Ryn of Avonside-163: A New Order

My mind was spinning with Umare scientific terminology, cultural oddities, and above all, questions. What was the lab trying to achieve? What were the words that I couldn't translate? Really, my greatest question was, what is the context that makes this make sense?

Right now, I had just enough of an idea to know I was missing out on most of the implications. I felt kinda dizzy, actually.

After the initial computer stuff in the xenology department, I dragged Lily into the Garden with me. Well, drag like in the cute silly way that people use to mean gently cajoling someone into going somewhere.

Lily, understandably, was extremely overwhelmed by the wildness of the open Garden, but calmed when we entered the silvered surface of Ryn's grove. Especially with a lost but familiar sun hanging in the sky. Feeling the light of your home star was… nice, even to someone who couldn't photosynthesise.

“This is what you've been gatekeeping?” She asked in wonder as we pushed through the jungle of otherworldly plants.

“I’m not gatekeeping,” I grumbled, giving her a frustrated look. “I’m just trying to temper a bit of reckless enthusiasm.”

I paused as my words hit my own ears. Oh no. That sounded so much like Esra.

With a cough, I pushed onwards. “Anyway, the really cool stuff is only possible because Ryn is Ryn.”

To embellish the point, I gestured out as we exited the treeline of Ryn's forest. The bunny village spread out before us, entrenched along a section of the hedge gardens below Ryn's tree. The tree itself rose up, and up, and up. Its needles shone with a deep green, that muffled, but didn't blot out all the various magically glowing bits and bobs.

Lily's gaze quickly rose as she took in the towering visage of Stormpine. “Holy fuck.”

“See? Ryn.” I gave her a sly, knowing smile.

A couple of minutes later, we were ascending the ramp and stepping inside the wide front door of the tree. I took the wide-eyed Lily up one floor into the glass balcony, where we sat down with our phones to read through everything we took from the computer.

The whimsy of Ryn's grove wasn't done with her yet, though.

“Oh,” Lily squeaked when Crash appeared at her side.

“New person, new coffee order to learn!” Crash said, her ears upright and focused. “What do you want?”

Lily looked to me for some sort of prompting, but I just gestured for her to listen to Crash.

“I don't have any money or work certs or…” she mumbled, trailing off.

Crash thumped a heavy, furred paw. “None of that shit here. We work together. We trust each other. Everyone got a job to do, and together we make it all work. My job — caffeinate the people who do too much thinking and not enough sleeping.”

A snort of self deprecating laughter escaped me. She wasn't wrong.

Crash continued to stare at Lily expectantly, but she flicked a quick, gently accusatory ear in my direction.

“Um… do you have… ice?” Lily asked hesitantly.

Crash nodded. “Yup.”

“Um… vanilla?”

“Vanilla iced coffee?” Crash asked with a tilt of her head. “Oat, almond, or no milk? We don't have cow milk, because… I don't actually know why.” fɾēewebnσveℓ.com

The few recently acquired cows in Verburch weren't being run through an industrial fertility regimen, that's why.

Lily smiled at that. “Almond works for me. Sugar too?”

“Sugar. Got it,” Crash nodded, and turned away, heading for her little castle of coffee preparation.

Originally, we'd set it up how we figured was best, but she had very quickly insisted on moving things around to suit her own eccentricities. It was now an indecipherable enigma of machinery, hanging bags, benches, and multiple plush seats. Personally, I think it was on purpose, so we were forced to always go to her for our coffee or tea.

While that little interaction was happening, I was already laying out sheets of paper. It was time to begin the task of translating the various reports and messages from the computer, with original alien script side-by-side with English. It would be a while before anyone else would be able to read this stuff, but this would help.

Hours later, Lily was massaging her temples while I squished my hand with telekinesis. It was cramping so bad from writing dozens of pages by hand that I couldn't uncurl it. Outside, the sun was beginning to set, but with clouds completely covering the sky now, there wasn't an actual sunset. All it did was dim the grey light coming in from outside.

“The Umare in this scale were riding the struggle bus,” Lily noted, voice dulled with the headache she was obviously beginning to feel. “Whatever they were trying to do was not working.”

“The way they were talking about trying to make an ‘interface,’ and how it would ‘allow individuals to better harness materia from the island’ — I'm sure they were attempting to create some sort of mage fruit or whatever, like how garden mages are made” I said, picking up one page in particular. “This later message is interesting, though. I think it's hinting at motivations?”

