Sophia groped for a comeback, some way to excuse the fact that she hadn’t even considered checking her Status. Nothing came to mind immediately, but when she looked down, she saw the glint of a silver-colored metal wrapped around her wrist. It was unmarked, but it had to be the bracelet the Wanderer mentioned.

  When she twisted it, she saw that there was an opening that let her slip it off her wrist and hold it up. “Have you attuned your bracelet yet?”

  Dav seemed to pause in place and check his wrist. It was clear that he hadn’t even before he flushed slightly and admitted. “No, I forgot.”

  “Then we’re even,” Sophia said with a wink. She slipped her bracelet back on and pushed a little mana into it to attune it. Dav was right; it was time to check her Status.

  Sphere: Plumed Domain

  Plumes of feathers claim and control your Domain.

  Anchor: Aura

  You are no longer limited to the body that was once your prison or your home.

  An Anchor is required for the first Upgrade. This may be modified by your Signature once it is discovered.

  Signature: Plume

  Feathers and plumes form the outward manifestations of your style.

  A Signature is required for the second Upgrade. This may be modified by your Grand Talent once it is discovered.

  Grand Spell: Pierce the Veil

  Your Plumes cross the boundary of spirit and flesh. This is a Variant of the Grand Spell: Part the Veil

  Spell Fragment: Stun Spirit

  Stun your opponent's spirit rather than their body. They may still take actions that do not require thought.

  Spell Fragment: Spirit Soothe

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Pacify spirits with your feathers’ touch. The effect is strongest for those wholly within the spirit realm.

  Spell Fragment: Veiled Sheath

  Cover anything that strikes you in a feathered sheath that transmits their power across the Veil.

  Grand Ability: Plumed Insight

  Your feathers feel more than the wind. Use them to comprehend your domain. This is a Variant of the Grand Ability: Shrouded Insight.

  Ability Fragment: Innate Communication

  Innate Communication is the most comprehensive of the set of Communication Abilities for sapients. It includes understanding of all forms of the language and the necessary knowledge to easily communicate in those languages so long as the capability exists. Languages that require methods not possessed by the possessor of Innate Communication cannot be used without that method.

  Ability Fragment: Aural MageSense

  Feel the magic within your aura.

  Ability Fragment: Collected Knowledge

  You understand the monsters in your partner’s Collection.

  Ability Fragment: Nexus Knowledge

  Share the knowledge you have collected with the Nexus about monsters that are currently attacking the Nexus, giving all defenders a reduced version of the benefits you receive from Collected Knowledge and all related Abilities.

  Ability Fragment: MageSight

  See magic in all its forms.

  Ability Fragment: Spirit Sight

  See the spirits which surround you. This does not show auras, but it can reveal spirits that are not native to the forms they occupy.

  Ability Fragment: Excellent Ears

  Hear the world around you with greater precision.

  Plumed Domain Abilities:

  Spread Plumes, Anchor Ability

  Enhance your feathers with mana to take charge of your Domain. Feathers can attack or be commanded to cast spells or use Abilities. Spread Plumes are required for many other Plumed Domain Abilities.

  Plumed Spellcaster

  Your Domain is aligned with the Arcane. Learn the spells that resonate with you.

  Plume Shift

  You are your plumes and your plumes are you. Turn yourself into a cloud of Plumes that you can spread across your Domain. So long as any Plume is intact, you may return to your normal physical form without injury at the location of that Plume. While using Plume Shift, your Shield is disabled.

  Focused Feather

  Concentrate your attention on a specific feather to improve your control of that feather and all effects it creates. Increases mana requirements.

  Piercing Plume

  You know how best to use a plume to break the Shield of enemies that you have Collected Knowledge of. Increased effectiveness when used in combination with Focused Feather.

  Plush Bonds

  Cover your targets in feathers that impede their ability to move.

  Plume-Reinforced Spell

  A spell cast using a Plume is more difficult to dispel by any means, including simple resistance. Plume-Reinforced Spells are buttressed by your control of your Domain. Costs additional mana.

  Disruptive Plumes

  Charge a Plume with Arcane magic to disrupt spell structures.

  Down Coat

  Your feathered Domain gathers around you to retain heat better in the cold and warm up more quickly. Environmental cold must deplete your Shield before it can cause permanent damage to your body. You may lend a Down Coat to another in your Domain at an additional mana cost.

