The Way Ahead

“So you’re sure that this won’t hurt, won’t permanently fuse us together into some kind of abomination, won’t create an utterly unbreakable bond between us, won’t corrupt me into something else, won’t turn me into your eternal servant…”

“Yes! Blight, Edwin, why are you so worried? You’re usually so much more willing to go along with this sort of thing,” Inion cut him off with a cocky grin.

Edwin rolled, “Well normally you aren’t about to perform a ritual to bind yourself to my literal body.”

“It’s not a binding ritual, it’s a magical ritual meant to transfer my binding point from the spring to the fey-primed Skill which manifests in across your body.”

“That explanation literally included both the words ‘ritual’ and ‘binding’ in it.”

“Did it? Hmm. Well, that’s on your language for not having adequate vocabulary, then.”

“We don’t…” he sighed, “Never mind.”

It may not have made Edwin feel any better, but he was already sitting half-reclined in Inion’s pond, Fey’s Caress at full bore turning his skin and hair to water, while the fey was flitting around, arranging floating plants in an approximate circle around him, “And you’re certain this won’t have any negative consequences for me in the long run?”

No matter how many times he’d done it, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever get used to being able to see his muscles exposed through his ‘skin.’ Anatomy loved it, naturally- in the week it had taken to get him prepared for this, it had already passed level 20, higher than even Flying had reached and he used that constantly.

“Yes! Now, calm down or something might actually go wrong.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of reassuring me, you know.”

“Oh, you’ll be fine. It’s only for a few hours anyway.”

The idea was ‘simple,’ apparently. While Inion was bound to her spring, sharply limited in power anywhere else, she could change the exact target for her binding relatively easily if it wasn’t a “major” change- namely, something of the same type of material and in close proximity. With a Skill that allowed him to change the composition of his skin, Edwin could sit in her pond and be about as ‘minor’ of a change as possible. Theoretically. Assuming nothing went wrong.

Of course, that still meant that Inion would be literally bound to him, physically as well as contractually, which Edwin still wasn’t sure how to process. Still, once they left the Verdant, and the magic-disrupting barrier which surrounded it, Inion planned to bind to a river, possibly even the Rhothos itself, and leave him once again to his own skin.

He’d even required an oath as binding as he could sufficiently wrangle that Inion would not harm him in any way during the transfer, and that she would leave him as soon as she could, making all reasonable effort to ensure that ‘as soon as she could’ came around quickly. Friend or not, Inion was not human and it was a constant struggle to remind himself of that, despite how critical it was that he did.

Even so, he was nervous. Inion may have been his only friend in the world and even seemed to genuinely care about his well-being, and was magically obligated to not harm him, but none of those precluded accidents.

He screwed his eyes shut as Inion sang a melodious song without lyric or rhyme, keeping them closed as tightly as possible until the itching in his watery skin and the sound around him faded away. He peeked out with a single eye, “…Did it work?” he hazarded.

“Ya! You’re good!” Inion cheerfully exclaimed, pulling him from the water.

Edwin breathed a sigh of relief as Fey’s Caress faded away upon his exit from the pond, returning his skin to its normal, solid and opaque state. He could feel… power coursing through him, magical strength flowing through his limbs and torso in a new way that was both disquieting and reassuring at the same time.

Congratulations! For willingly serving as a Bind for an ancient fey, you have unlocked the Fey Supplicant path!

Congratulations! For fusing yourself with an ancient fey, you have unlocked the Feykind path!

Level Up!

Fey’s Caress Level 16 → 28

He mentioned how he felt to Inion as he dressed, and she nodded thoughtfully, “That… that sounds about right? I know there are some fey- we call them fairies- who choose to bind themselves closely to mortals. Those they tie themselves to tend to get some interesting abilities. I’ve heard of eternal youth, the ability to fly, some transformations, that sort of thing. I doubt you’ll really get too much that way, ‘cause you’re not a true Bind and it won’t last for very long, but it’s not impossible either. Just part of the magic involved- I become more like you, you become more like me.”

