I wanted to return to my work but first I had to assuage an agitated ocelot. She was a bit too close for comfort, almost rubbing her nose into my face. I stepped back and pushed against her advance with a wing. Only lightly, but she got the message. She still purred at me, flipping her ears back and forth. I thought she was listening out for any problems, but she might just have been a little nervous. I did not know how my creating the bracelet had looked to the outside or how long I was trapped in my memories. It could not have been too long since the moon was still visible close to where it had been before. A few minutes at most.

At least I had succeeded at this step. Now came the complicated part. Not to say, doing infusion crafting without an infusion altar or any items or excess essentia was easy. This next part would require the same or more finesse but it also had no precedence in the Thaumonomicon. Nobody, at least at the level I knew thaumaturgy, had ever succeeded with what I was trying to do now.

I should be getting a closer look at the memory bracelet right now but I wanted to collect my thoughts first. What I needed was for this item to take a thought and instead of storing it, send it to another sapient nearby. This was the most basic requirement. If possible, I wanted it to allow for establishing a connection with someone else to send thoughts back and forth without requiring a second item. I also did not want to have a large device to lug around. That would be purely stressful instead of useful.

Currently, the item could take memories and store them for later perusal. It acted similar to photographic memory, just limited to what was put in there. It also allowed others to read if they got their hands on it. So I had to shift the storage part into a transportation function. There would need to be a way to target who to talk to. If possible, I wanted to allow for individuals, grouped or split apart, as well as sending to everyone in range. The latter was much simpler in principle but required much more power. I considered for a moment and decided a combination of movement and senses should do the trick. The movement part would replace the storage, though I might possibly use travel, while the senses part should be capable of targeting. I also decided to throw in some void for good measure. That should avoid being blocked by objects between sender and recipient.

Movement was easy enough. It combined from air and order, which I had access to. Adding earth turned it into travel, also within my power. Senses was once again soul, this time combined with air. I would need an extra water crystal to get my talons on some of that, but it should be feasible. Now I had to figure out how to actually apply it.

The memory bracelet lay in front of me, waiting for my inspection. And the ocelot was sitting there, staring at me. She had placed a paw on the bracelet as if keeping it from me. I drew out a shadow tendril and grabbed for it. A slight tug of war took place before the cat sighed and let me have the item. I watched her for a moment, as she returned to the Thaumonomicon. She was getting a little further into the book, reading up on new things. I could deal with that after I was done here.

My will reached out to the bracelet. The green stone started to give off a soft glow and I felt the item wait for me to put in a memory. I just went with the image of the dwarven wall. It was distinctive enough to still be mostly clear in my mind. I also put in a simple hunt. One that was done recently and entirely routine. As such it blended into everything else within my mind. I wanted to see how those two cases would be perceived when calling them up from the bracelet. The first was, as expected, pretty much the same. The memory took over my mind for a moment, the real world fading but not entirely disappearing. My perception once more saw the wall, lit up in the dark of night and the city in the distance behind it. I also felt the wind under my wings and heard a few noises from the stationed defenders. Nothing major but things I did not clearly remember. I found them to obviously be part of what I had perceived but set in the background when I was there for real. Now I could relive the moment and pay attention to the details I had sensed but not perceived.

The second part was much less clear. The hunt felt normal. I was flying, found prey and dropped down to catch it. Then I ate and took to the air again. There were, however, some disconnected details. I noticed the prey I had spotted was some kind of mouse but when I swallowed it was a lizard. I touched down to hunt it in a small clearing of grass and took off again next to a stony riverbed. There had been some mixup between different hunts. Because it all seemed the same, my mind had not been able to give a clear memory to the bracelet. I also realized another problem. I wanted to use this item for telepathy, not to share memories over distance. I had to remove most parts of perception and instead send knowledge and words. Not that memories would be bad, but it was not supposed to be the primary purpose.

That meant, using the aspect of senses was not a prerequisite to the successful creation of this item. I had planned to utilize it for making a connection but with how close it was to some things the memory bracelet already did it might be difficult to make it work a different part. How else could I form a connection? The obvious answer was in one of my Skills. [Identify]. It already formed a connection to another being in order to gain information. This was achieved directly through the soul. So should I use the aspect of soul then? It might be very uncomfortable and I saw a likely security risk for the user. If someone could use the connection for an attack it would go directly into my soul. I did not really want that. So I decided to go deeper.

