36 - Mana Abhors a Vacuum

Ideas were running wild in Maya’s head as they made their way back to the Hanganathorie. An entire standard day had passed since the rogue AIs had chased them from the watering hole, but it seemed they too had better things to do than wait for a few annoying SIL to show their faces.

They dug themselves out of the trash pile and with some trepidation and caution, scanned their environment to ensure that nothing was laying in wait.

Maya glanced back at the gleaming sea of mana and felt a surge of greed and want. She was shocked by the feeling and a little unnerved. Yet, that lake represented everything she wanted and needed. Mana, power, a way for them to remain alive in this unforgiving hellscape she was destined to spend the next five hundred standard years in.

Twenty liters of condensed liquid mana would keep the Cage running for an ungodly amount of time. She could stay connected with Earth and the multiverse for centuries, but Maya was thinking big. The condensed mana was the closest thing to essence mana in existence, without the need of being Tier 4.

With the black goo able to become a tesseract, Maya could feel her profitsense screaming for her to run into that lake and begin scooping condensed mana into her pockets. A source of clean, stable, universal mana that could power anything and anyone. Once the tesseract had been formed, it could exist for thousands of years, able to refine mana to be used by all.

Bell and Maya re-entered the room after an hour of waiting to see if anything else would happen. It was never too late for caution and with the black goo transforming into a white block of crystal, they were cautious around it.

“From what I remember,” Bell said, “You can’t touch it with your bare hands. It’ll tear all the mana right out of you.”

“I don’t have mana,” Maya said.

Bell snorted. “You have mana, it is reshaping your body all the time. It’s just that you can’t channel it and it seems the System is protecting you from the effects of this purge.”

“So this block of crystal is thirsty for mana?” Maya asked, crouching before it.

“It will absorb any and all mana it comes in contact with. It will then store it and change it, turning it into mana that can be tapped to be used by SIL or machine. But it doesn’t pull in mana the way a core or the black goo does, instead when it comes in contact with mana it pulls it all in.”

“Just a better version of a mana battery, got it.”

Bell let out a strangled cry. “That’s wrong on so many levels.”

Maya got close to the crystal and then pulled out her tester, she set it against the block and raised an eyebrow. “It’s dead,” she said.

Bell moved forward to get a better look. “You need to add mana to it,” he said.

“If it has no mana, why is it glowing?” Maya asked.

Bell shrugged. “It’s a tesseract.”

“Then why is it empty of usable mana?”

“The creation of the tesseract from black goo probably used up all the mana that existed within it.”

“So for every block we make, we’re gonna need to get an equal amount of mana to refill it?” Maya asked. “That’s a chore.”

Bell let out a strangled noise again. “You realized that a tesseract this large can only be created by only a few high tiered societies? And I mean societies, not a person, a whole society has to gather the power and materials necessary to create a fraction of this.”

Maya chuckled. “Still a chore.”

***

Maya fused together a box made out of marsani and stuffed the large crystal into it. She had added more condensed mana to it, but Bell was getting twitchy as she added a liter of condensed mana into the crystal and it turned from white to blood red.

“I don’t think it’s going to explode,” Maya said as Bell told her to stop.

“You don’t know that. You’ve already added a liter to it and that’s… about two hundred million gens.” Bell wrung his hands, all four of them, and paced the far end of the chamber.

Maya had tried to test the block after adding the liter to it, but it had begun to only display errors. Yet she could feel the mana coming off the crystal, it was a like a being wrapped in a comforter pulled right out of the dryer on a cold day.

“Fine, but I think it can handle more,” Maya said.

Maya sealed up the crystal in a box and was annoyed when it too could not be inventoried. She had gotten too used to not lugging anything around anymore.

They cut their way out of the trash pile. The scout rats didn’t report any movement or signs of rogue AIs and the sensor box only showed the constant fighting around the shore of the lake. The corpses of her defeated foes were gone and Maya sighed, there went another three bodies that she hadn’t been able to loot. She got the experience, but loot was loot and she kept missing out on it. Bell’s rogue AI kill didn’t drop anything as he didn’t have the Plunder Ability as she did.