Edwin nodded. Sounded rather fun, all told, and trying to call up his mana was significantly easier than it had been previously. At the mention of flight, he took to the air, reveling in the comparative river of mana he was able to call upon, letting him rise some two meters into the air, a good four times higher than his normal limit, “Pity!” he called back down, “I could get used to this.”

“Oh? You want me to keep you as a bind?”

“Ahh…”

“Kidding!”

Edwin breathed a faint sigh of relief as he returned to the ground and gathered his travel possessions together. He also swept through Obairlann one last time, just to ensure he hadn’t left anything behind. It wouldn’t be the last time he ever came here, but it would be the last time for quite a while. He was in a contemplative mood, he mused, running his hand along the living wood frame of the place he’d lived in and trained at for the past year.

It had been a bit of a chore to fully pack up everything he could use, including harvesting what crops were ready from his garden, but he’d eventually managed it. He had tried to stack Improbable Arsenal containers endlessly, to see if he couldn’t fit everything he had into his pocket, but it unfortunately didn’t work.

Whenever he put one container affected by Improbable Arsenal inside of another, only the one furthest inside actually benefited from the Skill. The outer container’s increased volume shrank by the exact amount of additional space within the sub-container. Also, he found that for whatever reason, using Improbable Arsenal on his Apparatus containers, while still functional, was less effective than on more ‘real’ objects, not that it mattered all that much in the end, thanks to the stacking issues.

However, instead of being able to load up on everything he could want, Edwin had to be somewhat pickier with what he’d take with him. Fortunately, he still managed to get most of what was actually important Packed away, though the result was a bag nearly as big as he was between both the basic backpack and all the stuff and improvised bags strapped onto it.

He was having to leave pretty much all of his pottery behind, but with Apparatus, that wasn’t too great a loss. After all, he didn’t really have a use for most of his simple clay labware and only really needed to bring materials and potions with him.

Speaking of materials, Edwin had two notable absences from his basic supply for being an Alchemist-Errant. Namely, actual explosives and smoke bombs. Sure, the former he could mimic through careful use of Firestarting, only made easier with Basic Thermokinesis, but it was still… far from reliable. All he really had in the direct offense sense was his alchemist’s fire, the not-really-a Molotov cocktail he’d devised from firevine. Anything more than that had no assurance it would actually work, as his explosive grenades required him to Infuse them while mid-flight, a tactic he had firmly abandoned after many frustrated months of getting it to work even twice in a row let alone a majority of the time.

No, he needed genuine bombs, preferably ones he could detonate with his Skills but which didn’t require them to work. If he couldn’t get it to reliably work in practice, no way was he ever going to try to do so in actual life-or-death combat. And without grenades, he really didn’t have much in the way of true force projection. Hm. Perhaps he should have taken an explosives-related Path, though he wasn’t sure what he might have given up on.

He almost wished he was back at Clan Blackstone, ironically. Sure, they had enslaved him for a month trying to get him to make cement, insulted and threatened him regularly, and held him underground against his will, but they had provided him with the materials he needed to make explosives. His homemade kiln, even post-rebuild- especially post-rebuild, he just hadn’t put the same amount of work into it as its predecessor, simply couldn’t get hot enough to turn limestone into lime, which was what he used for all of his gear back then. The few times he had tried, the bricks had crumbled and given out, breaking under the extreme temperatures well before the limestone he’d collected could react properly.

Thinking back on his escape, it was honestly a miracle he hadn’t blown himself up while trying to escape.Though, with the benefit of hindsight, Packing likely helped reduce the chance of his ‘will explode if shaken too hard’ arsenal going up in flames. He’d probably gotten much closer to death with that whole escapade than even he had realized at the time, and far closer than he wanted to be in the future.