In hindsight simply creating sounds and floating them on air might have worked as well, but that was not the path my thoughts took that night. I decided to go with my eldritch aspect. The Empty in between reality was connected to all souls. It also allowed for a certain amount of safety which I could not pinpoint. My instinct simply told me it would work. It was the right way to go about it. And because it felt so right I started my work right away.

A simple combination of order and air created movement and turned into travel at the addition of earth. It felt right to go for travel now that I had chosen the infinity of the Empty as my medium of telepathy. My thoughts would have to travel an endless distance no matter how far my target was in reality. Even though there was no real space on the other side. I aligned the magic to make travelling knowledge, the item now in a terribly unstable state. It hummed and buzzed beneath my talons but I ignored it. Eldritch mana was my true forte. It was what I felt most comfortable with, somehow. Darkness and air were close behind but the unknown, the surreal, it called to me. So I swamped the bracelet with my mana infused with my will and it complied. The shift took some time, though how much I could not tell. In the end, I looked at my creation in the shine of dawn.

The gold had twisted and formed a spiralling net of woven metal around a now deep purple crystal. The item had a small ring on either end. I could probably make a necklace using those. The crystal itself seemed to be only partially real. Parts of it flickered in and out of reality creating a light show of reflections in the golden light of the sun. The golden cage was also much smaller than the original crystal I had chosen. It looked like parts of it had shrunk and sometimes the golden threads were covered in crystal instead. The item was truly fascinating.

The ocelot seemed to think so as well as she was staring at me in curiosity. Her eyes were fixed on the object held in my talons. I pulled it up with a shadow tendril and let it spin around in the light.

Our obsession was broken by a cracking twig coming from the forest edge. Our heads snapped towards the sound in unison and together we spotted the stag I had seen before approach with slow steps. Behind it, the deer stood shy and watched the proceedings. I slowly pushed a tendril of shadows towards my Thaumonomicon which was right in the middle of the stag and myself. The animal struck the ground with its hoof once, then twice, slightly lowering its head in the process. I made myself seem as small as possible and slowly dragged my book towards me. As it finally reached, I quickly opened my storage and threw it in. That was the trigger.

At once, the stag shot forward, its steps blurring on the ground. I had trouble seeing where it actually went, parts of me seeing it turn to my left, other to the right. It did not matter much. I jumped and took to the air. My ocelot friend shot into the water before I had even flapped once. The stag let out a growling shout which disoriented me for a moment. The splash of water around me returned my senses as I started sinking into the pond. I had no time to shift my form but I could use my shadows to get down to the ocelot’s lair. One shift brought me most of the way down the vertical tunnel, a second one right behind the trap and the third finally into the den.

An incredulous cat was staring at me as I tried to lift my body. All the water drenching my feathers prevented me from moving much at all. The cat growled for a moment until it realized I could barely move. Then she deflated with a sigh and went to her bed. Right, it was morning. Time to rest for both of us. I eyed the item I had grabbed in my talons as I tried to flee. My will went into it and I felt the magic take hold. It drew a bit of eldritch mana from my core before settling in a ready state. The gold was now entirely covered by the not fully real crystal. I looked at the ocelot and decided on the simplest thing I could think of.

“Hello there.”

The cat jumped from her bed and knocked her head on the ceiling. A whine sounded through the small cave and slit eyes admonished the only person that could be responsible for her pain: me.

The crystal was still active and there was some kind of connection between us. As long as I supplied mana, it would keep working. That much I felt. I also noticed it could take other forms than eldritch mana, though the further away from it, the more it would take.

Then, I received an answer:

“Me… meow?”

Great. She was still meowing, even in telepathy. I would have to teach her how to use language. For now, there was just one more thing to do before embarking on this tedious task. Naming my new creation. What would be fitting for an eldritch item allowing for telepathy? Hmm… How about…

Supersensory Matrix? Yes, that would do.