Chapter 195: 195
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Orison sucked in a sharp breath and said, "A time traveling conduit and a woman from Amoril are my parents?"
Daniel said, "Close. Your mother is the maid of one of those nomadic fey tribes that likes to mingle with mortals. Pelentis, I believe... To wrap it up, they spent a long time at odds on how to fix your problem but with this being the last chance, they decided to work together. I think it helps that the version working with her is in the second stage of his cycle where he hasn't, can't really, go back.
"It's the way that they are working together that's a problem for you. One wants to kill you before the merge to get you spiritually across the divide and be reborn on the other side under a very controlled circumstance while the other wants you to pass through while stuffed inside your 'other body'. Whatever that means. Both of them aren't really interfering with each other so much as acting as the fall back to each other's plans, depending on what's going on with you."
With heavily mixed emotions, Orison asked, "How much of my life has been my choice?"
Daniel shrugged. "You didn't tell me and I have no way of knowing personally. I'd say a good deal has been all you while they cope and adjust. There's too many factors in your life to really control it without you knowing. Strongly nudged and herded, sure. But I think you've been in the driver's seat, mostly.
"I'm sure you have a lot of questions but you're going to have to talk to one of them if you want all the answers. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be rushing to give them until after the fact. No offense but it seems like they have it all figured out. What are you stressing about?
"Once I'm done fetching the few 100,000 gallons of life water from this small rip for my master, I'm free. I can do you a few small favors, if that's what's bothering you. They're only trying to give you a future. It's not like they have some grand design to control you or screw up your personal plans on purpose."
Forcing down hysterical laughter that came from a dark and chaotic place inside himself, Orison muttered, "I tried to put the best spin on it I could but my intuition can put the pieces together. I didn't survive Zeke's ritual-"
Snapped from his inner thoughts, literally, Orison replied, "I thought it was Rithus but that's actually not the case. At least, not yet. My real body is a sapphire looking stone that has my conduit inside of it. This is just a facsimile that overtook the shell created ahead of time for me here.
"Two well meaning egoists are the reason I can't cross over on my own. If I follow my father's plan, I become a living planar will that'll follow up that line to world will, reality will and whatever is beyond that. If I follow my mother's plan, I become a bloodline hybrid with a slew of powerful supernatural abilities.
"They don't know that the reason I can't cross over isn't because of some defect from the way I was born. Not anymore. Fusing with Al fixed that. It's because they have me in a strange crossroad between two paths that can't be walked at once."
Switching to inner thoughts, Orison continued his over clocked, intuition driven puzzle piecing. "I wondered about how odd my plane fit with the space. My space isn't meant to have life. Not yet. It's a depository for eternium. And that, at least, has nothing to do with either of them.
"It's the inheritance from the miasma and all the other 'chrism' I've taken in. Beyond the huge heterogeneous mess of an amalgamated existence I am, there is 'outsider'. Something that as easily breeds new life through traumatic insemination of its chaotic makeup as anything that passes for natural birth within reality. While they've been playing some kind of self-righteous game of who knows what's best for me, I've already become something that only resembles what they once made together.
"They only see the parts of me that reflect them and are clueless as to what my true physical nature even is... That extends all the way to my soul! Who knows what they think the reason is that my soul is a ring with a white hole in the middle but it's because I am an outsider that has accepted the sovereignty of reality and that is what I get for doing so, for forging the power of chaos into something that follows the rules.
"That's what Noxflora meant! She told me I was something like Nyarl-Gnarly, a being of void and soul... Come on, intuition. Come on, key trapped in my soul's spare tire. Show me a way to turn this mess into what I want, rather than just letting them choose for me or blindly turning into an essence hungry vacuum cleaner of Greater Reality.
He was knocked out of his train of thought again when Daniel said, "Oh, it's that assassin from last time."
Orison looked up to see that Roy had come down to check on him but when he signaled to the equipment specialist that everything was all right, he was ignored.
"It's not really his fault. Avalon has a consciousness hijack device inside the head of all of their equipment specialists that allows them to insure internal tech secrets aren't leaked to the UTF." The Pitcher wielding man said conversationally.
Something snapped into place. A last piece of a puzzle that not only would save Roy but take care of himself.
"He would have had to be re-implanted with it. That means there's another form of time traveling dumbness happening and how I'm outmaneuvered every time. As soon as I leave this temporal field, I'll be back under a thumb... As a trouble shoot, what have I done in the past to try and solve my dilemma?"
Daniel thought back and said, "You used something you have to copy a gate to forcefully travel to some other reality. You turned into a jewel but you told me to throw you out. You did that one a second time but I HAD to throw you out or the Temporal Centrifuge was going to eat you after it noticed whatever it was you were doing."
Orison said, "Let me ask. If I had a way to fast-forward reincarnate us. Do you have a way to preserve your memories so we won't do something stupid like both drink your pitcher water or you forget what you were doing here and wander off?"
