Web of Aeons - Chapter 30: Pocket Dimensions

“So let me get this straight . . .” Relia took a long drink of her coffee and blinked the sleep from her eyes. “You talked with your dad . . . in the past?”

“No,” Akari said. “I mean, kind of. It started as one of Elend’s dreams, then my present self took over. Things got weird after that.” Talek. The dream had been so vivid before, and now everything was a blur. What if she hadn’t woken Kalden in time? Would that have ruined everything?

“But that’s impossible, right?” Relia turned to Glim who stood in breakfast nook’s floor-to-ceiling mirror. “Shouldn’t that stop Elend’s technique?”

“Definitely,” Glim said. “Elend’s technique just cares about the facts.”

“Unless I never took control,” Akari said. "What if the memory was real, and I forgot about it?”

Relia rubbed at her temple. “This is why I hate knowledge mana.”

“Join the club,” Kalden muttered into his own coffee mug.

“No.” Glim’s blue eyes went distant as she replayed the footage they’d shared. “You took control, then you entered your own subconscious. That part’s clear enough.”

“Okay,” Relia said. “So, Akari just imagined the whole thing?” She snapped her mouth shut and sank back in her chair. “Sorry, that came out wrong.”

“It’s fine.” Akari gestured to Kalden with her thumb. “He said the same thing.”

“Then she went and made twenty portals,” Kalden mused. “Almost three times her old record”

“And we tested it,” Akari said. “I only get the power boost when we link up our thoughts.” Ideally, she could bypass that restriction once she’d internalized the new technique forms. Thoughts were fickle things, but habits were far tougher.

“Maybe you had this revelation yourself,” Glim said. “The dream could be your subconscious helping you understand it.”

“Me?” Akari furrowed her brow. “I thought Apprentices didn’t have breakthroughs like that?”

Glim shrugged. “It’s been done. Elend was just a kid when he made me. Not all breakthroughs are about mana.”

“But Elend was working on you for years.”

“You’re not so different,” Glim said. You’ve been studying spacetime since you were a kid, and you’ve focused on personal displacement these past two months.”

Akari still wasn’t convinced. Making a mana spirit was one thing. That process involved more belief than intellectual insight, and it made sense that a child would succeed where adults had failed. But this was a glimpse into the very nature of spacetime. A revelation that Grandmasters had struggled to reach for centuries.

“Have you heard of this before?” Kalden asked Glim.”Using revelations to become stronger?”

“Sure,” Glim said. “That’s the only way to climb through the Master realm.”

“What about passing a revelation from one person to another? Or advancing a specific technique?

“No.” the mana spirit frowned. “That was all new to me.”

Akari cleared her throat. “My dad said it was a secret.”

Glim’s mouth made a thin line.

“And this felt like my real dad.” Akari tapped the side of her head. “The revelation felt like him, too.”

“Maybe he’s talking to you from the island?” Relia said. “I mean, he’s a space artist, right?”

“But he mentioned me by name,” Kalden cut in. “He even knew about my Second Brain, and that technique’s only a few weeks old.”

Akari shrugged. “What if my parents left a Construct in my head, the same way Elend does with our flashback dreams?”

“But Elend has to refresh that technique every few months,” Glim said. “And he’s a Grandmaster-level dream artist. Unless your dad was a hidden Mystic, then I can’t see that lasting for years. Not to mention all the memory wiping you went through.”

“He wasn’t a Mystic,” Akari said with a quick shake of her head. “Both my parents tried to fight back when our home was attacked. They barely lasted a few seconds.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Glim said. “Relia can beat some Artisans that fast. In fact, you’ve beaten Artisans that fast.”

Talek, that was true. Until now, she’d imagined her enemy as an ordinary Mystic, but what if he was stronger than all the others? How could they ever defeat an enemy like that? But no . . . that was a question for later. So was this mysterious dream. They could spend all morning arguing about how it happened, but that wouldn’t change her next steps.

