to its physical form.

It could feel the connection but didn't have the ability to follow it 'home'. Had it given up or wandered away once its consciousness started growing fuzzy, as it should have, it would have become a grudge and its spiritual core would have wandered into the afterlife. It had something it desperately wanted to live for. The power of that surprisingly unselfish desire to live had it continuing to hold out for some kind of miracle.

But it was more than the soul's strong desperation that had allowed it to stay for so long without losing itself. Quite the contrary, strong emotions should have sped up the conversion into a grudge. Considering how much natural grudge and negative emotions the archer had died with, he should have been doomed almost the moments after death. Then, Sonny understood. The over robe portion of his suit had eaten Wade's grudge while the poor guy's strong but selfless desire to return had helped keep the brighter parts rooted in place.

Exercising the very limits of his understanding, and personal reserves, Sonny called on his power of entanglement, mending and healing to pull the soul back into clarity. While doing so, he saw a glimpse of Wade's physical form. Locked away in some secret location, a bootleg stasis pod, jury rigged into barely functioning, held a wasted body that was barely alive. The moment consciousness returned to it, the pod would end its functions and the archer would die from terminally advanced stasis sickness.

Preparing to up the difficulty, Sonny chewed some medicine and washed it down with a filtered replica of spirit water. Instead of shoving the wandering soul back to its body, the young adept pulled the intimately entangled physical matter through to the soul instead. Left with little choice, he used the pattern of the archer's form that echoed locally instead of the real world one to reconstruct that claimed matter.

Through gritted teeth, Sonny griped through gritted teeth, "Why do I have to glue and duct tape you back together with your own junk for me to rez you!? If only I understood things a little better in this arena, I could just pour some essence and elements into your pattern and set that sh*t like a cast mold. But nooo, I have to drag your pasty carcass across half the known universe in particles and fit it together like a damn billion piece jigsaw puzzle!"

Sonny, already weakening from adjustment to greater gravity and supernatural exertion, started seeing black spots in his vision when he reached reconstruction of the brain. There seemed to be a violation of law principles there. Rolling with the punches, he added some strain to the complexity of his task to allow the brain to order itself as reality dictated.

Similar issues cropped up for the baby makers and the quasi-spiritual extension attached to the heart but they hadn't been nearly as difficult to bend into a compromise with the newly acquired pattern. If that hadn't been the case, he would have failed and Wade would have not been revived. As it was, he barely finished the process with his consciousness on auto-pilot and relying on the supernatural qualities of his suit to provide the last burst of heal/mend shaped essence needed.

He had developed the potential to sleep cast. That was not a good thing. With such an ability, a bad dream or a reflexive action while coming to from trance could prove to be fatally disastrous. After snapping back to wakefulness at the sound of Wade weakly screaming for help, he hoped that if he managed to reach tier five, the consequences of such a double edged talent would be mitigated to some degree.

"Shut up, Wade. You're not dying from stasis sickness in your damn secret club house or whatever that place was. You're in the tributary cave of the caldera in Enigma Fields site twenty-three," Sonny moaned grumpily through a full body ache plus migraine.

The archer started flooding him with questions but he growled out an angry request for an hour or so of peace. Almost as if the guy had been mentally counting the seconds, Sonny woke back up to a hand blindly groping for his shoulder in an attempt to tap him awake. Weary but slightly amused by the panicky trill to Wade's voice, he relented.

Pulling out a chemical light, some food and a space ready under armor that looked similar to a wet suit with equipment attachment seals, the young adept addressed most of Wade's immediate concerns. "Most of your questions, I can't answer right now. Until I know I can trust you, put your mind in this mode. I am like one of those folks who tests out bleeding edge tech. Saving your life the way I did was LIKE violating a major non-disclosure agreement that could get us both tortured and killed."

Wade grew silent for a moment and then said, "I see. Yeah, that makes more sense than the crazy stuff I was coming up with. But still, I mean, wow. I look like my cyber diving avatar! I am majorly geeked out right now."

It was Sonny's turn to be confused.

With the lie of his words dancing in his eyes and reddening ears, the archer said, "You know, it's what I pretty much looked like anyway... if I played sports, ate healthy food... ever left my safe house work station. Minor cosmetic differences, really."