Lily looked over at it and began to read from the point I had my finger on. “Without an unprecedented breakthrough, it isn't likely we'll be able to create an interface in time for the arrival of the wave. It hasn't been said by leadership yet, but I think that they will soon announce an end to work. Perhaps it's just a cold-fever, but I wish to spend my last days with my partner. I must give you thanks, however, for continuing to correspond with me.Your memory will be thanked by the rescued sapients who will one day utilise the interface you helped create for 129.”

“Rescued sapients?” Lily asked when she was done reading. “Is that… us?”

I grabbed the next page in sequence and nodded. “Maybe?”

If you squinted, what happened to us did kinda fit that description… if you assumed that there was — I shuddered — a galaxy-wide threat. Was this Ring a sort of ark? Did I mention to Lily that we had evidence that the assumption of a threat to Earth might not be out of the question?

The sound of footfalls on the stairs drew our attention out of our thoughts, and after a moment, Ryn and Grace trudged into the room. Both looked tired and covered in road dust.

When she saw Lily, Ryn did a double take. “Lily. Hey!”

“Catherine brought me here. This place is crazy,” Lily blurted, rising to her feet. With a blush, she added, “Uh, and hello.”

Ryn laughed wearily. “Thanks, I think?”

Grace haphazardly knelt and then collapsed into a cross-legged sitting position on the ground. “Hey, Lily. Nice to meet you. I'll definitely be having a bath before I come and chill properly, but what are you two up to?”

“They cracked the plains laboratory computers today,” I said, gesturing to the mess of paper around us. “We’re just translating and transcribing the screenshots we got.”

It was honestly funny how Ryn immediately perked up and took half a step towards the pages. She pulled to an abrupt halt with one hand almost touching one of my carefully handwritten pages. “Damn it, I'm still filthy. What have you found so far? How's the rest of the xenology department going? Shit, I think I'm going to run and shower really quick. Gosh, I have so many questions and there might finally be some answers.”

“What about that magic thing that I absorbed? Is there anything about that?” Grace asked, looking both excited and nervous. “These computers came from that place.”

I winced. “I'm not sure. There's a few words that don't make sense. Like, my magical brain can't get a mental handhold on them.”

Ryn reached for the pages again, then huffed in frustration and abruptly headed for the door. “Hold that thought. I'm going to shower.”

Grace, with a groan, pushed to her feet and followed after her. “Yeah. Questions after, I think.”

As they left, both my and Lily's phones chimed. It was a message from Dr. Guthries, detailing the plan for the department going forward. The “ransacking” as he called it, of the computers would stop tomorrow, and a more in-depth and professional investigation would be carried out.

“I did wonder,” Lily laughed softly. “That place is usually pretty chaotic, but that was like a new year's party.”

I very much had to agree, there.

Ryn and Grace joined us again shortly, clean and clothed in comfy, casual clothing. My mage sister hurried over to me, eager to see the word that was slipping out of my grasp like an oiled fish. I pointed it out to her on my phone, and watched as her eyes became unfocused. She shook her head as if to clear it, then gestured for Grace to take a look. Grace gazed curiously at the word for a second, then shrugged.

“I don't see anything weird.”

Pursing my lips, I thought for a second, then picked up pen and paper. With careful fingers, I replicated the word, line for line—

The symbol, it almost looked like a celtic knot. No, that wasn't right. It looked like a twisted tree that was curling around and weaving into itself to form a circle, but simplified a little.

When I looked up to show it to the others, I— “Oh fuck!”

My train of thought shattered as I found myself staring into two dark voids — eyes in a horned mask of shining white bone. It was feminine in shape, but like, if that femininity was a threat. The same kind of threat that a holstered gun represented if it were hanging from a friend's hip.

The face moved back and tilted slightly in question, and although its expression didn't change, the implication of the mask shifted to one of deep caring, as though it could smooth over every problem in my life.

I blinked, and jarringly, abruptly, I was staring into Ryn's eyes as magesight faded from them.

“Are you okay?” She asked, concern pulling at her expression in a normal, non-eldritch way.

“Uh… yeah,” I said, glancing at Grace. “I saw the silvery mask again…”

Her eyebrows rose, and now she too was shining with magesight. Ryn didn't have hers active though, so Grace saw nothing. “That's a little freaky. I think we should maybe look into that.”

