Book 4 – Chapter 33 – Tabitha Booth – Dessert Parlor
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Flipping the cylindrical cloudy gemstone through my fingers, I couldn’t help but smile: it only took three months but Robert, Louella, and the others finally managed to get a wellbeing and vitality improving mandala for all the sweet tooths in the form of a racial sub-feature: Sweet Tooth’s Medicinal Io-Weatherstone. Sure it wasn’t a perfect solution to having a messed up immune system from being a trapped subrace, but it sure as hell made things a lot more manageable: no more having to think twice about taking medicine before heading out of the Enigma. Eyeing the io-gemstone, Margaret asked me as we made our way through Poor Gambler’s Sinchance to hit up the Endless Strip,

“So you just make one of thoses a week?”

“Yup, they told me I could make more too but not to go overboard. Something about the sub-feature not being made for mass production and the produced io-gems having diminishing returns if you use multiple at once,” I replied as I handed the io-weatherstone over to the taffy twined so she could get a better look. Even with her holding it, I could still feel my system and mandalas drawing on its limit charge. Would have been nice if it was a passive effect thing or at least rechargeable, I mused casually, leaving the blackzone and instantly feeling lighter as my effective tier returned to normal. Minus two to effective tier for every full tier was harsh even for a tier 3.2 like me.

They did say it was the best they could with the resources they had at time and what Robert wanted,” chimed Aiden from the back of my head as we made our way to the actual Las Vegas strip: even with the sky being clear and the air nice and crisp from all the city’s warding and boon glyphs, there weren’t as many people out in this section of the Endless Strip. I guess the cat was out of the bag at this point with how close Borolio was going to get to the city. From what I heard, a lot of residents were staying in the Babels or at a bare minimum two sections away from Summer-6.

Yeah I know, I would have just liked something a bit more fancy to help with my citizenship application,” I mentally replied before pausing to laugh and think how crazy it was that I was actually applying for an Endless Strip citizenship in my spare time. It was only a few years ago I figured I would never be able to move to Las Vegas and now I was living in an Enigma-turned-super distortion that was a part of the Endless Strip. I guess I did have a portfolio of mandalas that allowed me to pull off a superhero jig if I wanted, so I was a natural shoe in.

“Hey, do you think the SIEB is going to be busy when we get there?” asked Margaret as we found a set of rideshare scooters to rent out so we didn’t have to walk all the way to the nearest monorail station.

“God, it’s probably going to be packed,” I replied with a sigh: if we were going to the Endless Strip’s central SIEB for the Om-Ge-In hub for a huge deal on making your first Alternate Source’s connection then everyone and their mother interested in the Asset System or trying out Alternate Source magic would likely be there. From what we heard from Umi after she basically cleaned deck in our failed base defense attempt, making Alternate Source’s connection was relatively straightforward, but it was straight forward to her, an emperor-spirit apex. Probably wasn’t going to be that easy, even for mages like us.

“You think we should have skipped breakfast or something?”

“Naw, no way we would have been able to beat the crowd.”

“Yeah… gah I should have just asked Mita to hire us a limousine or something.”

“You really are cashing on the fact your boyfriend is rich?” I teased as we scootered our way to the station.

“Say the girl cashing in on the fact her girlfriend is a powerful figurehead in a Hidden City and has a sugar daddy of a blackzone for a home,” teasingly shot back Margaret, drinking the extravagant sights of flashy tall resorts and casinos and a sky covered in crisscrossing glyphs.

After a series of monorail stops across multiple worlds, we finally arrived at OGI-6 and were greeted by the sight of a ton of people walking between sprawling dark-coloured office buildings and resorts with soft chromatic trimmings. And with that I remembered why I didn’t come here often: being in a special locale hub in another layer of reality was trippy and the place was always crowded. Pulling out my phone, I double checked the address to make sure we were going.

