Ar'Kendrithyst

Erick’s day was not over, for he had at least one more meeting.

He held this one at Yggdrasil, on a little gazebo deep in the big guy’s fiery green canopy, behind many, many leaves. It would be rather hard to see Erick’s chosen location through [Long Range Scry]s, or any other sort of viewing magic, but he still put up Privacys around the space. This needed to be a secured talk and the words of Portal’s Trademasters had struck a chord.

Zolan had only been informed that ‘there would be a private meeting’, so Erick had had the rest of his evening blocked off for this.

And so, Erick sat alone in his nice little gazebo atop Yggdrasil, sipping a fizzy drink made from berries and sugar and his own CO2-condensing Particle Magic. It had turned out to be a rather nice drink which was different from the usual sorts, of tea, coffee, water, and beer, filling a different sort of niche, near to lemonade (which was another drink Erick had invented; Veird only had limeade which wasn’t very popular) but not quite lemonade at all. Dinner was still a while away, so Erick was still hungry, but Poi was working on that right now down at the house, making some fish that had been sent by Treehome as a gift a few hours ago. It was a gift of scarlet king fish, and Poi was very happy to have such good fish again.

The sun was setting somewhere to the west, beyond the green, but it was impossible to tell that the sun had set here inside Yggdrasil’s crown.

No one had shown up yet for the meeting, but that was fine. This meeting was a test. Apparently, though, as Erick sipped his drink and had to refill it, he realized he would have to actually make an effort if he wanted his ‘test’ to happen.

Erick blipped his drink and the remainder back to the house, and then he returned his attentions to his current location.

With a small cast of [Fairy Item], Erick created a pachinko machine. Such machines came in a ton of different varieties, but this version was a tilted table with a slot at the top, a bunch of pins in a rough triangle shape up and down that table, and a bunch of collection spots at the bottom. A ball placed into the slot at the top would roll down, randomly bounce around on the pins, and eventually end up into one of the collection spots, based on probability calculations that were beyond Erick.

Maybe a hundred drops would end up looking like a bell curve? Maybe a hundred drops would end up looking like an even distribution? Or maybe Erick had accidentally made a pachinko machine which would primarily drop the ball in only one slot? He didn’t rightly know.

All he truly knew was that he had a bunch of catcher slots at the bottom, and that only one of them was labeled. In crimson red ink, that one slot held the words ‘Kill 1000 people’.

This was a test of Benevolence, after all. A terrible test, for sure, but a necessary one.

… And yet, nothing had happened after conjuring the machine. No one showed up to stop him. Not a single message from Rozeta, or otherwise… But then again, ‘kill 1000 people’ was not a worldwide threat.

With his heart rate rising, Erick knew he would actually need to play the machine—

Erick sweated, sitting there in the cool air that filtered through Yggdrasil’s crown, as a terrible thought came to him. Perhaps killing a thousand people wasn’t a big enough deal to try and stop? Was he… Was he ‘too big to fail’ now? That thought hit Erick rather damned hard. He did not like that someone would not try to stop him from killing ‘just a thousand people’. But then again, what was a thousand souls to a Gate Network? Or when held against the weight of new worlds?

Nothing.

That was what a thousand souls amounted to.

Nothing.

This whole experiment had a problem, though. Maybe no one had shown up because Erick knew, deep down, that he wasn’t really going to do such a heinous act. How could he even consider such an awful action!? He couldn’t. But with this pachinko machine of death and destruction… The threat was out there. The possibilities of death for a thousand innocent people lay in one simple… tiny… little… metal ball.

Erick held that metal ball in his hand. He put it into the machine and the ball started rolling, hitting pins as gravity pulled it downward.

~plink plink plink plink~

~clack~

Erick’s heart had been in his throat, briefly, but now it settled back down. The ball rested in an empty space; a null result. Nothing would come of such a result. Erick conjured another metal ball, and waited, his heart seeming to move back into his throat with each beat.

He had specifically told Poi about this, before he set out to do this whole experiment, while also telling him not to tell anyone what he was planning on. Poi had shrugged, and said sure. He also didn’t think Erick had it in him to follow through with his test, so there was no harm in trying; no harm in testing Benevolence. No harm except for the mental harm that Erick was committing upon himself, at this very moment. Poi had told Erick that he probably shouldn’t even try this…

But Erick had to know. He had to test himself.

