BECMI Chapter 423 – A Numbers Game
The Avatar looked like an attractive dark-skinned human female, affecting a flaming halo about her head to broadcast her skill and ability with fire.
She called herself Nimbus, an Immortal interested in the magicks of the sun, light, and fire, a common enough obsession.
A new Avatar state couldn’t fool Dread. This attractive Avatar was another one of Gulguz’s alternate identities, easy enough to determine just by studying the residue of her Immortal Power.
Good enough. Captain Emeril and Master Lalo were warned about her, and more importantly, tracking her back to his home plane.
That involved a lot of Trace Teleports after tailing her from safe distances, identifying points she liked to leave from, and where she liked to travel to. Very few Immortals were NOT creatures of habit, especially the arrogant ones who liked to consider themselves so much smarter than others. Having never been confronted about her true identity, Nimbus was naturally confident she’d slipped below the radar of other Immortals, and didn’t act as paranoid as was probably proper for an Empyreal who’d been around as long as Gulguz had.
I already had the bastard’s True Name. Now it was all about tracking him back to his home plane so I could put a proper end to him there, something that could only be done to him from inside his own home.
This was also something I couldn’t be seen to be doing myself on the Astral Plane.
The reason for that was very simple. In this multiverse, the Astral Plane was a fifth-dimensional space, ‘higher’ than the Prime Material. That meant people had a temporal dimension that was clearly visible to Immortals, who were also fifth-dimensional beings. Looking at a mortal on the Astral Plane was akin to looking at a paper cutout on the Prime, mortals lacking the extra dimension that gave Immortals a weight in reality mortals didn’t have.
Eternals, however, had that weight in a different direction. Captain Emeril said I looked ‘dense’ on the Astral Plane, as if I was still four-dimensional, but so heavy in those dimensions the fifth dimension was utterly irrelevant and should get out of the way.
That basically meant that the fifth dimension that Immortals had was actually the core of their power. Even trying to look beyond the fifth dimension was supposed to be enough to summon in packs of powerful vortex creatures, usually the much-dreaded spectral hounds whose attacks could send one into the Dimensional Vortex directly and lose their soul forever in unknown higher or lower reaches of existence, a fate that even Immortals did not return from.
It meant that without magic concealing my extra metaphysical weight, Immortals would automatically know I was more than mortal, but also not an Immortal. Where that went was likely to be very negative rather quickly, even if initial curiosity by an unknowing junior Immortal was the initial reaction. Captain Emeril indicated he’d heard nothing of Eternals like me in any of his conversations, long-lived creatures all being Immortal Beings of minor power in almost all such cases.
Thus, researching magic that could conceal my existence and down-tone it to that of a ‘mere mortal’ was a must, and so a great deal of my time had to be spent researching spells of X Valence and higher that Immortals could not normally use without learning them directly. Immortal Power could easily duplicate spells of IX Valence or less without much difficulty, and any Immortal could puzzle out how to do so with merely a glance using Detect Magic, figuring out the spellcraft and able to implement it with their superior IP to greater effect and a massive Caster Level.
They could not, however, do the same thing with spells of X Valence or higher, which meant one of the most required things for me to do was keep raising my Spell Capacity to higher Valence spells they couldn’t deal with so easily.
Researching such spells was a lesson in very applied patience, and a lot of Skill Ranks devoted to Arcane Lore, Divine Lore, Natural Lore, Elemental Lore, Planar Lore, and the like, as well as Spellcraft. I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for teachers among the Immortals, so it again meant I was forging a path for others to tread, either making the first spells or rediscovering spells lost to history if other Eternals had existed and were destroyed.
There was no way Eternal Valences could be as versatile as Immortal Power, which, if there was a conflict, might have lost any past Eternals the conflict. However, Eternal Valences represented a LOT of similar Immortal Power, and even if relatively fixed in effect, could rapidly accumulate in capacity, especially if a certain someone was getting Intellect bonuses via her Ur-Priest Levels and Mystic Theurgy.
A normal Immortal Initiate like Captain Emeril or Master Lalo started with 500 Immortal Power, which basically represented about 250 spell Levels they could spend however they wanted to, subject to cost modifiers for spells not of their own Sphere. More Immortal Power naturally expanded that capacity, and Hierarchs had thousands of IP to spend as they wished.
So, if one X Valence represented 20 IP equivalent, well, I started with a mere 160 IP with six prepared X Spell Engrams and two X Spell Slots from Sorcery. Those Valences did get around Immortal Immunity to Mortal Magic, however, and used my true Caster Level, not subject to Mortal Limits, as well as having enhanced damage exceeding the nominal cap of 20 Hit Dice.
NovelFire is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Which was good, because I had an effective starting Caster Level base of 74 now with Ur-Casting, +9 Spell Power, +8 Sublime Chord, +8 Fire/Snow-Casting, and with +36 or higher Thaumic bonuses for spells on both sets of spell lists, among other things.