But that tied back into his other desire of making smoke bombs. What better way to help ensure his safety than to obscure everything that was going on? If he could make it an aerosol dispenser, he might have a decent way to disperse sleeping gas, but more pertinent to the concept itself, he would lose pretty much any straight-up fight he found himself in against a competent foe. His ‘fight’ with the bugbear assassin sent after him by the Blackstones was proof enough of that.

So, the obvious solution was to just never put himself in a straight up fight. He’d need to obscure what was going on, blanket the   with explosives, and run away. Not necessarily in that order, either, but misdirection would have to be a major tool of his going forward.

Even though his bag felt as light as a feather, compared to the sorts of weights he lifted when training his Skills, it still was about as big as he was, once he had everything factored in. Well, nobody could deny that he didn’t look like an alchemist if nothing else. Not with the glowing potions tied like Christmas lights ringing his pack. It was kind of nice, in a way.

All of his actually valuable things were in the very bottom of his bag, inside a sealed Apparatus box, and his coin pouch was locked in a similar construction that utilized the way Improbable Arsenal worked- namely, that it didn’t expand the opening- to be outright impossible to remove while the Apparatus was active. Dismissing his own conjurations was merely the work of tapping it while activating the Skill again, but breaking them was significantly harder and certainly not subtle.

He had no doubt that there were pickpocketing Skills which could bypass all of his precautions, but he had no way to prevent them totally, just make it harder for them. Hopefully they’d be rare anyway, what with the way the Empire had their Skill Management system set up. It mostly raised the question of how the Phantom Pickpocket Tara apprehended in his first visit to Vinstead got his Class, but perhaps he was just an Outlaw. There had to be a few within the city itself, especially if they were focused on stealth, right? Something to ask while he was in Vinstead.

“Ready?” he asked Inion, shouldering his pack and hefting his walking stick.

“I’ve been here so long, it’s strange to leave.”

Edwin nodded sympathetically, “I know what you mean, and it’s only been a year for me. We’ll be back here eventually, I want to harvest that hispera when it reaches maturity in two years if nothing else.”

“Always the alchemy with you, isn’t it?” she asked, and Edwin took a moment to parse her tone. She didn’t sound mad, that much was a relief. Rather, it seemed like she was genuinely asking.

He gave a curt shrug, “It’s who I want to be. Interacting with people may be a lost cause, but I at least have some hope of figuring out how my chemicals and potions work.”

“Who you want to be, eh?” she prodded. Huh. She wasn’t normally quite this inquisitive to Edwin’s personal thoughts. Perhaps moving out got her sentimental?

“Well, I am a scientist. Sure, we settle into the role of peeling back the mysteries of the universe- which is amazing and rewarding in its own right- but we don’t get into science without some part deep down that wants to be a mad scientist, doing all sorts of things that just flatly contradict everything we know about creation. Freeze rays, teleportation, time travel, interdimensional portals, warp drives, lightsabers… That’s the sort of thing that drives us, on a deep and fundamental level. Because we want them to be true, and now I find myself in a world where all that stuff might actually be possible?” he shook his head as they drifted along the riverbank, “It’s like if I had been told I was going to wizard academy when I was ten, but better because I know how to scientifically test stuff. Everything I thought I knew is vastly incomplete.”

“Wizard academy, eh? But you aren’t trying to be a mage?”

Edwin shrugged, “I have no basis for how to be a decent mage- you’ve admitted yourself you don’t know how to teach me anything,” Inion reluctantly nodded. “But science? I can do that. Besides, my mana manipulation is pitiful. Sure, I want to improve it in time, but I already have a solid base for alchemy, why would I not use that? It doesn’t matter if it takes me ten minutes to charge up a dagger with mana if there’s no time pressure for it. Doing most of my magic stuff beforehand means I can neatly bypass past-Edwin’s mistakes. One day, maybe I’ll try to figure out magic without the science, but the science will do nicely until then.”

Inion hemmed in agreement as they flew forward.

“You know, I’m kind of nervous this time.”

“Why? Last time you didn’t even notice it,” Inion countered as she toed the line demarcating the Verdant from the rest of Rhothos.

