No Need For A Core?

SNAP!

Svetlana mentally recoiled as her connection to Deidre broke; she then had to restrain herself from trying to reach across that sudden void to reconnect with that suddenly lost part of her spirit.

No, that would be awful for both of them; the original connection that united them as one was gone, and no new connection would ever feel right. Deidre could never even be a contractor for her now.

It hurt, but not nearly so much as it clearly hurt Deidre. Unfortunately, there was little Svetlana could do but watch and pray. Yes, she could send in some of her strongest inhabitants, but Satsuki was far more powerful anyway, and only so many people could help restrain Deidre’s thrashing body. Adding more people now would only make things worse.

All she could do to help was provide information. Most of it the Azeria cores could have gleaned for themselves, but they also had other matters to attend to while Svetlana’s nexus was relatively quiet. Trionea did not hold her in as much trust as others — especially Kuiccihan — held Azeria, but given the circumstances, that was understandable.

Eventually the process was done and Deidre began to recover. Svetlana wished she could do more for this former piece of herself, but she had already given Deidre what was possibly the most valuable gift within Svetlana’s power. A core could always edit what memories its external avatar would retain outside of the nexus’s territory, or in this case, would retain when the connection was cut. It was a necessary ability, given the limitations of organic brains of finite size that did not grow.

In this case, Svetlana had removed all direct memories of sexual assault and other degradation from Deidre. Svetlana still had those memories, still had to deal with remembering every detail of what had been done to her, but there was no reason for Deidre to be burdened by as much trauma.

After the Azeria cores made sure Svetlana was alright and passed that information on to Deidre, the group left, though Svetlana could feel the lingering attention of Kazue's core. Svetlana had to gently push Kazue away with reassurances that she was alright, and even with that, Kazue said she and the others were going to still be checking in on her.

Once she had shooed Kazue off, Svetlana collected the remaining tools and potions, then Krystraeliv withdrew the roots that had formed Deidre’s operating table.

Now it was time for her next task.

Though it would be a year before she could form a new awakened avatar, within that year she would have plenty of opportunity to experiment with her internal avatar. The simplest option would be to craft a body as powerful as any of her raid bosses, but that would be shortsighted, barring an emergency. Doing that would not help her learn, and she was looking forward to finally be able to freely learn again.

Instead, she was going to design and occasionally modify an avatar with far less innate power.

Mordecai had been helping her with the design process, and had shared much more information and guidance than he was intending to give Kazue and Moriko. His reasoning was simple: she already knew how to build complex avatars in general and didn’t need to learn the process, plus they all agreed it would probably be good for her to have a flexible avatar to learn normal life through.

Moriko and Kazue had copies of their original bodies for their avatars, and they both agreed that learning how to actually design their own future avatars with minimal guidance would be a good idea.

Svetlana’s first decision about her avatar’s appearance was to make an extremely androgynous young woman, who appeared to be human and was just a little shorter than Moriko, with hazel-green eyes and short but neatly styled hair. One side of her hair was pink, and the other was a pastel blue. Her facial features were on the delicate and pretty side without being decidedly feminine.

As long as she wore somewhat loose clothing, it would be difficult to tell the gender of her avatar, which was very much the point. For one thing, female was simply the avatar’s default, as shape-changing abilities would be built in. Svetlana would have gone for physically genderless if feasible, but healthy mammals, sapient bipeds or not, weren’t compatible with having no physical gender. Hermaphroditic was also possible, but came with its own health obstacles to overcome. So she had settled for female, with an innate ability to shift to male.

This took the place of other forms a young adult of a shapeshifting species might be able to take, such as a kitsune being able to appear as a human or a fox in addition to their in-between forms. However, her future shape-changing potential was similar to the flexibility of Mordecai’s avatar, with the biggest difference being that she was going to have to spend a lot of time and effort developing every stage of every new form.

‘Potential’ described a lot about this avatar. She was healthy and of average strength, but could become very strong and fit. She could learn almost any type of magic with a fair amount of ease, but would have to work hard to master any particular type of magic, let alone master multiple disciplines. This avatar could learn to do or be just about anything, but was starting from zero in almost every skill beyond basic social ones.

Svetlana didn’t know what she wanted her next avatar to be, and this seemed the best way to figure it out. Experiment with everything, and see what seemed to fit best.

The next morning, Svetlana’s new avatar awoke in her recently redesigned bedroom near her core. Instead of the very basic barracks design she’d stored her avatar in previously, she took inspiration from what Deidre had seen of Azeria’s suites, even though she didn’t truly need them yet. But she wanted to know what it felt like anyhow. The only things she didn’t include were the scented soaps and oils, as she didn’t yet know what she was going to like.

She rose slowly from the bed and began testing how her new body felt. Weak and slow described her initial findings, but that was in comparison to Deidre. This was a new self, and such expectations were far too high.

The body worked, did not protest movement within a normal range, and could perform basic exercises tolerably well. This was the starting point she had wanted.

When she was done testing how her body felt, she got dressed in a simple dark tunic that fell down to her knees, black hose, and soft leather boots. Then she shifted her avatar to a discreet location in Azeria, near where the starting zone bosses tested new delvers. There were definitely some advantages to being a subsidiary nexus, and having her internal avatar be able to exist inside of Azeria’s territory was certainly a perk.

She asked them to train her when they had the time, and maybe they could also find some visitors to the nexus to help her too. After she introduced herself as Svetlana’s avatar, she asked to be called ‘Svet’; while she did tend to think of herself as female, it seemed best to start with as neutral a default as possible.

The four small bosses were happy to each help in their area of specialization when they had time available, though they did still need to examine several of the new visitors over the course of the day.