Ryn sighed and looked away, avoiding both my own, and Grace's gaze. “Later, and how? We have no idea where to start with it. Anyway, this symbol is kinda concerning too. One thing at a time.”

Lily shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Ho boy, I am missing some context here. Does weird magic shit happen all the time, or…?”

“With distressing regularity,” I said, giving a sigh of deep, somewhat amused weariness.

“Right.”

“Well, the symbol is obviously magic,” Ryn said, and took the pen from my loose grasp.

Carefully, she wrote it out again. This time, the symbol wriggled uncomfortably on the page, like the ink itself was alive. Oh boy. Here we go again. It squirmed a little more, like it was trying really hard to fit its foot into a small shoe. Then, it made an audible popping noise, and went still.

All three of us turned on magesight in time to see a warm flare of silvery light dissipate.

What. The. Fuck.

Grace began anxiously balling her shirt up in her fist. “It's the same shit that Ryn put on the trees.”

“Okay, but this time it's directly related to the people who built the Ring,” I said, shaking my phone. “Ryn didn't just make this symbol up in a burst of whimsical creativity like last time. This is thousands upon thousands of years old.”

“What kind of context do they use it in?” Ryn asked, turning her eyes to the table where the sheets of paper were still strewn.

I picked one of the relevant ones out and handed it to her. It was the initial message that had been sent from Scale 39 to Scale 129, where they were asking about the mutual problem that had already been solved in 129.

It explained how materia from ‘Island 39’ was so volatile it had disrupted their ‘funny tree rune’ so badly that it had become unstable. It went into more detail, than that obviously, like how they had used ‘stabilisers’ to hastily regain control of their ‘funny tree rune’ after several ‘thinkers’ were injured.

“That sounds disturbingly familiar,” Grace muttered as Ryn read aloud.

I blinked and stared at her. “Huh?”

She pointed to her chest. “The thing that jumped inside me. It was contained by some disks that could easily be described as stabilisers, and it was very unstable. Ryn is able to eat energy from it, thankfully, and then Ollinfer was able to calm it.”

Lily suddenly scrambled over to a different page and after a second of frantic reading, blurted, “Here! If we're looking for similarities — magic from Island 40 was used to calm it. At least, they thought it would? It’s unclear.”

“Ollinfer is from the Nameless Garden,” Ryn added, then picked up the next piece of paper in sequence and read, “Application of materia from Island 40 is able to stabilise the ‘funny tree symbol’ for approximately two days before it returns to an unstable state.”

“So… is Island 40 the Nameless Garden?” Grace asked, her head so obviously full of thoughts that it was visible on her face.

“I think that's a safe guess,” I said slowly, while my mind also hurtled forward into the next set of baffling questions. Like, why didn't they just get a replacement for the thing that was unstable? Fingers crossed that the other computers had similar troves of documentation to give further context to all of this.

“So, the islands are realms, or at least the Umare’s foothold within a single realm. The plains laboratory was researching an unnamed realm, number 39,” Ryn reiterated. “129, though. I haven't heard of a realm with… what, mischievous RNG? 130 is absolutely the Loom, though.”

Lily, frowning, asked, “I wonder what one of these magic realms with cheeky RNG would even look like. I've only been outside of your little pocket dimension once, but those spinny plant things seemed very random to me, so… you know…”

Hearing Lily just… voice an opinion without any self consciousness was pretty cool. Poor girl had a self confidence deficit that I rarely saw her overcome.

As if my thoughts had pointed out how comfortable she was, Lily seemed to realise where she was and who she was talking to. It was immediately visible in the way she shrank slightly into the chair and looked down at the table.

With a sigh, decided to get her some breathing room by suggesting, “I think we should wait until we get info from the rest of the xenology people. Making guesses when we've only analysed one computer is kinda silly.”

Ryn nodded reluctantly. “Gah, this is such a tease. You're right, though, I guess.”

Before anyone could add further input on things, my stomach — which was completely uninterested in the intellectual mystery we were slowly unravelling — rumbled loud enough to be heard by the others. I grimaced, and then redoubled the expression when I suddenly became aware of how hungry I was.

“Food time?” Grace laughed knowingly.

Lily suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair. "Oh shit, I was going to eat with Amara tonight!”

Wryly, I stood up and began collecting the haphazardly strewn paper. “I'll take you back. Help me put this stuff up in the library first, though."