She’d achieved her goal for today. She’d dreamt of her father, and she’d learned his theories about personal displacement. Now, it was time to craft the technique itself.

~~~

She texted Arturo an hour later and they met up at his house for a brainstorming session. His parents lived in the Darklight’s neighborhood, so she only had to walk a few blocks. The morning sun cast its long rays over the rooftops, and a warm breeze ruffled her hair. She probably could have worn a skirt if she’d wanted to. Of course, Akari didn’t dress up much these days, not with the Darklights gone, and Storm’s Eye looming in the south. A fight could break out any minute, and she’d rather be prepared.

“You sure you’re cool with this?” she asked Arturo as they stepped downstairs toward the basement. “Might be a big project.”

He chuckled at that. “You kidding, shoka? After how much you helped me this month?”

Huh. Who would have guessed those efforts would actually bear fruit? Not to mention her training with Kalden; she never could have stored her revelation without him.

“Besides,” he said as he pulled open the door. “This will help the whole team, right?”

“That’s the idea.” Akari followed him through the door and glanced around his workshop. It reminded her of Master Kazalla’s office back on campus, with dozens of half-finished projects scattered across the tables. Mostly weapons and armor, judging by their shapes.

Arturo leaned against the nearest table and crossed his slender arms. “So how’s this gonna work?”

Akari shared the bones of her dream, including her father’s theories about swapping and pocket dimensions. If she were more experienced, she could have built these dimensions from scratch using her own mana. But that was a whole other technique, which meant months of practice. Meanwhile, Arturo had already dabbled in this field from a sigilcraft perspective. She hoped that was enough to fill in the gaps.

“You’ve got basic displacement down?” Arturo asked when she’d finished.

Akari unshouldered her backpack and pulled out a pair of marbles from the front pocket, holding them up for him to see. One was blue, and the other was red.

She placed the blue marble on the nearest table, then she tossed the other one toward an empty wall. Her spacetime Missile followed in its wake, grazing the marble’s shiny red surface. Akari pulled the mana back into her channels, then she hurled a second Missile at the table.

The red marble turned blue and soared off in a seemingly random direction. Meanwhile, the flying marble turned red and plummeted to the ground.

Arturo looked confused for a second, then a low chuckle escaped his lips. “Conservation of momentum—I get it!” He met her eyes again. “Don’t suppose you can fix that?”

“I could redirect the energy,” Akari said. “But that will take more practice.”

“Makes sense.” He scratched the stubble on his chin. “Always wondered how those space artists made portals to the equator and back. Anyway”—he clapped his hands and rubbed them like an evil genius—“What’s the first step?”

“We’ll need samples from the whole team,” Akari said. “Mana, muscle, blood—stuff like that.”

He hummed in consideration “What about the quantities? I mean, mana’s one thing, but I can’t just donate eight pints of blood before our next match.”

“Kalden can clone the cells with alchemy,” she replied. “Then we’ll need six pocket dimensions—one for each team member.”

He nodded. “Got a plan to hold these dimensions?”

Akari gestured to the fallen marbles. “These are easy to work with.”

Arturo knelt on the floor and retrieved one of the small glass orbs. “I dunno, shoka. Every pocket dimension needs a key, and spheres are hard to work with.”

Akari frowned. “A key?”

He nodded. “It’s the point where the pocket dimension touches our own world. It needs to be a physical opening—one that’s big enough to fit the dimension’s contents.”

“So why do they call that a key?” she asked. “Sounds more like a door.”

“Not that kind of key, shoka. I think it’s short for something in Old Koreldon. Keylas, maybe?”

That sounded familiar. Akari must have learned it when she was studying pocket dimensions back in Last Haven. Oh well, that was a tangent for another day.

“What about the spatial network you used in Vordica?” she asked. “Can’t we do that here?” She wasn’t really that attached to the marbles, but curiosity got the better of her.

Arturo shook his head. “I use those networks to reduce the weight of my bags. But you actually want the weight here, don’t you? Otherwise, the swap won’t save you any mana.”

Akari’s frown deepened. “So . . . each marble will weigh over a hundred pounds? Isn’t there a sigil to convert mass into energy?”

He laughed. “Yeah, it’s called nuclear fission. Might be a little unstable, though.”

“Oh.” Akari almost slapped her forehead. “Duh.”

“But I see your point . . .” Arturo stepped over to the white board and drew set of sigils. They reminded her of computer code, but with a different kind of syntax. “We could use a spatial delivery network inside the marbles and store the weight somewhere else. Then we set up a conditional on the outside. Your spacetime Missile could activate the outer sigil, and that could trigger a swap at the last second.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “But how do we get the timing right?”

Arturo spun the marker between his fingers. “Same way we do everything in sigilcraft—lots of trial and error.” He stopped spinning the marker and glanced back at the board. “And I’m no expert, but I know blood spoils pretty quick. We’ll need another Construct inside the container. Probably ice mana.”

Akari nodded. With more practice, she could probably weave a temporal Construct with the pocket dimension itself, but that was off the table for now. She’d been so focused on displacement these past few months that she hadn’t learned a single time mana technique.

Arturo picked up the marble again. “And these are also too slow in a real fight. You’ve gotta telegraph all your moves.” He mimed her underhand throwing motion from earlier Any serious opponents will try to stop you. Or worse—set a trap.”

Akari winced. “You got a better idea?”

“Hell yeah, I do.” He opened a drawer and pulled out a pair of gloves. No . . . gloves wasn’t the right word. They looked more like vambraces, with tiny rocket launchers along the backs of the wrists.

Arturo strapped one around his forearm and loaded some metal ammunition into the top. He tossed Akari the other one, then they stepped through a sturdy glass door into his testing chamber. This room had white stone walls, overlaid with blue protection mana. An intricate sigil network covered the stone floor, probably meant to handle explosions or injuries.

“Picture this,“ he said. “Instead of marbles, we use darts. They’re bigger, but they’ve got a flat spot on the back. That’s where we’ll put the key.”

Akari nodded along as she fastened her own device to the back of her wrist. Arturo passed her a set of darts, and she loaded them into the top.

“Best of all . . . ” Arturo lined up his forearm with a training dummy and fed his mana into the device. The dart flew across the room in a blur, taking the training dummy in the center of its head.

“We can slow it down if we need to,” he said after a short pause. “Fast enough to swap with a human, but slow enough to confuse our opponents.”

Talek. Offensive power was Akari’s biggest weakness right now. Bullets couldn’t usually kill an Apprentice, and grenades could be blocked or deflected.

But what if she could hurl Zukan at her enemies? Or Relia? Even Artisans would tremble before her team’s might.