They hurried to Bell’s trike and within minutes were swallowed up in the darkness beyond the glowing sea.

***

“Stop. Something’s wrong!” Maya cried.

They had been traveling for nearly two hours and the glowing sea was only a dim light on the horizon. Leaving the mana lake was like being dunked in cold water once more, the lack of mana felt like an icy wind trying to reach into her soul. Even Bell, who had recovered from his mana depletion sickness had slowed down and was struggling to pedal.

Bell immediately stopped and Maya hopped off the trike. She could feel the box of the condensed mana she carried beginning to vibrate. Something was happening and she understood it was nothing good. Her dangersense was beginning to sound off and Maya did the only thing she could think of. She threw the condensed mana container as far away from them as she could. It sailed into the utter blackness before the canister ruptured into a brilliant blue explosion.

Maya was thrown back and Bell’s trike tipped over with him on it. She hit the ground hard, but her armor protected her. She felt dizzy as hot uncontrolled mana rolled over Bell and her, the warm feeling wasn’t there anymore , instead it was like a blast furnace opening up near her.

The sky lit up for a long moment as the mana hung in the air, but after a minute the light faded and they were left in darkness once more.

“What the hell?” Maya asked.

“The canister wasn’t able to contain the condensed mana,” Bell groaned, righting his trike. “We’re in an area devoid of mana and you were carrying around liquid mana, so…”

“So mana abhors a vacuum,” Maya said getting to her feet. “It tried to expand back into the space that didn’t have it.”

Maya pulled off the other pack she carried and unsealed the tesseract crystal. It still glowed the blood red color, even more eerie as they stood in a field of complete blackness.

“This one seems stable,” she said and then sighed. “There went nearly four billion gens of mana.”

“Will that crystal be enough?” Bell asked.

“It should, but still… we should have made more when we had the chance. Now we only got this little sucker left.” Maya blinked still seeing an afterimage of the exploding canister. “Let’s roll, we still got power and we’re gonna need it.”

***

Maya thought on the problem of how to hold onto the mana as they made their way back to the Hanganathorie. Of course, putting twenty liters of condensed mana into a marsani jug had been foolish. There had to be another way to hold onto the mana; Maya suspected that any kind of container would eventually rupture if it were brought back into the mana purged areas of the plane.

That meant they would have to move to the mana lake, which Maya knew was just asking to be killed by the rogue AIs. Another option was that they could hook up a tank to the rover and get there in record time, faster than Bell could pedal his trike. If they managed to load up on condensed mana, they could make it back before everything went ka-boom.

Maya chuckled at the thought, but knew that there was only one option opened to them. The Cage. If the tesseract held as much power as she hoped it did, they would have a chance, albeit a slim one, to load up on condensed mana before they drained the crystal.

It all boiled down to how much energy the Cage would draw when they activated it. There was already a mana strain when the drones were moving around, nearly twenty times what they would normally use. If the Cage did the same, then the two hundred million gens in the crystal would be only five hours of power. Would that be enough time?

The other issue was the black goo, they had nine vats of the stuff awaiting them, but Maya had gone over the records that Tender and Roci had kept. It seemed Roci had been tinkering with the black goo formula and that had increased its efficiency by a few percentage points and also changed the formula somewhat. As they were using the batch that Roci had made, the question of if the adjusted formula was the cause of the tesseract forming or was the old formula able to do the same.

It hadn’t been a thought until Maya remembered seeing the rogue AIs, battered and bloody, plunging themselves into the liquid mana and coming back out healed and ready for another round of fighting. If it only took half a liter of liquid mana to turn twenty liters of black goo into a tesseract crystal, then wouldn’t that also mean the rogue AI’s own blood would become tesseract crystals too? Or was their own black goo a bit on the unrefined side, allowing them to suck in mana but not causing their black goo to become crystals?

Maya didn’t know the answers, but time was going to be a major factor when they returned for more liquid. As the liquid mana would expand when placed in a low mana environment, they would have to be sure that the black goo they brought with them would be useable or else they’d be in for a nice ka-boomy surprise.

