Lilith, Kali, Maven, and Amara had just gotten to their seats when Tess and Ellie arrived. “Aunt Lilith, do you know what this is about?” Tess asked curiously.

“Not much, except it’s something big.” Lilith said. “Pandora’s been pretty cagey about it, she hasn’t been sharing her senses or memories with the rest of us for the past few days.”

“Surely you must have some idea, though.” Ellie said. “I can’t imagine this would have happened overnight.”

Lilith scratched her chin thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, Pandora and Jerry have about ten different things that they’ve been working on that would be big enough. We can probably scratch off eldritch stuff, I don’t think they were particularly close to any breakthroughs there, but that only knocks off like five things.”

“Sheesh, that much?” Ellie said. “They’ve been busy, haven’t they?”

“Yeah. They apparently want to make the most of the time when Jerry is coming over every day to do research together. Once the whole plane-building lesson business is completed, they’re planning to go back to researching separately most of the time. I think they still intend to do joint research sessions once a week or so, but not every single day like it has been recently.”

“Well, it’s nice to see Jerry find someone she connects with so well.” Amara said. “I think the company is doing her good, and it certainly seems to be doing her research good, if this whole event is any indicator.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty clear that she’s been having a blast with Pandora.” Lilith said. “I can’t say that I personally enjoy the research process, but that’s part of the reason we made Pandora in the first place.”

“To tell you the truth, I used some personality traits from Jerry as inspiration when I was crafting Pandora’s personality.” Kali said. “Mostly in respect to her attitude towards research. I guess it’s not a huge surprise that they’re getting along so well, especially since Pandora’s a bit more…” Kali paused, clearly searching for the right word, “easy to work with than Jerry. Socially speaking, she takes after Lilith more than Jerry, and I think that probably makes her a better lab partner. If they were both exactly like Jerry then I don’t think their partnership would work out.”

“Well, as long as everyone’s happy, I see no reason to complain.” Maven said. “How are things at your place, by the way? I haven’t been able to drop in as much as I would have liked.”

“Oh, they’re going great.” Lilith said. “Levia’s fit in real nicely, and I think everyone’s enjoyed having more people over, it’s a real breath of fresh air. Just the other day Lia and –”

Lilith was interrupted by the sound of Jerry clearing her throat, magically amplified so as to reach the whole of the large audience chamber they were in. “Thank you for taking time out of your days to come here.” She said. “I promise you that you will find it worth your while. First off, I would like to take a moment to introduce my research partner, Pandora.”

Pandora, having moved on from being an arachne and now taking the form of a lamia, slithered onto the stage. “Hello everyone!” She said brightly, voice amplified just like Jerry’s. “My name is Pandora, and I’m one of Lilith’s Parallels. If you’re not familiar with our situation, well, it’s complicated, but for now just know that I’m one of the many facets of one of Kali’s Higher Beings. Recently I’ve been researching all kinds of things with Jerry, and we’re happy to say that we’ve made a rather important breakthrough!”

Jerry nodded, snapping her fingers and causing a large machine to appear next to them. “Specifically, we’d like to say that we have finally proved Mana-Worship equivalence!” She paused for a moment to let that sink in. “We’ve postulated for many millennia that the two are connected in some fundamental way, but thanks to Pandora we were able to successfully turn Mana into Worship!”

A murmur washed across the room at that. Even Lilith found herself a little stunned; she couldn’t think of a bigger breakthrough they could have made. Depending on how efficient the process was, being able to turn Mana into Worship had the potential to change life as they knew it, effectively trivializing one of the biggest resource bottlenecks Administrators faced.

“Unfortunately, this process if not yet practical for day-to-day use.” Pandora said. “It takes a significant amount of time and effort, and is by no means efficient, but it is possible for anyone to do. It is our hope that you all will take some time to experiment with it, and hopefully find something slightly more efficient in the process.”

“To that end, we’re going to a do a demonstration.” Jerry said. “Behind me is a Worship measurement device, calibrated to read out the Worship Pandora has on her. For the sake of this demonstration, she’s cut herself off from most Worship she has access to, so there should be little to no background Worship muddying the results."

Pandora laid a hand on the device, and a screen near the top displayed a ten. “As you can see, I have ten units of Worship at the moment.” She said. “Now, Jerry has with her some Blood Money, which she will be handing to me momentarily. I’m sure most of you are familiar with it, but for those that aren’t, Blood Money is a warped, distorted, and heavily diluted form of Worship created by Amelia, one of Jerry’s Higher Beings.

