He looked around for his over robe but didn't see it. He looked into his inner s.p.a.ce to find nothing, at least at first. His s.p.a.ce was as ma.s.sive as ever and all of the stuff he had stored in it was scattered to the edges, most having been chewed up. There was no problem reaching the center anymore but the only thing there was what could only be described as a white hole.

His soul and spiritual bloodlines had merged into something he couldn't understand, had no reference with which to do so. The only translation that came through to three dimensional thought process was that they had fused into some kind of ring portal with a pin p.r.i.c.k center to some violently energetic place. Reaching out through the void of his inner s.p.a.ce for anything gave him the sensation of jumping long distances but there was no sense of energy expenditure because the s.p.a.ce was a part of him.

His perception could be anywhere within it and anything within it could be where he wanted it to be. With this realization, he stopped searching for things and started drawing them. Eventually all of the remnants of his things were gathered in one place but there was one 'thing' that resisted his pull. Not so much resisted as ineffectually tried to dig its feet in, metaphorically speaking, and screamed not to be moved.

At a distance from the center where the radiation of essence from the pin p.r.i.c.k 'white hole' became a mild bombardment but still far away from the edge, sat his mini plane, still orbiting a chunk of condensed eternium. It had shrunk some and there were far fewer plants but everything looked more 'real' and 'alive'. He looked for signs of his summons only to find that the elementals had fused into the plane, transforming into living law of a kind. The horse was gone but his 'fairies' had condensed into one dormant form, hiding as some kind of potential within the spiritual ring portal at the center of his s.p.a.ce.

It wasn't all five of them, however. One had 'ran away from home', leaving little more than a trail of dissipating connection. Another was several miles away, connection withering but still present.

Returning his focus to the outside, Orison scanned around with spirit sense. It was as clear as his normal senses but not much further in scope. Things like walls and ground weren't much of an obstacle to it, though. He had a lot more control over what he could sense or not sense with it as well.

About eighty feet away in an outhouse, Zeke was relieving himself of some tension with a magazine. Feeling guilty and a little embarra.s.sed, Orison left him to it without further spying. While he waited for the ex-mercenary to finish with 'me time', Orison did a round of meditation to discover that his concepts and understanding had condensed down to almost nil.

Although it didn't leave him with much, metaphysically speaking, Orison could feel that what concepts remained were the very best of what he had. It could have waited. He might be set up for long term success but he couldn't imagine having less abilities to be a good thing for whatever situation he was currently in.

Reviewing, he realized it wasn't impossible to do things like healing or even summoning but that they would have to be augmented with ritual since that was the law of this land. The only innate abilities that he could still use directly were telekinesis and his devouring s.p.a.ce mode. Both were heavy and draining. He'd have to sharpen his physical training back up and really log some time with ritual study to get up to snuff again.

While he was experimenting around, Orison discovered that the emissions from the white hole could pa.s.sively invigorate inert essence. At a rough guess, he placed it at being able to process a fist sized thick sh.e.l.l's worth a day. If that were the only consideration, the size and newfound control of his s.p.a.ce would give him a lot of room to play but he had to worry about life essence reserves. That was something that didn't replenish so quickly.

For the time being, the young mage had figured out all he could without asking some questions. His experimentation had taken over an hour and Zeke still wasn't leaving the outhouse. He would have left it alone and given the ex-mercenary all the time he needed but there seemed to be something a little off about it and the unknowns of their situation were pressing like a toothache in the back of the young mage's head.

"You, uh, alright in there?" Orison said awkwardly.

There was silence for awhile before Zeke said, "I think I had too much of that candy bar the lady who saved you gave me. Can you check it out and see if your witch doctor stuff can figure it out. The other two bars are in the drawer under the book shelves."

Orison went back in to the cabin and inspected the 'candy bars'. The writing on the empty wrapper in the trash was in a language somewhere between cuneiform and the pictograph writing style of an animation call Hunter Vs. Hunter, unreadable. Luckily, the smell of the product and his spirit sight gave him an idea of what the problem was. To make sure, Orison ate a test bite of a bar and ended up eating the whole thing like he was starving to death.

Once his body had absorbed all it could, the young mage shunted the excess 'qi', spirit and life essence into his s.p.a.ce. At first he was worried about the presumed 'qi' being structure poison but it was so mild that it converted to stamina and a warm flow of bolstering essence of unknown but beneficial quality. Too much of anything is bad and even Orison would have been troubled if he didn't have something to catch the overflow.

