“Is the carpet ready?” Ranvir asked as he finished the last lines of the ritual circle, though comparing this to their previous circles was a bit misleading.

A few weeks ago, when they’d first resumed their practice of making circles after Saleema’s interference they’d run into a few issues. As Ranvir’d been powering the circle the pocket-space had started expanding like it should. Until a point. Then it suddenly collapsed squeezing out all the spatial energy.

Determined to figure out the problem, Kirs had gone to war with the ritual circles and space generator books. She’d spent many hours when the others had been training, searching for a solution when she’d finally come on the answer. Surprisingly, it had been one of her colleagues, who’d been reading about the production of uniforms that helped her with the discovery.

Elusria let nobles buy out a huge portion space generator contracts on the condition that they provided uniforms for the academy, the school, and the elusrian tethered army. Under the description of the production one generator went into details on the construction of the pocket-space where the cloth was stored. Specifically, he’d mentioned the support structured generated to brace the pocket.

This had allowed them to once more find their path. Ranvir’d been easily able to create such support structures himself, even if his own pocket-spaces didn’t need them yet. He’d tried using the trick Master Floki had shown him, traveling outside of reality to reach whichever point on the perimeter, but the inside still had space and reality, and he’d been unable to apply his powers widely enough to circumvent the issue.

Getting Sansir’s help, they’d once more dusted Ranvir with snow while he grew a pocket-space and added the braces.

They’d discovered just how complex the pattern was, drawing it out was way more intense than the basin. In fact, it had seemed like two determination-circles laid one atop the other. That was in fact what led them down the right path.

It took a lot of grunt work, by first drawing the determination sub-circle for growing a space, then subtracting that from their more complicated circle. Then they’d had to figure out where they’d overlap. Ranvir had tried for a time to just make the support structures but the effect didn’t come out right without the attached pocket-space.

Finally, they had two determination sub-circles. One that grew the pocket-space, one that supported it. They quickly added another basin and restriction sub-circle to the other side of the feeding circle. Which was where they ran into a new issue.

Ranvir could support both functions when he was the fulcrum of the effect, however, the rituals weren’t as energy efficient as he was, unfortunately. But it had only taken Kirs a short while to figure out a solution. While there was either very little—or simply no—spatial energy ambient in the air, there was some leaking from the ritual, which if they grabbed them immediately, they should be able to reuse some of it.

So they fashioned a containment circle which would sit surrounding the ritual circles and catch all their leaking energy and throw it back into the basin. It didn’t work perfectly, but it was an efficiency bump, so they added an ambient energy feeding circle around each of the sub-circles, which turned out to be unnecessary. The restrictions circles were the biggest culprit of leaking energy. Ranvir was honestly surprised he was able to power a pocket-space through that loss of efficiency at all.

They turned the restriction sub-circles into triangles, since the ambient feeders only needed detailing around the inner edge, and a few other places, thus they could easily fit the entire restriction into the ambient feeder. In testing this increased their efficiency, though this was the first time they were actually doing it for real with an actual ritual-circle.

“Carpet’s ready,” Kirs said slapping the big shaggy monstrosity they’d bought. They’d gotten it used from one of Himir’s uncles who’d gotten it from his grandfather. The carpet was huge and multicolored, most of the color came from the multiple different hides that had been stitched together to create the monstrosity. However, a non-insignificant portion of the carpet was also desaturated from other events. According to Himir, it was from children but it had been thoroughly cleaned so they needn’t worry.

Ranvir still did, and he was happy that he wasn’t the one who had to be at the ready with it. This was their countermeasure if Zubair or, Goddess forbid, Saleema came again. They’d throw the huge carpet over the ritual circle, sure it wouldn’t explain why they’d moved two of the beds into the corner, but kids had done weirder things Ranvir was sure.

“Here we go,” Ranvir said pinching off a bit of space and stretching to put in the center of the circles, then he started feeding power into their glyph feeding-circle. It was a long minute with him stretched across the circles feeding power and maintaining the small space, but finally the energy reached beyond the restrictions, through the determinations and into the center.