Daniel smiled slightly excitedly. "Two, even just one living reincarnation would really help me out! Uh, yeah... it's only a problem if I die, die. More than a few minutes and I start losing parts. The pitcher picks them up but you've seen how bad that can go."
Orison nodded and said, "Alright. Well, the item you saw me use to do the gate thing, it's an item capable of continuously casting a magic model its been touched by for as long as it has enough juice or it finally breaks down. It was a little something my conduit picked up for me. And I've been holding onto it to use as an emergency escape method, or best case, to get back to Amoril once I was on the other side.
"I think I have a way to do that without it, now. So, I'm going to use it to multi-cast something he called 'The Gate of Reincarnation'. He used it to reverse things but I don't think it matters which way you want to go. The only problem I think it might have is that I don't have faith power and there was quite a bit of that in it."
While Orison was talking, a mass of shadowy echoes of himself suddenly joined him and Daniel looked down to his pitcher with wide eyes. "I went from having some time to go to being done plus some!"
The young mage said, "Someone or many someones just tried to reverse time with me as the focus. Since I can still feel that my peeps are still over there, all they managed to do was eat more of Beta Prime's merge time away. The closer we get, the more this place gets squeezed.
"It's going to be a tricky switch but we need to time you getting the pitcher off the rip spilling that Vital water and me going space man to fit over it without dousing us with a lethal amount... Do you think a shaman spell can be ran without faith?"
Daniel said, "Sure. Voluntarily sacrificed life force. Cultists do it all the time. Why do you think demons and the like don't particularly care for devotion from their 'devotees'? They just need to be charismatic enough to talk other people into dumb stuff. No offense, but you'd probably make a good one. You talked me and that Gan fellow into walking into that death trap of a swamp, remember?"
While Daniel chuckled at his own joke, Orison set up the timing and they switched him out for the pitcher to contain the potent, life bearing water pouring from a fist sized rift.
When Daniel saw him go 2D black cut-out of a person, his jaw dropped. He'd been ready to use the Temporal Centrifuge to freeze the deadly 'life water' if the young mage had failed but whatever he had interpreted 'space man' as, it hadn't been what Orison displayed.
"You're a Void Walker!? Why are you doing all this weird stuff to get out of your predicament. Can't you just slip through a crack and be on your extra dimensional... Oh. Oh!!! You're going to mature yourself and then do it."
Orison shook his head. "I don't think whatever transition I'm going through is even partially complete. What I'm trying to mature is my soul. Too many people have stakes and measures to control my bodies. I'm only focused on what's genuinely mine."
Daniel shrugged. "If you can do what you said, it's completely in line for why it's useful for me."
"Okay, when I say 'go', drop the temporal shield's physical aspect only, keep the time ability interference thing active. Is that possible?" Orison asked.
Daniel nodded. "That's it's default ability. When master made it, she was worried about retribution or manipulation from her first conduit."
The young mage tossed out what looked like a snow globe filled with inky scribbles suspended in it's clear, water-like solution. Mentally ordering the item to cast 'Gate of Reincarnation' on repeat in reverse of its original affect, he noticed the globe 'hiccup' for a moment before it started configuring the model along its memory of the magic involved.
The moment Orison got the first whiff of rotten vegetation intermingling with the scent of new growth, he said, "Go!"
The world disappeared into muddy water induced darkness. That state lasted for some time before he heard someone shouting at him and realized what the problem was.
In an old man's voice, as reincarnation fought with the life restoring powers in the mud, Orison said, "For those who want to come with me, get in the cabin I just pulled out. The rest of you, there's a tunnel underneath the basement of the lake house. Or, if you're skilled enough, manipulate the formation under the house to take the property somewhere else. I'd suggest one of the training jump sites in the Plague Barrens. People are much less likely to be hurt there. If you have a better idea, do that."
People were saying all kinds of things but he couldn't really hear them clearly. "In a few seconds, I'm putting the cabin away. I hope you've made up your mind."
Once done doing that, he ignored the voices that kept speaking or yelling at him. Eventually, those voices had been joined by murder attempts but Daniel was expert at manipulating the timing of the fused marble conduit. Orison wondered if he had used it more than it's creator had and vaguely remembered in his foggy memory that conduits were made to be used by others to begin with.
It suddenly occurred to him that his memories shouldn't be fuzzy. Frantically, he started ear marking the most important ones as the edges were swallowed into some kind of induced dissolution. Forward reincarnation would seek to strip 'useless' memories from it's target and that was only one of several small errors in Orison's calculations. Intuition was not all powerful and a poor thing to make complicated plans with.
A young sounding boy's voice said next to his ear, "I got what I needed and more wouldn't be that useful. I'm going to exclude myself but I'll stick around for your-"
Orison had miscalculated the nature of his existence. His lifespan was incredibly long as he had wished it to be so long ago. The effects of the multiple casts of the potent shamanic spell ended when there wasn't enough life force, to act as fuel and sacrifice, in the water and mud surrounding it. Likewise, without the water to fight the magic's aging effects, Orison died almost instantly.