Orison handed a few items in through the door and said, "Okay. Eat the lotus seeds before the air drains them of their potency... Take the knife and make a small poke hole in the prominent vein of your swollen, er, toe. Due to the excess good stuff from the supplement bar, it'll stop bleeding on its own once enough pressure has been released... Catch that blood in the cup. Once the blood as been exposed to air for just a bit, cut it with the alcohol and mix it decent before drinking it."

Zeke cut off further instruction as he said, "You want me to drink it!?"

The young mage clarified and continued. "Its more like what will bond with the blood that I want you to drink. It'll give you a little boost to your growth. Don't get carried away with the draining, though. If the cut's too big or you force extra out, you could do damage neither of us is going to be happy about having to heal... Once you're done with all that, rub the aloe on any, um, raw spots if you have any."

Once Orison heard a tiny pop followed by a small whimper, he left, stomach flipping in sympathetic nausea. A few minutes later, Zeke stepped out of the outhouse with half the bottle of vodka gone.

When Zeke offered the items back to the young mage, orison took the knife and bottle. "These two, I'll take. The cup's all yours, buddy... If you're up to it, mind telling me what happened and how we got out here?"

The ex-mercenary nodded. "You got your head blown off by a sniper rifle. It exploded like a watermelon hit by a sledgehammer. The helmet of your suit came out when the bullet was still pa.s.sing through, throwing shards of it everywhere too. I even got cut by a piece... Then again, it might have been a piece of your skull or a tooth. It's hard to tell for sure."

Feeling a little green, Orison said, "Okaaay. Enough on that. What happened afterwards?"

Zeke said, "From what I remember, a six inch dark spot that looked kinda person shaped came out of you and went the direction the bullet came from. Then a lady came out of what looked like a, no offense, v*gina made of light and then I don't remember much until I came back around with her shoving the bars into my hand, asking me to look after you for a couple of days because it wasn't safe for her to stick around.

"When I asked her why, she said she was too high on some hype- hyper extraction line..." Zeke paused, looking troubled.

Orison added helpfully, "Hypostatic abstraction line?"

Zeke snapped his fingers and pointed at Orison. "That's the one... She said she was invalidating existence. Do you have any idea what the h.e.l.l she was talking about?"

Orison said, "Most people say honey is sweet but you can say honey has sweetness. If you do, then you can compare different brands of honey for which is sweeter and so on. If you did that with all the different factors that we use to identify something, it would be possible to identify one that is so exemplary of what that object is to us that the an object at the bottom of the same list might no longer seem like it's that object at all.

"In her case, she's so 'real' that this reality is invalidated by her presence. Because we're in a low dimensional world, that's dangerous. I'll fill you in on that some other time... Did she say anything else?"

Ready to drop whatever thoughts were paining him, Zeke said, "Yeah. She threw around some stuff about grandfathered warranties and a old as h.e.l.l recall that was placed on the teaser suit you had. Even though the last thing she said sounded like it was just a list of words, it might be important. So, I focused mainly on trying to remember that.

"For accidentally invalidating us, after she used a 'retrieve' scroll, she used something that I couldn't understand but roughly stuck in my head as 'filling in what's missing with what is truest'... Whatever THAT was, she looked like it really pushed her bottom line and she seemed like a nice gal... To finish it off, she revived us and brought us to a place where we wouldn't get slapped by the backlash. Once again, don't know why there would be one and I don't know what kind of backlash it was. She didn't say."

Orison said, "Do you know where we are and how long we've been here?"

Zeke said, "Well, we've been here just shy of two days. I done some looking around yesterday and lost the urge to when I realized that this was the only real safe spot. Don't know why that is, but we're surrounded by some pretty spooky stuff."

Orison frowned. "That's strange. I sensed that one of my, uh, summons is nearby. I wonder why they didn't stop in to say hi."

The ex-mercenary said, "Summons? Is that like Jimmy's invisible friend? I know he's real but that doesn't change the fact he's invisible."

"Easiest way to answer that is 'same flower, different kind of cake'... I'm not going to complain about it but I can't believe I was saved by a warranty and given some extra service because of a product recall. It doesn't give me high hopes for greater reality." Orison said.

