Lillene

Enjoy!

Immiki’s immediate attention was on Speaker Hulvex. Serenity didn’t think she’d even noticed him yet. “Hulvex? What did you do?”

She sounded like she was accusing him of something horrible. Admittedly, if she thought she was awake because of someone sacrificing themselves for her, Serenity couldn’t blame her for her anger. It said something good about her.

“I found someone who can give you energy without hurting himself!” Speaker Hulvex spat the words out quickly in a slightly higher pitch than normal. He waved a hand in Serenity’s general direction. “He didn’t need the siphon; it didn’t pull anything out of him forcefully! He also thinks he knows how to give you energy safely even after he’s gone.”

Immiki glared at Speaker Hulvex. “We’ll talk about pulling strangers into this some time soon.” 

Speaker Hulvex looked down, then seemed to gather his confidence back together. He pushed his shoulders back and glared right back at Immiki. Even Serenity could see he was fighting himself as he did it, but he did. “I don’t care. It’s worth it for the chance. It’s been years, Immiki. I haven’t told him any of the true secrets, but even if I did, it would be worthwhile. We’re fading, dying. The children leave and don’t return because there is nothing here for them. Soon there won’t be anyone left to care.”

Serenity thought that was a bit of an overstatement. There were still a lot of people in the village above. Whether there were fewer than there used to be wasn’t a question he could answer. It didn’t seem unlikely; that was a common pattern on Earth, after all, especially in places where future jobs dried up. It might explain some of Speaker Hulvex’s disdain for the city, too.

One of these days he should probably ask if the city had a name. Most did, but not all; even then, many that did were named more by location than by anything else, though the location did often drift into a proper name at some point.

“Then what is he getting out of it? People don’t help for nothing, especially not when it could cost them as much as the siphon does. Did you explain that to him? Fully?” Imiiki snapped right back at Speaker Hulvex.

Serenity wondered if she’d feel better if he were getting something important out of it. It almost sounded like she would. He stepped forward; there was no point in letting them continue to fight. “Speaker Hulvex offered to help with the reason I’m on Eitchen. As for warning me, yes, he did. It wasn’t really necessary; messing around with Essence when you don’t know what you’re doing is a great way to get hurt. I like to think I know enough to avoid that, at least; I never drain myself fully.”

Immiki’s attention switched to Serenity. She flew over to him, which gave him the chance to realize that even though she flew - floated? - with her head at eye level, she was only about three feet tall. “Are you telling me you know more about my spells than I do? I made this! I know everything there is to know about it!”

“Are you telling me you could refill one of these spheres on your own with no tools, not even a siphon?” Serenity watched Immiki carefully. He didn’t know anything about her particular type of Anemoi; he didn’t even know if she had the common Wind affinity or not. The orange of her sphere hinted that the answer was probably not, but it was entirely likely that the colors didn’t have anything to do with Affinities. 

Immiki winged backwards, clearly surprised.

Before she could respond, Serenity shook his head and let his smile form. “I didn’t think so. It’s not even a Skill for me; it’s natural to my Species. So perhaps you should accept that it’s not as hard for me as it is for you, just like it’s easier for you to fly than it is for me.”

That would be true even in Serenity’s Chimera form, though it might not be true in his draconic form. It was self-evidently true right now in his human form; he didn’t even have wings.

“You, you, … Fine!” Immiki shouted. “You can solve the problem that’s escaped me for decades! Of course you can, it’s easy!”

Speaker Hulvex tried to calm Immiki down. “Now, Immiki-”

Immiki whirled on him. “Don’t you “Now Immiki” me! I’ve known you since you were a child, Hulvex! A little boy, following his father around and sneaking into places he shouldn’t!  Did you really think I didn’t see you?”

Speaker Hulvex stared at Immiki. Serenity couldn’t tell if he was shocked that Immiki remembered him as a child, had noticed him when he thought she hadn’t, or was simply befuddled that she brought it up in the argument. Whatever the reason was, it did seem to derail the Speaker’s attempt to calm Immiki down. 

Fortunately, it also derailed Immiki. She spent the next ten minutes telling the Speaker everything she remembered from when he was a child that he’d done wrong. It wasn’t a short list, but Serenity noticed that it also wasn’t anything that was truly harmful; the young Speaker Hulvex seemed to have pushed boundaries until they broke. He sometimes got himself or occasionally someone else hurt, but it was never malicious. It sounded far more like a child finding out what worked, what didn’t, and why he shouldn’t play with matches.

Serenity didn’t hear that particular thing in Immiki’s recitation of Hulvex’s childhood faults, but he remembered it from his own childhood. He was fairly certain he’d been lucky to never burn anything other than his fingers when he got tired of trying to make the cobbled together primitive fire saw he made based on a Youtube video work and resorted to matches.

Huh. He’d totally forgotten about that. It was strange how memory worked sometimes.

Serenity waited until Immiki seemed to be winding down before he reminded her that he was there. “So, that was edifying I’m sure, but why don’t we talk about plans for the future?”