“It is notable for being received not from the usual channels, but when the holder of a specific ability kills another creature, regardless of whether or not that creature has a soul. Their internal Mana is siphoned and converted into Blood Money, and we estimate that it takes around fifty thousand or so Blood Money to equal the power of one unit of raw Worship. In terms of the Mana used, that comes out to somewhere in the ballpark of twenty or thirty million standard Mana units to a single unit of Worship. Jerry, if you would?”

Jerry laid a hand on Pandora’s arm. “I am transferring fifty thousand units of Blood Money to Pandora right now.” She informed the audience. “Notice how it does not register upon the device.” She removed her hand, and true to her word the device didn’t register a change in Pandora’s Worship stores.

“Now comes the tricky part.” Pandora said. “I have identified several key parts of the structure of Blood Money that, when removed, start a chain reaction. This does away with the trappings of the Blood Money, stripping the extraneous information away from it and converting all units of it in your possession into raw Worship.

“Due to my nature, I am able to cheat a little at this process and do it significantly faster than normal, but rest assured that this is possible for everyone, it will just take longer. I’m going to begin this process now, and while I do, Jerry is going to talk a little more about what we’ve found.”

“Right.” Jerry said. “You see, just the existence of Blood Money itself is meaningless for proving Mana-Worship equivalence; the tech behind it was something of a black box for a while, and it was entirely possible that the worship that was being ‘created’ was simply bits of my system being siphoned and turned into something else.

“However, with Pandora’s help, I was able to demystify the process, and confirm that the kernel of Worship contained within each unit of Blood Money is indeed produced from raw Mana. And, once we knew how the creation of Blood Money worked, it only took a little while longer to create a process that didn’t require any of the other effort that went into obtaining it; no ability or killing required, simply raw Mana and someone proficient in the methodology.

“I have a large number of instruction manuals and workbooks that I will be handing out to each of you after this meeting, that will guide you through the processes we’ve created. Once you have worked through that material, you should be able to both extract Blood Money from raw Mana and convert it into usable Worship.

“This may seem daunting, but we have had several of my Higher Beings go through these books, and most were able to pick it up within a day or two of practice. With that in mind, I am confident that all of you will have little issue learning this process, but do know that I am more than happy to help give advice if you’re struggling. Just be aware that I am quite busy at the moment, and it may take some time for me to get back to you, but I will get back to you and help you out.”

“Finished!” Pandora said brightly. And, true to her word, the counter on the device ticked up from a ten to an eleven. “Currently this process is rough; we would like to be able to skip the Blood Money stage and transition directly to Worship, but in the short time since we’ve made this breakthrough, we have not yet been able to do so.

“Still, we are very confident that it is possible to skip the Blood Money stage; in the conversion to proper Worship, we are simply exploiting quirks in the end structure of Blood Money to reduce it to its true state, we aren’t actually changing the material to Worship. That happens in the creation of Blood Money itself, and we think that there is something in the creation process that we simply have yet to be able to isolate and deduce what is responsible.”

Jerry gave a nod. “With that in mind, we would ask each of you to spend just a small amount of time tinkering with things once you’ve learned the process; we do not need you to spend days on end grappling with this, but just a bit of time here and there. And, if your Higher Beings can do so as well, that would be optimal, though we understand that many are busy and won’t have time for it, so it’s by no means required, just nice to have.

“Once you have, please send a report to me or Pandora on what you have tried and the results, and we’ll send updates out periodically on our findings. Our hope is that having so many different eyes on the problem will help us unravel this mystery just a bit faster, and we appreciate any cooperation you can give us. And…that is all we have prepared for you today. Please proceed to the stage in an orderly fashion, and I’ll hand out the practice material to each of you.”

An excited murmur filled the room as the audience stood, and Lilith was about to stand as well, but was interrupted by another set of senses sliding into her awareness. Hey, I’m back! Pandora said. You don’t need to get up, obviously, you’ll be receiving my memories of the thing tonight, so no worries there. How many people are with you, though? I’m going to come say hi and I might as well bring the books with me.

Lilith did a quick headcount. Five others. She said. Maven, Tess, Ellie, Amara, and Kali.

Perfect, be there in a sec.

“You guys don’t need to get up.” Lilith told everyone. “Pandora’s bringing stuff to us.”

“Oh, did she finally rejoin the connection?” Kali asked.

“Yeah.” Lilith said.

“I sure did!” Pandora said, teleporting next to Lilith with a stack of books in her arms. “And boy am I glad to be back; I’d forgotten how lonely it is to be on your own.”

“You know, some of us live like that all the time, Aunt Pandora.” Amara said, smiling wryly.

“Well, be glad you don’t know what you’re missing.” Pandora said, beginning to hand books out to everyone. “It’s like having two computer monitors; once you upgrade from one, you never want to go back.”

“I don’t think the rest of us would feel that way.” Maven said, smiling slightly as she accepted her book. “I’m pretty sure the rest of us would be pretty overloaded.”

