As I fell into my zone again, I noticed that Mnemosyne was peering at a cluster of colored blobs that I was still trying to classify. “What’s up?” I asked her curiously.

“Well,” she stated, “These are your body boosts. Most of them we cannot manipulate until you can unravel some kind of auramancy, but they define your body’s potential. You can unlock them by feeding them raw essence, but you have to be able to see them first.”

I [observed] the clumps, but most of them seemed to defy my skill, although a few yielded their secrets to my gaze. I was able to tweak them like the skill clusters, moving them around, so I pushed them until the links between them became more obvious. They were staged, so it looked like enhancing one would allow access to the next set.

“Those are your evolutions as a monster. And those,” She brushed her hands towards a second set that were detached from the first, and had a slightly odder purplish tinge to them, “Are your soul evolutions. They are from when you were a human, but the human evolutions are not here, they are tied to your body, which is not precisely human right now.”

She smiled a little, “The reason I am pointing them out is that, due to turning in that goblin’s head, you gained enough quest essence that your evolution is sitting at 122%. If you were a player you would be level two, but for you, we have enough raw essence that we can unlock an evolution.”

The kobold evolutions that seemed to be available were quite promising, and the soul evolutions even more so. I would have to collect essence from someplace to fill them, but at least they offered some opportunity for advancement. The information [observe] gathered was in Draconic as concepts rather than simple words, so with Mnemosyne’s help, I managed to translate it into English terms that made more sense to me.

Beefy- an automatic evolution, beefy kobolds become small creatures instead of tiny, adding health, muscle mass, and improving their lifespan by ten years. Beefy kobolds are easy opponents for young adventurers rather than yard trash. They are considered adolescent and are slightly more capable of following instructions and combat tactics, as well as having improved minor regeneration.

Brainy- Brainy is not an automatic evolution, but is reserved for kobolds that are artificially enhanced via sorcery, or are made into familiars. This instills sentience and self-reflection and allows the kobold to manipulate essence directly rather than instinctively. Brainy kobolds are considered a highly dangerous challenge to young adventurers due to their innate cleverness combined with foresight and tactical acuity, if not for their physical prowess. Brainy kobolds that are not familiars are treated as abominations by most sentient species as they can develop in dangerous and unforeseen ways to become a true threat eventually.

Frosty- Ice kobolds that are exposed to frost aspects have a small chance to naturally develop the frosty evolution. This increases the cold resistance to 100% unlimited by power level, and cold affinity to 250%. Frosty kobolds can manipulate frost aspects to protect themselves, create cold breath, and damage anyone that touches them without at least ice kobold levels of cold resistance. Frosty kobolds are considered a dangerous challenge to young adventurers that do not use ranged attacks.

The soul evolutions were even more interesting.

Tempus Fugit- You may extract temporal aspected essence from your core and use it effectively. This allows you to unlock time dilation from your soul space, reducing the endurance cost of performing physical activities under a time dilation effect. Using this ability has an increased chance of damaging your own body, however, as you can potentially strain your form in ways that exceed its natural limitations.

Quirky- You gain improved emotional integration and can recognize obvious facial expressions without decoding. You gain the ability to recognize individuals more easily by their facial features and habitual gestures and lose some of the social penalties associated with your unique mind. This will, however, cost you some of your analytical ability and you will lose the fear-resistant trait.

Quirky. I would have taken that evolution without hesitation when I was younger, but now? I was sort of used to being the monster I am, even in a human body. That one would have to wait if I wanted to take it at all. Heck, if I had it I would probably be curled up in a corner paralyzed with fear at being ripped from my world and stuck in a kobold body. Or maybe not.

There were a few other evolutions, including one which seemed to bridge associations between my soul evolutions and the kobold evolutions, and then a few that were floating free, only clustered with each other and barely connected to my physical and mental evolutions.

I checked out the bridge first, and Mnemosyne seemed to become a bit more excited as she helped me translate the concepts released by [observe].

Silver Cord- Currently you are a living spirit inhabiting a body not your own via necromantic energies, unable to return to your original body without becoming undead. This will allow you to forge a silver cord and truly claim it as your own, unlocking many potential evolutions as well as the ability to channel aspects and quintessence into your now-natural form.