“Oh, did Yosi keep the porch light on for us?” Maya asked as they neared the Hangy. A solitary light shined in the darkness near the main hatch. Maya could make out the ten drones stationary at the entrance, with only one turning to track them.

The hatch opened up and Yosi exited, a look of relief on her face.

“We’re back, hale and with gifts!’ Maya cried, hopping off the trike. Bell sighed with relief and joined her at the door.

“I’m not pedaling that thing ever again,” he said.

“But it was your pride and joy. The penultimate creation by the lone alchemist lost in the wilds of the rainbow sky hellscape,” Maya said.

“You seem happy,” Yosi replied.

“To return to a face as lovely as yours, why would I not be happy?” Maya grinned.

“We found a lake of mana and she wants to steal it,” Bell summarized.

“A lake of mana?” Yosi stared.

“I’ll tell you all about our adventures, but first I need a shower and a nice-“Maya caught something at the edge of her vision, her dangersense flashing for a brief moment before a figure came at her.

Instinctively, Maya met the approaching figure with the back of her hand. She felt a thud on her gauntlets and then a squeal of pain filled the air. A figure bounced off a defense drone and crumpled to the ground, moaning in pain.

Maya blinked and saw that it was Badblood.

“Oh, shit!” she cried. “I’m so sorry!”

Yosi gave a sigh and looked exasperated. “Badblood’s awake now and she’s a real handful.”

***

“Three broken ribs, a fractured arm, and a concussion,” Yosi said as they walked down the corridor to the mess hall.

“Jesus,” Maya muttered looking down at the unconscious figure in her arms. Badblood had been a wretched dying thing when Whiteclaw had ‘given’ her to them. But with her cancer healed, well fed, and out of the mana sickness that the purge caused, the small Tarvana looked almost cute.

“It’s an impressive regeneration ability,” Yosi said. “But that just makes her reckless and kinda crazy,” she added. “She woke up about twelve hours ago, then tried attacking me. Being level 2, it was almost comical, but she escaped and has been harassing me with attacks since then. I tried to be gentle, but I’m nearly level 40 now and she’s just… so delicate. It’s scary how easily she breaks. The good thing is that she can heal herself and nothing is permanent.”

“Poor kid.”

“Well, by her accounts she’s considered a full adult in the tribe.”

“You’ve spoken with her?” Bell asked.

Yosi ducked her head. “I accidentally shattered her knee and she couldn’t escape.”

“Accidentally?” Maya asked.

“She attacked me when I was taking care of Junior,” Yosi said defensively. “I just… reacted and kicked out.”

“Why is she still out?” Maya asked.

“She’s probably faking it,” Yosi replied.

At that moment, Badblood opened a crimson eye at her and flashed a sharp toothed grin. She jumped up with surprising agility and was about to flee, but Maya grabbed onto the woman and yanked her back.

Badblood struggled and snarled, like an animal caught in a trap. She turned and tried to bite down on Maya’s gauntleted hand and Maya winced, not from pain but from the fact that she saw a few of Badblood’s teeth shatter against the metal.

“Calm down!” Maya hissed, not letting go. “Calm the fuck down!”

Blood dribbled down Badblood’s mouth and she snarled at her again, trying to rake her thin claws against Maya’s armor.

“This is what I’ve been putting up with,” Yosi said as they continued down the corridor. “She doesn’t understand that our level differences means she can’t really hurt us. Her tribe is pretty low level and even at her level, she could hurt them.”

“Calm down, damn it,” Maya snapped. She didn’t let go, but Badblood continued struggling and snarling. Eventually she ran out of energy and hung limply in Maya’s hand.

“Don’t trust her, she’s faking,” Yosi said watching them.

Badblood opened her eyes and hissed at Yosi. “Traitor!” she snapped.

“You’re attacking the person that saved your damn life, moron!” Yosi snapped back. Maya could see the frustration and anger lining the small woman’s face. She could only imagine the strain she’d been under since they left, with Badblood running amok not helping in the slightest.

Badblood glared at Maya, her crimson eyes narrowing to thin slits. The blood from her mouth had stopped dripping and Maya saw that the teeth had begun to regrow, visibly moving up from the exposed black gums.

