The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 543 - I’ll Take ’Ogre Fairy Godmother’ For $5000
The room she had carved into the bedrock beneath the chemistry dome was not all that large. The smaller the volume, the easier it was to saturate with rituals that overlapped to keep anti-essence, anti-spirit, and even physical energy suppressive fields operating at a proper level. Something that was required because a certain research assistant had soundly refused to wear the manacles while giving birth.
’It would have been such an elegant solution. Bite down on the medallion I already gave her, and then use the shackles. But no!’
Three by three by three meters, every glass coated wall had been smoothed to a tolerance that Madrigil could appreciate. With his metalwork, keeping the surface polished without leaving tracks or burs could sometimes be difficult. The molten state of Metal was something he enjoyed working with, even if he struggled with the same sort of phase and temperature control that the ancient cultivator made look like child’s play... he did have the advantage of being able to work with solid and liquid forms easily.
Which would always be something the Gaseous cultivator - with an Element very general in some ways but specific in others Element - had to work *around*. Fortunately, she was stubborn and inventive. The way all good teachers are.
"You could have told me this was here."
"You would have asked questions. Not telling you was faster."
Though sometimes the quality of stubbornness had nothing to do with teaching certain people anything. The man could feel the desire to have him leave the area by just looking at the way she turned her head over her shoulder. Which was his time to be just a bit inventive.
"I’ll confine my curiosity to approved areas once you are gone, but while you are here you could-"
"See that you do. I’ll allow it this time, but there really is nowhere else secret that I am comfortable showing you. Now pay attention if you wanted to learn something."
He had followed her from the studio after their prior conversation, all the way to the center of what would serve as a delivery room. Sigil formations for all kinds of emergencies and preventative measures were wrapped around the room. Racks of as many specialized medical substances as she could manage to get the relatively new wielder of Acid to learn how to produce in the time allotted sat in all four corners.
A ring above glowed faintly, in the low lumen setting that indicated active ritual dampening was not on. When it was brightened, as she would need to help see, she would become just a normal young woman. Delivering normal triplets, out of a normal first time mother. A fact that she was as confident in as she was terrified of, for it had been a millennium since she had delivered a child - and never in this body.
Which is why she spoke at length about *every* feature to him. And didn’t stop until she had nothing more to say. Nor did he ask questions more than necessary. Because while he often came off like a troll, he understood when he was not hiding under a bridge but standing in a potential tomb.
"So you’re describing a space where a cultivator gives birth as though they were mortal."
"Yes."
She said nothing else for a moment, turning instead to adjust something in the floor’s array that - to Madrigil - did not appear to ever need adjusting. Delicate fingers that could crush stone tracing a visible sequence and the hundreds of micro-sigils buried underneath that the scholar was sure must be present. After all, she had explained to him once before offhandedly that if the medallions were made ’to scale’ by continental standards... that they would take up a quarter mile circuit.
"Cultivator labors are simpler than mortal ones in most respects. The mother’s body is optimally resilient, optimally heals and reacts during most of it, and while she will lose the physical energy manipulation during my delivery, unlike normal - it had to be done in this case. Because I don’t know what her particular Physique going haywire would do to me while I can’t shield myself."
It sounded severe when she straightened to a stand, in a motion like silk draping upward from the floor, and looked at him directly with mint eyes as dull as they had ever been. Her discarded but not forgotten facade was still capable of slamming down a tight hold on all her energies all by herself.
She had served as midwife and much more in the past. Through all that time, she had seen a lot of things. Dealt with so many complications between infant and parent that did not always end with anything like a good story. But her failure rate had slimmed to nearly nil if it were averaged across her last lifetime.
And she’d be damned if she wanted to blast out her ’terror’ of letting down her cousin-in-law... her fear of harming the infants that were only there in that *danger* because the reincarnator herself had chosen to be in the Exclave when she had. It was why Rezzue, their mother, was still there - and it ate at her normally quiet conscience like so many things with people that were not just her beloved over these years. However, whether Madrigil could see that in her or not - that was the kind of thing she would only admit to Qat later, when it was all over with.
"Follow me. Don’t touch anything."
"I thought you said-"
"I know what I said."
An adjacent space had set up specifically for another sort of construction over the past month. At least, the area that she finalized and put together the manufactured parts. Three identical looking, oblong pods sat on a set of individual cradles. Sized plenty enough for holding up to a month old newborn and sealed along a seam that bisected them lengthwise.
Madrigil’s hand hovered over the nearest one before his ’restraint’ was surpassed by his ’curiosity’ regarding the outer layer. However, Elua could not blame him. It must seem like some sort of improbable marvel to the Metal cultivator.