His space was pumping full of the stuff but that didn't help the 'very old' mage. That didn't mean that it didn't do as Orison hoped the magic would. His soul creeped along a ponderous metamorphosis. Slowly, it had taken on the sheen of condensed eternium but obtained a supple elasticity to it.
The resting 'potential' laying dormant within it had also matured into ethereal pellets still swimming in the ring of his soul, waiting for their chance at life. They too shared a pearly sheen but one of the three was far more green and had a strange emerald soul mark on it. Over the course of the reincarnation spell, the green hue and mark had been coated over in more eternium sheen, blending in with the rest but giving off a subtle additional strength.
It also possessed a completeness that the others lacked and wouldn't have until they had been officially been born once. Strong but hollow souls that they were, purely spiritual beings were a mystery of existence. Some thought that they had come to exist first and others later but it was a fact that they could take in a soul core, becoming a part of something else, or form their own after having been fully conceived.
Those weren't the only things that happened as Orison was in a period between lives. A tendril had reached out from the parasite plane to draw the mobile rip surrounded by devices, closer to the rip that was spewing the vital water. It had intended on gaining access to the rich meal not too far away but once the edges of the rips touched there was an implosion followed by an explosion. The rips spewed huge cities worth of vital water and other heavily positive energy inclined material along with psychic parasite riddled planar material before the rips collapsed.
The space was not a place for life to be and long before anything could potentially make it past the large swath of inert essence infused space, it was beyond dead. The strange shadowy entities that roamed the space for a short time also reached their end rather quickly when the space violently contracted. The space had never been something that could be measured but the stable part that the young mage frequently interacted with had shrunk from it monumental size to little more than the size of the Earth that Al's memories carried.
Whether it be pressure, shock waves or the radiation produced along with other essences that spewed from the white hole center of Orison's soul, the mysterious astral mist that encircled the plane eased and buffered such things. The keystone, once it had reached a conclusion to its own mysterious maturing, sunk the plane into a fold of the space. Still connected but also separate, the key left its sapphire home to return close to Orison's soul while the sapphire merged with the plane, releasing the three hazy lights it had produced to go their own way.
Whatever they had been made for when the keystone had consumed a portion of the Camdis shard, only the key had answers to. It wasn't volunteering and Orison wouldn't remember to ask. None of the Orisons would remember to ask.
Somewhere, a young lady ruler of an underworld laughed wickedly and sweetly cried at the same time while a green haired young man with an impressive rack of antlers looked at his powerful mother in confusion. An old woman with a new body and a new life asked a young man to consult his inner tree guide about a premonition she had while a redheaded woman looked away in boredom, having learned to respect and slightly fear the older lady. Another, frizzy haired redhead suddenly felt an oath that she had made to do no harm against a young mage, come undone and felt relieved but slightly sad.
In another place, an escaped Irregular convict waited for his chance to escape his personal hell and raise a little of his own. A few years later, a certain Northlander scout and several people on Amoril received quite a surprise but some were far less happy about it than others. There would be joy but there would also be pain.
Two people who had thought they had Orison's best interests at heart discovered that they had toyed a life directly into a strange and confusing situation. While they followed and secretly watched over the echo of their son's soul that they could find, chasing a girl named Wendy to a place called the Nexus, they wondered how long it would be before all the parts came together again. Magical reincarnation was a strange and tricky business.
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Orison sucked in a sharp breath and said, "A time traveling conduit and a woman from Amoril are my parents?"
Daniel said, "Close. Your mother is the maid of one of those nomadic fey tribes that likes to mingle with mortals. Pelentis, I believe... To wrap it up, they spent a long time at odds on how to fix your problem but with this being the last chance, they decided to work together. I think it helps that the version working with her is in the second stage of his cycle where he hasn't, can't really, go back.
"It's the way that they are working together that's a problem for you. One wants to kill you before the merge to get you spiritually across the divide and be reborn on the other side under a very controlled circumstance while the other wants you to pass through while stuffed inside your 'other body'. Whatever that means. Both of them aren't really interfering with each other so much as acting as the fall back to each other's plans, depending on what's going on with you."
With heavily mixed emotions, Orison asked, "How much of my life has been my choice?"
Daniel shrugged. "You didn't tell me and I have no way of knowing personally. I'd say a good deal has been all you while they cope and adjust. There's too many factors in your life to really control it without you knowing. Strongly nudged and herded, sure. But I think you've been in the driver's seat, mostly.
"I'm sure you have a lot of questions but you're going to have to talk to one of them if you want all the answers. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be rushing to give them until after the fact. No offense but it seems like they have it all figured out. What are you stressing about?
"Once I'm done fetching the few 100,000 gallons of life water from this small rip for my master, I'm free. I can do you a few small favors, if that's what's bothering you. They're only trying to give you a future. It's not like they have some grand design to control you or screw up your personal plans on purpose."
