Bellona sighed as she looked over her preparations so far. She didn’t have to pack immediately, but she was freed from all other duties for the next few days while preparations were made to ensure the tribe knew she was coming. Visitors could find reaching them difficult, given their innate powers. This particular tribe had made its home far up in the snow-capped mountains, in a valley kept warm and lush by the abundant hot springs.
Which meant the valley was actually a bloody caldera, but there were many promises from various divination sources that the volcano was mostly dormant and any chances of an eruption were centuries if not millennia off. That didn’t make her feel any better.
This meant that she was going to have to take clothing for just about every conceivable weather condition on her trek, both for the traveling and for the training. Oh, she could catch a wagon headed that way or rent a horse, but that only got her as far as the nearest town. Which wasn’t all that close. From there she was on foot, and without company. Part of the training no doubt.
At least there were no restrictions on her gear, and she already had a backpack enchanted with dimensional expansion and traveling clothes with basic weather exposure protections woven into it. She suspected that once she was there however, she was going to not have the luxury of any enchanted protections until her training was done.
After a bit of mental weighing, Bellona went with only a basic set of cooking implements. She loved to cook and bake, but the road wasn’t going to be the place, and she would probably be too busy to indulge in her hobby when she got there. Speaking of, she was going to need some provisions, including at least a little in the way of spices.
Her left hand started tingling just before there was a knock at her door. She frowned down at her hand before moving to answer the door. At least it didn’t itch anymore. Distracted as she was, Bellona was not braced to receive a charging tackle when she opened the door and was quickly born to the floor. “Congratulations!” bellowed her cousin Kansif, who was in the middle of trying to force all the air out of Bellona’s lungs.
“Thanks.” she managed to wheeze out before wiggling out of her cousin’s embrace. “Bah, I should have known you’d rush here as soon as you heard.”
The other orc sat up, running a hand through her hair with a grin. “What can I say, it’s exciting news! And I have to make sure I catch you today since I am heading out tomorrow, my little protege seems to have run into a problem child she wants me to beat some sense into.” Kansif snorted. “Hey, before you complain about being sent off to a dungeon after your training, be glad you didn’t have to babysit a spoiled princess for over a decade.”
“Spoiled? As I hear it, you were the one who spoiled the girl.” Bellona retorted as they both got back onto their feet.
“I have no idea of what you speak.” The older woman retorted with as much dignity as she could before lapsing back into a grin. “However, as long as I am here, I should help you out. And I am glad to provide assistance in your time of need!”
“Help?” she asked dubiously.
“Of course! We don’t want any of that lovely grub you cook up to go to waste, would we? And you are going to be gone for a while, so it’s best to use up anything that might go bad.” Kansif replied with an innocent expression.
“Of course.” Bellona said dryly. She admired the older knight, but the woman could barely cook a slab of meat without leaving the outside black and the center cold. Bellona loved a rare steak, but she didn’t like char and wanted the center to at least be warm. “Though not an entirely bad idea. I can cook what won’t preserve well, and start prepping everything else for travel. You have to help me clean though, I am going to be doing a lot of cooking.”
Kansif no longer looked as certain of her brilliant idea to ‘help’ the younger woman with her excess of food.
Kazue floated in the warm water of her deep bath, red hair radiating out around her as she drifted both physically and mentally. It took a while to feel better, and then only so much. Eventually she decided to get out and get dressed, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she didn’t have any better ideas. She was about halfway through drying off when she stopped and looked down at herself, thinking about the fact that she didn’t need to do any of this. It was just old habits from a life she no longer had.
The kitsune and her towel disappeared.
She did not respawn her avatar either. Kazue was now just her core, willfully not giving herself the expanded consciousness that came with an avatar. Would this be easier? She couldn’t be sick or anything after all. The dungeon turned its attention back towards the pit trap that its avatar had created earlier, and generated another body to slide down onto the spikes, watching the same event happen again, with all the attendant gore.
There was a sense of revulsion, a rejection of having created this instrument of death, but wasn’t that just a pattern imprinted from its avatar? Couldn’t it just turn its power inwards, and edit that? Golden crystal began gathering energy to trace and analyze the pathways shaping its own consciousness, considering what the results would be to alter them, and how that might make it stronger.