Immiki rounded on him, then seemed to deflate. She said a word Serenity didn’t recognize, but he could guess that it was profanity in a language he didn’t know. After a second curse, she returned to Bridge. “Fine then, ckikkif. What are we going to do?”

Serenity wasn’t certain what she called him, but he was certain it was an insult. He decided to ignore it and move on with what they needed to do. Hopefully it would calm her down. “The spheres, did you base them on dungeon cores or on something else?”

Immiki looked at him like he was nuts. “Dungeon cores break if you try to take them out of the dungeon and if you try to study them in the dungeon they send hordes of monsters at you. That’s not a good place to study even if the monsters are a lot of Tiers lower than you are, it’s distracting even if it’s not dangerous.”

There were ways to deal with that, but Immiki was supposed to be the first of equals, wasn’t she? If her friends weren’t her equals, they might not be able to maintain a completely safe area. It depended on the monster type, too, so finding a low enough Tier dungeon with simple, straightforward monsters might not be possible if you were relatively close to the Tier of the world. It also meant you were tying up an area that lower-Tier people could use, possibly even an entire dungeon, so it certainly wasn’t polite. “What did you base them on, then?”

“City nodes, of course! Did you know that a collection of city nodes doesn’t just connect to the other nodes and store information but can actually make decisions based on that information? They’re really complex and can have significant adaptability; they’re simply limited by their connection to the other nodes and by the rules that make them act as city nodes. That’s why they’re so large; more than three quarters of a city node is preconditions and restrictions. They can make complex decisions based on…” Immiki seemed to relax as she raved on about what was clearly one of her passions.

As far as Serenity could tell, she was saying that a city node was somewhere between a computer and a true AI like Aide, probably closer to the learning systems that were commonly called AIs but with some built-in limits and external correction. Immiki was never able to determine where that correction came from, but Serenity was certain it had to be the Voice. On Tzintkra it was definitely the planet; he still remembered when Tzintkra overrode his requests and also when it helped. It was probably Gaia on Earth, but Eitchen simply wasn’t well developed enough to play that role so it had to be the Voice.

Immiki seemed to have taken that idea and run with it to create “legacy orbs” for her friends and family when she left them behind. She combined the storage and processing power of the City Nodes with an enchantment that captured a snapshot of a person’s mind and Skills that also allowed the snapshot to learn and use their Skills in addition to conjuring the sort of presence-image she was talking through. It was fascinating even though Serenity was completely uninterested in duplicating her feat. He had suspicions that she’d stumbled on some of the same things that made dungeon cores work; if she hadn’t, he doubted they would feel sort of like dungeon cores to him.

Serenity listened for more than an hour before he decided he’d heard enough for now. Immiki’s sphere had noticeably dimmed, which meant they didn’t have much more time anyway. He waited for Immiki to pause; she did periodically, usually to take a breath but sometimes she seemed to actually want feedback to be sure that he understood what she was talking about. “Did you know that all City Nodes appear on ley lines?” 

On Earth, they all seemed to appear at nexuses, but that was probably because of how many nexuses Earth had with its splintered ley line system. Most planets didn’t have enough nexuses for that; a city might be over only one, which would be where the “main” node would appear. Perhaps it would be better to say the first node; it had to be a keystone to the system, but the Final Reaper had seen cities where the node in the nexus was not the node with the most authority. Destroying it still did very bad things to the city node system.

“Ley lines?” Immiki cocked her head to one side. “What’s a ley line?”

Serenity blinked. Ley lines were such a basic piece of knowledge to him that it took him a long moment to process that others might not even know they existed. He’d planned to ask Immiki if she’d ever looked into powering her legacy orbs using the natural magic of a ley line or nexus but how could he ask that if she didn’t know what a ley line was? “Uh, how do you think City Nodes are powered and connected?”

Immiki shook her head, which seemed to be a “no” in her language as well. “That was in the part I had to take out to get rid of the controls that made it a City Node. I had to work out another method of enlivening them, which is when I created the siphon. Using it was tiring, but I must have been strong enough; I didn’t have the issues others had. Of course, I also wasn’t trying to support eight used orbs, just one at a time that was empty.” She bit her lip and looked worried for a moment. “I hope I didn’t kill my chance to ever Tier up again. It wasn’t possible on Eitchen, so I wouldn’t know if I did.”

There wasn’t much Serenity could say to that, so he moved the topic back to what they actually needed to talk about. “We need to move the legacy orbs to use the magic source I know of; as far as I can tell, that means using the siphon is the best option. Will you wait on damaging or destroying it until we know if my method will work?”

“That’s what this was about?” Immiki sounded a little saddened. “I thought you were interested.”

“I am, but you don’t have much more time tonight,” Serenity said with a wave at her orb. “I figured I’d best get the question answered before you dissipate.”

Immiki seemed startled when she looked at her orb, like she hadn’t realized it was low. She turned her head back towards Serenity. “Will you call me to talk once you take care of that?”

Serenity smiled. He recognized the signs of someone who was lonely. “Yes.”

Lillene

Clearly, the best way to calm Immiki down is to get her talking about her pet project. It works!