Forcing down hysterical laughter that came from a dark and chaotic place inside himself, Orison muttered, "I tried to put the best spin on it I could but my intuition can put the pieces together. I didn't survive Zeke's ritual-"
Snapped from his inner thoughts, literally, Orison replied, "I thought it was Rithus but that's actually not the case. At least, not yet. My real body is a sapphire looking stone that has my conduit inside of it. This is just a facsimile that overtook the shell created ahead of time for me here.
"Two well meaning egoists are the reason I can't cross over on my own. If I follow my father's plan, I become a living planar will that'll follow up that line to world will, reality will and whatever is beyond that. If I follow my mother's plan, I become a bloodline hybrid with a slew of powerful supernatural abilities.
"They don't know that the reason I can't cross over isn't because of some defect from the way I was born. Not anymore. Fusing with Al fixed that. It's because they have me in a strange crossroad between two paths that can't be walked at once."
Switching to inner thoughts, Orison continued his over clocked, intuition driven puzzle piecing. "I wondered about how odd my plane fit with the space. My space isn't meant to have life. Not yet. It's a depository for eternium. And that, at least, has nothing to do with either of them.
"It's the inheritance from the miasma and all the other 'chrism' I've taken in. Beyond the huge heterogeneous mess of an amalgamated existence I am, there is 'outsider'. Something that as easily breeds new life through traumatic insemination of its chaotic makeup as anything that passes for natural birth within reality. While they've been playing some kind of self-righteous game of who knows what's best for me, I've already become something that only resembles what they once made together.
"They only see the parts of me that reflect them and are clueless as to what my true physical nature even is... That extends all the way to my soul! Who knows what they think the reason is that my soul is a ring with a white hole in the middle but it's because I am an outsider that has accepted the sovereignty of reality and that is what I get for doing so, for forging the power of chaos into something that follows the rules.
"That's what Noxflora meant! She told me I was something like Nyarl-Gnarly, a being of void and soul... Come on, intuition. Come on, key trapped in my soul's spare tire. Show me a way to turn this mess into what I want, rather than just letting them choose for me or blindly turning into an essence hungry vacuum cleaner of Greater Reality.
He was knocked out of his train of thought again when Daniel said, "Oh, it's that assassin from last time."
Orison looked up to see that Roy had come down to check on him but when he signaled to the equipment specialist that everything was all right, he was ignored.
"It's not really his fault. Avalon has a consciousness hijack device inside the head of all of their equipment specialists that allows them to insure internal tech secrets aren't leaked to the UTF." The Pitcher wielding man said conversationally.
Something snapped into place. A last piece of a puzzle that not only would save Roy but take care of himself.
"He would have had to be re-implanted with it. That means there's another form of time traveling dumbness happening and how I'm outmaneuvered every time. As soon as I leave this temporal field, I'll be back under a thumb... As a trouble shoot, what have I done in the past to try and solve my dilemma?"
Daniel thought back and said, "You used something you have to copy a gate to forcefully travel to some other reality. You turned into a jewel but you told me to throw you out. You did that one a second time but I HAD to throw you out or the Temporal Centrifuge was going to eat you after it noticed whatever it was you were doing."
Orison said, "Let me ask. If I had a way to fast-forward reincarnate us. Do you have a way to preserve your memories so we won't do something stupid like both drink your pitcher water or you forget what you were doing here and wander off?"
Daniel smiled slightly excitedly. "Two, even just one living reincarnation would really help me out! Uh, yeah... it's only a problem if I die, die. More than a few minutes and I start losing parts. The pitcher picks them up but you've seen how bad that can go."
Orison nodded and said, "Alright. Well, the item you saw me use to do the gate thing, it's an item capable of continuously casting a magic model its been touched by for as long as it has enough juice or it finally breaks down. It was a little something my conduit picked up for me. And I've been holding onto it to use as an emergency escape method, or best case, to get back to Amoril once I was on the other side.
"I think I have a way to do that without it, now. So, I'm going to use it to multi-cast something he called 'The Gate of Reincarnation'. He used it to reverse things but I don't think it matters which way you want to go. The only problem I think it might have is that I don't have faith power and there was quite a bit of that in it."
While Orison was talking, a mass of shadowy echoes of himself suddenly joined him and Daniel looked down to his pitcher with wide eyes. "I went from having some time to go to being done plus some!"
The young mage said, "Someone or many someones just tried to reverse time with me as the focus. Since I can still feel that my peeps are still over there, all they managed to do was eat more of Beta Prime's merge time away. The closer we get, the more this place gets squeezed.
"It's going to be a tricky switch but we need to time you getting the pitcher off the rip spilling that Vital water and me going space man to fit over it without dousing us with a lethal amount... Do you think a shaman spell can be ran without faith?"
Daniel said, "Sure. Voluntarily sacrificed life force. Cultists do it all the time. Why do you think demons and the like don't particularly care for devotion from their 'devotees'? They just need to be charismatic enough to talk other people into dumb stuff. No offense, but you'd probably make a good one. You talked me and that Gan fellow into walking into that death trap of a swamp, remember?"
