Broken Lands

Even with two of them working on it, it took far longer than Sophia expected to disassemble everything and get it ready to leave. She’d expected to finish fairly early the next morning, but it was hours before they had everything taken apart.

It was too bad that taking everything apart wasn’t enough.

Later, Sophia couldn’t be certain which of them came up with the idea of making a sledge out of the bits of the monster maker. It was really more like a toboggan than anything else Sophia could think of; the slab of bronze was flat enough that it was easier to just tack one of the interior sheets onto it and create a sort of prow that could be used to both lift the front of the slab and give it a smooth curve instead of a sharp corner and provide a surface to hold the rope Sophia always carried to let them pull the sled.

She was, however, certain which of them figured out how to actually join the two pieces of metal. Dav had given up on the idea of rivets and was trying to figure out a way to make a decent clamp when Sophia decided that the solution was just to melt the damn metal. Sophia couldn’t cast spells quickly without a Skill, but she could still cast them. Her Affinity for Fire wasn’t the best, but she’d practiced fire-based spells anyway. She’d never used them for something this big, but she’d cast a small version to start a campfire or light a recalcitrant camp stove more than once.

Sophia’s first few tries weren’t hot enough, but when she got fed up and really threw her mana at the problem in a seriously oversized spell, she actually melted the end off the thinner piece of bronze and left an inch-deep scar in the large cap piece. At that point, Dav was happy to help her try. It took quite a few more attempts to figure out that the key was to strike it with yet another thick, flat piece of bronze after getting the temperature right for a period of time; whenever Sophia tried to make a welding torch, she only ever succeeded in cutting. She was missing something for welding but they could, with care, sort of melt the two metals together in a far more haphazard but probably functional way. It wasn’t like they needed all that much strength, after all.

Naturally, Sophia figured out how to do it and then promptly ran out of mana because of her experiments. While she waited for her mana to recover, she helped Dav turn the large, thin-walled components of the monster maker into bins to hold the flattened remains of the bugs. If they were going to have to build a sled to move the big parts, they might as well carry all the small stuff that wouldn’t fit as well. It wouldn’t add that much weight, even with the harness that was needed to keep it on the sled, and there was more than enough room.

The second time Sophia had to stop because she ran out of mana, she was halfway done with the tack-melts that they’d decided should be enough to hold everything together. This time, she was exhausted; the sheer concentration needed to keep a spellform in place for a high-precision high-output spell was hard to maintain and that was before she added in the fact that she’d gone through her mana twice. She might not pass out when she ran out of mana but it was still exhausting.

When Dav plopped down beside Sophia, she was halfway through recovering her mana and finally starting to feel a little less woozy. “I think all the buckets are ready. We have more than enough for the parts; we even have a few spares in case we see anything else that might be valuable. Is there any way I can help your part? Give you my mana or something?”

Sophia looked tiredly at Dav. She needed to pace herself better. “Don’t you need your mana for your summon and reinforcement Skills?”

Dav shrugged. “If we’re going to depend on them, sure, but we got down here without them and I notice you’re not saving your mana. Does that mean there is a way?”

“Yeah,” Sophia admitted. “I don’t usually think about it because, well, I don’t usually run out of mana. It’ll be inefficient; I’m not good enough and you’re not trained. Still, anything would help.” He ought to have a decent amount of mana; wasn’t his Core value almost half what hers was? That ought to mean a decent amount of mana. Sophia had always had a lot of mana for her Tier, but truthfully having a little more mana rarely mattered. This was one of the cases where it might make a huge difference.

“What do I need to do?” Dav glanced at the incomplete sled then back at Sophia.

“Do you want me to just take it or do you want me to teach you the right way to give mana to someone else?” There was a big difference between the two. For this situation, it wouldn’t matter much, but if they ever had to do it in a fight it might matter a lot. She really ought to teach him the right way.

“Which one gets us moving faster?” Dav flexed his hands and glanced at the sled then back at Sophia. “I mean, I’m happy to learn something new, but I want to be doing something. Maybe you can teach while we travel?”

It was clear that Dav had guessed that learning the right way would take time. He was right, too. Once he knew what he was doing, it would be far better, but that would require time and practice.

