Mara watched Trace circle back and forth between two trap-runes, 'Fire Spear' and 'Fire-Water'. An ongoing process of playing pictionary with her skill for over two hours with little tangible benefit. She'd watched as it circled the bright bits, circled the dim bits, and pirouetted around the flashy bits. It was all very pretty, but it didn't tell her anything new. A double-downside was that all of Trace's work was buried under the floor or in the walls, so Trace was working overtime to draw both its usual patterns -and- the usually-engraved patterns -aaand- do it all while submerged in what should have been an opaque material.

Though she wasn't quite sure how that last bit worked, she didn't exactly have x-ray vision for anything else. It struck her as odd enough to take a break from her runic study and experiment with it. Which raised its own questions of course. It appeared to be overlaying her vision, not just drawing in the air around her, or in the ground for that matter. It wasn't something she noticed immediately, it never really stopped overlaying her vision, it was just very good at hiding 'behind' things in spots where it wouldn't be visible.

But now that she was looking specifically at the runes in the wall, her skill was more than happy to -trace- them to her heart's content. So... Does it make my eyes look weird when I'm using it? Or is it just 'magicing' light inside my head? Does this count as 'magic perception'? Her list of questions continued to grow until she shrugged them off, figuring it was irrelevant as long as it worked, she had too much of a headache to really give it much more than a thought.

So as Mara attempted to massage the tension from her temples, she watched Trace continue its dance between the runes, desperate to understand whatever the skill was trying to teach her. She could deactivate either of the runes at any point, but it was a feat that was only really possible thanks to Trace's helpful highlighting. She still had no idea how a rune was actually constructed or deconstructed, or how trace was seeing all this in the first place. Sure, she knew the runes were cyclic-magic constructs, mana dense things coursing with the stuff, running through the same symbols over and over until something finally changed, triggering a result. But at the end of the day, that still left her with 'shapes filled with magic', not a very useful takeaway.

I mean, what really makes Fire-Spear so different from Fire-Water? And what even is Fire-Water? Is it Oil? Moonshine? Napalm? And the sigils are still just as baffling, does the fire-attribute matter at all in the rune construction? Is there even a 'fire' symbol to be a sigil? Mara slumped back, defeated. Trace was an excellent skill but she was trying to learn magical machine code from a cricket that spoke in abstract art. Sorry Trace, I need a decompiler, not a hunting dog.

She wasn't exactly sure what that meant in skill-terms, but she'd realized a while ago that the magic pathways Trace was showing her weren't just streams of magic. They were dense, layered, compact rapids formed from hundreds of individual strands. Like a hundred-floor labyrinth trying to fill a single quantum-floor with all of them simultaneously. I mean, it's really just an impossible feat to try and decode something like this. Why couldn't I have just learned to 'swish and flick', or maybe some magic sign-language, but nooo. I get stuck with the weirdo skills built around staring at whimsical motherboards.

"Uuuuuuugh." Mara tugged at the roots of her hair, the whole situation was fucked. She wasn't exactly expecting to 'read' runes like a restaurant menu, but she had held out hope that Trace would have been a -bit- more helpful in a Rune class without any other real rune-related skills. Or maybe it just needs to level? Like Debug and its Daemon thing. She couldn't rule it out. Debug grew by leaps and bounds when she fed it right, Trace could too.

It was a gamble, a knowledge gambit. Spend an unknown amount of hours learning the hard way, or burn it all as skill experience and let Trace deconstruct their composition as she deactivated them. Is this any different than buying wall-hacks? No... No. This is why it's called 'experience'. She sacrificed both the runes she was working on, casting 'Fire Spear' and 'Fire-Water' into the nebulous pit that was Trace's experience requirement.

The runes slowed to a crawl, fizzled out without a fuss, and dissolved into whatever tangential non-space Trace considered its domain as Mara heard a familiar 'ding' arriving on her periphery.

<<

Skill Advanced: Trace I

Trace mana circulations.

[2/128]

>>

With a little fist pump, Mara relished in her success. Letting Trace cannibalize the runes had been the right move. After all, she couldn't exactly be expected to just sit around staring at runes until her eyes dried out, so if sacrificing a few of them could get her further than meticulous study alone? Well, sign her up. It's not callous, it's just efficient. She looked up at the rest of the mine-field, a cautious smirk appearing on her face, I'm gonna level the -hell- out of you Trace.

Picking another two runes at random, Mara repeated the process for the rest of the evening. First identifying the major regions of activity in a rune, then ordering the sigils by when the magic coursed through them, before finally spending a good bit of time watching the way that they interacted with their neighboring runes. She was rigorous. She was efficient. She moved through pairs at a respectable clip. She had no intention of self-imprisoning herself for months to get this done.