While Daniel chuckled at his own joke, Orison set up the timing and they switched him out for the pitcher to contain the potent, life bearing water pouring from a fist sized rift.
When Daniel saw him go 2D black cut-out of a person, his jaw dropped. He'd been ready to use the Temporal Centrifuge to freeze the deadly 'life water' if the young mage had failed but whatever he had interpreted 'space man' as, it hadn't been what Orison displayed.
"You're a Void Walker!? Why are you doing all this weird stuff to get out of your predicament. Can't you just slip through a crack and be on your extra dimensional... Oh. Oh!!! You're going to mature yourself and then do it."
Orison shook his head. "I don't think whatever transition I'm going through is even partially complete. What I'm trying to mature is my soul. Too many people have stakes and measures to control my bodies. I'm only focused on what's genuinely mine."
Daniel shrugged. "If you can do what you said, it's completely in line for why it's useful for me."
"Okay, when I say 'go', drop the temporal shield's physical aspect only, keep the time ability interference thing active. Is that possible?" Orison asked.
Daniel nodded. "That's it's default ability. When master made it, she was worried about retribution or manipulation from her first conduit."
The young mage tossed out what looked like a snow globe filled with inky scribbles suspended in it's clear, water-like solution. Mentally ordering the item to cast 'Gate of Reincarnation' on repeat in reverse of its original affect, he noticed the globe 'hiccup' for a moment before it started configuring the model along its memory of the magic involved.
The moment Orison got the first whiff of rotten vegetation intermingling with the scent of new growth, he said, "Go!"
The world disappeared into muddy water induced darkness. That state lasted for some time before he heard someone shouting at him and realized what the problem was.
In an old man's voice, as reincarnation fought with the life restoring powers in the mud, Orison said, "For those who want to come with me, get in the cabin I just pulled out. The rest of you, there's a tunnel underneath the basement of the lake house. Or, if you're skilled enough, manipulate the formation under the house to take the property somewhere else. I'd suggest one of the training jump sites in the Plague Barrens. People are much less likely to be hurt there. If you have a better idea, do that."
People were saying all kinds of things but he couldn't really hear them clearly. "In a few seconds, I'm putting the cabin away. I hope you've made up your mind."
Once done doing that, he ignored the voices that kept speaking or yelling at him. Eventually, those voices had been joined by murder attempts but Daniel was expert at manipulating the timing of the fused marble conduit. Orison wondered if he had used it more than it's creator had and vaguely remembered in his foggy memory that conduits were made to be used by others to begin with.
It suddenly occurred to him that his memories shouldn't be fuzzy. Frantically, he started ear marking the most important ones as the edges were swallowed into some kind of induced dissolution. Forward reincarnation would seek to strip 'useless' memories from it's target and that was only one of several small errors in Orison's calculations. Intuition was not all powerful and a poor thing to make complicated plans with.
A young sounding boy's voice said next to his ear, "I got what I needed and more wouldn't be that useful. I'm going to exclude myself but I'll stick around for your-"
Orison had miscalculated the nature of his existence. His lifespan was incredibly long as he had wished it to be so long ago. The effects of the multiple casts of the potent shamanic spell ended when there wasn't enough life force, to act as fuel and sacrifice, in the water and mud surrounding it. Likewise, without the water to fight the magic's aging effects, Orison died almost instantly.
His space was pumping full of the stuff but that didn't help the 'very old' mage. That didn't mean that it didn't do as Orison hoped the magic would. His soul creeped along a ponderous metamorphosis. Slowly, it had taken on the sheen of condensed eternium but obtained a supple elasticity to it.
The resting 'potential' laying dormant within it had also matured into ethereal pellets still swimming in the ring of his soul, waiting for their chance at life. They too shared a pearly sheen but one of the three was far more green and had a strange emerald soul mark on it. Over the course of the reincarnation spell, the green hue and mark had been coated over in more eternium sheen, blending in with the rest but giving off a subtle additional strength.
It also possessed a completeness that the others lacked and wouldn't have until they had been officially been born once. Strong but hollow souls that they were, purely spiritual beings were a mystery of existence. Some thought that they had come to exist first and others later but it was a fact that they could take in a soul core, becoming a part of something else, or form their own after having been fully conceived.
Those weren't the only things that happened as Orison was in a period between lives. A tendril had reached out from the parasite plane to draw the mobile rip surrounded by devices, closer to the rip that was spewing the vital water. It had intended on gaining access to the rich meal not too far away but once the edges of the rips touched there was an implosion followed by an explosion. The rips spewed huge cities worth of vital water and other heavily positive energy inclined material along with psychic parasite riddled planar material before the rips collapsed.
The space was not a place for life to be and long before anything could potentially make it past the large swath of inert essence infused space, it was beyond dead. The strange shadowy entities that roamed the space for a short time also reached their end rather quickly when the space violently contracted. The space had never been something that could be measured but the stable part that the young mage frequently interacted with had shrunk from it monumental size to little more than the size of the Earth that Al's memories carried.
