25

Volition 3.3

'Wake up, wake up!'

Agate's voice blared in my mind, and I forced myself up.

"Ugh…" I groaned and sat up from the couch.

I was now paying the price for two nights of barely any sleep. I checked the time and it was almost 11.

'Do you remember what happened in the dreams?' Agate asked me.

I went to the washroom and did my morning routine while trying to remember.

'Somewhat…not very clearly but I think I got the big pieces.'

A while back I told Agate to try and stop listening in on all my thoughts, as it wasn't really fair that I couldn't listen in on hers. The problem was that I didn't have prana of my own to send to her, so the things that I could perceive from her end were very limited, and she had to actively send me her senses, thoughts, and such. While I felt that I could trust Agate, more than anyone or anything else anyway, it was a fact of life that everybody needed a semblance of privacy at times as well. It would also be a debilitating weakness if we got used to "thinking together", and then met an enemy that could somehow block the psychic exchange.

She was reluctant about it, but agreed that it wasn't really fair. Over time the mental bond between us had become better and better, so now I had a sense of when she was listening and when she wasn't, and the fluidity of switching between broadcasting thoughts to her or just thinking to myself was also improving.

Last night after I left Coil's base and returned to the apartment, I sent Agate out to find the Palanquin, the nightclub that Faultline's Crew uses as a front and headquarters.

Part of it was to see what, if anything, Faultline was up to, but the bigger reason was Labyrinth.

It had slipped my mind last week that Labyrinth had an overtly dimensional power that was easily in reach and observable.

I was only reminded of this when Coil had contacted Faultline's Crew, and I started thinking about their members' capabilities and how I might have to deal with them when they came after me. Had I remembered this sooner, I would have sent Agate to find her shortly after she came back from the Simurgh portal from Madison.

Simultaneously, as our mental attunement had gotten better, and Agate started to properly understand human perception, we tested a new way to use our shared senses.

While I was asleep, Agate attempted to send signals of her observations and thoughts into my mind through the dream process.

It wasn't entirely successful, but nor was it a total failure. She hadn't been able to simply replace my dream with her senses, but I got impressions of what she had been doing, flashes of the visuals, and most of her thoughts at the time. But because I was dreaming, it wasn't as clear as my conscious memories, and I would have to spend some time sorting them out.

'You found them, and they were just asleep, except Labyrinth. I couldn't tell if she was asleep or just like that normally. Her power was still very active.'

'That's great! You remembered! And I learned a lot from watching her.'

Labyrinth had the power to reach into other realities and pull objects "closer" to this reality. What she did was very strange, things that she pulled over weren't necessarily here or there but somewhere in between. She could choose whether to pull them close enough to be solid and interact with objects in this reality, or leave them visible but untouchable.

It was somewhat similar to how Agate phased out of sync with this reality.

At first, it had taken a while to figure just how to scan and analyze what Labyrinth was doing, but after a while, when Agate combined what she learned from portal-making, she successfully developed a new sensor program for it.

The space that she worked with was closely related to the space that Agate phased into, but not quite the same. It was a sort of different layer that connected all of the different parallel realities of the Worm multiverse. Agate's phase space was outside of that, between that layer and the even more "outside" Kaleidospace—also known as the Blind Eternities.

This was getting somewhat confusing, so new terminology was in order.

The layer that Agate phased into would now be called pseudokaleidospace—pseudoKspace for short, while the layer that Labyrinth worked with would be called Wormvoid.

I decided to call it Wormvoid because it was not yet clear if such a similar space existed in other non-Worm reality clusters.

'I think pseudoKspace should be renamed agatespace.'

'You can call it Agatespace if you want.'

'But there's a real reason for it! I'm not just naming it after myself.'

'And why is that?'

'Onyx crystals have parallel bands and agate crystals have curved bands, representing parallel and alternate reality manipulation. It's part of the incantation from our contract ritual. What you're calling pseudoKspace is the semi-physical layer than connects reality clusters to the Kaleidospace. Since it's part of the pathway to alternate realities, we can call it agatespace.'

'Oh, that's pretty interesting. So then should we call Wormvoid Onyxspace instead?'

