Chapter 68

When the Blades Fall (V)

A wide and spacious room opened up at the end of the passage, eerily spherical in its shape, yet with that still being the least odd part about it. Staring at it, even Cain grew a bit dizzy and alarmed as this room was not in the collection of his memories from the video. Shit, did I take the wrong passage?!

At the very center of the room was a glassed sphere rotating almost like a planet, shining in specular coral, two pillars of light extending from the top and the bottom, thinning out toward their ends. Around it, gravity and even laws of physics themselves seemed to break, creating a spectacularly bizarre world that shouldn’t be possible to achieve in reality. Yet, it existed.

Rectangular shapes, buildings it appeared, orbited the sphere, some upside-down, some on their sides, some bent in impossible ways without breaking. The buildings, each at least fifteen feet in height, appeared to act almost like platforms, colors washed in the dulled orange of the sphere’s reflection, like the debris orbiting a gaping hole in spacetime.

The perspective itself, Cain quickly realized, was warped -- which was why everyone, him included, quickly got sick after staring at it without interruption. Their minds were incapable of processing what they were seeing, what with the elusive shapes seemingly breaking the laws of spacetime and bending unto themselves, like snakes coiling through and around themselves.

There were hundreds of shapes orbiting the sphere, some larger and some smaller, yet all equally bizarrely structured. The drag of the energy from the sphere was palpable, and it truly did behave like the center of gravity for the entire room, ignoring the external laws entirely.

On occasion, the shapes would break in half and float off, adjoining some other, creating even more bizarrely structured ones. All this continued without interruption, like a weird cycle that had to be maintained. As far as Cain could tell, there was no way to make heads or tails of what was happening, much less dissolve the patterns, the rules, and the laws behind it.

Though the hall was dimly lit, especially toward the edges where the light of the sphere barely reached, every shape was distinctly visible, even those orbiting the closest to the central sphere. The closer they were, Cain realize, the more unnaturally they would bend, their central parts appearing concave while tops and bottoms would extrude forward in a seeming attempt to desperately reach the sphere and hug it tenderly.

The group was briefly awakened from their reeling sickness by a string of notifications that dragged their eyes away from the impossible and onto something far less impossible.

//Welcome to the Chamber of Undoing!

An experimental creation of the brilliant Lacuna Master, L’besh, it has withstood the test of time and erosion, maintained within its own pocket dimension.

Master L'besh intent was to prove that no law within Creation was absolute and that all could be broken and restored with the right amount and dispersion of energy. His magnum opus was the Stellar Sphere, a condensed version of a star that uses a complex circulatory system to not only simulate but also change the very nature of how gravity behaves.

His experiments, though having proven that the perception of reality was fallible as much as everything else, were also seen as acts of heresy as the implication was that the Creation was not a willful act, and that nature came from itself rather than something larger.

The Legend says that those who manage to study and understand the Stellar Sphere, and the artificial laws under which it operates, will unlock an entirely new perspective on reality.

Side Quest: Study the Stellar Sphere and understand how it functions.

Rewards: Talent--Perception(Mythic), +60 to Wisdom, +5 levels, +1 mastery rank to a Skill of your choice.

Note: Only one member of the Party is privy to the rewards! It is possible for one person to clear the Quest, and then share the information with someone else who would then collect the rewards!

Good luck!//

Cain stared hollowly at the repeated string of notifications, his mood souring further with each new bit of information. Even when he read through the Quest, and its subsequent awards, he entirely lacked the excitement he felt the first time he saw that there was a potential Talent to earn as a reward. The reason was simple -- it was virtually impossible to clear, at least within the scope of human lifespan.

The Quest had nothing to do with stats, be that Wisdom or Intelligence, and nothing to do with how witty or perceptive or clever someone was, and instead it had everything to do with how far can someone bend the notion of reality and still understand its undercurrents.

The reality was that humans, in general, weren't very good with understanding abstract notions. And studying the Stellar Sphere, and understanding it, was as abstract as it got. As far as he could tell, it was a play on higher dimensions, the quantum nature of reality, and possibly even some concepts that humans haven't even discovered yet. For the most part, the idea of artificial gravity wasn't anything alien, and there were even some workable theories as to how to achieve them.

However, the Stellar Sphere wasn’t merely just a device that produced artificial gravity -- it was a star the size of a person, artificially designed, whose gravitational pull didn’t merely maintain an orbit of the matter around it but also broke all the dimensional laws as it had that very same matter bending unto itself which is impossible within the three-dimensional reality. And, he was certain, if he looked deeper into it, he’d even likely find some inconsistencies with the dimension of time as well, which would only make everything that much more difficult.

Even knowing all this, Cain had neither the desire nor the energy to sit here for likely years, if not decades, and mull on how that’s possible as the most obvious answer to him, Mana, clearly wasn’t it.

“Damn, these rewards are nuts!” Jamal exclaimed, feeling somewhat better.

“Yeah, but...” Emma mumbled, frowning.

“What? Is it hard to figure out?” Senna asked.

“Hard? Try impossible...” Emma sighed.

“Diya?” Cain looked at the one with the highest odds of potentially having a chance of solving the Quest.

“Uh... I... I don’t know,” she shook her head. “I’m sorry...”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Cain shrugged, stretching and sitting down. “It’d be a miracle if we could figure even a tenth of it.”

"I mean, it's not difficult to understand the general principles behind it," Emma commented. "It's the grit that's kinda nutty since we only have theories and no practical experimentation."

"Y-yeah," Diya nodded. "The sphere is definitely dense -- incredibly dense," she added. "But most of the matter would collapse if condensed to this degree. Even more, the range of gravity is very specific as it’s not dragging us in. Then, where is it getting its energy from? Stars are one thing, but I don’t see any of the normally occurring elemental reactions in the sphere...”