Whether it be pressure, shock waves or the radiation produced along with other essences that spewed from the white hole center of Orison's soul, the mysterious astral mist that encircled the plane eased and buffered such things. The keystone, once it had reached a conclusion to its own mysterious maturing, sunk the plane into a fold of the space. Still connected but also separate, the key left its sapphire home to return close to Orison's soul while the sapphire merged with the plane, releasing the three hazy lights it had produced to go their own way.
Whatever they had been made for when the keystone had consumed a portion of the Camdis shard, only the key had answers to. It wasn't volunteering and Orison wouldn't remember to ask. None of the Orisons would remember to ask.
Somewhere, a young lady ruler of an underworld laughed wickedly and sweetly cried at the same time while a green haired young man with an impressive rack of antlers looked at his powerful mother in confusion. An old woman with a new body and a new life asked a young man to consult his inner tree guide about a premonition she had while a redheaded woman looked away in boredom, having learned to respect and slightly fear the older lady. Another, frizzy haired redhead suddenly felt an oath that she had made to do no harm against a young mage, come undone and felt relieved but slightly sad.
In another place, an escaped Irregular convict waited for his chance to escape his personal hell and raise a little of his own. A few years later, a certain Northlander scout and several people on Amoril received quite a surprise but some were far less happy about it than others. There would be joy but there would also be pain.
Two people who had thought they had Orison's best interests at heart discovered that they had toyed a life directly into a strange and confusing situation. While they followed and secretly watched over the echo of their son's soul that they could find, chasing a girl named Wendy to a place called the Nexus, they wondered how long it would be before all the parts came together again. Magical reincarnation was a strange and tricky business.
Orison sucked in a sharp breath and said, "A time traveling conduit and a woman from Amoril are my parents?" Daniel said, "Close. Your mother is the maid of one of those nomadic fey tribes that likes to mingle with mortals. Pelentis, I believe... To wrap it up, they spent a long time at odds on how to fix your problem but with this being the last chance, they decided to work together. I think it helps that the version working with her is in the second stage of his cycle where he hasn't, can't really, go back. "It's the way that they are working together that's a problem for you. One wants to kill you before the merge to get you spiritually across the divide and be reborn on the other side under a very controlled circumstance while the other wants you to pass through while stuffed inside your 'other body'. Whatever that means. Both of them aren't really interfering with each other so much as acting as the fall back to each other's plans, depending on what's going on with you." With heavily mixed emotions, Orison asked, "How much of my life has been my choice?" Daniel shrugged. "You didn't tell me and I have no way of knowing personally. I'd say a good deal has been all you while they cope and adjust. There's too many factors in your life to really control it without you knowing. Strongly nudged and herded, sure. But I think you've been in the driver's seat, mostly. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions but you're going to have to talk to one of them if you want all the answers. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be rushing to give them until after the fact. No offense but it seems like they have it all figured out. What are you stressing about? "Once I'm done fetching the few 100,000 gallons of life water from this small rip for my master, I'm free. I can do you a few small favors, if that's what's bothering you. They're only trying to give you a future. It's not like they have some grand design to control you or screw up your personal plans on purpose." Forcing down hysterical laughter that came from a dark and chaotic place inside himself, Orison muttered, "I tried to put the best spin on it I could but my intuition can put the pieces together. I didn't survive Zeke's ritual-" Snapped from his inner thoughts, literally, Orison replied, "I thought it was Rithus but that's actually not the case. At least, not yet. My real body is a sapphire looking stone that has my conduit inside of it. This is just a facsimile that overtook the shell created ahead of time for me here. "Two well meaning egoists are the reason I can't cross over on my own. If I follow my father's plan, I become a living planar will that'll follow up that line to world will, reality will and whatever is beyond that. If I follow my mother's plan, I become a bloodline hybrid with a slew of powerful supernatural abilities. "They don't know that the reason I can't cross over isn't because of some defect from the way I was born. Not anymore. Fusing with Al fixed that. It's because they have me in a strange crossroad between two paths that can't be walked at once." Switching to inner thoughts, Orison continued his over clocked, intuition driven puzzle piecing. "I wondered about how odd my plane fit with the space. My space isn't meant to have life. Not yet. It's a depository for eternium. And that, at least, has nothing to do with either of them. "It's the inheritance from the miasma and all the other 'chrism' I've taken in. Beyond the huge heterogeneous mess of an amalgamated existence I am, there is 'outsider'. Something that as easily breeds new life through traumatic insemination of its chaotic makeup as anything that passes for natural birth within reality. While they've been playing some kind of self-righteous game of who knows what's best for me, I've already become something that only resembles what they once made together. "They only see the parts of me that reflect them and are clueless as to what my true physical nature even is... That extends all the way to my soul! Who knows what they think the reason is that my soul is a ring with a white hole in the middle