Normal people measured power in levels and stats. The governments, guilds, corporations, sects, and true elites measured power in tiers. Starting with the non-rated tier, moving down the line through the Earthly, Lunar, Stellar, Legendary, Ethereal, Mystic, Saint, Eon, and Eternal tiers. The point being, that different terms had different meanings depending on who you asked. Similarly, the word “calamity” meant something different for those us in the nebula.
For those of us living in the nebula, a calamity wasn’t just an event causing great and sudden damage and distress. A calamity was a type of being or event, that existed as a result of the flawed creation of the nebula. Magical energy would gather, percolate, and grow increasingly dense and corrupt. Forming a cloud of concentrated chaotic-magic known as a calamity-seed. After drifting freely for a time, the calamity-seed would take root in some wild-site or dead-site. Infecting the monsters, making them increasingly dangerous and increasingly powerful, till eventually, the “Calamity” was born.
In the simplest terms, a Calamity was any non-sapient threat amounting to force two or more tiers above the average maximum level of the local live-sites. One tier equaled 1000 levels. A nigh-unbridgeable gap in strength. “Two” tiers was something that couldn’t be made up for. It was the difference in power between a man and an avalanche, it was a difference in power between a house and a hurricane. All that could be done was to flee from it, and even then that might not necessarily be possible.
The only real responses in the face of a true calamity were flight or death. In a few extremely rare cases, one might get lucky, and the ancestor, hidden dragon, or hero-waiting in the wings, might be just high-leveled enough to make the Calamity a lesser threat. However, that was usually very unlikely. A monster would of a particular level, would almost always be equal to three or more people at that same level. The only exceptions were in the cases of the monstrous peoples, such as the dragons and demons. It would take a Paragon, or Sovereign, the sapient equivalents of a Calamity and those were beyond rare and generally too busy plotting against their fellows to be bothered with the plight of the common-folk.
The worst part about the calamities was that the creatures really were like powerful forces of nature. Changing the landscape with ease, erasing cities, mountains, and small countries. Not only did one have to contend with the calamity itself one also had to contend with the after effects of its passage through the area. Like the tidal waves that follow an earthquake.
The Human-faced Megalodon’s trick of swimming through the earth didn’t just cause earthquakes they caused “space”-quakes. Disruptions in the nebula’s dimensional-firmament. The Calamity that consumed most of Goldfish City caused a destabilization in the channel’s space. Destroying all the smaller settlements that were built in the vicinity of the city. The Calamity’s aura, the chaotic magics, and the deaths that resulted from the fall of Goldfish City released by the destabilized space resulted in the monsters that dwelled in the local wild-sites and dead-sites being drawn out into a frenzy. In short, the few survivors of Goldfish City’s fall soon found themselves running for their lives from a horde of enraged beasts.
This chaotic state wasn’t going to end any time soon either. This was just how the channel was going to be for the foreseeable future. From now on, the channel would be chaotic beyond habitability and overrun with death and monsters. The whole channel would become either one big dead-site, and the only places that people could run to would be those parts of the channel that were so far away from the human-faced megalodon's initial entry point as to not be affected. For most people, this would mean leveraging all their influence, and wealth to get into the larger live-sites, or trusting their luck held and nothing came and wiped out the smaller live-sites.
Then there were was still the third option that people could and would take. That option was the option of leaving the channel altogether through the use of the many staircases, portals, and tunnels that connected this channel to its neighbors, above, below, and around it. Most of the better “pathways” were monitored, monopolized, and monetized, by the powers on either end of them.
Fortunately, yours truly had the power of [ideation] and fortunately, our fair Nebbia was as nebulous as its name suggested, thus with active data-sampling I was able to find a few undiscovered pathway ages ago. I’d saved the locations on my mental map, putting them aside for a rainy day. Now it was both figuratively, and literally, pouring, if you counted the shower of dust and soot as actual rain. I didn’t really have any choice in the matter now, it was either run or die.
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“Well this sucks…but it could be worse.”
Fast forward two weeks since the fall of Goldfish City, and you’d find me on my back, staring up at the stars. I was inside my bubble. I didn’t mean that figuratively. My current lack of a permanent home meant that the only safe place for me to lay my head down was my “cabin” a literal bubble of altered space-time, that I’d created with my ever-handy [Ideation].
It wasn’t entirely terrible. Though I couldn’t activate the ability while I was in combat for various reasons I’m not gonna bother getting into, being able to summon the cabin was a fairly handy trick. Once the cabin was full set-up and running, nothing could attack me, nothing could get me from the outside, I was protected from the elements and almost entirely insulated from the outside world.
The cabin’s only true failing was that it was small, super small. The bubble was barely bigger than a closet. Creating spaces that things could “live” in, was harder than creating spaces that things could merely “exist” in. Speaking in the plainest terms, it was the difference between building a box and building a world. One was just a simply matter of using energy to set up a an enclosed data-structure that would plug into certain cosmic laws to keep your crap from floating away or disintegrating. The other involved building a million different complex systems and then struggling to get them to run without reality pulling a blue screen of death. The amount of power it took to make my tiny cabin could easily setup a hundred warehouse-sized subspaces.
The silver-lining was that after the first time I set up the cabin, I never had to set it up again. It existed within me as a permanent structure and I carried it within my consciousness, bringing it out whenever I needed to. I suspected that I was on the verge of discovering something the first time I setup the cabin. I had a hunch that the creation of the cabin was the beginning of me developing a proper inner-world.
Life was a progression of the pronoun game, you started as a what, be it a seed, a few lines of code, a lump of cells, or a ball of clay. Then you became a who, maybe some idiot named Mike. Then as you grew stronger and more cosmically significant you’d become a where, when, why, and how. Mike, Lord of the Far-Reaches. Mike, the embodiment of gravity. Mike, who makes gravity in a certain universe have a certain constant. Mike, who is the secret cause of gravity. Mike, who serves as the secret actor who pulls the particles, thus causing the phenomenon the rest of the universe knows as gravity.
Of course, it wasn’t as straightforward as that. Even ordinary mice could be homes to millions of lives, so the rules were a bit...inconsistent. The point was that gaining an inner-world was a big deal. Every day I’d try to expand the cabin to something more livable and I found that as I did so, I was getting stronger. As if the expansion of the cabin equaled an expansion of my soul and the power that lay within my soul.
Returning to the topic of my current circumstances, I was technically back to square one. I was broke. I no longer had a permanent address. All my hard work building up a reputation in my former home channel was now rendered pointless. Yet, things could be worse. Thanks to my sub-spaces, I still had most of my possession. Thanks to the cabin, even if I was technically homeless, I didn’t need to worry so much about the lack of a roof over my head, since I was least safe, secure, and relatively comfortable.
Rather than despair over everything I’d lost, I decided to focus on the future. I’d already planned things out in my head. I figured in three, no, two months tops, I’d be back at the top of my game. I’d regain everything I’d lost and then I’d gain more. I decided to ignore the fact that I’d somehow managed to get lost despite the powers of my [Ideation]. I also decided to pay no mind to the horde of bloodthirsty nightmares that had been stalking me since I’d emerged in this new channel. My main focus, for the time being, would be on my glorious return to the mercantile world.
