Chapter 297: If we knew what we were doing... (Patreon)

It takes some more discussion for us to figure out who should be doing what right now, but we get there. We decide Dave ought to be permanently stationed in Trisha’s Teahouse, so he can keep refining our plans and coordinate through her.

An unexpected boon comes to light when we ask Trisha to take good care of him. It turns out she’s come up with a new, experimental technique based on the Blank Space.

“I started to think, rather than constantly transferring Espir, why not transfer Essence directly?” she explains, her eye stalks wobbling in excitement. “I’ve been calling it a Blank Essence Transfusion, and I believe it should work. Well, as long as the transferred Essence isn’t toodense, and moreover we take it a bit slow, so the recipient has time to properly convert the Blank Essence, make it their own. I won’t be able to turn them into powerhouses or anything, but getting Dave, Jacob, Alec, and Loudmouth up to around 2000 motes in a relatively short timeframe seems reasonable.”

“That’s...” I trail off for a moment, lost for words. “That’s brilliant, Trisha! It would be a massive load off my back if my friends weren’t so weak that I could rip them apart by sneezing.”

“Hey!” Alec protests, to which Jacob pats him on the shoulder in commiseration.

“She’s not exaggerating, Alec,” Kaitlynn tells him earnestly. “You shouldn’t underestimate how fragile you are in this Realm. But, Trisha... this is going to cannibalise your own power, right?”

She smiles. “I have dozens of drones, Kaitlynn. Weakening a handful to get your friends ready for combat is but a minor inconvenience to me, and that lost strength will return in time.”

I nod to myself. Considering each of her drones has about 4000 motes, it should indeed be a drop in the bucket for her. Hell, if you add it all up together, Trisha probably has more Essence and Espir than Goddess, it’s just spread out and therefore nowhere as dense, which is why she’s still weaker in comparison.

I doubt I’d be able to take her though.

Since Dave is staying in the teahouse, it’ll be easy enough for Trisha to slowly strengthen him. It’ll be a bit more difficult for the other three, as they’ll be spending most of their time in the Yin-Yang Realm, but with Kaitlynn, Sudo, and Farouq bringing them over on regular visits, they should manage.

Because that’s another thing we’ve decided: that I’ll be giving Farouq his body back. I don’t trust him like I do Suri, but he’s expressed a clear willingness to help and accept Commands to make him a non-threat. Moreover, I’ll be staying in Herman’s Haven for a while with Suri, as we have ideas to test.

Alec doesn’t seem to mind either way. In fact, he’s quite enthusiastic about what he’s decided is to be their next project: new armour for the Blue Dragons.

Jacob is probably less enthusiastic about returning with Sudo, but we’ve got little choice regarding that.

Kaitlynn is going to be staying at Lyrack’s estate with Loudmouth, to keep up appearances as well. She’s thinking of giving the impression that Lyrack’s starting to feel a bit better, make some small talk with the neighbours to keep an ear out for rumours. That should hopefully push back any attempts from Clarity Conclave—Clarity Cove’s homeowner association—to kick us out.

In the end, that estate is still our best main base in the Yin-Yang Realm. Sudo has a place in Clarity Cove as well, but there’s no telling what kind of monitoring there is on the home of someone who’s part of a secret police force. Yog’s estate in the Gleaming Firmament is even grander and larger of course, but also probably under even morescrutiny, considering his status and how many sycophants wish to brown-nose him.

Finally, Akir has his own, special assignment, right here in the Realm of Imagination.

He’s going to convert the massive, hollowed-out tree that I have such fond memories of, into an Ark.

Or as Alec calls it, a Jurassic Ark.

One thing that quickly became obvious to us as we were forging our plans, is that we are going to need some help. And for that, we’re naturally turning to the Great Guardian Realm

The Realm of Imagination is actually rather sparsely populated in comparison. Or perhaps I should say its population is relatively weak, rather than sparse.

Don’t get me wrong, no other Realm has as many powerhouses as the Realm of Imagination, but the population as a whole is still a lot weaker on average.

There’s a variety of reasons for this. First of all, there’s no focus whatsoever on growing stronger here, and Goddess even actively forbids predation by sapient beings. The only truly strong beings are the relatively rare reformed Ascendants like Akir.

And while in the Realm of Imagination the people wait for sapience to arise naturally among the large population of sentient critters, the raptors in the Great Guardian Realm are actively growing their population by bathing their eggs in the Essence of Fading prey and even Ascendants.

But in order for them to help us, they first need to get here. Hence the Ark.

Anyway, Marty promised to get Akir the help of most of Hangspire’s population for the construction, though they’ll be told it’s supposed to become a luxury cruiser that’s going to sail on the sea of glitter.

Odds are, we can’t hide this portion of the plan from the Peilor, but hopefully they, too, will buy the lie.

With our plans mostly set, it’s now just a question of executing them.

And fast.

Meanwhile, Suri and I have other business to attend to.

The lynchpin of this whole operation, after all, is the concept of superimposing a portion of the Realm of Imagination—namely Herman’s Haven—onto a portion of the Yin-Yang Realm, namely a pocket dimension created by the Voidcannon. And for us to get green light to continue, we first need to deliver proof of concept, show that it’s even possible at all.

Goddess generously gave us a week to pull that off.

Of course, we don’t have access to the Voidcannon for testing, so we’ll be making do with a pocket dimension created by Suri for the time being. Since this is not the kind of thing we can secretly do in the middle of Clarity Cove, Suri and I first take Bulging-Eyes and Smooth-Cheeks out to find a properly secluded spot.