“I can only see some pipes running around,” Emma added. “But I can’t think of a material that wouldn’t be utterly obliterated in this scenario. The general idea behind the ‘artificial gravity’ is the rotational drag that creates inertial force. However, even if that was the case with the sphere, its gravity wouldn’t extend outward, and it certainly wouldn’t out-drag the natural gravity.”

"I... I don't think it's artificial gravity," Diya said. "It's... it's likely that the sphere manipulates the existing gravity... somehow. At the first glance, it reminds me of black holes, but without the complete pull."

“... hey,” Cain thought of something somewhat stupid, but still decided to ask. “Could those bendy effects be reproduced if the sphere both pushed out and pulled in at the same time? So, like, both repulsive and... whatever you call the ‘sucking’ energy.”

“No,” Emma shook her head. “Besides, that wouldn’t explain the dimensional shish kebab going on around here.”

“Yes,” Diya agreed. “If the sphere is influencing higher dimensions... the secret could be somewhere in the string theory since it is the closest... uh, how do you say it... combination? To uniting gravity and dimensions.”

“... oh, so we just have to figure out Theory of Everything and we’ll have solved this Quest,” Emma scoffed. “Seems easy enough.”

“Like that movie?” Cain commented. “It was a good movie.”

“Let’s say that the sphere has a specific mass,” everyone ignored his interjection as Diya spoke out. “What other variables do we account for to explain its influence on gravity, dimensions, and possibly things on a quantum level?”

“Rotational speed,” Emma said. “Number of dimensions we’re working with...” Cain slowly tuned out of the conversation, noticing that Jamal and Senna didn’t even bother going along with it. He walked over and joined the two, taking out three cans of beer and handing them out to the two.

“Damn, Emma’s gonna kill you -- again.” Jamal said, though still took the beer.

“Nah, it’s cool -- judging by their expressions, we’re gonna be stuck here for a while, so we may as well relax. What, Senna? You don’t drink?”

“You know that it’s illegal to give me alcohol, right? You do know that I’m sixteen?”

“I had my first shot of whiskey when I was seven,” Cain said indifferently. “It’s not about how legal it is -- it’s about how big of a rebel you are!”

“Good God man, no wonder you turned into an alcoholic...” Jamal said, popping open the can.

“... I... I never had a beer before...” Senna said, her cheeks flushing faintly red.

“Well, yeah, you do seem very law-conscious,” Cain chuckled, putting it down in front of her. Eh, good to see that the age-old tactic of giving teens shit they legally can’t have works on charming them to your side... “What about you, J-man?”

“Never call me J-man again.”

“Alright, Ja’mam.”

"I'll strangle you." Jamal warned, taking a sip. "Had my first beer when I was thirteen," he added. "Still remember it like it was yesterday. I skipped school 'cause that's what all the cool kids were doing and was just strolling around my neighborhood, too afraid to go back home 'cause my ma' woulda beaten my ass silly. Anyway, I ran into this group of thugs who were pretty chill dudes, actually. I sat with them, they gave me a beer, and the rest... well, the rest is history..."

“Hey, you’re just like Senna,” Cain said. “It’s not a group of thugs, though, just a pair of them.”

“The lamest pair of thugs, then.” she commented, already having taken her first sip, trying to battle back the frown of bitterness as he hardly enjoyed the taste.

“Did you get anything of what they were saying?” ignoring her, Cain asked Jamal.

“Some,” he shrugged. “But they’re talking theoretical physics. That shit’s wack yo’. They look at something as simple as a star and think ‘how can I complicate the living shit out of this to confuse everyone and their mother’? And then the fuckers do it...”

“... oh well,” Cain shrugged as well, lying down at an angle and tossing one of his legs over the other. “Hey, Senna, can you sing?”

“Huh?”

“Can you sing? Like songs?”

“The hell are you asking me that for?!”

“Well, I’m kinda bored...”

“And you want me to sing to you?”

“No, not just me -- Jamal too.”

“Hey man, don’t drag me into your shit!” Jamal protested.

"Oh, come on already -- get used to it. You're the only dude beside me in the party," Cain looked at him oddly. "Who else am I gonna drag down with me?”

“..”

“Of the three women, one of them is my ex-wife, another is a shy reclusive, and the third is an angsty teen with a chip on her shoulder so large you can practically see it from space. You just fit with me so much better than any of them, y’know?”

“... I think you pissed Senna off.” Jamal said, faintly grinning.

“Beh, like that’s an accomplishment.”

“She’s fuming, man...”

“She’s always fuming -- it’s like the centerfold of her entire personality...”

“Like being an asshole is yours?!!” Senna exclaimed angrily.

“Yeah, kinda...”

“Fuck you! I hope you drown in your own cum!”

“I betya’ she doesn’t even know what that means.” Cain chuckled.

“... I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more skilled at pissing people off than you...” Jamal sighed. “Like, you strike that fine balance -- I never feel like killing you, but I constantly feel like beating the shit out of you.”

“It’s all in the game, Ja’mam,” Cain said. “It’s all in the game.”

“...” both Senna and Jamal looked at him hollowly for a moment before they stood up, kicking him into his side once, and walked to the front, joining Emma and Diya who were still in a heated discussion. Cain yelped in pain and held onto his side for a moment, though a smile appeared on his lips as he watched them walk off. Aaah, I see that my skill of pushing people away still works like a charm... the problem is... I don’t need it... none of these guys are planning on killing me... some habits, Cain came to realize... are really, really difficult to kill.