Limitless Path

Mortaine took a while to show up, which wasn't a big surprise to Beth or the group, though Andrea, Adam, and Neph didn't have much, if any, experience with the Exalted. Beth had gathered the team up after Mortaine had popped up, and they were ready to continue training before going to visit Sera's family, though Beth wasn't sure exactly who they were taking on that trip. Her and Sera, obviously, and Blood would be coming along, which also meant it was highly likely Val would join them. If they were already taking four, then what difference was five, or six, or the whole group?

Her musings were interrupted by the man himself, Mortaine popping into existence with a light humming sound and a soft, pulsing yellow light. He greeted them as he prepared a drink via remote manipulation, same as he had done years ago when Beth first visited. It was even more impressive this time around than it was in that long ago age, as now Beth could understand a little more of what he was doing. He was very clearly not manipulating space to make the objects float or teleport, leaving her to try to study the tricks very closely. What she saw was an incredibly complex manipulation of multiple kinds of mana all at the same time while blending in the use of very tiny, and awfully complex, groups of runes. And all that just to make a bottle of whisky and a glass levitate over to Mortaine and the bottle pour itself.

"Well, now, it's not a surprise that a group such as this would get such trivial tasks done so quickly," Mortaine said. "I'm not surprised you've already returned, but how did it go? There were no issues, correct?"

"None," Beth said, nodding to Blood, who produced everything from her storage space.

"My, my, how excellently harvested," Mortaine exclaimed, gathering everything with a broad smile. "You even managed to kill the monster without damaging the core or heart. I have to say, you are my most reliable group of gatherers. There'll be plenty of work for you going forward. But that is that and this is this! Come, let us see the fruits of your labor."

Mortaine snapped the fingers of his free hand, the one not holding the alcoholic drink, and suddenly they were all somewhere else. Despite all of their strength and resistances, their newfound power with their Mana Physiques and their skills, it was a stark reminder they were still small potatoes compared to those of the big leagues. Mortaine was able to teleport them all using an incredibly powerful spell before they even realized what was happening, and none of their resistances even pinged; once again, Beth's high resistance to spatial manipulation did absolutely nothing, not even give her a warning, showing it was spatial manipulation that Mortaine was doing. The mysterious and slightly daft old man was using dimensional and planar magics to do things that they might not even normally be able to do, but his knowledge and skill was so high that he could reproduce tons of different effects effortlessly.

"Now," he said, gesturing at the room they had arrived in, showing a strange assembly of machinery and runes at one end. "This is what your efforts have been contributing towards. I've been building a device to twist space using a concept of both where and, more specifically, when the activation happens. It layers on hundreds of spatial runes together with a dimensional core to create an alteration of the current space. The component I was missing was the temporal piece, and a metal base powerful enough, with transitive properties, that I could wrap the temporal unit in. Hence, the time-based item and the flesh of the monster were exactly the last component to complete this device!"

"That's very…exciting," Beth said, trying to get her eyes uncrossed from the deluge of nonsense. Val and a few of the others had moved over to the device and were examining it, though they were being very careful not to touch anything or get too close.

"This is really masterful work," Val commented, taking her pipe out and sucking on it. "How long did it take you to do all this enchanting?"

"Oh, a few weeks," Mortaine replied, sipping his drink. "The hard part was trying to get everything figured out and setup without having the temporal component. Take some scans of it now, because it's going to change quite a bit when I weld these components in. You can also scan this document if you want more information."

Mortaine sent them all a document, which Beth opened and scanned through briefly before she felt her eyes starting to cross again. Much of what was in the design document was focused on enchanting and was far beyond her current skill with runes and mana manipulation. The others were variously interested, with Adam being fascinated as he wanted to learn more about runes, Val loving it as an enchanter, but many of the others had the same reaction as Beth. Mortaine eventually shooed Val away and finished the device, which he did in just a few minutes without seeming to expend any effort to do so. The whole team was fascinated by his work, watching the way he manipulated the mana and twisted and rebuilt the materials to make them fit exactly as he envisaged in the device.