“Sure… but last time I wasn’t half fey.”

“You’re not half fey. You’re… fey-adjacent.”

“Still not sure how much of an impact that has, though.”

Edwin vaguely mumbled some kind of agreement and brought his hand up towards where the barrier apparently was… and felt no resistance.

“Huh. Guess it still doesn’t affect me,” he noted, uneventfully stepping out of the forest. “You having trouble there?” he asked Inion, who was slowly struggling against the fierce ‘wind’ keeping her penned inside.

“I… can… got it!” she stumbled forward as she pushed through the resistance, recovering her balance before she fell in the dirt, fortunately without needing Edwin’s help- if he had tried, who knew how his backpack would react, and he did not want to have to repack it all. “It was easier that time,” she remarked, brushing imaginary dirt from her arms.

“Glad you have it so easy,” Edwin wryly replied, “I’d hate to see you have to work.”

Inion stuck her tongue out at him as they floated to the road, and Edwin drew his tone into a more serious one, checking in on his friend, “But you’re feeling alright? No water deprivation or sensation of slowly dying?”

She shook her head, “Nope. It feels more like I’m in Obairlann, other than the lower magic out here.”

Edwin frowned, trying to sense the mana in their surroundings. It did feel rather anemic, and was only made more obvious by directing his Perception towards the task. Using Ritual Intuition, too, there was little of the feel of nature he had come to associate with his surroundings. Instead, it felt more like a faint breeze tapping at the edge of his senses. There was still a hint of life and nature, but it felt like sprawling grasslands rather than the greenhouse-like sensation within the Verdant, “Huh. I think I can feel what you mean.”

As they reached the road, Edwin sank back to the ground, taking the strain off of Flight.

Level Up!

Flight Level 18 → 21

Ritual Intuition Level 14 → 16

Fast leveling or no, the Skill still had a strain on him that was just tiring. Granted, he could probably keep it up for most of the day thanks to his Stamina and Mana, but doing so would be like if he spent the entire day hiking pre-System. Meanwhile, walking essentially didn’t tire him in the slightest. He had plenty of time to level Flight, after all.

He wasn’t planning to try and reach Tier 3 until his Alchemy was at least level 120 and he got Alchemy Specialist. By then, Flight and what it evolved into would have had more than enough time to hit level 60, he was sure. He’d make sure to use it as much as possible to help speed it along, but he wasn’t pushing himself that fast anymore.

Besides, he could use the Skill’s existence as a Path lightning rod to give him security when completing Attribute-granting Paths, giving him another shot to unlock them before he went for the full Tier 3 jump.

He felt much more confident now in his ability to take care of himself. Not only did he have an actual defensive Skill- two if he counted Fey’s Caress- but he had Health, First Aid in the 80s, and a whole suite of health potions. He could take a few bumps, even if he couldn’t return the favor.

“So how does it work, when you bind to something like the Rhothos? How does it compare to your pond?” he asked as they walked down the road.

“I’ll be stronger once I’m bonded to it than with my pond, but it’ll also be less localized. Basically, I get more freedom and more power!”

Edwin raised an eyebrow, “Then why weren’t you bonded to it before, if it’s so much better?”

“Eh,” she waved her hand dismissively, “Aenliss had bonded to its spring so she had a strong claim to it. With whatever is keeping the Verdant separate though, the main river’ll be unclaimed, just for me!”

“What if another naiad is already bonded to it, though?”

“No big deal. The river is big enough to support loads of fey as proper river spirits. It’ll just mean the power is divided up some. Still great for me, and still with loads of mobility.”

“So again… why didn’t you do this earlier?”

“Because I had people visiting me, that’s why. I enjoyed having my own little cult who came and asked me for wisdom and stuff. I was a big deal back when, I’ll have you know!”

“Sure you were.” Edwin replied, placating her in a manner he knew would irk her pride, speeding up as he did so.

“I was! Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. Edwin! Edwiiiinnnnn!”