"This isn’t crystalline... it feels more like glass."
"That’s because it’s an amorphous alloy made by rapid quenching of molten metals at a ratio meant to confuse the crystallization process."
"I’m sorry... but what?"
She understood his interest. It was a mechanic of physics that was quite similar to causing her gases to reach a perfect supercritical state that made it act like a liquid in some ways. In this case, causing metallic solids to have a lack of a true lattice structure was as close enough to the same thing as keeping them in a *very partially* liquid state. Producing her notes on the subject out of a hiding hole, she waved them over her shoulder like an owner playing fetch with their pet.
"I used a quinary alloy of zirconium-beryllium-copper-nickel-titanium. The glassy structure has no grain boundaries, which means no planes of weakness for fracture propagation under any exotic stresses - like that moment of intense forces inside the Gateway portal. But that’s just to keep the insides inside."
She unsealed the nearest pod along its seam with a coded burst of essence and the two halves separated to reveal the interior construction. Three distinct layers were visible in the cross-section of the hull wall, each one a different color and texture. The first was meant to handle the direct mechanical stress and any tidal forces that an Enchanter’s energy might deflect.
"Superconductor and sigil-driven cryogenic field, a mesh of niobium-tin bonded to the inner surface of the amorphous metal. Repels some other nasty effects that our essence fields usually handle."
"The electromagnetic shifts."
"Glad you paid attention to my prior explanations, makes things quick so you can go on your way - and I can return to my final preparations. While the corridor is mostly held together with Spatial essence hijinks that I’ve ripped off from studying thousands of realmshards, there is significant electromagnetic flux from the other rituals that maintain the wormhole on this end."
"That explains why my hair stood up the time I actually watched from at all closeby."
"Yes, it would. Newborns have a higher water to lipid ratio than adults, which make them susceptible to thermal agitation from this sort of situation. And keeping their brains from overheating is paramount to reduce the chance of long term damage that might not manifest for years. As you can see, I am not willing to accept any such risk."
Rather than see, he could hear it. The young woman who could banter happily within that group in the kitchen the week before, even when talking about chemistry or other lecture heavy moments, was speaking at the some sort of monotone that all but disappeared the first year in this place. Just like that voice, the innermost layer of the pod was a dark composite that produced a flat, dead, entirely non-resonant sound when tapped with her fingernail.
"Lead-bismuth-boron composite. Cosmic shielding for any ionizing radiation produced by the energy conversion processes during the transit. This one is probably overcautious, given that the transit duration is under three seconds and we are moving from a cepheid void. But I’m still pushing infants through a hole in dimensional reality. So I think covering all bases is simply being intelligent."
"So all in all, you made them a perfect cosmic armor."
Elua had told him some of the other Exclaves. Of travel through the depths of space and how some cultivator civilizations had taken to the stars in great ships. She hadn’t fully explained all the materials involved in that, but many of the principles of what she studied of those cultures were quite relevant to her material engineering for these safety pods.
’Yet, he is still a bit wrong.’
"I made them a cosmic womb. Similar, but different."
She lifted the open container to show off the interior cavity more clearly. Despite being larger than could fit an infant perfectly, it was not padded with fabric or lined with any cushioning. It was just a sealed chamber that the children would tumble around in, as far as he could tell.
"The cavity will be filled with an oxygen-saturated perfluorocarbon emulsion before sealing. It will act as a liquid lung during the time between transit and arrival."
"You can’t breathe liquids. Kaland has shown us that repeatedly."
The man spoke of the early days of the Yecine boy’s Aquatic training, in which he sometimes stayed down too long and came up hacking up fluid that slipped past his mouth before he could breach the surface and take in real air.
"Yes, well, just because a human cannot breathe and filter *water* does not mean that the lung cannot filter oxygen out of a substance that fills the airspaces gently in the chest. Though I agree it is not going to be pleasant for them, as while the fluid is different... I am essentially having them cough up yet another phlegm plug..."
Though it was not as simple as the mess of amniotic fluid, but instead also had a microscopic colloidal suspension and numerous other sigil rituals that turned it all into a non-newtonian fluid capable of preventing sudden jolts from slamming the child into the walls. While also not hardening so much it would lead to bronchial distress inside the lungs.
All in all, she had gone all out on keeping a mere three mortals safer than anyone had the right to expect. Because they were... technically not related to her by blood, but were still her disciple-sister’s progeny. Rezzue was now a chosen family member to the medical fairy.
’And that makes them my little goddaughters. Ah, careful. I still need to keep that part carefully secret. She said that she didn’t want to know until the day of. And this man has proven he is unreliable with secrets.’