Even with a series of Spatial jumps, moving away from Peilinor far enough that Suri deemed it safe takes a frustrating amount of time. Still, after several hours of non-stop warping, we come to a halt on a tiny landmass—a mile across at most—with a variety of vegetation and a nice pool of Hydrum for our hosts to chill in while we get to work.

The light of Big Bortha and the Twinstar are dim from this distance, making the glow coming of our crystals stand out far more than I’m used to as we float towards a cave Suri spotted on our approach.

While I’ve returned Farouq’s crystal to him, I had some time on the way over here to work on changing the colour of my original one by integrating small amounts of Toxic Energy into its lattice.

I’m not quite the hue I was going for yet, but I’m getting close, which means that, as we enter the cave, the colours spilling onto the stone walls are a mix of Suri’s cyan and my almost-but-not-quite lilac.

Stalagmites and stalactites—curved due to this Realm’s odd gravity—throw shadows as we come floating through, heading deeper. Finally, the stone tunnel widens into a larger cavern, and we come to a halt.

“Well then,” Suri chimes. “Let’s put your theories to the test, shall we?”

“Yeah. Let’s do it,” I reply, with more certainty than I feel.

This better friggin’ work...

It’s going to take some set-up before we can do our actual first attempt, and most of that consists of us travelling to and from the Realm of Imagination, dragging along various tethers to anchor into the Yin-Yang Realm. However, we don’t make these tethers that span Interstitial Space ourselves: each originates from one of our helpers back in Herman’s Haven.

Which is everybody there, pretty much.

Wrangling Kaitlynn’s cuties without her help is a challenge, but they represent a significant portion of the strength we’ve got available, so I suck it up and patiently help them each produce a tether. Shelly just stretches forth a vine of course, but the rest is a little less straightforward.

Eventually, I have something for each of them, even if for some I don’t really understand how they’re meant to function, like woolly’s literal lightning bolt, and Sal’s rope of blue flame.

Hey, if it works for them, it works for me.

Of course, I don’t think we can just pull the Realms together physically—or spiritually, for that matter.

In fact, I don’t think we can get the Yin-Yang Realm to move at all. Instead what I’m hoping to do is to use collective Imagination to try and get Herman’s Haven to stretch down and more or less descend upon Suri’s pocket dimension in the Yin-Yang Realm in a temporary fashion.

The tethers serve both as a connection to help guide the descent towards the right location, and as a metaphor to help make the Imagining easier for the participants.

Currently I’m sitting on the beach in Herman’s Haven, helping Koko wind her web around a spike of bone that’s going to serve as her anchor on the other side. Considering her Espir Pool, her contribution is probably not going to matter much, but every little bit helps.

The same goes for Kirri, of course, who’s chilling in the sand next to us. I already ferried her literal anchor over earlier.

“Ah ah,” Koko squeaks. “Are we really going to see the Yin-Yang Realm, Emma?”

“Well, there won’t be much to see, I’m afraid,” I mumble as I try to tie the sticky strands into a proper knot. “But maybe someday I’ll bring you down and show you more of it.”

“Ah ah, and you’re sure this is safe?”

I shrug. “It should be. No Spiritual Realm I’ve come across likes to have its fabric ripped. Moreover, the Realm of Imagination is tough—it would have to be, to withstand the chaos this high up—so I doubt we could manage to damage it even if we tried.”

With a sigh, I give up on my knot and just wind the remaining strands of web around the spike of bone a couple of times. They’re probably sticky enough to hold anyway.

Lifting up the spike, I glance over at Suri behind me, who’s just finishing up with the last of Trisha’s drones. We asked the friendly hivemind for reinforcements, and she showed up big time: there’s nearly two dozen drones idling on the beach making sand sculptures right now.

She comes floating over, her humanoid conjuration looking quite natural as it walks on the sand. “This should be the last of them, correct?” she asks, loosely holding the end of a knitted scarf that this drone of Trisha seems to have produced as a tether.

“Yup,” I reply, before turning back to Koko and Kirri. “All right then. Suri and I are going back down to set it all up, and then when I return... we’re going to do this.”

“Good luck, Em!” Kirri calls out as I once more pull myself down into Interstitial Space.

Back in the Yin-Yang Realm, I look around at all the tethers attached to the walls, and am glad to find all of them still properly anchored. The only problem is, they’re not where they have to be just yet.

A marble-sized ball of deep-blue energy starts to form in the middle of the cavern, which seems to contain a bright spot in the centre.

“You’re sure you can make it big enough?” I ask Suri once more.

“I’m positive, Emma,” Suri chimes. “Herman’s Haven is not that large. You just focus on moving over all of those anchors, please. Try not to take too long.”

I sigh as the blue marble expands into a swirling portal, but grab a couple of anchors and move inside to go attach them to the exterior walls of Spatial Energy that contain the expanding void inside.

“Okay, is everybody ready?” I ask once I’m back on the beach in Herman’s Haven.

My question is met with a chorus of yesses, growls, yips, and cheers.

“All right!” I shout over the noise. “Then let us begin...”

Author's note:

The feedback I got on this chapter from my writers' group is that they found it a bit hard to follow what was going on, particularly with what Suri and Emma were up to, so I've tried to make it clearer.

Please let me know whether you think I've succeeded, and thanks for reading! ^^