"What's going to happen to magnetic devices when they get near me?" Lisa asked while walking along the edge of the dune.

"Ideally nothing," Bath answered. "That's contingent on how well you can control your new boon. Don't try to use it with your cell phone in your pocket."

"Fair enough. You know, this isn't as hard as you said it would be." After only half an hour of walking around, Lisa felt like she was starting to get a good sense of the area's magnetic field. When she walked past, she felt the magnetic field inside of herself, as though something within her was contracting and expanding ever so slightly to the presence or absence of magnetism. In the beginning, she didn't notice it at all; now she was acutely aware of it.

"Can you feel the Earth's magnetic field yet? As in, the field created by the poles?"

Lisa gave him an uncertain look. "Maybe? I can feel the field in this area easily enough." Though that was likely just the strange magnetic field that pervaded the area.

"It's fine. You'll get a better sense for it once you reach a higher altitude and leave behind this area's magnetic noise."

"Wait, I can start flying now?" Despite the fact that Lisa could now sense the magnetic field in the area without too much trouble, she didn't feel any other differences in her body. "How?"

Suddenly, Lisa felt herself rising upward. "Bath!" she yelped. In the blink of an eye, she was suspended twenty feet above the ground.

"Do you feel that?"

"No!"

"You should be feeling something as I change your altitude. I'm manually controlling your boon right now. Think of this like...oh, someone teaching a kid how to write by holding their hand and writing letters."

"That is not how kids learn how to write," Lisa shouted back from above. "However, I get what you're trying to say. I feel like something is changing, but it's hard to isolate. I just feel a lot of tugging force all over the inside of my body."

"Now?"

"Now I feel it a lot more in my chest," Lisa admitted.

"Good. Can you try to control the sensation? Move it around?"

Lisa scrunched her face up in concentration. "Like this?" She began to rotate slowly to her left as she concentrated some of the force into her left arm. Unfortunately, this also meant that she began to tilt vertically.

"Wait, help," she called out, uncomfortable at the thought of her face being the closest part of her to the ground.

"I'm keeping you aloft," Bath reassured her. "Just continue practicing. Maybe try concentrating the sensation into your feet."

As Lisa did so, she began to sink slowly downward and rotate right-side up. She exhaled a sigh of relief. "How have I been doing?"

Bath gave her a wry smile. "If I wasn't interfering, you would've smashed into the earth a few seconds ago."

Lisa's face grew ashen. "Wait, seriously?"

Bath nodded. "I've given you a powerful boon, Lisa. You can use it to fly, or at least to simulate flight through extending the duration of a jump. You can also use it to keep yourself rooted in one place. I'm personally interested in seeing how much magnetic force you can pack into a punch." Ideally, when Lisa mastered the boon, she would be able to manipulate magnetic force within her body to accelerate one of her limbs. In that sense, she'd be able to explode outward with a lightning-fast punch. This put a huge strain on the body, though it was one that Bath had already accounted for.

"So if I was to keep concentrating this downward force in my feet, and you were to just let me fall..."

Bath gave her a mischievous grin.

"Bath...Ahg!" Lisa only took a split second to fall the whole twenty feet. When she made contact with the ground, ripples of sand exploded outward. Since her feet were effectively glued in place, Lisa fell forward onto her hands in an incredibly awkward downward dog pose.

"That was cool," she stated breathlessly. "Now how do I get back up?"

"First, try to move the sensation out of your feet so that it's evenly distributed throughout your body."

Lisa realized that she was continuously sinking through the sand at a somewhat alarming rate and wasted no time in spreading the force around. It took her about a minute until it was evenly distributed.

"Now what?"

"The easiest way to ascend is for you to jump, then move the sensation into your upper body." Bath was pleased that his boon was working well.

"What is the sensation, anyways? Does it have a name?"

"Just think of it as your magnetic sense." It wasn't like the sensation itself was the cause of Lisa's movement; it was simply a control mechanism that Bath incorporated into the boon to control the superconductors.

"Okay. So, I jump up, then concentrate my magnetic sense in my upper body...got it." Lisa sprang about ten feet into the air with a strength-enhanced jump, all the while trying to move the magnetic sense into her upper body. She failed, gravity pulling her back to the ground.

"Well, I tried," she stated dejectedly.

Bath cracked a smile. "We have today and the weekend. Patience."

"Patience my ass," she grunted, then immediately tried the maneuver again.

'She picked this up quite quickly,' Bath mused. 'I wonder how far she'll get in three days, let alone a century.'

---

Dean was starting to get freaked out by the cultishness of the two factions. Now, daily, the two faction heads organized ritual worship workshops where they explained the miracles of the Church and the Dragon and then led people in prayer.

Dean felt conspicuous in his white tabard, not really sure exactly what he'd been forced into when he'd first accepted Lisa's invitation to Dawn faction. Not that it mattered, considering that he'd be forced into a faction either way. He didn't know a single person who wasn't wearing a tabard.

He sighed as he focused on cultivating his artist boon. Still an Apprentice after two days, he was starting to wonder if maybe he should have started with something else.

