“Stick out your tongue and say ah.”

“Ah,” The tiny Gorn stuck out his tongue and Garth used a tongue depressor to check his tiny tonsils, followed by a stethoscope to the chest to listen to his tiny heartbeat.

“Well, Mr. Gorn, from what I can see, you seem to have come down with a sudden case of Avatar Syndrome,” Garth said, taking the stethoscope off his ears. Garth wasn’t the absolute most knowledgeable man in the multiverse, but compared to everyone else in this dungeon, he was the goddamned Dr. Who.

“You’ve got a heartbeat, tonsils, pupillary response, salivation, all the things to indicate being alive, but…”

Garth pulled out Gorn’s palm, took some mana and tried to push it through the deity’s flesh.

The mana bounced off, and for a brief second, he could see the ultrafine web of mana in a strange, organic pattern underneath his skin. Normally mana would go straight through a person’s body unless it had some kind of effect.

“You seem to be entirely composed of mana rather than fleshy meat and, according to you, are cut off from your main consciousness?”

Gorn nodded. “It’s very disconcerting, being corporeal again. I don’t know why Munasei and Beladia like it so much. I’d much rather be happily spread out, everywhere, making storms.”

“Probably because it’s hard to for Munasei to get nailed while incorporeal.” Alicia chimed in.

Gorn shuddered.

“Alicia, tell me how this happened again.” Garth said, turning his wheeled doctor chair to face her.

“We were hunting for meat lizards in one of the Nifishnya, one that makes bad thoughts take form.”

“Like the Facet one?”

“From what they told me, it makes weird, amorphous creatures that attack or pester, not copies.”

“Not like the Facet one.” Garth said, thumbing his chin. “Were you wearing your OSHA safety gear?”

“What?” Alicia asked raising a brow.

“Were you wearing a helmet?”

“Yes, one of the best ones.”

“And when did Gorn here make the scene?”

“We were ambushed by a mouther. I saw it coming a mile away, but when I went to flick it out of the air with lightning, he came out instead.”

“So you tapped into Gorn’s gifts.” Garth clarified.

“Yes.”

“Well this seems like an easy fix.” Garth said, slapping his knee. “Blast him.”

“What?” Gorn and Alicia said at the same time.

“Every Apostle has a two way connection to their deity.” Garth thought about his extra strong Beladia tether. “Some stronger than others.”

He pointed at the tiny Gorn. “That is a part of Gorn’s mana, given physical form, but lacking a connection to his consciousness. If you were to channel his mana while touching him, the connection will be restablished, and Gorn will use that opportunity to reabsorb his avatar here.

“Really?”

“Of course.”

Alicia placed a hand on Gorn’s shoulder, and lightning lanced down her arm. In a flash of light almost too fast for Garth’s enhanced senses, Gorn’s avatar dissolved in a flash of light and travelled back up Alicia’s arm, overloading her whole body with crackling bolts of energy.

“Gah, mother-“ Alicia tensed up for an instant, then relaxed, her eyelids fluttering as the endorphins flooded her brain. “fuuuck.”

Wow, I had no idea that would work. Garth made a note in Castavelle’s notebook.

“What was your class again?” Garth asked, redirecting his attention to Alicia.

“None of your business.” She said when she came down from the pain high.

“As your master, I would think-“

“What’s for dinner?” she asked, avoiding the subject.

“Spaghetti. It’s not Lightning Bottom is it?”

“No.”

“I would have thought after all the things we’ve done, you wouldn’t be embarrassed about the name of your class.”

“You’re pretty grating sometimes,” she said, sitting at the table and pointing a fork at him. Her plush lips got him thinking about things other than her class.

“I’ve heard that before. I’ll drop it for now,” Garth said, putting his hands up as Alicia began eating.

Almost as soon as she got started, Garth ushered her up and showed her each of his new inventions of the day, gushing in a flood of excitement while she forked rolls of pasta from her bowl into her mouth.

“Ioun stones that alter reality at my command!” Garth said, excited.

Alicia sucked in the last strand of spaghetti, careful not to slap herself in the face with the noodle. “Explain.”

“Okay, so I got the resonance formation.”

“Right.”

“So I was thinking about making a formation of stones covered with an enchantment that would make them float anywhere I want them to, always in prefect relation to each other, so I can simply pick targets and they’ll spin around it, giving whatever it is a shit-ton of exposure to the practice effect.”

“A floating, targetable Resonance formation.” Alicia said, nodding. “Neat.”

“Right. Ever since I found out about the need for a precise distance for the resonance to work, I’ve been brainstorming ways to put one around the core without the rat-tiger in the Core Room fucking everything all up.”

“And you think this will do it?”

“Yes, If I make them autocorrecting, so they return to formation even if knocked away, or change their formation if one is destroyed. As long as they’re tough too, they should be able to reassemble themselves between every bat from those gigantic claws. They might not be on one hundred percent of the time, while reassembling, but it’s way better than having to start from scratch if the creature manages to move a single crystal by a fraction of a centimeter.

“Okay, why are you so excited, though?”

“because,” Garth said, reaching under the dome in the center of the formation and pulling out the tiny crystalline Beladia in the middle of washing her hair in the nude. She glowed softly in the green and brown of the deity’s colors.

