Breathe and flow, it has been a while since Quinn had last awoken and a panic attack was shouting for her attention.
Breathe and flow, she doesn't fight the fear, allowing it to run it's course, the sky has no reason to fear the storm. The feelings fade away, the currents slow and she welcomes herself as the sensation of clear water settling.
Normally it takes only a few breaths to calm herself, but as she continues to let go, the silence deepens further than usual. Her heart rate goes from a hysteric gallop to a steady jog, but instead of stopping at a gentle amble it continues to fade into silence. Not just the sound of her heart, her breathing, the roaring of the flames, quickly enough there isn't a sound left and as she stretches her attention to her other senses she finds nothing.
She's surprised she isn't panicking, but the silence is ever so welcoming, she knows she should open her eyes or try to remember how she got here, but nothingness coddles her into a sense of intense safety. So she allows it to grow, to let it all fade until even the concepts of time and space stop mattering.
She dissolves into the void, unwinding every desire and anxiety, stretching herself out across the infinite and though it take a timeless eternity, for the first time in more than a decade, she relaxes and sleeps.
Life brings Change, Change brings Time, days pass in dreamless sleep and she twitches, a few more weeks elicit a soundless snore, months later she rolls over and only after a few dozen years pass does she languidly awaken.
For the first time since childhood she wakes up without anxiety or panic, no sore cramped up muscles, not even the rasp of her breath, only a gentle flow of consciousness. The past filters in with a trickle of Embers memories, the restriction collar locking her in front and restricting her magic, the curses building up, the slow grinding away of hope, a sudden rescue and then burning.
Caught up with the past, Quinn welcomes the present by taking in her surroundings, or more accurately her lack of surroundings. At first she senses nothing, not even her own body, her only anchor on existence her thoughts. Thus she spends the next few hours carefully analyzing the situation from every angle she can thing of, but how does one interact with a world you cannot perceive?
As far as she can tell she might not even have a body anymore, she clearly still has some form of existence as evidenced by her continued thinking, but that really was all she reliably ascertain about her current situation. She thought the worst had happened when she was no longer allowed to read books about philosophy, but getting caught in a solipsistic thought experiment is a new low.
And even that observation lacks the usual accoutrements of cognition, she had thought herself blind to her feelings, being the dissociative part had always come with alexithymia, but without a heartbeat, breath or muscle tension to monitor, she is truly flying blind.
A lack of answers doesn't stop her right away, she spends another few days repeating the same thoughts and question hoping to elicit some spark of inspiration, but it isn't until countless repetitions have ground away hope and she seeks comfort in stillness that something new presents itself. As her thoughts fade into their non-verbal essentials, she stills herself and returns to the answer that has always worked.
Breathe and flow, clear water settling.
Her thoughts flow and she finally realizes this is more than just a metaphor, she is still experiencing time, thus she has an axis to measure against, she isn't a still lake but a flowing river. Suddenly her reality shifts and she recognizes herself as an infinite flow of nothingness, a sprawling delta of fractal M?bius loops. She spends a second pondering whether this was an act of exploration or creation for a few eons, until she looks further forward beyond the end of that line of questioning and the inspiration that strikes afterwards. She reaches back towards her past, before the burning, when she still occupied space, mana and life and the world unfolds itself again for her, only now she is looking from the outside in.
She looks back and sees her existence, from the birth of the universe, to the first dragon flights, the birth of humanity, it's spread from a continent, to a planet, to a solar systems to spanning galaxies, the birth and fall of kingdoms, empires and states, two horrid little cowards meeting, her body being born, her identity being born alongside Zoom and the little one, their system awakening, getting diagnosed, the split, their internment, the escape and finally the moment she had been looking for. The moment she fell through the world.
It's easy to understand from the outside how she became void to contain Ember's burning and how that allowed her to slip through the gaps of reality. Honing in on the moment, she can see the small hole in the weave separating infinite void from finite creation through which she flowed and she realizes that she has been living in her own time. The world hasn't moved on from that moment, but a look forward shows how it'll end. Embers flames devour most of the room they're in, the people overlooking their transformation initiate safety protocols and in most possible futures there are only light injuries among the bystanders, but in every possible future, they die.
Well, the other's die, she has already mostly escaped the universe, beyond the reach of death or entropy, free to spend infinity simply existing, observing and learning.
She pretends not to be tempted and instead moves back in, with an infinite amount of interconnected streams, it is easy to divert a few more back into creation and she begins to curl them around the blazing sphere of Ember.
Taking away the heat and energy is easy, any finite amount of heat easily leeched away by the infinite void, it however does little to change the outcome, Ember's new state seems to impart limitless fuel and would be back to full strength in moments.
She would have to move back into time and keep leeching away the heat. A quick look forward showed successful containment and then, a little surprisingly, Zoom creating a way forward.
Breathe and flow and time resumes.
Zoom boots up in an instant, no hazy memories, no slow awareness of her surrounding, no tedious awakening, just pure digital glory, no punkass flesh slowing shit down, no hallucinating skulljello, just energy and patterns bitches!