Well, I know what Mnemosyne wants. To be fair, it looked like the best option for me as well, although beefy was certainly tempting. While giving up my original body was painful, if it was really dead I didn’t want to turn into a spectre, whatever that was. In all of the stories, turning into an undead was an unpleasant situation, and frankly, I liked occasionally stepping into a church and might want to have a family someday. Flesh rotting off was also just not a good look.

I started checking out the last evolutions, but Mnemosyne interrupted me. “Those are for solidifying our bond, and won’t actually be useful until after we get to know and trust each other a lot better. Right now your focus has to be on surviving, and you need to use your essence to improve those rather than things like building me a house down here or letting me taste some of the nasty stuff you might have to eat.”

I nodded, resolving to check those out later since I felt like I owed her a debt of gratitude for the assistance she had supplied so far. “Speaking of which,” I added, “How are you doing here? I mean, I know time passes a lot slower, I hope boredom isn’t driving you crazy or anything.”

She smiled at me again, and I wished there was a way to change her to a less perfect form. I might be a kobold, but it still caused a distracting reaction. “I am fine, the time dilation only happens when you are here, most of the time my attention is taken up feeling what you feel in the real world, sleeping when you sleep or trying to help figure out what everything down here means. I figured out why you cannot pull apart the taint and aspected mana around your core, though!”

“Why is that?” I asked her curiously. That big messy bundle of fibers was looking less and less organized as I cleaned up my soul space, and the little OCD monkey inside of me was flinging poo and trying to get me to pay attention to my core.

“Well,” she started winding up, I could tell this would be a long explanation, “You appear to have a huge amount of temporal aspect around you. I am not positive, but I suspect that while your world might not have a lot of quintessence, it still seemed to have enough aspected mana that a lot of people probably used it without realizing it. Pitchers and boxers that throw or hit harder than can be easily explained, mothers that could tell their children were in trouble instinctually, people that could perform feats of strength in emergencies that defy explanation, that sort of thing. In your case, I think that you have always used temporal essence in your zone, and when you were spirited here with temporal mana, it just enhanced things. Basically, you are using temporal essence to speed things up every time you are in your soul space, and that interferes with handling other types of essence.”

“We need to practice coming into your soul space without speeding up your perceptions. Aspected essence gains structure and structure requires movement, and when you try to untangle essence from your core, it cannot move at your enhanced rate, or the temporal mana gets mixed with the other aspects and causes taint. You seem to have more taint than your body’s age would indicate, and I am betting that is the reason. Every time you zone, you are blending temporal with anything else you have and creating taint out of proportion. Add that to your innate cold aspect, and I bet we would find your core laced with a frozen time that is interfering with anything we try to do with your core.”

I thought about it for a moment and suggested, “Let me guess. You think that choosing the silver cord evolution will let me address the taint issues, move into my soul space without activating temporal mana, and umm… what else?”

She nodded quickly, “Add essence channels to your body. Once it is flowing through your body, I guess you would call it chi, and it can help remove taint blockages, improve your body’s strength, healing, durability, and you might even be able to take in certain substances and herbs that can help get rid of taint or improve the way that essence cycles through your body.”

Yep, this was sounding more and more like the stuff my old sensei used to say before it got too woo-woo for me. Then again, if people are saying the same thing on two different worlds, I probably owed him an apology for not taking it seriously.

For right now, though, I took Mnemosyne’s advice a lot more seriously than I took my old sensei’s. I slowly gathered the sparkles in my soulspace together and fed them into the spark of ‘silver cord’, moving it to the character sheet as I worked. It took some time, but now I had to deal with the reality that this would probably feel much faster if I weren’t running at mental hyperspeed.

As the mote filled, I felt myself forced out of my soul space, returning to the Barracks. My body felt… odd. I felt ungrounded and took a moment to [observe] myself.

The change was spectacular! I could actually see the energy flowing through my form, and identified frost, life, and temporal aspects in my body. The aura that had previously been globular now tightly clung to my shape, outlining my hands with energy under the [observation]. I even received messages as I [observed] more closely.

Hands- These are your hands. Your hands are wearing partial leather gauntlets that offer greater protection.

[observe]- Your [observe] verb has improved to great! Keep up the good work.

I started practicing trying to get to my soul space without using my zone ability. After almost an hour of trial and error, I managed to immerse myself into my soul space and noticed something very unusual.

