Chapter 836: Academically Unsound (Patreon)

Thunder and lightning assaulted the ground like an army of angry angels. Rain hammered down, turning black dirt into sludge. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, mud and, for the silver-rankers clearing the rubble, tongue-coating stone dust. The amount of rubble was enormous, having once been a towering mesa. Much of it was scattered far enough away that it didn’t need to be cleared but thousands of tons of stone still needed to be removed.

It would have been impossible without the power of the silver-rankers. Their superhuman strength and vast magical power accomplished in a day what would have taken weeks or months on Earth. A scant few gold-rankers Miriam Vance had spared from claiming more territories shielded them from the lightning.

They were done in the late evening, although that made little difference to the light levels. The sky was filled with black clouds and pounding rain, the staccato lightning the only source of natural illumination. The lightning struck in such quick succession that the air was never entirely free of rumbling thunder.

The silver-rankers had finished their task and were sheltering under the massive lightning rods. They used various methods to stay dry, from magical umbrellas to force fields to heat zones that evaporated any rain that came close. Their conversations were loud to be heard over the constant noise, fresh claps of thunder frequently interrupting.

The space that had once occupied the mesa was now a broad disc of stone protruding from the ground. It was misshapen and jagged, ranging anywhere from barely clearing the ground to several metres high. With the rubble gone, the full result of the avatar’s attack on the mesa was revealed.

“How powerful was that thing?” Clive wondered, looking it over as they waited for a gold-ranker to get in position. “The raw physical power to do this is astounding, even for a gold-ranker. I can’t believe Gary went toe-to-toe with that.”

“Yeah,” Jason said grimly. “It took so much power that it’s slowly killing him.”

Most of the rubble had been piled up out of the way although certain parts had been dug out and handed over to Jason. The twisted scraps of metal that had been the lightning catchment array atop the mesa were most of it. There were also parts from the control centre it had hidden, drones that could be controlled from the mesa along with some of the mesa rock itself. Jason had fed it all into his cloud flask.

The gold-ranker finished her preparations. A member of Miriam’s team, Moon’s Edge, Ramona projected a translucent dome into the air,  spanning the entire space the mesa had once occupied. Lighting repeatedly struck the dome, scattering across it. Moving with Jason were Clive and Belinda, whose auras helped replenish Ramona’s mana. Farrah, Taika and Nik joined them, the diminutive rabbit man looking nervous. They hovered over the mud in a black skimmer that was more sleek and stylised than a cheap and colourful model.

“Are you sure this will work?” Nik asked loudly over the thunder.

“No,” Jason said with a laugh. “No, I am not.”

“What he means to say,” Farrah corrected, “is that everything we know points to this working. Weeks of testing has confirmed that these control nodes are not just able but primed to be connected.”

Farrah’s specialisation was in magical arrays. Combined with the insight she gained into natural arrays from studying the grid on Earth, she had proven herself critical to the plan. Her expertise accelerated the testing of Clive’s hypothesis and the linking of the environmental control nodes.

Farrah lacked Clive’s broad grasp of magical theory, or even that of Belinda and her eclectic knowledge. Farrah had a traditional adventurer-first approach to magical study, meaning she excelled in her specialty but only knew the fundamentals beyond it. Their project centred on her array magic specialty but dabbled in other fields. The gaps in her knowledge would have slowed them down if not for Clive.

On becoming an outworlder on Earth, Farrah gained the power to form bonds of trust, allowing her to copy knowledge from the other person like a skill book. It had allowed her to rapidly learn about Earth from Jason, including a lot of information she wished she hadn’t. However useful a qualitative comparison of different Voltrons might have recently proven, there were things in her memory now she never wanted and rarely admitted to possessing.

