“Why are you looking at me like that?” Mae Myrna gave Westrisser a frank look. The two sat in a rather mundane room, considering this must be one of the deepest chambers within the Westrisser compound. The walls were bare stone, with only a small candle to provide lumination. A few beaten pillows provided only the barest hint of comfort beneath their folded legs.

Mae kept scanning the area, looking for something she missed during her first examination, but there truly was nothing of note. She couldn’t decide if that made her feel better or worse about this private meeting with Westrisser. Between them was an unassuming wooden table. Judging from the dust around its legs, it had remained here for a long time. Yet the point of contention was the strange, vulnerable look Westrisser gave Mae from across the table.

He cleared his throat, his face settling back into a much more palatable look of apathy. “I am not a man who shys away from his works. If your image will be refined by me, I will claim responsibility, no matter if your mind breaks under the strain or if you actually manage to make something of yourself-”

“From that ordering, I can tell which you believe is most likely,” Mae muttered. She pressed her hands against the ground, enjoying the coolness of the stone.

Westrisser ignored her. Instead, he gestured around at the bare room. “This is a recreation of the room I lived in before I escaped my home and found my own Path. The leader of our clan, when I was born, placed all feathered serpents youths into such rooms. Only when you had confidence in your own powers were you allowed to step out. And if the overseers didn’t agree with your confidence… well. From within my room, I had heard many claim greatness and then be ruthlessly cut to pieces for their inadequacies.”

“Wait, what?”

Again, Westrisser didn’t acknowledge her. His voice took on an unusual cadence, almost as though he was repeating a mantra he had spoken to himself thousands of times. “The room serves as a reminder; without power, we are nothing. We return to this room. We are trapped. All options are stripped from the weak, leaving them with nothing. To avoid this, we train tirelessly. We push our limits. We grow.”

“How could you know whether your power had increased enough to receive the overseers’ approval?” Mae felt strangely fascinated by the offhand admission. For the first time in her life, she felt a glimmer of curiosity about the glum father of her childhood friend. “Were any guidelines given?”

Westrisser serenely continued with his own thoughts. Yet somehow, the shadows in the room seemed to deepen the more he explained. “I have some passing familiarity with your image. I have not seen you manifest it in a few years… but based on the aura I sense from you, the foundation is stable, if a bit unexciting. If you are to be changed by me into an individual worthy of respect-”

“Hey now,” This finally wiped the smile off of Mae’s face.

“-then we must begin by strengthening the bonds of casualty in your world projection,” Westrisser leaned forward. His eyes flashed with something not too dissimilar from excitement. “I’ll speak frankly; some of my own personal experiments have led me to a very fruitful area. What you need to do is learn to incorporate some Nether principles in your image construction. The presence of the actual energy won’t be necessary. Simply resembling the shape will add an adhesive quality. That way the very presence of your image will beget itself. The energy you spend maintaining the image will be cut in half.”

“Experiments?”

Westrisser released an exaggerated sigh. “I have been examining the anchoring effects of Nether King’s Phaea. Now, if you have no more foolish questions… let’s begin. Demonstrate your image.”

*****

Randidly spent twelve hours remaking his farm. He activated Skill after Skill, his teeth gritted in both annoyance and a vague sadness. The thorough carpet bombing of the fight between the Grey Creature and Nether King Bleak Sky had eradicated all biological matter unlucky enough to be sprouting out past the ground. However, these were plants that had grown and evolved in an energy-dense environment.

The sprouts died, but their seeds sunk into the ground could be easily recovered. With a few bursts from Randidly’s Fourth Authority, the remnants germinated and greenery cautiously crept back to the surface.

Honestly, considering how long the development of the farm had taken, it almost pissed Randidly off how quickly he managed to bring everything back in line.

The farmhouse itself was also in shambles, but Randidly could only throw his hands into the air. First from the Grey Creature ripping off the wall by his room, then from the clashes during the fight. Armel would probably need to come back and fix things up.

Of all the losses, what annoyed Randidly the most was the orchards. The ground in the area by the apple orchard smelled vaguely sweet from the juice of fifty bushels worth of apples having been smashed and obliterated when Bleak Sky summoned his overwhelming storm. Growling to himself, Randidly isolated the seeds and planted them again in nice rows. This area he gave a double dose of Animation Nova. He wanted to get the orchard back online as soon as possible.