Sighing with relief, Ranvir leaned back, keeping contact with the glyph as he found himself a more comfortable spot. Now came the next issue. In theory, they should be efficient enough that Ranvir could manage at least a decently sized space. Unfortunately, that theory was largely based on Kirs and his’ guessing. They had no hard facts, which meant he had to get his output as low as it could go while still maintaining the energy flow into the space.

Technically, one such solution would be a better distribution of power. Right now, he was giving each of the two paths equivalent power, which would create many powerful braces within the pocket most of which would be completely unnecessary.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t found a method for managing the distribution of energy, yet. So for now, he would just have to settle in for the long haul. If he didn’t feed it enough power, the space would lose energy, shrink, degrade, and, eventually, fall apart. If he fed it too much energy, Ranvir wouldn’t be able to keep up. At least not like he currently was.

His pull toward advancement had gotten stronger over the past weeks. Where before, when he’d been in tether-space he’d felt it like a longing, a desire to become stronger, now he felt it even as he was embracing the pressure and should be mostly unaware of his tether.

The outer-edges of the restriction triangles started lighting up. It won’t be long now, Ranvir thought pushing a little more power out as he thought the lines were dimming in the restriction to his right.

Light that would’ve disappeared too fast for Ranvir to notice, swam through the air and into the ambient feeding circles surrounding the restriction triangles. Those lines lit up quickly, feeding the energy into the determination sub-circle. Ranvir could tell from the intensity of the glow coming from the lines that a noticeable portion of his work load had been taken off. Though, he would have to experiment with how much. That power still came from him. If he lowered it, then he would lower both his input and the catcher’s input.

Still, he was already feeling the strain so he lowered the energy a little, giving himself some more time. It felt ridiculous, since he knew he could go out and advance tomorrow and by the day after tomorrow he could fuel this entire circle with ease, yet here he was.

Gritting his teeth, Ranvir pushed through. His lowered input was still growing the space, though it was slower than before. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kirs step closer to the distortion in the space. That was one issue they hadn’t quite solved yet. Ranvir’s spaces weren’t open by default. He had a theory that the problem might solve itself, however.

The aperture that kept the space enclosed and separate from the rest of the world helped to increase the stability of the pocket-space. With this pocket it shouldn’t matter whether it was open or not. Another factor especially noticeable in tether combat was that you couldn’t generate material within another person’s physical presence, even pushing through their native presence was difficult unless you were significantly stronger than them.

In effect, that meant generating a ball of light and throwing the light at an enemy was easy, generating the ball of light in front of the enemy, pushing through the native presence of their Veil was difficult, and pushing through the physical presence of their skin and summoning the ball within their stomach was impossible. Master couldn’t even do it to non-tethered.

Kirs reached out to the pocket-space, her finger extended. As the aperture came into contact with her finger it was shredded by her physical presence, unable to resist the force of her finger. Partially, that was due to the lack of energy behind the aperture, but also that space was as close to harmless as energy got. Had she done that to warp she would’ve pushed through, even as she lost the finger.

Inside Ranvir’s mind, he felt the creature stir coming together as hazy reds and oranges indistinct in its form.

“It’s bright inside,” Kirs noted as she peered through the shredded aperture, the ritual lacked the determination-circle to remake it. The creature snorted at her comment and dissipated into the ambiance of Ranvir’s mind once more. She shaded the hole with her hand, “I guess it makes sense that the light from the room would enter,” she muttered.

Ranvir’s head was starting to hurt, telltale pinpricks of pain blossoming in the back of his mind and he felt himself start to slump.

Kirs took in a deep breath, “I’m gonna do it,” she stretched forth her hand reaching into the pocket-space. The space was just large enough that she could fit her whole hand inside it. Ranvir couldn’t see much of the space around her hand, but he did notice the slight wavering before the space stilled. The support structure division started sucking energy much faster than usual, pulling all the energy for a few seconds before it stabilized and the flows normalized.

“It’s holding,” Kirs observed turning to look at Ranvir with wide-eyes, “It’s sustaining itself.”