When he was finished with the work, he immediately activated the device, the room thrumming with power. Beth personally thought that was a little unsafe, then again, he was an Exalted and had all kinds of arcane knowledge that was beyond any save perhaps Zane or Fallon in the whole of the galaxy. The device at least turned on without exploding, which Beth already considered a huge win, but it also did what was advertised, or so she assumed from Mortaine's overjoyed ramblings and triumphant fist shake. The whole thing created a sphere of distortion around it, an area where space and time got quite strange quite fast, and it all had the appearance of a tunnel boring through some extraneous dimension. The effect looked quite strange but was also beautiful and held many of them captive, though Beth was struggling a little to understand what, exactly, the point of the device truly was.

As the machine, or formation, or both, Beth was still a little unsure of what to call things that blended in technology with enchanting and rune formations, hummed away and drew in more mana, the effect it produced started changing, becoming more subtle and complex. Beth could see different layers of space stretching out from the sort of 'hole' the device was generating, and those layers of space were interacting in fascinating ways. She stood up and walked up right to the edge of the twisted space, ignoring the warnings from the rest of her team, peering deeply into the changed space. Sera rose and made to move over to her and grab her, but Mortaine's hand lashed out and stopped the dragon, even though the man himself hadn't moved from where he stood partially within the twisted space. After seeing that Sera had stopped and was paying attention to him, he released her arm and made a lowering gesture at her, indicating she resume her seat.

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"I'm worried-" Sera started.

"Enough," Mortaine said, though he wasn't being overly harsh. "She is caught up in an epiphany or an elastic change of perspective right now. She has a very powerful innate gift for spatial magics, one she has not at all fully tapped into up until this point. I hadn't really intended this, though I knew there were some possibilities there, but the activation of the device has sparked something in her. Hmm, perhaps it is the way it twists a passage through both space and time all at once that is giving her some kind of new inspiration. I will have to think more on this, and I am eager to hear what she has to say, but we should not disturb her during this moment."

"As long as it's safe," Sera said, resuming her seat.

"Well, safe is a relative term," Mortaine said, making a calming gesture when several of the team were upset by that response. "Relax, she is in no danger; not physically or mentally or spiritually, and I have the means to prevent any damage something like this device would do. The most important thing at present is that she gets the most out of the experience, which is a bit of a bother to me, as I am fueling a part of the device's operating cost. Oh, do not fear, I will not run out of mana or any such, but it does mean I have to physically stand here to keep the device operating in its current capacity. If I were to step away, it would vastly tone down its output, which would interfere most directly with her inspiration."

For Beth, everything around her had faded into a dull background hum, if even that. She had seen something in the twisted passage that Mortaine had created, something that had sparked an idea within her that she couldn't quite seem to get. The way that the space had twisted and even dissolved had reminded her of several things, and the longer she was observing the effect that the device had created, the more she thought she understood what was going on. The others had gone quiet after a minute, not that she noticed, and she continued to peer into the tunnel for another minute or two when she caught fire. It wasn't as if she had self-combusted, but was rather a gradual process that started a little at a time over the course of a minute. Little wisps of flame had started burning away from parts of her body, a warm and pleasant silver light starting to drift away from her. Mortaine reacted quite a bit to that, though it was a surprised reaction that he quickly got under control, urging the others to calm with a hand gesture.

Beth didn't even notice the fire, but something about the way space was collapsing over a progressing timescale the deeper the hole went spoke to her on some fundamental level. She stared deeply into the twist in space and started to cycle her mana, not in any skill that she had access to, but moving it in certain patterns that felt right. She did so subconsciously, but she wasn't creating a new skill; instead, what she was doing was working in conjunction with her new understanding. Within her mind, and her soul, were new pieces being layered into place one-by-one, things suddenly making sense, some of them that she wasn't even aware she was confused about or didn't yet understand. She could envision a flame, a strange notion to start with, but a flame that burnt away everything, even time and space, and yet space couldn't be wholly destroyed. At least, not the full fabric of space, and so she started to understand a fire that could burn space and yet weave into it at the same time.