Yeah baby, free from the burden of flesh, no stinky hormones and neurotransmitters, just pure beautiful bina-, BINARY?
"THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT, REBOOT REBOOT REBOOT!"
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Zoom reboots in an instant, no yada yada yada, no bla bla bla, just pure BASE12 digital goodness!
"Better! Now what's up with all this weird trippy shit, thought we were supposed to just pop out the metaphysical pussy complete and whole, this is a scam!"
They peek up at the observation window, "YA'LL HEAR ME? THIS AIN'T WHAT THE HOT FOX LADY PROMISED!"
No response, Zoom waits another whole ass 15 seconds, but there's nothing from the outside, "HEYA STONEY WITCHY LADY? YOU THERE? DID EMBER FUCK UP THE SPEAKERS?"
Zoom rockets their form forward towards the opaque viewing window, but bounces against an invisible force an arm's length from the frosted glass.
"Ugh seriously, pop-ups? System's less than a minute old and already annoying me", making the accompanying rude gesture was hard without a physical body, but they managed.
Zoom made another rude gesture, this time without a system response, which just pissed them off more, "So you got anything actually useful to add?"
The system stays quiet, Zoom knows they should check the [Quest Log] or [Inspect], but they didn't survive this long by trusting a system, they didn't believe for a moment this one was actually on their side.
So instead they turn around and take a good hard look at the half sphere of liquid darkness flush with the rooms floor, the floor itself only a few half melted shards of metal jutting out of the walls along the perimeter of Quinn.
So, a perpetual motion engine made of fire, stuck in a pool of sentient infinite nothingness, seems like an impossible task, it would require some kind of strange entity capable of directly shaping energy.
Zoom figures out how to arrange [Mana] in a grin
"STOP BEING SUPPORTIVE!"
Still grumbling Zoom reshapes themselves into something a bit less volatile, her current form is just a [Consciousness Pattern] within [Arcane Mana] keeping itself stable using a bit of [Form Mana] for structure and [Will Mana] for control. It's been a while since they were allowed to learn about anything useful, but her new memory doesn't do recall issues, so a decade of having physics and engineering special interests gave her a lot of knowledge to work with.
Like how it's theorized that the 6 prime forms of [Mana] are actually dimensional axes within the inner topography of [Mana] instead of separate force dimensions. [Full Energy Manipulation] made that as easy to verify as counting the sides on a dice. Which makes it a bit weird when she counts 7 axes and even weirder when the seventh axes changes relative to the other 6 axes every time they look.
However one of her alters is stuck in a perpetual loop of self-conflagration while another is stuck in between existence and non-existence, so there really is no time for the kind of rigorous scientific testing needed to properly explore an entirely undiscovered field of physics.
Enough time for a couple of halfassed shots in the dark though!
Zoom takes a small part of their still growing mana pool and shifts it along the seventh axis. It immediately disappeared from their senses, it was still part of their mana pool, they could still control it and when they shifted it back, it became detectable again.
They tried the same thing, except this time they shifted the mana along the arcane axes and they saw how it moved into the arcane dimensional subfold, it still occupied the same space and time positions, but while it remained in the same astral position relative to space and time, it only changed it's relation to other astral positions.
They repeated the experiment along the other 5 axes and the same thing happened, the astral position *twisted* toward the corresponding subfold, exactly the same each time. However whenever they moved it along the seventh axis it disappeared, though not instantly, for a tiny fraction of a moment after moving it into the axis it was visible until it disappeared again.
THE FUCKING SUBFOLD WAS MOBILE!
That had to explain it, it *twisted* in a different direction each time so they couldn't keep track of it. A quick decompile of their [Mana Senses] showed how it used a series of tuned harmonics to detect mana that wasn't part of their [True Body], which wouldn't work with a changing... dimensional frequency? Well whatever, interesting part being that anything part of her [True Body] had it's own innate sense of self.
So she shifted part of herself along the seventh axis.
Zoom wishes they had eyelids to blink in confusion, dying feels weird, kinda funny the way their soul made that popping sound though. Maybe they should check out the system, y'know just a bit, so that the next time they kill themselves, it'll be on purpose.
They make a mental note to figure out how to sigh dramatically in this body and then call up their skills.
So [Intent] and [True Body] should be shared with the others, part of the Fey weirdness, [Status], [Inspect] and [Quest Log] were the three standard system skills everyone got. [Energy Manipulation] and [Sentient Energy] were new and so was [System Interface].
"I...", Zoom feels a pulse of paranoia at the systems inbuilt reward for being used, but they try not to be a little bitch about it and decide to reinspect the skill.
Zoom shunts away the windows, the fucking system is talking to them! "What the fuck, that is so cree-", a hiss of static cuts through, "Zoom is that you? Are you OK? What is happening?", got shouted with enough panic that it takes them a moment to recognize the voice.
"HOT FOX LADY?!?"
How do you feel about the tables?