First off, my entire space, and all the mists and motes within it, were slowly rotating around my core. They had seemed static before, but that was clearly due to my time dilation from zoning. Now, the entire thing was in constant motion, glowing sparkles drifting everywhere and slowly sliding through my aura to combine with my internal motes.

My core, too, was slowly revolving. The coils of mana within it were moving and pulsing, and it looked a lot less like a solid, dead rock in the middle and more like a sparkling gem laced with cords of various colors, with a light blue and silvery pink predominating. My little park place, the diorama I had created earlier, was moving with a nice breeze, the previously-still grass moving with a susurration. The grasshoppers were as before, hopping when you moved, but I imagine that the illusions were tied to my own perceptions rather than this place, and they looked far more realistic in the blowing grasses.

Mnemosyne looked even more vibrant as the wind blew her hair, walking through the grass towards me with her hands brushing the heads of the stalks of grass. The sound of the burbling brook nearby was surprisingly loud, but I could understand why Mnem was able to stay here comfortably at normal speeds. Heck, if it weren’t in my own head, I wouldn’t mind spending some quality time here myself. I didn’t want to pat myself on the back, but man, this place was even better than my childhood memory of the real thing. No chiggers, no sunburn, no bullies, and no machine noises from the nearby construction machinery holding yard. Beautiful scenery of both the natural and human kind and the knowledge that time was passing in the real world while indulged knocked me out of my temporary stupor.

I would never understand ‘modern’ or ‘post-modern’ art. To me, it was nothing but pure ugliness. I was half-convinced that anyone that claimed to understand or appreciate the slop was just pretending to look sophisticated and clever. There was no way any real human could enjoy enema art, Jackson Pollock crap, or an artist canning their poop or semen or selling a pile of garbage. This, though, this kind of beauty was real and could entrap the mind if you were not careful.

“You did very well, your [observe] verb increased to great, and your essence manipulation is good now. We should be able to get another verb going, but more importantly, you have an aspect of auramancy now. If you concentrate, you should be able to purify enough taint to extend a channel to one of your meridians, probably your heart.”

“Meridians?” I asked her curiously, to which she answered, “Yes, you have eight of them right now. One in each limb, one in your brain, one in your heart, one in your tail, and one in umm… and she cleared her throat, motioning with her eyes and head towards my crotch.”

“Right,” I stated, I had heard the word before under the context, but most people referred to them as centers instead, I suppose trying to steer clear of the Hindu version of Meridians, which could be anywhere from five to twenty-seven and generally were intended to display something OTHER than chi flows.

As I could recall, there was a LOT of information on various ways to open, guide, pattern, and cycle your chi through your centers, at least in martial arts. It had various names, qui, chi, ki, mostly because the word doesn’t fit into English very well, and I think it started in China and was imported to Japan. Mnemosyne was simply watching me work, without offering any advice, and when I raised an eyebrow at her she just shook her head a little bit, keeping quiet.

She either would not or could not, help me figure this out. I used [observe] on my core, as I slowly teased out the knots of color with my will. They moved somewhat readily and responsively, and as I tugged them they flexed and expanded, like silken curtains made of mist that constantly tried to escape before flowing back into the band, constantly in motion against the mass. The band I had chosen first fluctuated between various colors of blue, based on its density, and I noticed that it was a small band that had ghostly links to my skills as I tugged it free. Everything was interconnected, and I guessed that. Based on how much it looked like the sparks from that identify skill Cassie had used, this particular flowing mass was linked with some kind of information aspect.

The damned thing kept slipping from my grasp as I tugged it out of my core, and I realized that each time, I was relaxing my grip as I tugged out the mass, and it had to keep in motion. After trying for over an hour, I realized that the mass I tugged out needed a path to guide its movement or it just returned right to where it was originally, so I started tugging it out and setting it spinning in my soul space, separate from my core.

After I figured out the trick, tugging out much more of the mass became easier, and the spinning ring started to orbit around the outside of my core, its own mass drawing more and more of the thin strands out as I worked and helping me pull it out. Eventually, the last of the blueish energy pulled itself from my core and spun slowly in place, the whole thing orbiting my core like a space station in a scifi movie.

The other major strands soon followed, and before I knew it I had 7 major spinning globs of energy slowly circling my core. The largest was an almost frosty white, but they stayed evenly spaced from each other as they orbited, almost like battery negative charges pushing away from each other as they spun.

