Broken Lands

The second of the feathered treasures Xin’ri didn’t want to try to modify was something Sophia would have picked up because it was feathered rather than because of its power without advice from Notii. Based on the description the World Tree gave, it would have been more useful for Dav than for Sophia, but Notii pointed out that the Lifeweb was a “mental network.” More than that, he knew someone else who could enhance others through the Lifeweb, and she used a lesser version of the same item. They were apparently common among the enhancers of the Et’Unii Clan, at least the ones who worked their magic over the Lifeweb.

They weren’t the only people who used items that enhanced their Lifeweb links, of course, but the other uses weren’t relevant to Sophia.

Clarity Adornment

Increases the clarity and range of mental networks. Requires attunement.

It quickly became apparent that Sophia couldn’t easily put it on by herself. While the main portion of the “adornment” was a jeweled brooch on a spray of feathers, it was attached to a golden loop that was intended to fit around a ponytail. A golden “feather” hung from the loop on a beaded chain, while two more beaded with real feathers on the end split off from the main one. Sophia wasn’t sure what they were for, but Ci’an braided them into hair on either side of her face that she kept out of the ponytail. According to Ci’an, the side braids were important for balance. Sophia wasn’t sure what that meant.

Sophia braced herself before she attuned the jewelry. Increased clarity might be fine or it might be annoying, but increased range for her connection to the Lifeweb sounded positively problematic. She was okay now but it took a lot of effort to get there.

Instead of the expected rush of voices, nothing happened.

Sophia held herself still for a long moment, listening. The voices she could hear were clearer, like something that muffled and distorted them was gone, but they weren’t louder. She wasn’t even certain that there were more voices. Maybe that was because she was in the Moonlit Branches?

While there were a lot of Archons inside the World Tree, there were far fewer inside at any time than there were outside. From what Shaman Venique said, the normal range was pretty limited, but a lot of the Archons lived near the World Tree. Maybe there were more in her range outside than were here, even with the range extension … or maybe she just had a long enough range that the range extension didn’t really matter inside the Moonlit Branches. That seemed pretty likely, actually.

She’d need to be careful if she wore the hairpiece outside the World Tree, that was all.

The Clarity Adornment was one of the things Xin’ri suggested using one of their spare Item Manifestations on. It fit the bill of something that both suited her Sphere and required attunement, but she wanted to see how well it worked with her team and not just the Lifeweb before she used up a limited resource on something that she wasn’t sure she needed. They had more of them than Sophia expected, because Dav decided to pick up a bunch of them and was apparently able to complete most of the keywords for the Item Manifestation Treasure nearly as quickly as Sophia managed to finish the Treasure Challenges for feathers, but it was still a limited resource.

Now that she was certain she wasn’t putting herself in a tough spot, Sophia moved on to the last of the feathered treasures. It was a fan, the sort of thing you might see someone fan themselves with in a period piece, except that it didn’t fold; instead, it had a nice, grippy handle. It was a showy piece, with internally lit feathers that more or less followed the colors of the rainbow from one side to the other. Sophia liked it, but she didn’t expect Xin’ri to immediately insist that she attune it so that they could test it out.

Feather Fan

This fan creates a cooling breeze strong enough to lift and move small items. The breeze can be directed to turn once it is created if the fan is attuned.

There was a lot to test with the fan, but Xin’ri insisted that the ability to control airflow after it was created was huge. She won Sophia over with the question about how it would interact with her feathers when she was Plume Shifted. It had enough feathers that she could probably control it, but could she use it to move without having to shift back to her normal shape and then back to plumes? For that matter, could she use it to move a few feathers so that she could hit things that were hiding? That didn’t come up very often, but when it did it would be nice to have another option.

The test wasn’t destructive, so Sophia ran shifted into her plumed form and tried it out. Both options worked, though the movement was far slower than Sophia’s step-teleportation. Despite that, it was another candidate for an Item Manifestation Treasure. Slow movement that didn’t require revealing herself could come in handy. The breeze itself probably wouldn’t come up too often, but if it did it would be useful. They didn’t face poisonous clouds very often, but it had happened and Xin’ri was the only one of them with a good way to counter it that worked on them all.

Only one of the non-feathered trinkets was likely to be worth using an Item Manifestation treasure. It was the only thing Sophia picked up that really looked like it belonged in a Meteor Fall Event, since it was a lumpy, almost egg-shaped black rock pockmarked with craters that glowed with fiery mana.

Mana Pulsar

Mana stored in this stone can be emitted in a single or series of pulses. Mana pulses may interfere with spells and Abilities dependent on mana. Attunement allows the pulses to be shaped.

After testing it, Sophia had mixed feelings. She could already do everything the Mana Pulsar did with her own mana. It definitely worked with her like a feather, but she could already counter and disrupt spells; she didn’t need a separate way to do that.