It looked like Zeke had a light turn on in his head. "Oh, that's right. She did say something else. It was right after I was fixed or whatever the h.e.l.l it was she did... She was surprised that one of the products made it so far away from the reality splay it belonged to. We're a couple over... You have any idea on that one?"

Orison thought for awhile and responded, "Not really. If I guess from the use of 'splay' and I a.s.sume potential realities start to decrease in number the higher up we go, then a splay of realities would be an ever widening slice belonging to a specific higher reality that climbers funnel towards. It has to do with low, mid and high dimensional reality stuff I haven't really explained to you yet because I didn't know if you were going to become a climber or not."

Zeke said, "What's a climber?"

Oriosn looked around and saw that it was getting fairly late in the day. "Alright. It looks like we're going to be staying here until morning anyway. I'll tell you about what a climber is and all that. I'm pretty sure you have the juice to be one now anyway."

Over the course of the late afternoon and early evening, Orison explained his journey. He skipped over some sensitive details and left out things that he didn't think Zeke would be interested in knowing but was pretty thorough otherwise. They also split up and shared the last supplement bar within safely timed intervals to keep it from being made worthless by the greedy air. Orison would have saved it in his s.p.a.ce but the ex-mercenary wanted it and it was his. At least he was willing to share.

As the sun set, Orison began feeling tired. It had been a long time since he had experienced drowsiness like a normal person. He didn't know exactly what the cause was but considering everything that happened, the young mage felt that only time would be able to answer the nearly endless questions he had.

Like the previous day, Orison came to like someone had flipped a switch on him. This time it was the crack of dawn. He looked down to the floor where Zeke had made a pallet to sleep on. The man looked like he had a fight for his life. The young mage quickly looked himself over to see that he was perfectly fine, if in need of reactivating his suit, which he did.

Turning his attention back to the ex-mercenary, Orison saw that the faint bruising and scratches were fading even as he watched. It made the young mage wonder how bad he had looked like earlier. He was even more curious to find out what happened.

Since Zeke wasn't in danger but in desperate need of new clothes, as a rag of a t-s.h.i.+rt and torn boxers was all the man had left, Orison combed through his s.p.a.ce to find that there was a lot more stuff in it and quite a few more motes of condensed eternium floating around. It dawned on him that more time might have pa.s.sed than either of them was aware and this was his share of abyssal t.i.thing.

That wasn't the only thing that changed from the day before. The withered connection he had with the remaining 'fairy' was gone. It had went the way of the other connection he could barely feel, off world and most likely out of this reality.

Sifting through the shopping mall worth of stuff dumped into his s.p.a.ce, Orison found a d.a.m.n good set of motorcycle riding leathers that would serve the ex-mercenary well. If the array of most advanced items was anything to go off of, it was somewhere in the mid eighties out in the wide world. That was quite a bit shocking but all things considered, Orison really didn't feel overly awed by it.

Suddenly curious and inspired, the young mage dusted off some unused knowledge and decided to test how much of a law unto itself his s.p.a.ce had become. Mixing the new understandings of ritual with old knowledge of enchanting from his first world, Orison bent his s.p.a.ce to his will and performed a series of enchantments on the set of clothes. Even the socks weren't spared.

Orison's budding excitement cooled rather quickly as the enchantments performed without ritual work began buckling and twisting before he removed them into the world. Once done, Orison was rather disappointed with the result. Only a fifth of his investment manage to stick which made for decent armor-like clothes with a resistance to heat and cold that wasn't to sneeze at. A silver lion with gold accents that hung on a thick neck chain even managed to carry a small aid to healing on it. The rest was either so weak it was negligible or didn't stick at all.

While he consoled himself that the knowledge and experience was worth it, if nothing else, the young mage tapped Zeke on the shoulder. Clothes and chain flew as he found himself pinned chest down under the man. There was a slightly wild look in Zeke's eyes that only managed to fade after a handful of breaths.

"Alright. I'll take that as a lesson learned on how not to wake you but my feelings, and therefore you, are about to get f***ed up if you don't let go of me," Orison said unhappily.

Zeke grinned in a way that Orison almost took as a challenge before the ex-mercenary let him go and the young mage remembered how misleading Zeke's slightly 'evil by nature' face made every expression.

The man helped lift the mage back up and dust off. "Good. You're you."

Orison decided to ignore the slight sound of disappointment in Zeke's voice. "While you're checking out your new threads, maybe you can tell me what happened last night? I would really like to f***ing know!"

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