And he had to know how good [Benevolent Sight] was.

Erick had not told Aisha; he had not told Teressa. Those were the two people with [Benevolent Sight], and the two people who might be able to pick up on this experiment.

Aisha was back at the House. She had been working lightly in the Benevolence Research Tower in order to test the plants growing at the Benevolence dungeon. She was still a bit stiff in the joints, though, and she had been prone to some uncalled-for outbursts among her employees and everyone else she met, and so she had ended the day early to head to her room and sleep in her tub. But she was still there, doing her job for several hours. Only now was she sleeping.

Teressa was clearly still recovering a lot, though. After her prognostication battle with Treehome yesterday she had gone to bed, woken up for meals, and went right back to bed. She was currently sleeping, too.

Perhaps it was a bit cruel of Erick to try out this experiment right now, when both his prognosticators were sleeping and had soul damage.

… Life was cruel, and people needed to be ready for war at any time.

Erick put the second metal ball into the pachinko machine. Plink, plink, plink, the metal ball bounced around. It fell into another unimportant slot of the machine. ‘Kill 1000 people’ remained empty.

Erick conjured another metal ball.

The ball went in the slot. It plinked around. It fell into an empty box at the bottom. One by one, Erick conjured metal balls and slipped them in the slot. Plink, plink, plink. Clack. Clack. Clack. He went faster after the seventh null result.

Erick conjured the eleventh ball and placed—

Lightning flickered, and Erick pulled his hand away. The ball remained in his hand. He looked around, and noticed that there had been no lightning anywhere except for in his mind, or perhaps inside his veins. The power in his soul had barely moved at all, and maybe it hadn’t actually moved and he had imagined the whole thing.

But he had certainly imagined something.

Had that been a success? If not a success in drawing Aisha and Teressa out of their slumber, it had been a success of Erick testing himself.

… Maybe?

Erick tried putting the ball in the hole again. The ball went in easily and began plinking around. It landed, of course, in an empty catcher. Erick conjured another ball, and kept going.

On ball #26 he got another reaction. With his hand holding the ball in the slot, he waited a moment for the imaginary lightning to stop striking. And then the lightning passed. He put the ball through the slot. It landed in an empty catcher.

By now, some of the catchers in the middle and one on the far left were halfway full. By now, the only thing Erick knew was that he had not managed to make the pachinko machine distribute the balls evenly.

The killer box remained empty.

Erick got another reaction at ball #36, and then again at #39. He didn’t get his next reaction till ball #54. By ball #74, the slots to both sides of the kill box were filled. The reactions came faster and faster as the machine itself began to fill, and there were fewer and fewer places for the ball to end up outside of the kill box.

Erick kept putting balls into the top slot. The lightning became difficult to ignore, but only because Erick was truly focused on it. If he wasn’t looking for the reaction, he might merely pass off the feelings he was getting as pinging against his superstitions, or something similar. ‘Don’t walk under that ladder’! ‘Be wary of that black cat crossing your path!’ That sort of thing.

But Erick got more and more reactions, he realized that every time was just as bad as saying the wrong words to Kirginatharp, or to Rozeta, or to anyone else in power who had the ability and skill to end him, if they wanted. These imaginary flickers of lightning were what he felt when he fucked up a meeting, or tanked a negotiation in the worst way possible.

Erick wasn’t sure what to think about that.

There were a lot of nuances to this whole Benevolence thing that were freaking him out, but not because he didn’t feel in control of himself. Benevolence acted exactly how he wanted it to act. And yet...

Erick looked at his pachinko machine and held up one final ball. He pushed that metal ball to the slot, and felt his insides tingle a bit as though he was about to do something inherently wrong.

… He pushed the ball into the hole, anyway, pushing past his hesitation at the same time.

