Excerpt from the third draft of An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe

Affinities

There are several models used for Affinities. None of them capture the full range that is possible, but they give a useful framework for discussion. If you get two wizards together that use different frameworks, you’ll probably see a bitter argument about which is correct.

There’s an answer to that, but it’s not one most wizards like: neither of them. Magic doesn’t seem to like being restricted to a strict set of rules. There’s argument over why this is, but personally I think it’s simple: magic is ruled by intent. If you believe your magic works in a specific way, it will, whether or not anyone else agrees with you.

There is a way to divide up Affinities that has proven useful over for most mages (healers have a different one, as do most specialists); it’s considered to be the standard Affinity model (when anyone calls them anything other than “how magic works”).

It divides Affinities up into basic, advanced, and specialized; there is also a “normal” set of advanced Affinities that are considered the set to work towards if you’re a “normal spellcaster”.

Before anything else, Serenity wanted to check on the “condensed Void” Aide mentioned. He closed his eyes and sent his awareness into his body.

It was easier than ever. He could feel Essence and Mana swirling through him, and he didn’t even have to reach for another Affinity; looking at himself reminded him of looking at a spellform. He was different, but the similarity was still there.

Aide’s directions made it easy to find the clot of Void. As Serenity looked at it, he realized that while it felt like him, it didn’t feel like either Liminality or Nihility, the two Affinities he’d pulled out of his old Void Affinity. It was something different.

He added “figure out what the heck the ‘void’ in ‘void sovereign’ means” to his mental to-do list. He wasn’t sure where to start, but it was still something to be aware of.

As far as he could tell, it was a solid clot of shadows, about the size of a marble. There was simply a space in his abdomen where it gathered next to the crystal inclusion, like his flesh made room for it.

Out of curiosity, he shifted while watching it. It was present in all of his shapes and in each case, it simply sat there. He couldn’t move where it was in his body; no matter what he did, even in Void Sovereign form, it stayed near the center of his mass.

There was only one more thing he could think of to try.

Analyze

Void Spark

Created by a Void Sovereign from its own being, this Void Spark has not yet had its purpose set.

Unsatisfied but with no real way to get more answers, Serenity shifted back to his chimera shape. At least it sounded like it wasn’t a problem; it was something Void Sovereigns did. If only he had some idea what its purpose was.

Which, of course, led him to the next thing he planned to do with inadequate knowledge and only a good guess that it wasn’t harmful to himself.

It was well known that the Voice rewarded those who blazed new paths, but it was also well known that some - probably most - were destroyed by that blaze eventually. In many ways, that was true of the Final Reaper as well; the very abilities that took him to the peak were the reason he felt he had to keep climbing.

So far at least, Serenity didn’t feel the same way. He was driven to climb not by the hatred of others but by the fact that he cared. Maybe - maybe after the second wave was defeated, he’d be able to relax and take time for himself?

Maybe even after the first wave, before the second? There was so much to do still, but they were well ahead of the curve now. In a year or so, would he even still need to push?

Serenity shook off his introspection. He wasn’t there yet; there were things to accomplish before then.

The stuff in the boxes was all different, but what it shared was that it was incomplete. None of it was a full system, other than the satellite dish; that seemed to have the thing to mount on the roof and the receiver, though Serenity didn’t think there was enough cable.

Serenity wasn’t certain how he was supposed to absorb any of them. If that was what happened with his phone, it just sort of happened. Which meant Tek took care of it.

Serenity didn’t want to leave something like that in Tek’s control. Even if Aide was the one managing it, it was still not ideal; Serenity needed to control his own body. As much as he could.

Which meant he needed to use what he had better, or find a new tool. Well, he had a Technology Affinity. He’d never tried using it on Tek’s device or on Aide; why not see what he could find out?

Serenity looked inside himself again, but this time he deliberately triggered his Technology Affinity. There should be a limited response, no matter what; that was part of what having an affinity meant. It was part of you.