I was a bit exhausted, but my OCD monkey was satisfied as the core, while still churning with a sort of darkness of mixed colors, seemed to be shedding sparks of color that either blended into the spinning rings or joined the sparkling orbit. It looked like eventually, the core area should naturally clear out quite a bit over time, as the rings seemed to have their own gravitational pull that stripped the colors away from the center.

“Mnemosyne?” I asked her as I turned, and noticed that she seemed to be nearly hopping from foot to foot in excitement as she watched me.

She nodded, and said, “That was not what I expected, at all. Most people break up the overall affinity groups as they work, winding up with hundreds of minor strands, but your will was very strong. You have all seven major affinity groups separated from your core, and they are strong enough that they are helping strip the taint out of your core. You set up a way to purify taint! That’s probably why the Band cannot catch your essence because it relies on carefully structured taint to guide your paths into the forms it needs, and every time it tries to form the framework, you ripped it away!

“So This is good?” I asked her, feeling wiped out. “They want me to join a party or something with adventurers tomorrow. That means that I might be interacting with the bands directly, or with people using identify. Is there some way we could join their party or something?”

She smiled again, but shook her head, “I am not positive, since external mana patterns, like what you use to cast spells, depend on taint frameworks to build their patterns. You might not be able to cast spells outside of your aura, but inside your aura, you could eventually gain access to pretty much any kind of aspect you can dream up. I haven’t seen anything like it, but being able to peel taint and purify it back into aspects, or maybe even quintessence, could be a game-changer.”

I needed sleep, like right away, but nodded as she finished. “But as for joining a party, that would probably not work. On the other hand, identify should be easy enough to fool.” She smiled broadly, “After a little while to clear up some of your taint, you should be able to extend your quintessence, and maybe even some of your aspects, along your meridians. They can help reinforce your body, your evolutions, and even your gifts, but relieving the pressure from the aspects on your core has moved a lot of the taint so it would be hard to pull quintessence.”

I noticed that my core looked tighter, more even, and compact, kind of like a bowl of dino-wheats after you eat all the marshmallow bits, but the orbiting spirals were slowly stripping away the cereal part that kids don’t care about.

I took a last look at my character build before I crashed out of my core to try and get at least a little sleep. I realized that, with my essence clear, I could probably add little indicators for fatigue, mana, and health if I wanted to, but right now two of the three, fatigue and mana, were nearly bottomed out. It seemed like almost every ‘improvement’ I made wind up stripping almost everything I had, but the improvements were unmistakable, especially since I had unknowingly enhanced essence manipulation into journeyman, and while willpower wasn’t enhanced, it too was in the journeyman levels now.

Brantley Gallagher Winterborne

Ice Kobold

Body size: Tiny

Body: Mediocre

Health: 100%

Evolution: 23%

Mana: 100%

Mind: Good

Fatigue: 100%

Reflexes: Extreme

Unenhanced Skill Groups

Logic: apprentice good

Mathematics: apprentice good

Acrobatics: novice good

Physical Fitness: novice fair

Willpower: journeyman mediocre

Piloting: apprentice fair

Socializing: apprentice poor

Security: apprentice mediocre

Metalworking: novice good

Stealth: apprentice superb

Spellcrafting: novice mediocre

Enhanced Skill Groups

Survival: expert fair

Martial arts: journeyman fair

Ranged combat: adept superb

Improvised Fabrication: journeyman poor

Essence Manipulation: journeyman fair

Innate

Ice Kobold

Unique soul

Kobolds innately gain trapmaking and scrounging at apprentice level, minor natural weapons, can swim at a trotting speed, darkvision, and minor regeneration.

Ice Kobolds in particular gain 75% cold resistance and 150% cold affinity.

All Kobolds are considered tiny creatures, difficult to target for larger creatures, but are much weaker and less resistant to damage.

Your unusual origins give you a unique soul for your species.

You gain combat meditation which includes mental time dilation, fear resistance, pain resistance, and the ability to access your soul space for mana manipulation and improvised spell creation.

Unfortunately, your special soul also gives you a minor penalty to social skills.

Evolutions

Silver Cord

Gifts and Traits

Draconic Language

Rhydian Language

Quintessence

Aura Domain

Enhanced Verbs

[Observe] great

Aspects

Quintessence

Temporal

Frost

Blowing a kiss to Mnemosyne as a good night, I dropped out of my soul space, curled into my blanket, and fell asleep.