Sharing the bond with Clive was a more pleasant experience. His mind focused on magical theory with a single-mindedness that was almost scary, and she came to realise how staggering that mind was. She used Clive as a glorified skill book, shoring up gaps in magical knowledge as they worked. His mind moved so fast, though, and in such complex patterns that she struggled to absorb the knowledge. While taking breaks she thought back to her original studies in magic. The combination of the bond and Clive would have been an egregious and very welcome cheat.

While working on the rituals that would link the environmental nodes, Clive, Farrah and Belinda demonstrated a formidable synergy. It had been the same when they were conducting the ritual that triggered the transformation zone in the first place, rushing to finish before they were overrun by the undead. The time constraints were less immediate this time, but no less real. The transformation zone was more stable than others Jason had been in, but it would eventually break down if not unified and reintegrated with reality.

“Devising the rituals to link these nodes may have taken us a few weeks,” Clive told Nik, “but by magic research standards, it’s been breathtakingly fast. We’ve already linked several nodes safely and successfully.”

“This isn’t a control node, though,” Nik pointed out. “This is rubble.”

“This is not rubble,” Jason said. “We cleared off the rubble; this is a lump of rock.”

“Which is somehow better?” Nik asked.

“Uh, no,” Jason said. “Just more accurate.”

“You know that all the information I was born with about this place went away when it was destroyed, right?” Nik asked.

“When the transformation zone was first forming,” Clive said, “everything was in flux. Power became accessible in ways it wouldn’t normally be and Jason used that, consciously and unconsciously. The conditions allowed him, in that moment, to do things that couldn’t be done at any other time.”

“I have a power that allows me to reshape reality when it is in a malleable state,” Jason said. “It allowed me to tap into the physical material that formed the zone, and everything that was inside it. Including the soul forge and something the Healer gave me which is how you came into being.”

Jason let out a groan as realisation crossed his face.

“Giving you the talk about where babies come from is going to be so complicated,” he complained. “I might have to recruit a priest of Fertility. And one of Knowledge.”

“Putting that very far aside,” Clive said, “while Jason was changing things — and creating you — he also created a network of power. The territories like this one with hidden control centres are nodes in that network. We haven’t confirmed that there is a central hub, a node that controls the network as a whole, but we think there is. We think it’s here and—”

He was cut off by a fresh crack of thunder, close enough to drown out his words.

“Part of our developing hypothesis,” he continued, “is that this site is the central node of the network. And that you are the key to making it all work.”

“Except that this key is broken,” Nik said and gestured at the rock they were floating over. “The lock is even more broken.”

“We don’t think that you’ve truly lost the knowledge you had about how to make this control node work,” Clive explained. “As you said, the node is very broken. But we think the knowledge is still inside you, just dormant. The idea is that if we can replace the node, that dormant information will come back.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Nik said. “You think this is the central node of some massive network, but I never got a sense of that at all. I knew how to control the lightning, more or less. The drones, the elevator, I guess, but that’s all. There wasn’t any sense of some inactive link or an unconnected network or whatever.”

“Just like you don’t have the memories of how to control the mesa now,” Farrah said. “If we restore the mesa and that restores your connection to it, that’s step one. Step two is linking other nodes to this one. If you gain the knowledge of how to control them as we do that, it means we were right.”

“And if I don’t?” Nik asked.

“Then we’re not right yet,” Clive said. “Research, experimentation and testing is an iterative process. We develop a hypothesis and look for where it’s wrong. Then we refine and keep going until we can’t find anything wrong.”

Nik looked unconvinced.

“What you’re saying,” Nik said warily, “is that you want to get something wrong over and over again with me stuck in the middle of it the whole time.”

“Exactly,” Clive said happily.

“No!” Farrah said, shooting a scolding glare at Clive before turning back to Nik. “What he’s saying is that we’ve already gone through the critical test stage. That’s why we linked several other nodes before we came anywhere near this one. I am extremely confident this is going to work.”

“Why?” Nik asked.

“Because you’re here,” Farrah told him. “You were literally made for this. Jason could have made some kind of control matrix, but he didn’t. He made a person.”