“That’s awesome,” Maya said, watching as the Tarvana’s wounds healed up before her eyes.

“It is painful,” Badblood snapped.

“That’s your fault,” Maya said, without compassion. “Bite me again and you’ll lose more teeth.”

Badblood hissed and tried yanking herself free. She wasn’t successful.

“I’m like sixty levels above you, kid. You think you can do anything that’ll hurt me?”

Badblood struggled some more. “The strong make the rules, the strong take advantage, the strong sell me like a piece of trash!” she struggled again and Maya let her go. The woman staggered back and crashed against the bulkhead.

“Look.” Maya crouched before the panting Badblood. “You’re free to do what you want. You were ‘given’ to us by Whiteclaw because you were dying and they didn’t know what to do with you. Our doctor healed your illness, we made sure you survived, but you don’t owe us anything. We would have done the same thing for anyone in that same situation.”

Badblood stared at her and didn’t say anything.

“Oh, why does she understand what we’re saying?” Maya asked.

“Nan installed a language module, a low-grade one, in her.”

“Without her permission?” Maya groaned. “That woman…”

Maya sighed and looked back at Badblood. “You can stay as long as you like, you can leave if you want, but there’s some weird shit going on out there and there’s no more ambient mana. So you’re healing factor is probably going to stop sooner or later.”

Badblood’s eyes widened at that.

“No ambient mana?” she asked. “What of my people!”

Maya shrugged.

“We must go and see if they are unhurt!” Badblood scrambled to her feet.

“They literally gifted you to us so that we could dissect you and figure out what nutrients they needed to live,” Maya said.

“They are my people!” she cried.

“Okay…” Maya shook her head and got to her feet. “We got a lot of other things to talk about first, but your peeps are apart of my plan. Also, they chow down on mana stones and that’s about a third of their diet. I’m sure they’re fine.”

***

“The Nerigana have been trying for centuries to make this,” Yosi breathed staring at the tesseract crystal. “Even the Tier 4s have a difficult time creating them. I cannot believe it’s made from the black goo.”

“Our little creation is paying off more than we thought,” Maya said, chewing on a ration bar. The crystal sat in the center of the mess hall while Bell hooked it up to various lines and cables, using its own stored power to bring the Hangy back to life. “Unfortunately the mana usage on anything is twenty times what it used to be. For once we have a massive amount of mana at our disposal, but the price of everything has gone up and we’re back in the poor house.”

“But we can still use the Cage, right?” Yosi asked.

“Yeah, the 16Mg threshold needed to start that sucker up hasn’t changed, but it’ll be chugging nearly 40Mg an hour.” Maya finished her ration bar and took a swing of water. “That doesn’t give us much time, in addition to that, we’re also going to need to do a lot of manufacturing for what I’m planning.”

“Your liquid mana containment field?” Yosi asked.

Maya grinned. “All that engineering knowledge I’m downloading as finally paid off.”

“It’s a theoretical concept, you don’t know if it’ll actually work,” Bell said.

“I’ll run some scenarios in VR and see what that says. It’s usually about right.”

“Usually,” Bell muttered.

“What’s the worse that can happen?” Maya grinned. Bell sighed.

“I don’t understand the rush,” Yosi said, “that lake is not going anywhere.”

“Who knows what the System will throw at us tomorrow,” Maya said. “That lake wasn’t there two days ago and it formed within minutes of the mana purge occurring. It could just suddenly vanish in the next five minutes for all we know. We need to get to it fast, grab as much as we can, haul ass back here, and wait out the mana purge.”

“What am I to do?” Badblood demanded. “You have given these two tasks and yet you have ignored me.”

“What can you do?” Maya asked.

“I can… I can…” Badblood frowned and shrugged. “I have been sick my entire life, my mother cared for me and I was not able to obtain a trade.”

“Well, many hands make light work. You can help Yosi in what she’s doing.”

“Must she?” Yosi asked.

“Or help Bell.”

“Pass,” Bell said as he pointedly ignored everything and focused on the crystal.

“Right. Off you go kids. Railguns and explosives aren’t going to make themselves.”