  Plumed Aura Armor

  Your plumes deflect attacks before they reach your shield.

  Magic Attuned Aura

  Your aura resonates with the power of magic. Your plumes can weakly affect magic within your aura in any way you choose.

  Firewater Plume

  Create a plume of crystallized Water that holds Fire in its heart. Requires ambient Water and the Fire that is to be captured. The crystalline prison can be disturbed by a sharp shock, returning to its constituent water and releasing the captive Fire. The crystal will slowly evaporate if kept in a dry environment.

  A Firewater Plume can be used like any other Plume. Composition of the Firewater Plume may affect some uses.

  Spells:

  Force Bolt

  Discharge a bolt of magical force to damage your target.

  Force Blast

  Create a rapidly expanding shell of magical force at a distance to damage targets in the area.

  Corruption Bolt

  Discharge a bolt infused with the magic of Corruption to damage your target. Corruption erodes the core element of a being.

  True Death Bolt

  Discharge a bolt infused with the magic of True Death to damage your target. True Death has little effect on natural creatures. It is extremely effective against beings created by magic, such as magical constructs and the walking dead.

  Attractive Affix

  Attract other magic, including both spells and enchanted objects, to a chosen feather. The feather may be affixed to a creature or object or may simply be a feather in your Domain. The attraction is weak but may disrupt distant attacks or make an affixed creature or object easier to target.

  Parrying Presence

  Repel other magic, including both spells and enchanted objects, away from a chosen feather. The feather may be affixed to a creature or object or may simply be a feather in your Domain. The repulsion is weak but may disrupt distant attacks or make the creature or object harder to accurately target. Parrying Presence is more likely to disrupt targeting than to completely deflect a blow, though attacks that are poorly aimed may be redirected completely.

  Embody Element

  Manifest your element physically. Exact effects depend on the element embodied.

  Species Abilities:

  Scaley

  Call upon your heritage to gain the scales of your ancestors.

  Magical Translucence

  You can choose to diffuse magic that strikes you, reducing its effect on you and spreading a weakened effect over a wider area.

  Manifest Wings

  Temporarily create a pair of wings formed of magic that can lift you into the sky.

  Prismatic Magic

  Split magic into its constituent elements.

  Wonder, shock, and worry ran through Sophia as she stared at her Status. It was similar in some ways, but it wasn’t the same at all in others. The most obvious difference was the background. She’d noticed the original when it appeared, but she hadn’t thought too much about it; it was different from the messages, but lightning on a Status didn’t seem wrong; both were power, if of different types.

  Her Status no longer had lightning. Instead, it was full of colorful feathers, with a background that was “space” the same way Dav’s armor was “space.”

  Maybe space was the Wanderer’s theme? That would make some sense, actually; if you were limited to a planet, who wouldn’t want to see what was out there? His title made it clear he traveled.

  The feathers, on the other hand, were clearly Sophia’s theme. She already regretted it, and she hadn’t even shown it to her sisters yet. She was so going to get teased for that.

  She almost looked forward to it. She still didn’t regret coming to the Broken Lands, but she was starting to miss home, at least a little.

  Past the background, everything else was different, too. The Wanderer had clearly increased both her Body and her Core, and he’d done it by more than one point per level, and he’d expanded her Core more than her Body. She wasn’t sure if she should take that as his recommendation going forward or if it was just another convenient place for him to spend Wisps to get around the cap.

  Well, the second answer was probably true, but there was no reason it couldn’t be both.

  Her Shield was much higher than she expected, but it was the Wisp number that made her freeze for a moment. No wonder no one had mentioned a cap; Sophia couldn’t imagine saving up thousands of Wisps without spending some of them.

  She skimmed the description of the Anchor and Signature. She’d seen those words a few times on things she’d read in the Registry libraries, but she’d never realized they were actually something on the Status. They definitely weren’t listed in all of the writeups, but it looked like they were descriptive as much as anything. If they didn’t actually do anything, and you didn’t have to do anything special to get them before the Upgrade, there wasn’t any reason to emphasize them.

  Cliff’s new Sphere name made Sophia giggle. Vestige Invoker sounded an awful lot like Summon Echo, when it got all dressed up and went out on the town for a fancy date. It sounded like he was going to have a lot of fun with that; she looked forward to seeing how it worked, especially if he was actually able to do something more than provide her with Martial Abilities and Spells she didn’t really use.