“So, I’m a glorified control panel?”

“No,” Farrah said. “Jason is obsessed with doing what’s right, even though he’s wrong about what that is most of the time.”

“Hey…”

Farrah was seated next to Nik in the skimmer. She shrugged down to bring her eyes closer to the level of the diminutive rabbit man.

“You,” she told him, “have what most people in the cosmos spend their entire lives looking for: a purpose. And it’s not some small thing that a control panel can do. Your purpose is to keep us all alive. To prevent the destruction of a city full of people who have already suffered so much. To save the brightheart people who will go extinct without you. You were born to be a hero, Nik. You’re the most important person in this transformation zone.”

“Really?” Nik asked.

“No, it’s me,” Jason said, earning a glare from Farrah. “You’re definitely next, though, then probably Clive or Gary. Neil is near the bottom, between the magic researchers and the Builder cultists.”

“You know the thunder doesn’t muffle all the sound!” Neil yelled from his spot under a lightning rod. “Silver-rankers have very good hearing!”

“Quiet, you!” Jason yelled back. “This is why you ranked below that messenger who keeps stealing cars. If you…”

The air around Neil shimmered as a privacy screen snapped into place.

“Oh, no he did not,” an affronted Jason said.

“Operations Commander,” Ramona said from somewhere below the skimmer. Jason looked over the side.

“Sorry, Ramona,” he said. “I forgot you were down there.”

“Clearly. Not to complain, Operations Commander, but is there any chance you could get on with it? I can absorb some mana from the lightning to feed back into the shield, but I can’t keep this up indefinitely.”

“You should listen to the nice lady, bro,” Taika said.

“Why are you here exactly?” Jason asked him.

“Rude,” Taika said. “I wanted to see what it looks like from underneath when the lightning hits that shield.”

They all looked up as a fresh lightning bolt struck the shield, electricity dancing across it in a brilliant display.

“Okay, that does look awesome,” Nik said.

“I’m so glad about that,” Ramona said. “CAN YOU PLEASE DO YOUR ACTUAL JOBS?”

“I like her,” Taika said as Jason got to work. He plucked the shrunken cloud flask from his necklace and it returned to normal size. He set it on the dashboard in front of himself and Nik who was sitting next to him and removed the stopper. Wisps of cloud snaked out to form three small shapes: a mansion, a bus and a palace.

“Nik,” Jason said. “Stick your hand in this one. The house.”

Nik did as instructed and shoved his hand into the miniature cloud mansion. Jason did the same and the other two cloud models vanished. The image of the house started shifting, from the shape of a mansion to a replica of the mesa.

“Think about what you remember about the mesa,” Jason told Nik. “Don’t push it; just think about it and let the memories come.”

“Those memories went away,” Nik said.

“The ones on how to use the control centre, yes,” Jason said. “But not your memories of the place itself. Of your time there with Dustin and Neil. What did it look like? What was the layout of the rooms? Where did you sleep? Did the elevating platform make a sound when it moved? Was the air dry or humid? What did it smell like? How did you launder the sheets?”

As Jason spoke, the cloud image became an increasingly accurate representation of the mesa. The array of lightning rods around the roof started to take shape.

“I think I’m feeling it,” Nik said. “It’s weird, like remembering something I forgot years ago.”

“You’re only a few months old, bro,” Taika said, still looking up at the dome.

“Shut up,” Clive told him in a sing-song voice, trying not to sound upset and interrupt Nik.

“Sorry, bro.”

***

Once the cloud flask had formed a pattern based on the mesa, it started belching out cloud material. The skimmer backed off and Jason left the flask by the side of the mesa base, sitting in the mud. It continued spraying out cloud-stuff, ignoring the lightning. It was struck several times, the lightning appearing to be sucked inside.

“Should we have just used that to shelter us?” Taika wondered as they watched it.