'Just so long as it isn't combat related,' he thought knowingly to himself. 'I already have enough trouble with that as it is.' In the end, Dean had asked one of the brown-robed peacekeepers about having his own private room for training his "special" combat skills. Only a minute later, a squirrel guide had come into the room and beckoned for Dean to follow. Accordingly, he'd been directed to a large, private training room fairly out of the way of everything else. Dean wondered how many rooms the maze-like basement encompassed.

He'd been practicing there over the past two days when not working on cultivating the Apprentice tier artist boon: fractured visualization. In the beginning, Dean had no idea what that meant. Soon, however, he realized that with the boon, it became far easier to merge separate concepts together into new ideas. An example of this was visualizing a generic flower and ocean. Now, as he stared at his canvas, Dean was able to create a completely unique mesh of flower and ocean into a beautiful, if not somewhat abstract, image.

Dean had always loved painting, despite lacking the requisite artistic talent to do it as more than a hobby. Now, glancing at the heap of drying canvasses off to his left, he was really beginning to appreciate the power of Bath's boons even in disciplines separate from combat.

Not everyone in the Apprentice room was working on painting. Quite a few were engaged in what looked to be incredibly exhaustive dances. Others were practicing in a separate, smaller training room just down the hall with lots of soundproof practice rooms.

Dean was somewhat frustrated because, despite the many canvasses he'd painted, he still hadn't advanced to Beginner.

'Am I simply that challenged at making art?'

Much to his relief, after two more hours and two more completed canvasses, respectively, Dean was approached by the room's peacekeeper about advancement.

'About time,' he thought scathingly. 'I wonder what the second boon will be like.'

---

Edgewood had no doubts in his mind that the two new factions were perhaps the best thing to come to Basalith since boons and land-shaper interior decorating. He particularly liked how snazzy the Dusk tabard looked on his armored form.

After 6 days at Basalith, Edgewood was proud of his rapid advancement to the Expert tier of close combat. Now, instead of sparring with various quasi-sapient animal species, Edgewood and the others of Expert tier fought amongst themselves. They were all equipped in faction-provided dragonleaf armor and practiced using various dragonleaf weapons against one another.

Edgewood loved how Basalith functioned like a post-scarcity utopia. Anything that anyone requested of the guilds they would get. Probably.

'As long as the request isn't...unconventional,' Edgewood acknowledged, recalling a story from two days ago about somebody asking a land-shaper to make a dragonleaf vibrator. Apparently, the faction leader appeared in person to rant about the waste of time and resources. Nevertheless, the day afterward, a land-shaper had personally set up shop on the side to service such requests.

Aside from a few similar incidents regarding strange requests, the factions were excellent at creating and distributing resources. For example, Edgewood had already acquired five abstract paintings created by people in the artist profession and distributed by Dusk faction.

The factions were also sponsors of the Daily Black and White, the largest newspaper reporting on what was happening in Basalith. This publication, along with a few other fledgling magazines, were huge "employers" of the educator, administrator, scholar, and tactician professions. Not that inhabitants of Basalith actually worked in the traditional sense. Rather, as soon as people found that utilizing their new mental boons to write articles sped up advancement to the next tier, everyone was itching to join in.

Edgewood personally found the Daily Black and White hilarious. Since it was sponsored by both the Dawn and Dusk factions, the opinion section that made up the majority of its daily bulk was, in part, a giant battleground of wit and rhetoric. Next to each opinion writer's name was their faction affiliation, and opinion topics always had two people opining from the "white" side and from the "black" side, respectively. Because everyone universally acknowledged that neither faction had a perfect idea or explanation for everything that was going on in Basalith, the white and black opinions had a lot of fun coming up with conflicting and absurd theological and scientific explanations for everything.

This was one of the main reasons why, when Edgewood advanced a few hours into the 6th day and was given the option to choose a new profession, he chose specialized educator. Another motivating factor was that a large part of what he'd done in the military was teaching people new tactics and drills, as well as instructing people in close combat.

'It feels like I was back on the base ages ago,' Edgewood sighed wistfully to himself. It felt like far more than just 6 days had passed since his abduction. Since then, he'd stopped responding to his CO, being more than aware of just how tenuous the U.S.'s power was now that COTD had appeared. 'Even now, Basalith can probably give the entire army a run for its money.' Edgewood couldn't wait to see where Basalith would go after the city unlocked the next stage professions and people ascended beyond Expert.

Now that Edgewood had technically chosen his side in the inevitable clash between church and state, he was determined to ensure that he was on the winning team. While Edgewood didn't doubt that Basalith would be able to stand against the United States, standing against all of NATO was another thing altogether. Therefore, he figured becoming a specialized instructor would be a great way for him to speed people through the advancement process, particularly the close combat profession.

'It'd be fucking lit if I could make my own school, like a dojo,' he thought to himself. Then he wondered, 'Can the quasi-sapients learn martial arts?' His mind relished the image of the lithe raptor-like quasi-sapients ripping into human forces with well-placed talon strikes, or the innocent-looking lemur quasi-sapients jabbing their fingers into pressure points...

Edgewood shook his head, clearing his desires from his mind. First things first, he needed to follow the cute little squirrel ahead of him to the specialized educator Apprentice training room and get started.