This is such an uncomfortable place,” murmured Vertrala from his personal space, causing both Scalugon the Last and Scalugon the Second from their own personal spaces. Rolling my eyes, I felt Scalugon the Second’s legacy and mirroring collage-room connecting me to Margaret, my alt-rhi, and three of my other self’s housemates: Hime, Jones, and Nicole. That was definitely something I was going to have to look into that collage-room later, but now was time for Alternate Souce’s connections. Besides, I need more practice with pushing myself, like maintaining multiple modes on them because mixing modes was a severe drain on me even with the extra reserves their mandalas gave me.

Yeah, no kidding, dimensional miasma is the worst,” I telepathically replied with a shudder, focusing on circulating mana to ward off the sparse amount of dimensional miasma that managed to make its way into this Citadel-version of Las Vegas. Glancing over to the right as Margaret and I followed my phone’s instructions, I noticed a new set of World Bridges, Neither World Bridges. Well I guess I know where they are sourcing the magical devices for making Alternate Source’s connections, I noted, not even wanting to figure out just what neither between hub that that trio of Neither World Bridges led to.

Walking up to the central SIEB and staring at its polished obsidian glass exterior, Margaret and I noticed that there actually wasn’t a huge crowd. Scratching her head, Margaret commented,

“Maybe we missed the crowd?"

“I hope so,” I replied before following the crowd into the building only to get hit by such a strong and weird sense of vertigo that what little chronophasia I had started to flare up. This place was spatially expanded to all hell and was practically filled to the brim with people who obviously were here for the deal also. Quickly suppressing the urge to throw up and forcing my sense of time to return to normal, I scanned the oversized lobby to try and find a counter with dozens of people waiting in lines. After getting adjusted to looking around dealing with how bright the place was despite the dark and honestly a bit foreboding monolithic style of the interior, I finally managed to spot one out towards the back.

“Hello, how may I help you?” inquired the receptionist child of the locale with a professional smile as we finally got the front of the luckily short line, her pitch black suit rippling with a sort of dark red pattern made out of what I could only assume was pure value funneled through this hub’s instance of the Asset System.

“We’re here for the deal on making an Alternate Source’s connection,” answered Margaret, only for the receptionist to sigh and pull out some sort of scanner and waving it over us.

“Well you both are clean, no Alternate Source’s connection yet. Let me print out your tickets for the 99% percent off deal. Do you two want to use the same booth? It will save time.”

“Yes please,” I replied, catching the child of the locale’s drift: she wanted to get this done quickly and I couldn’t blame her, she was probably dealing with people like us all day. Taking the pair of tickets and listening to her instructions, Margaret and I went to pushing our way through the crowd until we hit the hallway that led to our booth.

“So you or me first?” asked Margaret as she stared at the giant enchanted cross between an ATM and a teller booth that was operated by an automaton and flanked by countless hard light screens.

“Pretty sure we can both go at the same time,” I replied, pointing out to the fact that the booth’s desk was split into three different sections.

“Oh yeah. Okay then.” Conjuring up my card from Vagesal’s Asset System, I made my way over to the middle section and inserted my ticket. The sound of buzzing as I suddenly found myself being forced to focus through my mind’s eye: I could feel my manalogical sense of detecting pieces of a being, orgsen, drift away from my Sea of Phenomena and move toward my mind and the Alternate Source that resided in it.

It felt weird, like I could move around within this space like I was in my real body: probably the booth helping out, which would explain all the screens surrounding the edges of my field of view. Walking up to the tower-like slab that was my Alternate Source, I could see that its shimmering citron colouration was reflecting my colour attunements to a degree. Pressing my hand to the Alternate Source, I got to work and felt a connection form with three empty sub-connections as I gave the input of I wanted this one to connect to blackzones since the type of system was already decided.

Instantly the first of the sub-connections went to linking toward the Om-Ge-In hub’s Asset System, leaving the other two open for me to decide whatever I wanted. Naturally I used the second sub-connection to my multi-system slot connection for the Hybrid System of Warring Cores since stratum 0 Alternate Source’s connection could actually power-link up to stratum 2s instead of just stratum 0s. Which left the third sub-connection… I could have just done a self-empowerment to make the link and power-link stronger which would have been useful cause the power-link was for getting another kit without filling out the multi-system slot’s maximum weight. I also could use it to make an alternate gateway, the new weird alternative to the Sea of Phenomena for spellcrafting that was directly connected to the Alternate Source. But after a bit of thinking, I decided to power-link to my Phantasm Kinesio Eyes synthesis feature cause why not get some support from Aiden and cake-eye-balls.