The response he saw was far more than simply having the Affinity. There was a webwork of lines throughout his body that sang with the Affinity. Oddly enough, they also shone with the Essence Affinity. A deeper examination confirmed it; they were the crystal veins he’d noticed back on Tzintkra; the ones he’d damaged then had restored themselves. Only they weren’t quite the same; they had a hint of metal to them.

A thorough scan of the rest of his body showed similar things; the components of his phone seemed to have been diffused into crystalline Essence. He couldn’t find a battery or a screen, and the interfaces between devices were odd, but other than that it seemed like there was something similar to each of the other components somewhere.

As he looked he simply knew what each was. The antennas were in his ribcage, while the processing and secondary memory - and Aide - lived in his pelvis. The other features were spread out or missing, like the cameras that replaced his nonfunctional pupils and the microphone in his jawbone. There didn’t seem to be any way to physically connect another device.

It wasn’t technology as he knew it. It was a melding of technology and magic. Did Tek even know she’d done that, or did she not see it that way?

Serenity checked the back of his neck, where Tek had set her device. It was still there, under the skin; in fact, there was an entire flexible magitech device that covered the back of his neck. It was an interface device; that much felt obvious. It also seemed to have a secondary capability; the secondary capability was what made it so large. That had to be the integration she’d done with his phone. He’d have to see it in action to know what it did.

Looking at it through the lens of his Affinity made more about it clear than he’d known before. It used principles that weren’t based on mana or essence, but which were different from anything Serenity would have called science; it was almost like it hooked into some sort of underlying Intent without magic, to find what was and wasn’t technology.

That sounded like magic.

Serenity poked it again, trying to get it to give up some of its secrets.

Hidden deep inside the device, in the very place it was looking in others, was a shred of power. Of Essence lined with mana.

It wasn’t looking without magic.

Yet it was magic on the same scale as the magic of a Tier 0 animal; virtually none and deeply hidden.

Still, the fact that there was magic there made all the difference. Of course it didn’t quite make sense to him; Tek put it together, and there was no doubt that her understanding of technology and his were different. That was likely also the reason for the static; anything he made would be compatible with the senses he expected, and Tek sensed things differently than he did.

It’d taken her a while to figure out why there was a problem. Serenity wanted to blame her for that, but he’d done too much troubleshooting in his life to believe that it was easy. She’d had a fix ready for new technology in days twice; he’d clearly taken up a lot of her attention.

His next step was clearly to try to do what she’d done, only on his own. He ran his Technology Affinity into the device in his neck to watch it, then reached out to the nearest box. After tearing open the wrapping, he dumped the microchip into his hand.

This time, he managed to stay conscious. He saw the device shimmer as it was carefully destroyed and analyzed by Aide, then a similar pattern imprinted in one of his bones. Serenity moved to another device and watched it happen again and again.

Serenity felt his Essence pool drain as the process continued. It used up some mana, but it used far more Essence. Serenity had to stop twice to allow his Essence to recover; it wasn’t fast, but an hour’s rest got him full enough that his regeneration rate started slowing down as the planet sucked the energy away from him.

By the last device, he was confident he could repeat it. He probably couldn’t manage anything this complex and he certainly couldn’t do it this quickly; he wouldn’t dare do it to himself, either. Still, he could probably make a simple device out of Essence if he had an example to work from.

He was also confident that all of the devices he’d seen had a tiny sliver of mana-laced Essence in them. Technology wasn’t entirely different from magic.

On the other hand, he was coming to believe that all matter had a tiny sliver of mana-laced Essence. It would explain so much; it would explain why he kept finding Essence in everything if it wasn’t simply the magic of life but the universal building block.

At the same time he had to wonder: why hadn’t he run into it before? Why did no one off planet seem to use Essence other than monsters, and yet Russ used it?

Russ did have a core, so perhaps he was technically a monster. That didn’t feel like a complete explanation, but Serenity didn’t have a better one yet.

Serenity’s attention snapped back to the electronics when words appeared in front of him.

Status Update: Integration complete. Initiating scan across accessible frequencies. Estimated duration: six hours. Scan will pause if the range limit is exceeded.

The words disappeared after he read them.

It was the first time he’d ever seen Aide talk anywhere other than his Status page, but it was clearly Aide.