Raising an eyebrow, through a few swallows of herb infused water, the young adept said, "Right... I'm about to send you to something similar to a safe house after covering a few ground rules. Is there anything important that I need to know? It might take a few days before I can get back with you."

Mind whirring, Wade said, "How long has it really been? And uh, does this safe house have a VR diving unit?"

"Best guess is around a decade for you. And... no, never. You'll only have to put up with it for a couple of weeks or less, hopefully," Sonny said.

Damming up a surge of emotional pain and anxiety behind suddenly glassy eyes, the archer said, "Would it be possible to take me to Zemlya Utyug?"

"If that's the world where you were at before your... dive, yes," the young adept said.

After confirming the suddenly morose Wade didn't have anymore important questions, he added, "When you get to the... safe house, these are a few main issues. Don't swim past the buoys in the lake. You might die.

"Don't go past the roped off area of the woods. Same reason. If it's not locked up, help yourself. If it is, stay out. That goes from doors to cabinets. You've been warned.

"There's only one bedroom unlocked, first door on the left, in the hall. Bathroom's directly across the way. Feel free to use the clothes and toiletries in either. I doubt Garret or anyone else that once lived there even remembers they left that stuff, much less care."

While he distracted Wade with some sleight of hand, he touched the archer's back with the snow globe artifact. With a soul ignorant of the forces of magic, the guy didn't even instinctually resist the pull. After replacing the artifact back in his head space, the young adept could no longer resist curiosity and went to check the essence rich cave chamber.

Layer upon layer of complex and powerful wards covered the cavern. It was completely sealed and hidden from all senses mundane and supernatural. The thing was, the essence used to make them was similar to the artifact ring around his greater self's soul. The key to the wards' defenses resided inside him.

As he walked through the layers, Sonny occasionally saw a dead body of some unfortunate. They had died from various causes but the common thing that linked them was excess. Muscles stronger than frame and blood vessels could withstand, a brain that consumed glucose faster than the body could provide it, 'too much' was the only commonality.

Rounding the bend, he finally saw it. The artifact was an obelisk riddled with cracks. It radiated power and possibility. Deep within, Sonny felt Orison stir uneasily. The reason was easy to understand once a connection was made. The artifact was like a physical manifestation of the Tower of Ruin.

Upon making that realization, he wanted nothing to do with it. Following deep VR events, he could collapse the cave system and claim some benefit in resources and maybe use the obelisk's last gasp of shaped power to reach out for a few people. Before he tore his eyes away from the monstrosity to do just that, a shimmer of refracted illumination from some unknown source bounced into his face from the glossy coat of a floating card.

He had missed it in the all consuming attention the obelisk wrung from him at first sight. But after noticing it, the card held his attention with just as much focus but much less negative association. As he stepped closer, he saw a picture of three berries on the cover that changed characteristics the longer he looked at it.

Reaching out, he took it. Three separate auras were mingled on the card, erasing the ability to discern any of them. Each aura presented a different approach and advice on how to use the obelisk.

One method would solve his personal problems and the dangers he currently faced. The second would leave him with some challenges to overcome but promised to grant him instant access to the things he desired most. The last was more a plea, offering advice on how to safely use the obelisk to help several people he didn't even know.

He was no saint. Had it not been for the mystery woman's advice, he wouldn't have even considered the third option. In spite of that, the second was too tempting to ignore. That alone made him consider the first as being the best choice. 'Too good to be true' was a common phrase for a reason.

Sonny agonized for a few brief moments before conceding that using the artifact on 'selfless acts' carried the least risk. There was something about the obelisk that made him loath to allow its power to touch him directly. The sense of recklessness in the second option and the intimate ways the obelisk's power would influence him in the first, made them less appealing by the moment.

Carrying himself forward, projecting an appearance of decisiveness he didn't actually possess, the young adept approached the obelisk. As he drew near, the surface of the side in front of him grew ethereal to allow him entrance. Nerves drawn tight from the sensation of being close to echoes of power far beyond his ability to comprehend, he stepped inside.