To her, time had lost all meaning, though even that wasn't entirely true, the old saying not quite congruent, as part of her understanding was about the nature of time itself. It was only something in passing, but it incorporated with her knowledge about this burning white flame, a flame that could melt space, or that could weave the laws of space anew. She watched as a flame was born in nothingness, growing to be more brilliant and great than a star, scorching the nothing around it and creating something from that nothing. She had a sudden understanding, perhaps what one could describe as an epiphany within an epiphany, showing her how that flame could fit into many different forms and ideas. She understood in that moment how that flame could fit within her, and then she watched as the flame transformed, taking different forms before settling with the heart of a great being. She couldn't really describe the figure any more than that, but there was a sense of majesty and power around them that Beth had never experienced before, a greatness that made even the Manumitted she had met feel as if they were ants.

The figure disappeared even more suddenly than it had appeared within her imagination. She found herself staring at the twisted space again, and this time she understood so much more. She reached out and gestured with her right hand, a gentle movement, and a small tongue of flame formed and floated forward, pure white and shining with a strange radiance. The flame flew into the tunnel and started to absorb something from it, a twist of spatial mana that was unlike anything Beth had seen or experienced before. Some time passed, perhaps a day, perhaps a week, perhaps a nanosecond, it was so hard to tell, but the flame flew out of the tunnel in space and wrapped around her before burrowing into her flesh. There was no pain, only an understanding, and she knew so much more than before. She was snapped out of her reverie when the spatial tunnel collapsed, Mortaine having turned the device off while giving her a very searching once-over.

"Well, that is something I didn't expect, though it wasn't outside the realm of possibility," he said, nodding several times as he finished examining her.

"What's going on?" Beth asked, more than a little confused.

"You, my girl, without anything but the pieces you already had, and a vague notion of what to do, have just fully formed your Ideal," Mortaine said calmly. "As a fellow within the Understanding, let me be the first to welcome you."

"Uh, thanks, but what does that mean?" Beth asked, glancing between him and her teammates, who all seemed various degrees of stunned.

"You are, though lacking the power, technically a form of Exalted right now," Mortaine said before holding up a hand. "Do not think you are an actual Exalted. The barrier to that title, however, is fully conceptualizing and internalizing your Ideal, which we all just watched you do over the last hour. There is no barrier at the peak of Ascended for you, young one, but merely a simple evolution into the same kind of state I am in."

"Uh, well, I don't know what to say," Beth said before practically being tackled by Sera.

"I can't believe what I just watched!" the dragon exclaimed as she smothered Beth in a huge hug and kissed her forehead and cheeks. "My fiancée is already a mini-Exalted! How the old codgers are going to shit themselves at this!"

The others let Sera crow in delight for another few moments before offering their own congratulations, all of them at least a bit stunned, but many of them with very thoughtful looks on their faces. Watching someone fully form their Ideal, and from only the most basic of nascent concepts to fruition, all in one sitting was something rare beyond rare. The rest would have a ton of valuable lived experience of the process of Ideal creation just by having been in that room, and everyone there had been taking copious notes and observing very carefully. Even Mortaine, who was already an Exalted, but he could always use more data and understanding.

"What you just did was like throwing the wing of a fly through a the eye of a needle, if that needle were on the other side of the planet and you didn't know its location," Mortaine said. "So, you accomplished something quite amazing. I wouldn't really be surprised if you got a Title for doing that, though Titles are fickle things."

"Uh, I did get a Title, though I don't have anything on my stat sheet for an Ideal," Beth said.

"Ideals are like Presences; they are an intangible extension of the soul, and such things have not rank nor designation. Just the way you learned your Presence and how to best use and extend it, so will you have to study how your Ideal meshes with your body and mind. It will not be easy; many Exalted spend millennia studying their own Ideal. It will, however, be incredibly rewarding," Mortaine explained.

"Well, go me," Beth said, putting on a faux excited tone.

"Sometimes I still forget that a lot of this isn't second nature to you like it is to us," Sera sighed, shaking her head. "What you just done was incredible and so far beyond rare that you might legitimately be the only one currently alive in the Milky Way to do it. That's the air you're breathing right now."

"Oh, well, that's a bit more impressive," Beth said, tapping her chin and putting on a more appropriately joyful expression.