“Kazue? Kazue! Stop, whatever you are doing, stop that right now! Please?” Mordecai’s panicked voice resonated over the soul link and the fused edge of their mingled core, and Kazue’s thoughts briefly shattered. Stop doing what? What exactly had she been considering doing? She remembered it, but the idea of what she had been considering suddenly felt wrong. Confused and uncertain, she manifested her avatar once more, directly next to her husband in the war room, grabbing onto him.
“Mordecai? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m not sure why I was thinking of doing that. I mean, I know I didn’t want to feel so weak, and I was thinking maybe it’d be easier to do it if I was just my core, and then I saw the part of me that was still reacting and thought to myself how I didn’t have to think like that anymore, that I could just go and alter those paths.” Kazue felt like she was babbling, but the worst part was the spike of pure terror on his face and over their link, the keen edge of it spilling over to Moriko, who was immediately questioning them.
“Guys? What’s wrong? What’s happening? Do you need me to come back?”
Mordecai's thoughts tumbled over the link, disturbing in how scattered they felt to Kazue. “No! I mean, no, sorry. It, nothing actually happened, it just almost happened, but we’re good now. Just a mistake, um, give us a moment.” Verbally, he asked Kazue, “Love, this could turn a bit sensitive, but I think it would be good to just include her in on this. Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah, I don’t want to hide anything from her.” She didn’t know exactly what had caused Mordecai to panic, but she was getting the feeling she had narrowly avoided doing something incredibly dangerous.
“Alright.” He replied, then switched over to the mental link. “Let’s start with making sure we’re on the same page. Kazue, did this start from thinking about making the trap earlier?”
“Yeah, I didn’t like that I was such a wimp.” Kazue's thoughts trickled over the link in a mutter. “I mean, it’s not like the ‘body’ was even real, if someone had thrown it out the entrance, it would have just dissipated into mana again. But I felt like I’d just murdered someone. I feel like such a coward.” She saw Mordecai’s expression and Moriko’s exasperation came in clear over the link, but she cut back in before either of them could say anything. “I know, I know, I faced what scared me, that means I was being brave. But that’s not what I feel like.”
That caused a brief pause as they both took that in. “Okay,” Mordecai started “That’s something we need to work on. But later I am afraid, as what just happened is more urgent. A few minutes ago, something started feeling off, then I noticed Kazue had dismissed her avatar and had her attention focused on her part of the core. Then that wrong feeling intensified, and I interrupted Kazue’s focus. From what she just told me, she was considering altering some of the patterns of her personality on her core, to ‘fix’ what she sees as flaws. Thank all the gods that I interrupted her, that could have been really bad.”
Kazue frowned a bit. “But isn’t that basically what you did?”
“NO.” She blinked at his emphasis. “To be more specific, what I did was go in and copy my memories, creating more compact versions to take with me. I did not screw with any patterns involving who I am as a person, and I didn’t alter existing memories. I would never have dared to directly edit that. I am sorry, love, but we don’t get any shortcuts there, if we want to change something about ourselves, we have to do it the same way as everyone else.”
“Guys?” Moriko cut in. “I get the gist, and yeah, that sounds like a very bad idea. But it sounds like you are drifting into the technicality of why it’s a bad idea. So, here’s the deal. Kazue, listen to him on this, and if you still think you need to work on things, well, we can work on it when I get back with some meditation techniques. But I don’t think you need to, I love you for who you are. Now, I am going to get back to my running, this conversation was a bit much to hold in my head while I was traveling like that. Love you both! And I’ll be able to talk after I get to the city, I’ll check in with you guys then.” She sent them a last wave of warmth and affection, and then her mind was pulling back from theirs to concentrate again.
Kazue sent back her love to Moriko, then looked up at Mordecai. And then back down at his chest while she fidgeted. “How bad could it have been?” Her voice felt dry.