She sped through her work like she was practicing for an eating competition. She might have been tired, or still thinking about the last rune, but she'd just shove another one under her nose and get to work. Some runes even felt like they had more to offer than what she was gleaning from them, as if they held secrets just out of sight, but as soon as she'd hit a wall with them, she'd just dismantle it and move on to the next. It was crude but addictive, encouraging her to binge late into the night -and probably most of the morning- before she finally dragged her tired frame back to bed.

She was thriving on the activity, the obsession of it, but she couldn't fight her sandman. The sleep plagued the corners of her vision like a warm-blanket-burrito, threatening to drop her where she stood if she didn't find a bunk fast enough. Which won't be an issue, she thought, tumbling into her familiar bean-bag mattress as her blanket crinkled behind her like a loose pack of tinfoil. It wasn't long after she got comfortable that Mara drifted off into a slumber of twisting clocks and mazey-mice. An overwork-induced dream-land, but it beat the hell out of shadow assassins and howling blenders.

∆ ∆ ∆

The last week-ish had been good for Mara, both mentally and physically-- except for the rads. The assortment of local berries hadn't upset her stomach, at least no more than the now ever-present nausea, and harvesting them was a cake walk thanks to her 'Rings of Impudence'. Sure, both were looking a little cracked, something that was a little concerning when she first noticed it, but she was -pretty- sure they had been cracked like that when she got them.

Runie-wise, Mara was down to some two-hundred traps, already clearing a good portion of the corridor. Trace wasn't far from level two, and her Hexadex had gained a progress metric- which is currently sitting at eleven-percent. Meanwhile, Debug was gaining experience from -somewhere- but Mara still couldn't pin down what, where, or how, so she'd just assumed it had something to do with the Daemon migration. A passive bonus or something. All the more reason to level Trace up.

Though on the lesser end, Mara's 'Runic Recollection I' had barely made it halfway through a level, and her class -still- hadn't budged in the slightest. The former was likely tied to how infrequently she had to 'recall' a sigil from a previous rune, she'd been taking her time to avoid that outcome in particular, ensuring she kept at least one working copy of anything unique on hand. Perhaps I should just be wiping them all and leaning on the skill? Risky... But it just paid off for Trace, I mean, it's already leveling way faster than Debug. It took, what, two days of forest-finder, status bs and a rune just to get its first level? Yuck.

But the latter? Her dead-in-the-water class? Well, she had a few hunches to go on, but her best guess was the Hexadex lore. Even if the progression's slow for a video game, it makes sense for something you develop over months and years. To gain one level every time the lore 'completes' just seems... fair, I guess? She wasn't entirely sold, but she had enough circumstantial evidence to support her grim hypothesis. She still couldn't 'use' her lore for anything else, and everything else she'd encountered seemed to take just as long. She had no resistances, no new stats, barely any skill progress, and a class that refused to even give a progress bar.

A level for a few weeks of work isn't going to be that awful, I'm just impatient. Back home I could pick up a whole new programming language in a couple weeks, maybe less, but out here? I mean, how long did I really think it was going to take to learn an eclectic, overly-nuanced, impossibly-compressed, magic-cypher-labyrinth 'language'? I mean really now!

Mara's laugh echoed throughout the woods, interrupting the alternating 'flip' and 'flop' of her afternoon run, her dumb-glee at the thought underpinning just how ludicrous her objective was. Won't stop me though. Apparently, I'm kinda-immortal. That is, if I don't lose my mind next time I get reprinted. Or on subsequent re-reprints. Is it photocopying the photocopy or is there an original 'me' somewhere in all this? Is this body even 'me' or just a perfect match of some half-elf demon spawn? Staring up at the hazy orange sky, Mara watched as the canopy bobbed up and down in time with her jogging. I guess it really doesn't matter in the end, I'm 'me' now. That's how teleporters worked in Space Trek right? She chuckled, shifting her gaze to watch the trees slide by as she jogged past them.

Initially the place had been a bit of a maze, but after she had gotten side tracked on one of her 'berry-harvests', accidentally removing an entire swath of forest in an absent-minded bit of wander-chopping, she decided to put in a bit more effort and do a full loop. Removing the rest of the major obstacles hadn't been too much of a problem for her fabulously fashionable fingers, easily dealing with enough of the crap required to turn her malformed forest into a small jogging track. It was really more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, but after a three-day binge of non-stop sleep-and-rune-study, the old habit just sort of cropped up when she needed to clear her mind.

Mara wasn't really exercising for the physical benefit, after all, her body was bound for extreme cellular failure at some point, she just wasn't really sure when. No, the running was really just a therapeutic, fresh-air-infused break from all the hustle and bustle. It helped a little with the physical toll, or at least improved her mood about it, but it was primarily just for the space. She knew she didn't have too long, the previous morning had greeted her with a full cranial-throb instead of her usual migraine, and her stomach had picked up kick-flips as a hobby a few days earlier. But so far? She could concentrate. She wasn't chained to the bathroom. The more severe stuff though? She wasn't so sure about that.