While Ramona headed for Miriam and some much-needed rest, Jason and the others joined the rest of Team Biscuit under a lightning tower where Humphrey had set up an open-sided tent. He remained the best-equipped member of the team, having not just money but connections with adventuring supply specialists. The tent was pleasantly warm, magically repelling water and even had some basic cloud furniture.

“How much did this thing cost?” Jason asked.

“Not sure,” Humphrey said. “Mother purchased it for me.  Said I’d need it if I was still in Rimaros for the rainy season.”

The main part of the work was done, not just for Jason’s team and Ramona but all the silver and gold-rankers. They all watched the cloud house mesa reach completion, the mass of cloud-substance taking on the precise look of the destroyed rock formation. Humphrey and Sophie were on a cloud couch, Belinda and Clive on another. The others stood around a table Jason had set up as a build-your-own-sandwich bar.

“That’s exactly the way it was,” Neil said as he handed a plate holding a salad sandwich to the rabbit man who could barely see over the table. “You did a fantastic job, Nik. How are you so much more competent than your dad?”

“Thanks, Uncle Neil.”

“Nope,” Jason said.

“Absolutely not,” Neil agreed.

“We are not brothers.” Jason insisted

“Definitely not brothers.”

“We’re barely teammates. We’re going to kick Neil out when we find a better healer. Or a thinner one.”

“We would’ve kicked Jason out already except he always figures it out and fakes his death before we have a chance. Or cripples himself and gets laid up for months. Or goes off alone and comes back brooding like a teenager.”

“Will you two shut up?” Clive asked. “Nik, how did we do?”

“They’re back,” Nik said. “The memories of how to use the control centre. nothing about other nodes, though.”

“That’s right within expectations,” Clive said. “We need to get you inside and do some testing. Neil, you’ve been there before, right?”

“Yeah, the original version,” Neil said and pointed at the base of the mesa. “The hidden entrance should be just down there.”

“Then can you and Nik please lead us inside?”

“We’re just about to eat,” Neil said.

“We really should be acting with haste,” Clive said.

“Oh, NOW we should be acting with haste?” Ramona called out from under another tower. She was reclining in a hammock that was hung on thin air.

“Can we please just go?” Clive asked.

“Okay,” Nik said. “But we’re taking our fu—”

A peal of thunder drowned him out.

“—ing sandwiches.”

“Nik,” Jason scolded. “Just because you can use those words doesn’t mean that you should.”

Shade bodies appeared and took the form of personal transport devices. They were floating discs that were normally round but these black versions tapered to a sweeping point.

“You realise that round is more practical?” Clive asked as he moved out. His platform turned back into Shade and he landed in the black mud with a squelch.

“Apologies, Mr Standish. Please give me a moment to assume a more practical configuration.”

“Ah, no thank you,” Clive said wisely. “I’ll just walk.”

Jason used his aura to shield them all from the rain as he and Farrah brought up the rear. The mesa now shielded them from the lightning, the array of rods on top of the cloud version working like the original.

“I guess you were right,” Jason said.

“Of course I was,” Farrah said. “About what?”

“In being confident that this was going to work.”

“Oh, that was a lie. Do have any idea how many academically unsound shortcuts we’ve taken over the course of this project? Half-tested hypotheses are the least of it. Half of the stuff I’m putting together I’ve taken from Clive using a questionable mind-reading power. These rituals we’re using to link the control nodes are built as much on guesswork and hope as sound theory. The fact that we haven’t made one of the Magic Society guys straight-up explode is a minor miracle.”

“Uh, Farrah mate,” Jason said.

“Yeah?”

“We don’t have a privacy screen up.”

Farrah looked around and saw everyone else looking back. Nik at the base of the mesa and the Magic Society researchers under a nearby lightning tower looked especially unhappy.

“Huh,” Farrah said. “The thunder muffles sound less than you’d think, doesn’t it?”

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