“If you were lucky and managed to not break anything, the sudden dissonance in personality between avatar and core would have merely been continually disorienting until you re-balanced. Which I might add would trend in the avatar's favor, as there would be traces of the old pathways left in the core. More likely you’d have hurt yourself in one of a variety of ways that would have been difficult at best to heal and would have left a permanent mental mark. At the far end of possibilities, you’d have done something to start a cascade of failures that would have killed us both and left Moriko a widow and our inhabitants running for the surface as the dungeon started collapsing.” His tone was flat as he delivered those words, and Kazue gulped as she began to realize how badly that could have gone. “Oh, and your mother would have had to deal with her daughter dying, again.”
Her world wavered a moment, but he was right there for her to cling to, and he pulled her in close to hold her. “I’m sorry I had to speak so harshly,” his voice was more of a whisper now, “But I had to make sure you understood how bad that could have been.”
She nodded mutely, face buried in his shirt.
Mordecai’s voice turned wryly amused now. “Though I have to say, it was something of a prodigal moment. It takes most dungeons centuries before they consider doing something that monumentally stupid. Must be something about being a reincarnate.”
Kazue tried to pull back and glare at him, but broke down into tearful laughter instead. “Okay, okay, it was a dumb idea. I promise to never try messing with our core again. I can even pinky swear if you want.”
“No need to pinky swear my love, you just made a promise to a priest. And if you break a promise to a priest, you’d certainly have to be punished.” His voice was teasing, and Kazue was suddenly considering if there were any minor promises she could break, to find out what he had in mind as a ‘punishment’. She pushed aside those thoughts after a moment, though by the spark in his eyes he had probably been trying to put those ideas there.
“Alright, enough bad one!” Kazue declared and pushed out of his arms with more than a touch of regret. “I learned my lesson, and you said earlier that you were going to show me some safety stuff. Something about the sewers?”
He eyed her a moment before responding. “Yes. But first, to be clear, I am not trying to change you, I just want to train you to cope with the downsides of what I consider to be otherwise very good things. Like any training, it’s about pushing and then recovering. I’ll use my own judgment on when to offer more training, but you are always free to tell me not yet. And later we still need to have a talk about how it made you feel, certainly before we try training you again.”
Mordecai turned to the nearby hologram. “Now, about those safety features; the first thing we want is three more doors on each of the paths leading to the sewers, and another set right before you get to the actual slope. No more than one of each set of doors should be able to open at a time. This will keep anything from having a direct pass-through.”
Well, that made sense to her after a moment's thought, and soon enough she had it in place, using some mechanisms modified from the first floor’s selection room. “This is to keep everything inside the sewers, right? Um, should we create some sort of wind spell to blow gasses and stuff back?”
“Correct. But there is a slightly more efficient method than a direct spell. You can create a sort of spring, just like the water springs, only it’s air. You want to make sure it’s pure air, at least for this area. Hmm.” She felt him hesitate as an idea came to him, which told her that it was something dangerous. Dangerous to others that is.
Kazue growled at him as a small spark of anger ignited, fueled by resentment that she might be holding him back from what needed to be done and also not wanting to be coddled. Spoiled, yes, coddled, no. “Just tell me already. I need to get used to this.”
His gaze examined her, and she could feel the edge of his thoughts tracing the emotions she was leaking across their bond, then he finally nodded. “Alright. But still, heart-to-heart talk later. You aren’t getting out of that. Now, when you create your air springs, I want you to focus not just on normal pure air. I want you to find the aspect of air that is what we need to breathe. It’s what plants make for us, the part that goes stale in a closed room, what lets us turn food into fuel for the body.”
Kazue focused on his instructions, not understanding at first why this would be dangerous. It seemed like it might be healthy even, and as she finally started isolating that aspect of air, she felt like that initial impression was correct. A quick check with her core simulating something breathing that air showed her that it would quicken its metabolism and mostly just make things run better for a while.
There had to be something else. Then she remembered that fires turned air stale quickly too. Kazue ran another simulation, then stared at Mordecai with wide eyes. It wasn’t likely to do much harm unless someone walked in with a lit oil lantern or something, but she felt certain that there was another piece coming that was going to make it so much worse.