“Sure! I want to look around this room for a bit too! Couldn’t see some things because of the shadows,” Luna said, flying off to the walls of the room and leaving a floating flame for Kain to use. Kain chuckled and turned his attention to one of the cubes they found in the underground room. It had a frame made of a gray metal, but had numerous crossing wires that could be seen through gaps in the frame that were all insulated in some sort of crystal. After he looked at the physical structure, he examined it with a few Ether limbs, delving deep into the messy jumble of wires.

The imbuements of the object were split into two layers: the inner system and the outer system. Both areas were damaged and a side was missing, which he guessed could have been found in some of the piles of scrap metal, concrete, and plastic that were scattered around the room. In the end, the cube could only send sparks of blue and red every so often due to the injuries, so he grabbed another cube to compare them. The second cube was almost identical, with the only difference being the location of damage. He peered into the corner of the cube, which appeared to have been chewed off, and found more sparking wires sticking out. His first method of learning the cube’s purpose was to try to flood the item with Ether.

The results were predictably poor, as the cube almost immediately lit up with large blue and red sparks. Sighing, he tried to recall what he saw the Ether do while in the cube. It was complex. Extremely so. He noticed that the Ether traveled in odd patterns throughout the inner system of the cube while it was simply spun into a sort of shield when put in the outer layer. The inner system seemed to have the purpose of cycling the energy while the outer system had the purpose of spinning a protective shield with Ether. ‘It honestly seems familiar… where did I- Wait!’ he thought. Pulling out the green crystal with a triangular base he began to compare the two.

They seemed to be almost entirely identical in design save for the general sophistication of the device. They both had inner systems with the purpose of cycling energy while they also had outer systems meant to turn Ether into a protective shield. “They’re the same thing!” he soon yelled out. He began to examine them both in even more thorough detail; he wanted to know what made one different from the other and if he could put the odd, red energy of one into the other.

It was at that moment when he realized that the cube he was holding had stopped sparking red, both areas emitting blue sparks. He decided to try to funnel a large amount of Ether through the systems of the first cube he was holding. Once he did and the sparks from the flooding ended, the machine had blue sparks occasionally lighting up in both sections. He nodded to himself and looked for some sort of difference between the two devices. The only one he had figured out so far was that the shield function was much more efficient. He took one more cube and flooded it with Ether.

The cube was much less damaged than the others, only sporting a shallow gouge near the surface of the inner layer. Despite the lack of damage, it still reacted the same as the other cubes. Despite that, however, he figured out what differed between the two: in the crystal, the two layers were not connected, while in the cube they were. He almost jumped when some sort of random movement from the Ether in the inner layer caused a part of the outer layer to open up, letting a small burst of Ether through the shield. He tried the experiment once more, making sure to intentionally cause the Ether to randomly move, and sure enough there were more openings that split and fused depending on where in the device the Ether touched.

He thought about it for a moment and decided to try to recreate the functions present in the cubes in the crystal. His first thought was to repair a cube and transfer the odd, red energy from the crystal to the cube, but he had no idea how to do something like that, so he decided to try and recreate the cube’s functions in the crystal to see what happened.

Although the crystal was easily the most complex thing he had ever tinkered with, he was ready to begin his work. He turned to look for Luna only to find her hovering right next to him. “Ah, how long have I been doing this?” he asked.

“Eh, an hour? Two? Either way, you need my help, right?”

He nodded. “The cube here and the crystal we found in the Duvalid ruins are almost identical in function, however, the cubes have an added function of connecting the inner and outer layers while the crystal does not. What I need your help with is connecting them. If we can do that, then we may be able to figure out what these things are,” he explained.

“Okay, but why not just repair that one and move the red stuff from the crystal to the cube?” she retorted.

“Because I don’t know how. That, and if we mess this up, then it’ll be a while before we can find something else like this,” he explained, pointing at the crystal. “This red stuff is extremely uncommon. So much so that this is the only amount we have of it.”

She thought for a moment and nodded. They got to work immediately. The first step in their endeavor was to figure out what exactly they were copying. They had a few ideas, but they had to resort to blasting the connectors with Ether, trying to understand what exactly they did. Normally, Kain could vaguely understand what a shape of Ether’s concept was; that was not the case with structures that were too advanced. Luna asked about it during their testing. “It’s like trying to look at a river bank and pick out an individual grain of sand or small clumps of it. It’s impossible, to say the least,” he answered.

After a few hours of testing, while still also vigilant to their surroundings, Kain got a sense as to what the connectors were like. “Hmm. They’re like muscles,” he muttered.

“Muscles? How? Is it something that humans figured out?” she asked.

Nodding, he began to clear away the area, sweeping broken cubes and shards of metal away. He examined the crystal once more before placing it between them. “Yeah, pretty much. Muscles are the strands of meat in your body that let you move. Without them, you would just be a pile of skin and bone, unable to properly stand or move. In this, it connects the core to the outside. Now that I think about it, it could also be a sort of nervous system. The brain is the inner system while the body is the outer system, and the connectors act as the nerves that, well, connect the two. Hmm… I guess that this is a bit of a fusion of those. There’s also the fact that the connectors split the shield open to allow Ether to exit. Perhaps it’s more like a bridge than anything else. It allows Ether from one side of the ‘river’ to cross over,” he mumbled. “I think I need more time to think about it.”