but it's because I am an outsider that has accepted the sovereignty of reality and that is what I get for doing so, for forging the power of chaos into something that follows the rules. "That's what Noxflora meant! She told me I was something like Nyarl-Gnarly, a being of void and soul... Come on, intuition. Come on, key trapped in my soul's spare tire. Show me a way to turn this mess into what I want, rather than just letting them choose for me or blindly turning into an essence hungry vacuum cleaner of Greater Reality. He was knocked out of his train of thought again when Daniel said, "Oh, it's that assassin from last time." Orison looked up to see that Roy had come down to check on him but when he signaled to the equipment specialist that everything was all right, he was ignored. "It's not really his fault. Avalon has a consciousness hijack device inside the head of all of their equipment specialists that allows them to insure internal tech secrets aren't leaked to the UTF." The Pitcher wielding man said conversationally. Something snapped into place. A last piece of a puzzle that not only would save Roy but take care of himself. "He would have had to be re-implanted with it. That means there's another form of time traveling dumbness happening and how I'm outmaneuvered every time. As soon as I leave this temporal field, I'll be back under a thumb... As a trouble shoot, what have I done in the past to try and solve my dilemma?" Daniel thought back and said, "You used something you have to copy a gate to forcefully travel to some other reality. You turned into a jewel but you told me to throw you out. You did that one a second time but I HAD to throw you out or the Temporal Centrifuge was going to eat you after it noticed whatever it was you were doing." Orison said, "Let me ask. If I had a way to fast-forward reincarnate us. Do you have a way to preserve your memories so we won't do something stupid like both drink your pitcher water or you forget what you were doing here and wander off?" Daniel smiled slightly excitedly. "Two, even just one living reincarnation would really help me out! Uh, yeah... it's only a problem if I die, die. More than a few minutes and I start losing parts. The pitcher picks them up but you've seen how bad that can go." Orison nodded and said, "Alright. Well, the item you saw me use to do the gate thing, it's an item capable of continuously casting a magic model its been touched by for as long as it has enough juice or it finally breaks down. It was a little something my conduit picked up for me. And I've been holding onto it to use as an emergency escape method, or best case, to get back to Amoril once I was on the other side. "I think I have a way to do that without it, now. So, I'm going to use it to multi-cast something he called 'The Gate of Reincarnation'. He used it to reverse things but I don't think it matters which way you want to go. The only problem I think it might have is that I don't have faith power and there was quite a bit of that in it." While Orison was talking, a mass of shadowy echoes of himself suddenly joined him and Daniel looked down to his pitcher with wide eyes. "I went from having some time to go to being done plus some!" The young mage said, "Someone or many someones just tried to reverse time with me as the focus. Since I can still feel that my peeps are still over there, all they managed to do was eat more of Beta Prime's merge time away. The closer we get, the more this place gets squeezed. "It's going to be a tricky switch but we need to time you getting the pitcher off the rip spilling that Vital water and me going space man to fit over it without dousing us with a lethal amount... Do you think a shaman spell can be ran without faith?" Daniel said, "Sure. Voluntarily sacrificed life force. Cultists do it all the time. Why do you think demons and the like don't particularly care for devotion from their 'devotees'? They just need to be charismatic enough to talk other people into dumb stuff. No offense, but you'd probably make a good one. You talked me and that Gan fellow into walking into that death trap of a swamp, remember?" While Daniel chuckled at his own joke, Orison set up the timing and they switched him out for the pitcher to contain the potent, life bearing water pouring from a fist sized rift. When Daniel saw him go 2D black cut-out of a person, his jaw dropped. He'd been ready to use the Temporal Centrifuge to freeze the deadly 'life water' if the young mage had failed but whatever he had interpreted 'space man' as, it hadn't been what Orison displayed. "You're a Void Walker!? Why are you doing all this weird stuff to get out of your predicament. Can't you just slip through a crack and be on your extra dimensional... Oh. Oh!!! You're going to mature yourself and then do it." Orison shook his head. "I don't think whatever transition I'm going through is even partially complete. What I'm trying to mature is my soul. Too many people have stakes and measures to control my bodies. I'm only focused on what's genuinely mine." Daniel shrugged. "If you can do what you said, it's completely in line for why it's useful for me." "Okay, when I say 'go', drop the temporal shield's physical aspect only, keep the time ability interference thing active. Is that possible?" Orison asked. Daniel nodded. "That's it's default ability. When master made it, she was worried about retribution or manipulation from her first conduit." The young mage tossed out what looked like a snow globe filled with inky scribbles suspended in it's clear, water-like solution. Mentally ordering the item to cast 'Gate of Reincarnation' on repeat in reverse of its original affect, he noticed the globe 'hiccup' for a moment before it started configuring the model along its memory of the magic involved. The moment Orison got the first whiff of rotten vegetation intermingling with the scent of new growth, he said, "Go!" The world disappeared into muddy water induced darkness. That state lasted for some time before he heard someone shouting at him and realized what the problem was. In an old man's voice, as reincarnation fought with the life restoring powers in the mud, Orison said, "For those who want to come with me, get in the cabin I just pulled out. The