'No that's different. Wormvoid isn't actually between parallel realities, at least not in the way Master Zelretch defines it. It would be more accurate to say that Wormvoid is a sublayer of agatespace, because it also links alternate realities in a sense, but it's a space without the Primordial Chaos energy, which is why people and things can freely move through it. These alternate realities exist in a structure that's unique to this sector of Kaleidospace, as far as I know. Your Earth world and the world I came don't have any stable alternate realities.'

'What? I don't understand, what does parallel reality for the Fate universe mean then?

'When we manipulate parallel realities, what we're really doing is manipulating world lines. There are an infinite number of branching world lines, but there are also major convergence points that world lines gravitate towards, and the superposition of all world lines is the true reality. The individual branching world lines aren't true permanent realities in and of themselves. You might understand them as quantum probabilities, but it's a little more complex than that. These parallel realities can't exist independently of each other, nor can anything physically travel between them. The Second Magic and anything that exists outside of space-time are exceptions to that rule, but there are limits to those too. The structure of the world lines is what I would call onxyspace, but that's a conceptual rather than a physical space.'

It took me a long moment to process all of that. Was that really how things worked in the Fate franchise I read? There was no way to tell, really, unless I went back to my Earth and found the authors. But so what if it wasn't? I had already expected that some things might be different.

'Okay, agatespace and Wormvoid it is then. So what is this Primordial Chaos you mentioned?'

Since this had turned into a lecture, and I had some free time now that the big threat of Coil had been neutralized, I might as well learn more about the whole thing.

'Well, you know that the Root is the source of all creation and the record of all things. But the truth is, Master Zelretch realized that the Root that we knew of in our universe wasn't the True Root. Even if we touched it, it was being filtered through something else, which we don't fully understand yet. The filter is different for every universe. But we think that the filter is related to the combination of the Primordial Chaos energy in the Kaleidospace, and the Creation Mystery that orders the Chaos into stable realities. Primordial Chaos is the reason that things get destroyed in Kaleidospace, and also the reason that living things die in agatespace. Agatespace is a kind of thin membrane that filters out the Primordial Chaos from disrupting the realities we can exist in.'

'I see…then if the barrier blocking our exit is in Kaleidospace, that's pretty much the worst scenario, isn't it? It's powerful enough to withstand Primordial Chaos for such a long time.'

'Actually, I got an idea about that last night! It might be easier to get around than if it was in Wormvoid or agatespace. We may not be able to break through it directly, but it's possible that the barrier isn't very big, so we can just go around it. This reality cluster is huge, and the energy it would take to block off all of it would be ludicrously massive. From what we know about the Cycle and the limits on shard powers beyond the moon, it's possible that Scion only blocked off a small section of real space and Wormvoid. If he thinks we can't go very far in real space anyway, and he's already blocked off most of the local Wormvoid for the Cycle, he only needs a barrier in Kaleidospace big enough to cover the part he wants isolated for the Cycle. That means we might be able to get escape if we travelled beyond the moon, or if we found a way to break through the Wormvoid barriers.'

'That's genius! I hope he hasn't put up a barrier in real space too, then. If he hasn't…then all we have to is find a way to get into space. We'd have to get through the Simurgh somehow, but at least there's a direction to work towards now. Can you just make a portal to beyond the moon?'

'Sorry, I can't! Those portals use Wormvoid warping, and we can't go that far in real space through Wormvoid. The limit is approximately the distance to the moon. That's probably why the shard powers stop working at the moon, they all use Wormvoid in some way to channel their powers.'

Damn, of course it wouldn't be that easy.

'Alright, we'll think up some ways to get into space later. Anything else important you learned?'

'Labyrinth pulls things through Wormvoid from other realities. I'm not sure how she's shifting them into Wormvoid from real space, But if I could observe it from the other end, where the objects leave real space, I think I could then figure out how we can move into Wormvoid ourselves.'

'What about the opposite? What if you tracked where the objects came from, then open a portal to that reality, head through, and wait for Labyrinth to release the object eventually on that side?'

'That could work…but it will take a lot more observation of Labyrinth. I have to figure out how to calculate the relative position of realities in Wormvoid first. So far my portals just use Waypoint beacons without any calculations.'

In the end I decided that while gaining Wormvoid phasing as an ability would be extremely useful, there were other priorities for Agate in the short term and I might need her with me to protect myself, so I didn't send her to continue observing Labyrinth during the day time.

When I exited the washroom, I noticed that Amelia wasn't home. I texted her and found out that she went to the warehouse base, so I made breakfast for myself and went over as well.