“I’m done, how about you?” asked Margaret at about the same time that I was returning to reality.

“Yup, I got everything set up,” I replied, feeling everything shift into place as the booth drew money out of my card. Conjuring up my new card and comparing it to my old one, I noticed this one had a dragon emblem on it instead of a medieval suit of armour. Great… I got another dragon… I thought with a tinge of annoyance, I already had three dragons to deal with and how I had a freaking fourth one from the looks of it.

“What did you use your third sub-connection on?”

“My Phantom Kinesio Eyes, figured it would be a useful synthesis to power-link with how cheap it was making things.” I mean seriously, we didn’t even break one grand in cost and we had two power-links to stratum 1 things. “How about you?”

“I just did it for my system slot’s connection for the Asset System, figured I might as well try to see if I can get a kit that lets me use Titanala, even though her flations are stupidly expensive.”

“Yeah, I don’t think a kit is going to make things cheaper.”

“I know… it was just a thought. Also, why didn’t you power-link Vertrala? Isn’t he your bread and butter?” commented Margaret as she conjured up her own new card.

Indeed, why didn’t you do that?” snidely followed up Vertrala from his personal space.

“Because I figure let’s not start out with him for once? I mean I also have both Scalugons and now a new dragon from the looks of it,” I explained with a sigh, feeling the new dragon of an asset stir in their personal space: a flash of a draconic figure even slimmer than either Scalugon to the point that I felt like it was an eastern dragon, or maybe aquatic.

“Well… maybe we should get a second and maybe third Alternate Source’s connections while we’re at it?” suggested the taffy twined as she pointed to a blinking floating screen that was offering 75% off for up to three more Alternate Source’s connections. “Might as well get them up to par or something?”

Yes please do so,” muttered the new dragon, causing me to sigh in frustration: I knew Margaret was just looking for an excuse to spend more money since the discount was pretty huge and if I knew dragons, this new one wouldn’t let me forget if I said no to this. Thank god Robert and Mita gave us a lot of money, the perks of being Margaret’s friend and the most famous sweet tooth… not counting Jean, I told myself as I went back to the desk and accepted the offer. 

As my Alternate Source came back into view, I saw my new connection appear in the form of a protrusion coming out of its slab-like surface. And of course drifting around it was my new dragon which was definitely an aquatic dragon: compared to either Scalugons’ serpentine figure with six arms and pair of legs, this one had two sets of wings and a set of rudder-like back legs-wings. Looking at me with its eyeless face and a set of eight floating crystal balls, it commented with a surprisingly feminine voice,

“Greeting, I am Sapphira, at your service.”

“Oh wow, a girl dragon… wait are you an actual dragon?” I replied before pausing and noticing how mechanical her scales were, nope another quasi-dragon.

“I don’t see why that matters, now are you going to give me more connections?” replied Sapphira with a huff. Just another draconic summon with a definitely draconic temperament. Rolling my eyes I went to work and started to work on the second Alternate Source’s connection.

Filling it out with the first sub-connection being an empowerment to the first Alternate Source’s connection, one thing led to another. Using the second and third sub-connections, I power-linked Dragon Beard Dragon Fruit (Adventuring) legacy facsimile and my mirroring collage-room, Scalugon’s Meeting Chambers, and saw that I could actually splurge on another Alternate Source’s connection. Next thing I knew I had made a third one that empowered my first Alternate Source’s connection while power-linking to both my Alternate Source itself and my heim of selves after I decided to take some inspiration from Robert’s physical therapy proxy body.

And… I think I just overdid it… I mused as I noticed just how much I spent. Welp, there went my next two months of savings for magic stuff. At least I got yet another powerful dragon out of this.

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