“Doesn’t the swarm have a few people like that, though?” Ellie asked. “They share a similar sentiment, apparently.”

“Yeah, but they’re all…different.” Maven said. “You know, like…all hopped up on Amelia’s modified system, who knows what shortcuts it’s using to make things easier. And even then, they don’t have multiple personalities, just multiple bodies, I think.”

“Suit yourselves.” Pandora said with a shrug. “Anyway, what did you think of the presentation?”

“To be honest, I’m kinda floored.” Tess said. “I knew something was in the works with Blood Money, but with how Jerry had been talking, I wasn’t expecting it to be unraveled for decades yet.”

“Well, I’m cheating, remember?” Pandora said, tapping her head. “I’ve got that whole comprehension thing going on, and this process doesn’t use any eldritch stuff in it, so I got to read it all. It still took quite a while to get through, the thing was incredibly complicated, but we were able to skip years of work thanks to that bit of cheating. After that was just trial and error, and a little bit more cheating to determine how best to unpackage the Worship.”

“So…you mentioned you get to make the unpackaging process faster, right?” Amara said curiously. “Is it enough for you to use personally?”

“I’m afraid to say it’s not.” Pandora said. “While it would be faster than just waiting on natural Worship gain, that’s only because our planes have so few people. And even though spending all day doing this would triple the personal Worship supply for Lilith and us Parallels, it’s not even half as much as what Kali gets, and we just don’t need that Worship at the moment. Our time is better spent on other things.”

“That bad?” Amara asked.

“That bad.” Pandora confirmed. “Like we said, this whole thing just isn’t practical to use right now unless you are doing nothing else and desperately want an extra point of Worship every half day or so. But this is only the early stages of this, we’re really hoping that in the next few decades or centuries we’ll be able to get the process into a significantly more practical state.”

“But not for now.” Kali said, grabbing Pandora’s hand. “You have been far too distant these past few days. The kids and I really want to spend some time with you, so for all of tomorrow you’re going to be with us, okay?”

“I suppose I can take time out of my busy schedule.” Pandora said, sighing theatrically as she leaned down to give Kali a kiss.

Lilith let them kiss for a moment, then broke them up. “Okay you two, we should probably stop flirting in front of our nieces.” She said.

“You guys are cute.” Maven said, smiling fondly. “It makes me really happy to see you like this.”

“Well, you’re sweet.” Kali said, walking over to pull Maven into a hug. “It makes me feel lucky to have such good nieces.”

They chatted for a while more, and then Kali turned to Amara. “Amara, I realized I never formally invited you over to my place like everyone else.” She said. “You are free to come over at any time you want, no warning, no nothing. If you want, we can show you how to pay a lump sum of Worship so that you won’t have to use any more to go between our planes, and then you can just show up.”

“But what if you’re asleep or something?” Amara asked. “I’d hate to wake you up if I came at a bad time.”

“At least one of the Parallels is awake at all times.” Pandora said. “We should pick up your request within half a second. But, yeah, we’ve got a lot of unused space in the dungeon and we’re trying to turn it into a sort of hangout place for everyone so…involved in the situation. And, of course, though you may not have any…additions, you’re family, and we’d love to have you over whenever.”

“Well, that does sound pretty nice.” Amara said. “How much Worship are we talking about for the lump sum?”

“Around thirty.” Kali said. “A little steep, we know, but it’s for the rest of time and the hope is that it’ll pay for itself if you come over enough.”

“Oh.” Amara said, a hint of disappointment in her tone. “I’ll need to save up a little, then.”

“Here, this should help.” Pandora said, transferring some Worship to Amara. “Consider it your allowance.”

“Really?” Amara said gratefully. “Thank you!”

“Eh, it’s all just extra Worship I got in the process of testing this junk out.” Pandora said. “So really it’s no biggie, it was just laying around. It’s certainly worth having family come over more often. Now, if you would like, I could teach you how to pay that sum now, it’s not hard.”

“Please do.” Amara said.

“Perfect. So, first, pretend you would be going to the plane normally…”

Fighterman481

I'm not sure how big this comes across to people, but this is an earth-shattering revelation for Administrators, an e=mc^2 moment. It's not useful now, but if the process if refined...well, it'll be just as impactful to Administrator politics as nuclear bombs are to ours. 

I don't have a huge amount to say about this, though, so next time...well, I have some ideas, but there's just under a month of time between now and the next chapter (due to scheduling with the holiday special and my move) (note from the present: chapter coming out on normal schedule, that was quite a while ago), so I'm gonna keep quiet for now in case I think of something better.

I can't really tell you to look forward to an unknown, so, as always, thanks for reading!