  It was not at all a surprise that Taika stayed a Psychic Bulwark through his Upgrade.

  A lot of the Abilities were different. Some of the changes were simple, like her Grand Spell Part the Veil becoming Pierce the Veil, but others were far more drastically affected. Focused Feather had to have once been Visual Targeting, but how it worked seemed completely different. Instead of letting her control her spells when they were within her sight, it allowed her to select one feather to control far more precisely. Similarly, Storm Phase seemed to have become Plume Shift, while all of her Imbue and Animate Blade Abilities seemed to have condensed into Spread Plumes.

  Other Abilities were simply gone. She’d expected to lose both Summon Echo and Eldritch Empowerment, but the loss of Offensive Illusion Field was a little annoying; it had helped against the Hungering Spark, but that was the only time she’d ever really used it.

  More than that, entire sections of Abilities were gone. She’d expected to lose Martial Abilities and Spellblade Spells; what she hadn’t expected to lose was the entire Unaffiliated section. At the same time, she wasn’t certain she’d really lost all that much; the Abilities there seemed to have morphed and joined her Plumed Domain Abilities, and she definitely had more Ability Slots than she remembered. A lot more, in all of her remaining categories.

  That definitely wasn’t from the Upgrade, any more than the fact that all of her Abilities were slotted was directly due to the Upgrade. The Wanderer had clearly given her more than he’d said he would. Buying new Ability slots would be horrendously expensive, especially with everything consolidated into a smaller number of categories, but the Wanderer had pre-bought enough Ability Slots that Sophia wasn’t sure she’d ever have to buy more. Other than the Wisp-sickness, she couldn’t really complain about that.

  Well, maybe in the Grand Spell and Grand Ability. He hadn’t bought as many there. On the other hand, they were also more limited than the areas where he’d bought huge numbers of slots, weren’t they?

  It was simple to see how the Plumed Domain was supposed to work as a Sphere; she’d either release or create feathers with “Spread Plumes” then control them to do everything else. It would take some testing to get the specifics, but the only things she was certain had changed were the fact that it used feathers for everything and the fact that she could use multiple feathers instead of one blade.

  There were some things she could tease out of the display about the future, as well. The most interesting one was that the Signature section referenced a Grand Talent, while what she had was a Grand Spell and a Grand Ability. From the Wanderer’s descriptions, she’d assumed that the general term for that was Grand Ability, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it could be any of the three, with Talent as the most generic. If the Wanderer’s was a Grand Ability, he could be used to thinking about it that way even though that wasn’t the only term for it.

  It was something else to ask about, probably something else that people assumed she just somehow knew. It was incredibly frustrating how often that happened here; sure, she could probably have looked it up, but how was she supposed to know to look?

  “I’ve activated the shield sharing enchantment on my bracelet.” Dav’s voice pulled Sophia out of her fixed focus on her Status. “I think we both have to do that for it to work. We don’t need it right now, but I want to find out if we can keep it active all the time, just in case.”

  “Better now than later?” Sophia said with a grin as she focused on her bracelet. It was simple to activate; all she had to do was will it to begin sharing her shield. “I don’t feel anything, and … huh. Interesting. My Shield says it’s at 125, with 75 in parenthesis.”

  “And mine’s 125 with 50 in parenthesis,” Dav confirmed. “Clear enough. I’d say we should test the mana sharing, but I’m pretty sure that would be one of the things the Wanderer said not to do yet.”

  Sophia felt her eyebrows climb up into her hair in surprise. “He told you not to do things other than spend Wisps?”

  “Yeah.” Dav grimaced. “We’re supposed to avoid stressing ourselves for at least a day.”

  Sophia frowned at him, then at the bracelet. “Would sending mana really be stressful?”

  Dav tilted his head to the side with a grin. “I don’t want to find out the hard way. I’m done with being in bed.”

  That was something Sophia could completely agree with.

  Some of you might remember that the Sphere added to Sophia’s list by the Guide was Plumed Enchantress. If you do, you remember more than Sophia does.

  The Wanderer, on the other hand, definitely knows … and thinks it was a much less appropriate choice than the three he presented to her.