In short, I could already Cast at a higher level than Hierarchs could, although only my friends knew that, and I made sure my magic only looked mortal maximum if examined by those with Immortal Power intrinsic to them, courtesy of Dread.
Most of my spell research simply followed the well-worn trails and trials of Raised Spells and Upcasting effects. I and my Sims certainly had time to do spell research, but they didn’t have the profound weight needed to research Eternal magic, as they were Sims setat 60% of my Levels, and unless I reached Level 61 could not qualify as Eternal Creatures themselves.
So, that’s what I was doing, effectively cracking open new Valences to the limit my admittedly high Intellect could allow, which could get me all the way up to Valence 26 with my Intellect at its current Stat of 62… before I’d even put any Karma into boosting it, now that I could!
Given the Karmic costs of raising Ability Stats, using any other method to raise them was highly recommended, too!
All that spell research into higher Valences was one of the reasons I needed more time. There was no one around feeding me spells at those levels, so I had to research them myself. Apparently Exemplar Surge couldn’t fetch anything Eternal out of the Akasha, as post-mortal knowledge wasn’t storied or accessed so easily, so research it was.
I had no guidance, no mentors, and I certainly wasn’t going to be asking Immortals about higher-end magic like that.
Pointedly, I was naturally very interested in duplicating their ability to split themselves up among their Avatars.
There were two kinds of Avatars. One was about actually making an Immortal body for themselves. These could be identical to their own, only equal to that of a mortal, or anything in between. They allocated the Hit Points of their Immortal Life force among their active bodies like that, but all of them pulled on the same IP reserve.
The other option was using Constructs to do that, effectively taking over the artificial body and adding a few of their own Health to it to make the body tougher. Generally it was the superior option if you didn’t have to deal with people, but all that did was immediately guide me into what was obviously the best of both worlds.
Avataring my own Simulacra.
Sims were of Mortal Magic and were frozen at emulating sixty percent of such beings as they were made to resemble. That effectively froze them at about Twenty as far as concerned me… which happened to be the basic Limits of Rank M, Elven Wizardry, and my basic Ur-Priest levels.
In short, each Sim could employ near the limit of mortal Elven ability as far as magic went, each… but if they were Avatars, use my mental ability stats, Feats, skill Ranks, and knowledge.
They could do all of that concurrently, while maintaining their own forms, plus possibly a small required addition from me to justify the hive-mind this basically represented.
The link wouldn’t work across the timelines, but it would work through astral space and other planes reached from it. Basically, if a Mark could reach across it, the Avatar link would as well, although even more closely, as your mind was being split into new thoughtstreams supported by new bodies, each able to function independently while still being part of the whole.
Avatar, gained by studying and helping Emeril and Lalo make new bodies for themselves and replicating the effect with Eternal magic, was thus my first independent new X-level spell, a step beyond just an Upcast Simulacrum.
The upcast-Sim was normally a Clone spell by default, but that was useless to me, as the base Clone magic created a death-match between original and clone to determine which of us was ‘real’. While entirely possible to use in the future to keep myself independently active in both timelines, doing a Clone now would be a complete waste of time leverage.
Right now I could spend as many years as I liked on the Other Shore, then return to the Far Shore only ten minutes later, and vice versa. Calculations indicated that would be the case right up until the timestreams reached harmonization and Confluence, i.e. I spent four thousand years here, and both timelines were at the same points in time.
At that point the closed loop would fully sync up, and the two timestreams would advance in parallel or potentially merge. THAT would be the time to Clone myself an Avatar and have it over here full time, living in each timestream independently.
For the future.
Improved Clone at IX, however, removed the deathmatch drive, if you only had the one Clone. The Clone was basically a mirror of you, but could not exceed your power, and could not effectively digest Karma, only accrue it. When another Clone IX was Cast upon it, memories were exchanged, Karma accrued to the original, and effectively I would then profit from its actions.
As an alternative, there was a Stasis Clone spell that existed, able to create and maintain multiple Clones, holding them in stasis for the soul of the Casting Wizard to jump to upon death. It was protection from multiple attackers, deaths, and those seeking out hidden Clones. The weakness of it was that someone smart could figure out the waking triggers, wake all the Clones up at once, and they would be compelled to fight one another to the death if they met!
Said Clone was still Mortal Magic, and could not exceed Mortal Limits. So, most ability scores at base 18, Wishes needed to be spent to raise them to 23, and also reflecting fewer Class Levels and suchlike since the limit was the mortal Apex.
An Avatar Clone was basically my equal in ALL respects, but again, there could only be one of them. Still basically the equivalent of a full Immortal Avatar or better.
Another alternative was Bilocation, the Mirror Image VIII, basically being in two places at once. At the mortal limit, this was a quickly-Cast spell of short duration, a mere six seconds per Caster Level, but at X, that limit could be expanded greatly, and Eternal Bilocation effectively made it two bodies at once truly, with totally independent actions possible, although still only one set of spells available between them.
It would need Valence XIII for a duration of an hour/Caster Level, however.