The reaction was immediate and exactly what Erick had been waiting and hoping for, though it did not happen here. Down in his home and over in his House, where Ophiels watched and waited, Teressa shot up out of bed and Aisha pulled together, waking up from her ooze form and becoming just a person sitting in a stone tub. Both of them instantly blipped away—

They reappeared on the other side of the gazebo, both looking terribly tired, both focused on Erick and on the pachinko machine, and upon the ball headed directly for—

With a bit of Benevolent light, Erick blocked the kill catcher, instead catching the metal ball himself. He snaked the ball back up and out of the pachinko machine then set the ball down on the table between him, Teressa, and Aisha. By the time their sleep-stricken eyes looked at Erick, and at the machine, Erick realized that they were only confirming what their own [Future Sight]s had shown them.

“Hello, Teressa, Aisha.” Erick said, “Sorry for waking you.”

Panic passed.

Teressa collapsed into her seat, her eyelids already drooping a bit, as she said, “I’m ready whenever needed, Boss.”

Aisha waved a hand and sat down too, saying, “I’m surprised this test worked as well as it did.”

Erick said, “I don’t think I could have actually gone through with it, so your guess as to why it worked is just as good as mine.”

With half-closed eyes, Aisha said, “You worked along a part of an Element that it is uniquely stressed to sense, plucking it like a spider’s thread. It doesn’t matter that there were no flies on the web and that there never were.”

Teressa sat back in her chair. “Sounds correct to me.”

Erick said, “I’ll make this meeting as quick as I can. Have either of you two discovered anything about Benevolence that I should know about? The basics of it all?”

Teressa briefly looked lost, and then she looked to Aisha.

Aisha breathed in, then said, “All Elemental Bodies generally allow for several basic uses. These are as follows:

“Sensing through the Element, and/or sensing that Element.

“Manifestation of the Element through various different ways.

“Shaping and control of the Element that already exists in the world.

“And then, finally, union with the Element which leads a bunch of different movement techniques, as a baseline.

“I use ‘Element’ in the loosest sense of the word, here. Elemental Stone is not stone, yet it is stone that one [Stone Body]s through when using that Elemental Body. Similar cases are had for Fire, Water, Air, Light, and Shadow. These basic 6 Elements exhibit the basic breadth of various skills associated with all Elemental Bodies; they are the baseline upon which all other Elemental Bodies are judged.

“The Esoteric Elemental Bodies are slightly more nuanced. They usually exhibit all the normal abilities that a normal Elemental Body has, in the case where someone is actually able to get an Elemental Body out of, say, Blood, which is rather rare… Esoteric Elemental Bodies tend to go far beyond the normal Elemental Bodies in very specific ways.

“Elemental Blood is very good at manipulating fleshy bodies. It’s also great at compounding effects and generally reinforcing magic it is a part of, as long as that magic is treated as a living thing that is capable of strengthening itself.

“Therefore, it could be said that Elemental Blood is uniquely good at Shaping and control of the element it is named after. Since most people are made of blood, this gives Elemental Blood, when used on a person, a variety of accidentally or purposefully corruptive effects. It also makes Elemental Blood great at hurting fleshy people.

“Elemental Mercy is very good at sending someone into a negative Health coma, which is about the easiest way to subdue someone without actually killing them… In most cases. Mercy also turns all other magic where it is used into something less directly harmful. Mercy is very good at cloying onto other mana when used in magic and producing this effect.

“Therefore, it could be said that Elemental Mercy is uniquely great at manifesting itself and making other mana take on Mercy-like effects.

“Elemental Benevolence seems to be uniquely good at various sensory-based magics, and in specific scenarios; sensing loss of life, guiding hands to better outcomes for all, and other general prognostications in those sorts of directions. Benevolence also has capabilities in the manifestation arena, for it makes plants. Other than that, Benevolence is rather terrible at directly causing magical damage, doing less actual damage to living things than other magics; the effect-per-mana is terrible. Of course, we haven’t tested Benevolence against a Benevolence-approved target yet, but we haven’t found one of those, either—” Aisha briefly brightened as she remembered something. “It’s also great at buffing and debuffing, as well. A former half-dragon from Ar’Cosmos— Ah. You know Clavog, sorry. My mind is rather frayed right now— Clavog made a [Warcry] which buffs him and his side of a battle, and debuffs the enemy. So that was a rousing success.”

Erick perked up.

Teressa perked up, too. “Shouting Magic?”

“Oh yes.” Aisha brought out a pair of blue boxes and handed them out, saying, “Much improved from Clavog’s normal version, too.”