It's one thing to know I'm going to 'survive', and even that's nebulous, but it's an entirely different thing to actually jump. And I'm jumping into a wood-chipper made of radiation- But it's more like a conveyor that I can't escape. So do I just expedite the inevitable, running with the conveyor? It would be less suffering overall... Or at least ideally. And I mean, I'm kind-of doing that already anyways, so... yolo?

She pounded away on the patchy dirt, her mind awash with wandering thoughts. She hadn't really gotten time to do that in a while, most of her waking hours were spent face-in-monitor and handcuffed to a keyboard. Hell, she hadn't really 'gone camping' since high school if she was being honest, most of her recent father-daughter outings were more just that, 'weekend outings'. There was always a 'Monday'. Here though? Here it was just her, and the trees. An ashen haired 'half-elf' running through a forest like a natural-born Runie. She'd left her heavy hoodie and space-squid pants with her pack back at base, which left her wearing what should have been indoors-only clothes, but she wasn't too concerned about running around in her undergarments if there wasn't even anyone around for -hundreds- of kilometers.

Though she certainly did come off looking an awful lot like one of those bimbos in a forest-cabin horror-movie. Laughing at the mental image of herself she was purporting, she let her rambunctious laughter fill the desolate woods as if in protest against their suffocating vibes. She was genuinely enjoying herself outside for the first time in what was probably years, and it was all in the backyard of a radioactive obelisk.

Of course, said obelisk was waiting for her when she got back, the sun threatening its last light as Mara crossed through the airlock. She'd been excessively diligent about her time management, but after finding the chronometer's ticks to be too frequent for everyday use, she'd been left to her own devices -or lack there of- so she was starting to cut it close. Regardless of her newfound fighting odds against her shadow-demons, the last thing she wanted to do was get caught outside unawares. Even if she was pretty sure she could fight off a few of the foxes, that was only if they ran at her, and a late-night ambush was an entirely different scenario. I could totally take one though, maybe two. They can't -a-void- these babies.

Happily snacking on her day's harvest as she dragged her pack to the rear of the structure, Mara dropped down next to the receding edge of traps as she sent off Trace to kick-start her runic-study. The foxes wouldn't be a problem if she didn't make them a problem, and she had plenty else to distract herself with. Like these bloody runes, she thought, knocking the first one out almost immediately with a slight tinge of frustration. She was getting faster at picking through what Trace was showing her, and it was starting to get a little old.

Her last project had been glorified sigil-to-school practice, doing her best to figure out which sigils were used in each 'school' of magic, but with each rune she cleared, she became more and more convinced against the notion until she abandoned it entirely. I mean, I'm just not making progress. I still can't even identify a rune without asking Debug or Trace, there's no visible difference between a 'Fire Spear' and a 'Heavy Bellow', so why are they two separate runes? She grunted and vaporized 'Heavy Bellow', feeding its magical musings to Trace's gluttony. A choice that continued to prove fruitful as a soft 'ding' chimed in her ears in response.

<<

Skill Advanced: Trace II

Trace mana circuits.

[5/256]

>>

The friendly notification brought a smile to her face, it was a panel she'd been waiting on for a while. It wasn't the fastest skill, but she wasn't sure if she could use Debug as a metric. It certainly has its own little party going on. But Trace had leveled, even with the low volume of experience each rune awarded. It was something around two to six, and she'd seen a few singular points for anything that was a little too close to a previous rune. Luckily, their 'scuttle policy' seemed to involve using one of every flavor or something, the diversity is stupefying. And -I'm- the monumentally stupid one here? But I suppose if I were trying to prevent the unknown inhabitants of an alien world from gaining access to my super-duper secrets, I'd sure as hell make sure to color in every nook and cranny with every crayon in the box... Which is -exactly- what they did. Totally works out in my favor though, I get to learn -all- the magics. She chattered gleefully, an odd behaviour quirk she'd picked up. Possibly a sibling of her boisterous cackling 'issue', or just another symptom stemming from her morbid humor and terrible puns.

You know, for living in a radioactive dumpsite, I'm honestly having a -blast-.