It would really only be useful if it let other people use the Ability, and that was a bit of a reach. It would require using the Item Manifestation Treasure followed by manual modification of her Sphere to turn its pulses into an Aural Plume instead of a separate manifested item. Worse, she wasn’t really sure how different it would be from her existing Disruptive Aural Plume. She kind of wanted it because it was a plume that was based on the movement of mana rather than being a feather, but she wasn’t sure how to make it useful in fact as well as in concept.

Maybe it was something to talk to Revanos about the next time he visited. Sophia didn’t know when the Wanderer would stop by; the roc egg auction was the last time she saw him and that was unexpected.

The rest of the trinkets were just that: trinkets. Oh, there were wands and gloves and a new pair of boots, a belt, and even a circlet that was supposed to keep her cool when it was too warm; Sophia knew she’d have liked that one if it wasn’t a circlet.

The pack of cards that could be thrown like knives was a little silly, except that they sought their targets and could carry spells. Xin’ri handed them to her along with some glue and told her to glue some down to each of them so that they could carry her Aural Plumes. They would be destroyed when they were used, but they’d still be useful for Dav. His ability to hit things at a distance wasn’t great, since he mostly used his sword.

Somewhere in the middle of a project that felt like it belonged in elementary school instead of the serious weapon modification that it actually was, Leo returned from his trip to the lowest level of the World Tree with a pile of fruit, nuts and three dungeon cores. The news that he’d reached the first branch and then decided it was time for a break was worrying, but Sophia believed him when he said that his friends wanted to stay in the Roots for a while.

It did mean that Xin’ri added Leo to the list of people she was making equipment for.

Over the next twelve days, they trained and tested the gear Xin’ri created for them. Sophia’s new armor didn’t have just the glassteel leather balm; in fact, she’d actually removed the repair enchantment to add a feathered cape made from a wide selection of different feathers. Many of them were simply magical, with wildly varying elements, but she’d worked in all of the enchanted items she could find that were based on a single feather or plume. She somehow managed to turn that amalgamation into a single enchantment, Elemental Attunement.

Since it was on armor, her prediction was that it would be defensive in datura, allowing Sophia to reduce the effect of all of those elements on herself. That much worked when they tested it, but it wasn’t until Sophia used the Item Manifestation Treasure on the armor that they found out that her true goal worked: Defensive Elemental Attunement was added to Sophia’s Aural Plumes instead of staying tied to the armor manifestation, which merged with Sophia’s Arcane Scales.

Naturally, that made Xin’ri even more interested in the Treasure. They were expensive, but common enough that anyone who passed to the fourth upgrade could buy a few if they wanted. For all that Revanos didn’t mention them, they were apparently the single most common way to alter the direction of a Sphere once you were high enough upgrade that stable Challenges no longer awarded Abilities that most people could use.

Of course, the reason Revanos didn’t mention the Treasures was probably the warning they got every time Xin’ri asked about them. Item Manifestation Treasures could break a Sphere, making it impossible to upgrade. The advantage of the Treasure was its ability to add things you’d missed or even things that didn’t fit neatly within your Sphere, but you absolutely had to modify them so that they did fit or figure out how to remove them yourself. The only way the Guide would do it was if you decided to break your Sphere and regress to an earlier upgrade.

Of course, that made the fact that an armor Item Manifestation merged with existing Abilities rather than creating its own interesting. That was something you were supposed to have to do manually, but it happened to Dav as well as Sophia. Even the Abilities that didn’t merge with existing ones came through as normal Abilities that belonged to an existing category instead of trying to make their own.

Xin’ri was fairly confident that she could get away with having Abilities that called themselves Item Manifestations; after all, she had the Item Anchor. She was lucky that way as well, but it was luck that they probably should have expected.

Ci’an was not lucky. The single Item Manifestation treasure she used ended up as a separate Item Manifestation category of its own. She spent days trying to tame it and went through most of the Thread she’d gathered since they reached the third upgrade before she was able to merge it into her Nightowl Sphere, and she was going to have to keep working on it to be a “proper” Nightowl Ability instead of an Item Manifestation that she then had to trigger.

Another letter came from Xavier. He was relieved that Leo was fine, concerned about the dungeon cores, and apologetic that he couldn’t yet send a spell she could make to initiate a letter. He’d write more often, but that was all he could promise. His part of the letter was short, because most of the letter was in their mother’s handwriting, directed at Leo. Sophia glanced over it and saw only the normal warnings of a worried mother rather than the specific directions of a skilled Oracle. She was grateful for that; it was never worth avoiding her mother’s foresight, because she never bothered saying anything that wasn’t significant. Nothing there meant they could manage without the help.