He might be slightly woozy from expending all of his mental energy during the fight, and also excited to experiment more with the method the Grey Creature had found to utilize his emotional sea, but he still had mundane plans in the memory world he wished to see through.

Just as Randidly sat down to try and meditate and restore himself, a hint of movement brought his head whipping around. He hopped over to a partially melted storage container that had been knocked up against the side of the farmhouse. He looked inside and blanched from the blood and scaled bodies; the three Arakis Beasts that followed him had clearly tried to utilize their innate abilities on him during the fight with Bleak Sky. As usual, each failure was a crimson splatter painting on whatever surface had the unfortunate honor of being in front of them.

Just as Randidly was about to turn away, something caught his eye. He blinked. “Wait, is that hair?”

Rather gingerly, the three Arakis Beasts shifted their bulky bodies and revealed the crumpled form of Devick. Randidly quickly pressed his hand to her neck and surprised himself with the pure sense of relief he felt that she was breathing quietly. He released a hefty pulse of Aether into the environment around her, helping her restore her injuries more quickly.

Looking at her, it almost looks like she tried to imitate the Arakis Beast’s ability… Randidly couldn’t help but chuckle. Considering how unhinged Devick has proven herself to be, even as a young woman… I wouldn’t put it past her. But much more likely her body simply couldn’t withstand the physical shocks of the fight.

Randidly dragged a finger across Acri’s blade and allowed a single bead of emerald blood to bubble out of his skin. He pressed his thumb gently to Devick’s lips and then felt oddly creepy doing it. After positioning Devick in a more comfortable position to recover, he walked away. “Hopefully… this can’t be considered doping an athlete, right?”

With most of his immediate worries assuaged, Randidly took time to simply breathe. Once his mental energy recovered to a usable point, he focused inward on his emotional sea. The fourth core of emotion hadn’t exactly been incorporated directly into his emotional sea, having instead been consumed by the Authority based on the Stillborn Phoenix. But at the same time, it also no longer weighed heavily against his consciousness.

Randidly took a long breath in through his nose then exhaled through his mouth. He felt the subtle pressure building from the Alpha Cosmos at an all-time low, since he first discovered it was leaking into his subconscious.

He had made his choice and had finally caught up to the present. His emotions were under his exclusive control. There may be another bill coming due in the future, but his current self had more pressing concerns.

Randidly’s eyes flashed open. I need to train using the emotional affect and see if I can incorporate it into the other images. But first… I need to get things started here. Bleak Sky’s presence proves the situation will develop soon: he strikes me as someone without much patience.

Randidly stood and stretched, intending to head to his skyislands and get them off the ground. Right on cue, Devick sat up and unleashed a loud burp.

“Morning sunshine,” Randidly said casually. He walked over next to her and crouched down next to her. As her eyes focused on him, still clearly very confused, Randidly rather unsympathetically rapped a knuckle against her forehead. “What you did was very, very dumb. You don’t have a Class, you can’t Level, and your Health is a pittance. If the Arakis Beasts hadn’t been piled on top of you and soaked up some of the energy radiation, you would just be a corpse. Can you imagine how obnoxious Jawem would have been if you had actually died?”

“He would have tried to attack you,” Devick smiled at the thought, then winced. Even though her hair was thickly crusted with blood, it was easy to overlook it if you didn’t focus on it. The color of her hair was such a vibrant crimson. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get involved. But considering your capabilities, I couldn’t resist the chance to watch you fight.”

Randidly pressed his lips together. “Have a bit of self-awareness. Compared to fighters like this, you are a gnat. No matter how much you’ve studied Engraving, that won’t help you survive at all.”

“Would you be sad if I died?” Devick glanced sideways at Randidly.

He gave her an unamused look. After a few uncomfortable seconds, Devick grimaced. “Jeez, it was just a question. But anyway… did you manage to drive the storm guy away?”

Randidly snorted. Only when he saw Devick’s even more confused expression did it occur to him that she probably had passed out before the worst of the fighting and wouldn’t have been able to interpret the movements with her low Perception anyway. He cleared his throat and shook his head. “...in the end, we had no real quarrel. But I suspect it had more to do with the watching eyes of Faelmac Westrisser than me. That Nether King… Bleak Sky didn’t want to reveal all of his capabilities.”

“...somebody means to attack Malloon?” Devick’s eyes widened. Then she clicked her tongue. “How audacious.”

“Anyway, let’s get a move on,” Randidly offered her a hand. “There’s a lot to do.”