Mara's gleeful-chattering intensified, inversely proportional to the self-inflicted -pun-ishment- she was dishing out herself. It was honestly embarrassing, but she let herself laugh until her sides hurt before she went to find the next rune, chuckling all the while as she continued to wipe the tears from her eyes until she sat back down. 'Trace 2.0' was already hard at work on the next rune by the time she collected herself. It had swapped its coarse brush strokes for pen stripes, an increased fidelity that was utterly breathtaking. Now this is what I'm talking about. Each strand was crisp, clearly visible and easy to follow. New wisps of 'hair' had also appeared, coiling near-invisibly along neighboring sigils as the current coursed along their strands. It was like seeing a video buffer from low quality to high. Sure, with Trace she could see the runes before, but now she could -actually- see them. And they are gorgeous. She ran her fingers atop their encasing stone, tracing the currents with her digit like her skill chased the magic. So, Trace changed the name. Are they actually circuits then? Magi-tech ones? Not just 'circulations' of mana, but flowing patterns? Architected constructs? ...I mean... I guess they've always kind-of been like that, but how far off -are- my computer analogs?

Mara chewed on the thought, dissolving a 'Root Foot' rune in her path as she tried to pin down -what- exactly she was attempting to work with. I guess mana's not exactly electricity, but neither is it a plasma or a liquid. Or a weird quantum wave thing. It's dynamic, viscous and flowing, maybe-even-living, but it's not exactly matter. And yet it's 'dancing around the rune' and the squid-ites artifacts use the same 'stuff'. However ,Trace works on one, but not the other- Or does it now? Are -they- circuits too? She quickly focussed her skill on her right-ring, watching as the colors swarmed the torus before dissipating, ineffectual and disappointing.

Shrugging her skill's inability off as an -artifact- of her current limitations, Mara studied the next several runes under the ever-present thought of what she might -actually- be looking at. But after another hour, and five more runes gone, she was still no closer to pinning down what magic 'was'.

After a dozen more runes, and easily another five hours, Mara was fairly confident she'd eliminated pretty much every way she could approach the individual sigils, or the rune as a whole. Most of the runes had ways to interact with them to shut them off or trigger them outright, but it wasn't like there was an easy 'help button' anywhere.

At this point, Mara was pretty sure the computer analogy wasn't that far off, but she felt like she was going about it all wrong, like she was looking at magical machine code and she'd basically need a decompiler of some kind to even begin to decipher the numerous intentions undoubtedly encoded within the multitude of sigils and flowing mana. Wait– Decompile... Oh. Oh-ho-ho. Suddenly a tantalizing thought teased at Mara, tempting her to try something she'd not even considered yet. Something brash, something probably absolutely moronic, but after being up for god knows how long, the idea was awfully tempting.

Dropping to the floor next to a 'Pixie Proxy' rune, Mara quickly read over Debug's inspection before dismissing the panel. She was entirely uninterested in summoning the facsimile of a spiteful magical sprite- or whatever else it does -she was looking to get something wholly different out of it as her curiosity had latched onto an idea, a dangerous idea. Digging at the stone with her 'Void Ring', she scraped away material with a diligent urgency, hastily taking only small centimeters of stone away at time until she scraped against the surface of the swirling magic, some twenty centimeters into the stone.

As soon as the open air touched it, it was clear the rune didn't like it, not one bit. It wasn't your typical physically-anchored rune, it was just mana, no engravings, no rigidity. Now exposed, near imperceptible ripples of air began to distort the carefully orchestrated magic circulations. The mana, now left without anything to hold it back, began a sort of feedback loop of unconstrained ripples that soon became ruptures, a vicious cycle that introduced more and more quakes until all the mana-made sigils that composed the rune began to tear themselves apart under the mounting current of aggravated magic.

With each tremor the rune split further and further, splitting apart in places that shouldn't have gaps, giving Mara the all important glimpses into the internals of a still functioning not-fully-spatial being. It writhed in agony. If it was screaming, she couldn't hear it. That was probably for the better. The process was excruciating just to watch, and likely an even worse thing to experience, but just like the first doctors learning from still-living patients, she too would have to suffer her choices in the name of progress.

Tangential non-space wept, the magical construct finally disintegrating and escaping its painful agony, much like Mara thought she would when her body faced its own version, given enough time. What she had done was unforgettable for different reasons, but she forced herself to memorize every moment of it regardless. Runic Recollection leveled twice, Trace filled half its experience pool. She had seen what she wanted, but she didn't want to see it. Everything about what she had just done bothered her. No, tormented her. I didn't think- I didn't think they'd be so...

But she understood now. It was impossible to look past, Trace's illustrations more vivid than they'd ever been. A harrowing masterpiece of a vast multitude crying out, each sparkle and spec the epitome of some fragment of a whole. All of them illustrating some particular moment, a memory of an action or an event. She couldn't fully grasp what she was feeling or seeing, but it was then, seeing the sum not the parts, that Mara knew just what 'mana' truly was. And it horrified her. But despite that, some part of her just couldn't help itself because the only thought in her head wasn't remorse, but a pun– And not a particularly good one at that.

It's -a-life-.