After another hour of mumbling to himself, he finally settled on the vague concept of a ‘gate,’ as the connectors in the cube split the shield open and made a path like a bridge across a river. Before long, they were making the bridges, sculpting them out of Ether, and bridging the seemingly insignificant gap in the crystal. As time went on, as the crystal came closer and closer to completion, Kain got a bit of a sense that some things were not connected properly. Some of the ‘bridges’ were in places that the red energy would never touch, so he subtly altered the course of the cycling pathways. It was nothing more than moving some of the earlier constructs over by a few millimeters, but everything was so complex that even a single mistake could ruin everything. Eventually, however, they completed the crystal.

“Nice! We did it!” Luna celebrated.

“More like I did it and you gave me the Ether,” Kain retorted, chuckling.

“Same thing! Anyway, when’s something gonna happen?” Luna asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing will-” he stopped himself, as he felt something stirring in the crystal. Luna felt it as well, because she snapped her head towards the crystal. They both felt the Ether around them sucking into the crystal; not a lot of Ether was sucked in, but it was enough to be noticable. Soon enough, however, they felt the crystal stir, and smoke plumed from the surface of the crystal. They went wide-eyed as the smoke shifted, swirled, and then condensed into a shape floating above the crystal. As more and more blue smoke coalesced from the crystal, the hazy silhouette of a massive serpent, over 200 feet long and floating in the air, stared down at them. They gazed into the red eyes of the specter as a voice, even more ethereal than normal due to the amulets, echoed off of the barren walls of the room.

“Who are you?”

*=====*

Ythane was growing concerned. It was an emotion she almost reveled in, as it had been, what seemed like, hundreds of years since she had felt concern. Or happiness. Or excitement. If anything, the last hundreds of years had been filled with nothing but anger, hate, greif, and self loathing. She had escaped into the crystal, putting her very self into it, while her children died. She had given up her body to be in the crystal. To survive. She had let her children be slaughtered while she hid in the crystal. She hid without sight, without sound, and without Ether. It was only after she had trapped herself in her soul crystal that she realized that she needed a way to filter new Ether into the soul space for her to do anything. No, that fact was not what concerned her, she had already lamented that oversight enough to last a thousand years, but it was what was happening to her soul crystal that was making her nervous.

While she could not hear, see, smell, taste, touch, or use Ether, she was able to feel the Ether in her soul gem. And at that moment, her senses were telling her that someone, or something, was attempting to manipulate her soul gem with her still inside.

Her typical reaction would have been to shatter every bit of Ether they were using, walk up to them, and demand an apology. It would have embarrassed them greatly, especially if they were one of the children of the Duvalad, the Duvalid. She knew that social murder was much mroe effective than physical murder in many cases, which is why she was much more of a diplomat than a fighter. She internally sighed as she let go of her distracting day-dreams. She could not shatter their Ether at that moment. She had Ether to do it with. She could also not demand an apology. She had no voice to do it with.

Suddenly, she felt a shift in her soul energy. It began to cycle in a slightly different way than it was designed to. She panicked for a moment, but then realized that the new path brought her into contact with the numerous connectors between her and the shield on the edge of the soul crystal.

‘Speaking of, for what reason are they doing this? Are they my children? Did some survive, and they are freeing me from this prison?’ she thought to herself. ‘Will they be kind? Will they have strayed from the path of Du? What will- Oh! They finished!’ She noticed that the new imbuements were completed, but waited for a moment anyway. She did not want to get herself hurt due to impatience. As her soul energy creeped to the new imbuements, they opened up. ‘They… opened. They opened! I’m free!’ she cried out in her mind. Without further delay, she began to absorb the Ether in the air around her crystal. She paused for a moment in shock. ‘This is… extremely dense! How could anywhere have this much Ether!? WELL! We’re about to see where that is!’ she began to take the Ether in, pouring it though her soul and spreading it out through the connectors. The Ether spread in a smoke-like pattern, but was soon brought to heel when Ythane reshaped her soul energy to allow her to control it. It was certainly harder than imbuing, that was for sure. But as a Duvalad Soul Shaper, how could she let her pride take a blow by not bringing the Ether to its knees using her soul alone.

She shaped her soul energy to make it easiest to perform ‘instinct casting,’ as her Duvalid children called it, and shaped the Ether run through her soul into a form reminiscent of her old body. Shaping her body was hard work, and it seemed that the room where her soul gem was held was small, so she curved around the large object in the center of the room. Once most of her body was completed, she sent a puff of soul energy into the Ether construct, shaping them to become her eyes and ears. Once she received the images from her new eyes, she was in shock.

Instead of her Duvalid children staring back at her, she saw a short, skin-covered creature staring at her, wearing a cloak. She was about to attack it, but stopped. He was not a titan, nor a giant for that matter. The rabbit, which reached the creature’s knees when on its hind legs proved that.

‘For that matter, why is it floating on a black deer skull? That seems… odd. Actually, why are they here? Where is here? But… most importantly…’

“Who are you?”

*=====*

Alright, new character! Fun times all around! Anyway, rewrite for chapter 2 out by the time you see this. As always, thanks for your continued support, and I hope you enjoyed.