rest of you, there's a tunnel underneath the basement of the lake house. Or, if you're skilled enough, manipulate the formation under the house to take the property somewhere else. I'd suggest one of the training jump sites in the Plague Barrens. People are much less likely to be hurt there. If you have a better idea, do that." People were saying all kinds of things but he couldn't really hear them clearly. "In a few seconds, I'm putting the cabin away. I hope you've made up your mind." Once done doing that, he ignored the voices that kept speaking or yelling at him. Eventually, those voices had been joined by murder attempts but Daniel was expert at manipulating the timing of the fused marble conduit. Orison wondered if he had used it more than it's creator had and vaguely remembered in his foggy memory that conduits were made to be used by others to begin with. It suddenly occurred to him that his memories shouldn't be fuzzy. Frantically, he started ear marking the most important ones as the edges were swallowed into some kind of induced dissolution. Forward reincarnation would seek to strip 'useless' memories from it's target and that was only one of several small errors in Orison's calculations. Intuition was not all powerful and a poor thing to make complicated plans with. A young sounding boy's voice said next to his ear, "I got what I needed and more wouldn't be that useful. I'm going to exclude myself but I'll stick around for your-" Orison had miscalculated the nature of his existence. His lifespan was incredibly long as he had wished it to be so long ago. The effects of the multiple casts of the potent shamanic spell ended when there wasn't enough life force, to act as fuel and sacrifice, in the water and mud surrounding it. Likewise, without the water to fight the magic's aging effects, Orison died almost instantly. His space was pumping full of the stuff but that didn't help the 'very old' mage. That didn't mean that it didn't do as Orison hoped the magic would. His soul creeped along a ponderous metamorphosis. Slowly, it had taken on the sheen of condensed eternium but obtained a supple elasticity to it. The resting 'potential' laying dormant within it had also matured into ethereal pellets still swimming in the ring of his soul, waiting for their chance at life. They too shared a pearly sheen but one of the three was far more green and had a strange emerald soul mark on it. Over the course of the reincarnation spell, the green hue and mark had been coated over in more eternium sheen, blending in with the rest but giving off a subtle additional strength. It also possessed a completeness that the others lacked and wouldn't have until they had been officially been born once. Strong but hollow souls that they were, purely spiritual beings were a mystery of existence. Some thought that they had come to exist first and others later but it was a fact that they could take in a soul core, becoming a part of something else, or form their own after having been fully conceived. Those weren't the only things that happened as Orison was in a period between lives. A tendril had reached out from the parasite plane to draw the mobile rip surrounded by devices, closer to the rip that was spewing the vital water. It had intended on gaining access to the rich meal not too far away but once the edges of the rips touched there was an implosion followed by an explosion. The rips spewed huge cities worth of vital water and other heavily positive energy inclined material along with psychic parasite riddled planar material before the rips collapsed. The space was not a place for life to be and long before anything could potentially make it past the large swath of inert essence infused space, it was beyond dead. The strange shadowy entities that roamed the space for a short time also reached their end rather quickly when the space violently contracted. The space had never been something that could be measured but the stable part that the young mage frequently interacted with had shrunk from it monumental size to little more than the size of the Earth that Al's memories carried. Whether it be pressure, shock waves or the radiation produced along with other essences that spewed from the white hole center of Orison's soul, the mysterious astral mist that encircled the plane eased and buffered such things. The keystone, once it had reached a conclusion to its own mysterious maturing, sunk the plane into a fold of the space. Still connected but also separate, the key left its sapphire home to return close to Orison's soul while the sapphire merged with the plane, releasing the three hazy lights it had produced to go their own way. Whatever they had been made for when the keystone had consumed a portion of the Camdis shard, only the key had answers to. It wasn't volunteering and Orison wouldn't remember to ask. None of the Orisons would remember to ask. Somewhere, a young lady ruler of an underworld laughed wickedly and sweetly cried at the same time while a green haired young man with an impressive rack of antlers looked at his powerful mother in confusion. An old woman with a new body and a new life asked a young man to consult his inner tree guide about a premonition she had while a redheaded woman looked away in boredom, having learned to respect and slightly fear the older lady. Another, frizzy haired redhead suddenly felt an oath that she had made to do no harm against a young mage, come undone and felt relieved but slightly sad. In another place, an escaped Irregular convict waited for his chance to escape his personal hell and raise a little of his own. A few years later, a certain Northlander scout and several people on Amoril received quite a surprise but some were far less happy about it than others. There would be joy but there would also be pain. Two people who had thought they had Orison's best interests at heart discovered that they had toyed a life directly into a strange and confusing situation. While they followed and secretly watched over the echo of their son's soul that they could find, chasing a girl named Wendy to a place called the Nexus, they wondered how long it would be before all the parts came together again. Magical reincarnation was a strange and tricky business.