The carakin Ubasti had the most free time, as not many people needed to be quizzed about their knowledge of various gods, and Svet found religion to be an excellent starting point. Previously, Svetlana hadn’t paid much attention to religious matters, given her feelings about her situation, but this provided a chance for Svet to rectify Svetlana’s lack of knowledge.

While her avatar learned and trained, her core had other work to focus on: continuing to rebuild all of her zones.

Svetlana had decided to reinforce the fae theming, and once past the outer faerie forest zone, delvers who entered the hill would find themselves in a different type of faerie forest.

It was much more closed-in and densely packed, with shaded glades and sun-dappled meadows spread throughout, and meandering streams winding through the trees. This was a place where it was easy to get lost, and Svetlana took advantage of that to pull off a fun trick.

The trick began with creating effectively identical locations, which she made in sets of three. There was one important difference though: these locations were rotated relative to their matching counterparts.

With those locations in place, the pixies could take part in the trick by simply creating mushroom rings. Through these, it was possible for a delver to be transported to a different location without realizing it, though naturally, stronger delvers would be able to feel the magic happening.

Of course, this required that a mushroom circle had been formed at both locations. If there was only the ring around the delvers and the magic tried to transport them, it would fizzle out. That, too, could be useful; for the delvers strong enough to feel the magic attempting to transport them might not be able to tell that the magic failed, leaving them to believe that they had been transported when they were, in fact, still at the same location.

Svetlana didn’t have to coordinate any of this; she merely needed to communicate the idea of the game to the pixies, and they took care of all the rest, even though it took a lot of pixies to form the two separate mushroom rings. Which was a good thing, because Svetlana had too many pixies to deal with.

It seemed that being a subsidiary core to Azeria brought with it the mixed blessing — or curse — of the pixies not being bound by the normal constraints of inhabitant capacity, and more had just started appearing over time. At least some of them were new pixies from Kazue’s puzzles that had wandered off, as Svetlana and the Azeria cores had managed to track a few doing just that, and noted when one of them either shifted to the Other Side and made their way along the corridor between the territories, or somehow used Krystraeliv’s connection to simply move to Svetlana’s territory directly.

This did not, however, account for how many of them Svetlana was now dealing with.

Maybe she shouldn’t have selected a theming of fey creatures, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In addition to dealing with pixie pranks and getting lost, delvers had to navigate between potential social, skill, and combat challenges in grand fairytale style. There were feasts and dances aplenty, and the occasional lone fae creature, and one had to understand how to navigate dealing with the fae in order to not commit a social mistake that would provoke them into attacking instead of being mostly-benign hosts.

Non-social skills came into play when dealing with flora, fauna, and the land itself, as telling what was safe to touch or harvest could be difficult. For example, a random plant might be a useful medicinal herb, or it might be a sprout from the cap of some sort of earth or plant fae that was taking a nap. Telling the difference was important.

When a delver finally managed to make their way through this disorienting forest, they would arrive at what appeared to be the outer fortifications of a massive castle or walled city, which entirely blocked the way forward. This was Svetlana’s third zone.

Entering the fortifications meant first dealing with whoever was guarding the particular entrance a delver found and approached. Initiating an attack was futile unless one had the strength to batter down the reinforced doors or gate.

This left most people with choices of subterfuge, bribery, or diplomacy of some sort. Not that there was any actual fooling of the fae guards here, but they knew the roles they were playing.

Once inside, delvers discovered that there were several political factions at play, and given the chance, they would embroil the delvers in various schemes aimed at each other. These factions mimicked some of the major court alliances, namely Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, Wet, Dry, Shadow, Light, and Celestial (or Star, depending on one’s preferred terminology).

Not that Svetlana had a perfect understanding of how each of these factions worked, but Deidre had promised to talk with some of the more approachable fae roaming through Azeria’s Other Side to see if they wanted to help populate Svetlana’s court, while the cores would check with the fae presently populating their hot springs resort.

The Wet and Dry season-themed courts were less well known in temperate climates, but many places had only two seasons, and the fey in those regions often formed into matching themed alliances. As far as Svetlana knew, this was an instinctive reaction, rather than a conscious choice, for most courts.

Svetlana was also careful to leave room for more potential court affiliations in the future, but she could only deal with creating so many options at a time.

Successfully dealing with the harrowing experience of faerie politics meant gaining enough favor with a faction that they were willing to send the delvers on to a secret, though naturally dangerous, path that led deeper into the 'kingdom'. These paths were, of course, themed to match the faction who the delvers had won the favor of.

The passageways were laid out in a loose spiral to take maximum advantage of Svetlana’s large territory, and were filled with a variety of different challenges. There were ‘wild monsters’, scouting parties of opposing factions, dangerous terrain (including natural traps like rock slides), magical wards that needed to be broken, and so on. All the adventurous highlights one would expect to find in a storybook.

The passages also had the occasional branching path, and it was very difficult to tell if a given direction was leading along the same court’s route, or if it led to a different court’s area of control.

The part Svetlana liked best about this was that the theme worked for several consecutive zones, allowing her to simply create increasingly harder challenges without having to change the basic concept. Given how fast she was reshaping all of her zones, not having to spend time making new design concepts was very useful.

Having the passages lead to a giant courtyard, or perhaps one of several not-as-large courtyards, seemed like a thematically solid concept, but she wasn’t sure what she should do with it. Perhaps a tournament of some sort?

While she was pondering this decision, deep underground and near the very bottom edge of her outermost zone, something too titanically massive for her senses to properly comprehend moved.

Svetlana panicked.

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Early chapters, some excerpts and short stories, and more art!