“As long as you realize that I am going to teach you,” Sophia threatened. “All you need to do is let me hold your hand, relax, and let me have your mana. Don’t even try to send it to me; that’s what you’ll have to do when I teach you, but it’s far too easy to snag onto it if you try to hold it at all.” She could still remember learning the technique herself. It was a lot harder than it sounded to smoothly push mana out while keeping control of it and not grabbing onto it and slowing it down.

Dav nodded and held his hand out to her.

Sophia found it weirdly easy to look inside Dav’s mana pool, but what she saw was odd. Instead of the complex structure she was used to in both herself and others, Dav’s mana pool was nothing more than a sphere of mana without any easy walls to constrain or guide the mana flow. It was stagnant instead of continually moving; she could see that he was generating mana, just like everyone always did, but his generation was slow. Some of that was probably because his mana pool was full, but Sophia suspected that most of it was because his mana pool was stagnant.

Sophia had no idea how to build a mana pool. She glanced at hers; she’d been born with it, as far as she knew, and it was both far larger than Dav’s and much more complicated. She normally controlled mana by flexing the walls of the mana pool or mana heart; most of the time she didn’t even have to think about it. She wasn’t sure how she was going to teach Dav proper mana control with such a simple mana pool. Maybe he’d have to squeeze the whole thing?

Sophia’s mana pool looked different from usual. It was almost like there was an entire second mana pool superimposed over it; that had to be Cliff’s. It was strange to look at, because where Sophia’s mana pool was refilling, Cliff’s had clearly not been emptied. They were both complex but very differently structured. Sophia was sure she’d want to explore that later if Cliff agreed, but for now it wasn’t important. It didn’t seem to interfere with anything.

Sophia could only think of one thing that would explain the lack of complexity in Dav’s mana pool, and it was honestly kind of terrible: he lacked any Affinities. She’d never examined the mana pool of anyone with low Affinities, but it kind of made sense, The way you accessed and modified mana, especially without the Voice’s help, was through Affinities. That was probably the same as using the complexities of the mana pool, the method she’d been taught as a child by the man who taught her Intent-based casting.

Sophia turned her attention back to Dav’s mana pool and noted how small it was. It was like comparing a marble to a baseball, but that wasn’t entirely fair. She’d expected it to be roughly two-fifths the size of her own, given the information on their Statuses, but it wasn’t even close. Even without including the addition of Cliff’s mana pool and after accounting for the fact that Dav’s was artificially reduced in size because of its lower complexity, Dav’s was at best a fifth the capacity of hers and it might have been only a tenth. It was hard to measure.

Well, she’d get to measure part of it shortly when she swept his mana into her mana pool. Sophia turned her attention to that instead of just examining his pool. It was just as weirdly easy to pull on Dav’s mana as it had been to look inside; it was almost like she was pulling her own mana out of an attuned container instead of taking someone else’s mana. Dav clearly had no idea how to access his own mana, so he wasn’t accidentally getting in the way, but that wasn’t all of it.

No, there were only two real options: either the Guide made mana pools, or mana cores as it called them, that were far simpler and more compatible with everyone than natural mana pools, or something that had happened in the Origin when Sophia tried to protect Dav made their mana unusually compatible. Sophia’s guess was that both were likely. It did mean that Dav was unlikely to ever be capable of Intent-based casting and he might never be able to learn spellforms. He might well be limited to the Abilities the Guide gave him.

From the Guide’s perspective, that probably wasn’t a bad deal. It might even be intentional.

It almost had to be, didn’t it? Almost everyone had at least some sort of low Affinity back home; it was something the Voice showed on the default Status screen. It was interesting that the Guide didn’t. Maybe it didn’t think it was important or maybe it knew most people didn’t have Affinities because it didn’t create mana pools with Affinities.

Sophia knew which way she was going to bet, and she already preferred her homeland’s Voice to the local Guide. She trusted the Voice, but the Guide seemed less and less trustworthy. She’d just have to hope that the system the Guide oversaw was fair. She hadn’t seen it lie yet, which was something.

Sophia finished drawing Dav’s mana and noted that she’d had far less loss in the process than she expected. When she opened her eyes and looked over at Dav, he didn’t look abnormally tired; that was one of the few places she envied humans. “How did that feel?”

“I’m not sure if I felt anything or if it was just my imagination. I think I’m going to have to work to even tell that I have mana. It’s always been just a number and it still feels that way.” Dav shrugged as he spoke, then paused with a frown. “I still can’t believe this is real, but I have to treat it that way. Too many things don’t add up to any other solution and you’re one of them.”