“I made this with Practice stones and my own thoughts and nothing else.”

“…good?”

“There’s a hundred villagers here that believed that this stone’s Purpose was to glow and that was it. from my experiment, I know that Purpose is unaffected by stats, so their belief heavily outweighs my own.” Garth said with a grin. “This little figurine means I made a filter that only lets my Purpose through.”

“And you’re going to put that cap on the Core?” Alicia asked, glancing over at the pale dome.

“Nope!” Garth said with a grin. “I’m gonna coat the Ioun Stones with it, so that no matter what they’re targeting, my Purpose is the only one transmitted through them.”

“You sure that’ll work?” she asked.

“No, but the dome works, so, Worst case scenario I’ll have to make a few dozen pokéball looking things, and we’ll have to keep the Boss distracted while we hijack the dungeon a little bit at a time.”

“So in either case…”

“We’re going home.”

Alicia jumped on him and gave him a big spaghetti kiss on his cheek.

***

A couple days later, Garth finished his Halo, small Practice stones cuts with machine precision to be absolutely identical before being coated with a layer of Purpose filter, then a layer of enchantments scripted with microscopic detail, then a layer of armor.

Wish I had better names than Purpose filter. Ah well, it is what it is.

Garth had programmed the enchantments with every behavior he could imagine, using his laser cutter to make maximum use of the layer of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Core™ stone, leaving a little bit of wiggle room, pockets of open space in the design for the shells to grow into.

While the stones themselves were immune to their own effect, the shell that he’d placed around them would be constantly under the barrage of the Practice effect. Garth was confident that leaving open space on the enchantment would allow new channels to grow as the shells learned.

Yep, why stop at a really useful tool when you can give it the ability to learn and grow?

One of these days, I’m gonna – Garth truncated the thought before he finished it. He had to be careful what he thought before his creation had stabilized.

As Garth took the clamp off of it, the last stone came off the table, spinning with its delicate guts hidden behind a millimeter of nigh indestructible armor. The trapezohedron joined the swarm of identical bretheran, their formation automagically adapting to incorporate the new addition.

Since they were in standby mode, they took turns spinning in the center of their own formation, an idea Garth had to maximize their efficiency. Why waste time doing nothing when they could be Practicing each other? The actual behavior reminded Garth of an animal preening its feathers as they methodically gave each piece a couple seconds at the center of the mind-bogglingly intense Practice Effect, improving its armor, behavior patterns, and filter Efficiency. Each stone spent a moment in the center before moving on to the next in an odd kind of conveyor belt that was almost hypnotic to watch.

“Alrighty then,” Garth said, looking around. The first thing he needed to do was confirm that the filters were working properly, which meant more testing. His first thought was to grab a bunch of villagers and claim he’d made another lawnmowing rock. Problem was, they would more than likely catch on if he then whipped out his incredibly fancy looking metal coated crystals and had them spin around an ordinary rock or something. That wouldn’t work.

Garth stood away from the work bench and cracked his spine with a groan. He’d been working on the Ioun Stones in a creative frenzy for sixteen hours, and Alicia had long since gone to bed, woken up, had breakfast and went out for the day.

“A simple glow-stone should do it.” Garth took one of the glowstones and placed it on a stand for this specific purpose.

“Alright, let’s-“ Garth glanced over his shoulder at the Halo, and his jaw dropped.

“Well that was fast.”

The formation of stones had altered their idle into a complex three-dimensional shape that allowed nearly every single piece to receive boosted Practice simultaneously. The pattern still shifted hypnotically, stirring in a way that made Garth’s brain hurt, even when he tried to review the memory in slow-mo.

Are the enchantments diddling with Space magic? I never added that.

As soon as he thought of it, light began to warp around the Halo in strange ways, as pockets of reality-altering contradictions opened up in space, until each stone was at the center of the other twenty-four stones, each one receiving the full brunt of over ten thousand times Practice speed, simultaneously. So many tiny portals made it look like the air was filled with thousands of the metal-coated gemstones, spinning and glittering.

“Alright, very impressive, get over here.” Garth said, snapping his finger and pointing at the glowstone, not allowing himself to feel the slightest trepidation. This thing was more powerful than he’d expected.

The tears in space disappeared, and the stones moved to make a new formation around the target.

Widen it out, Garth thought, peering into the gem as he projected the exact purpose he wanted the gem for. He needed a large, round, flat surface to create a scrying mirror out of, and this stone was doing it.

The gemstone morphed in front of him at an unreal speed, turning from a glowing stone into a large, round mirror as his reflection went from a vague impression to a full color replica with internal lighting. Somehow the gem put on several pounds of weight as it shifted.

With a thought, Garth waved the Halo off, and the stones returned to their mind-bending self-Practice.

“How’s this look?” Garth asked, holding up The Origin of Gods up to inspect the mirror.

Looks better than I expected. Now you gotta create these symbols. Using the blood of someone who was there helps.

Garth inspected the image that came up, committing them to memory in seconds.

“You’re not screwing with me this time?” Garth asked.

Not this time.

“Alright…hope this works.” Garth muttered, slicing open his fingertip and replicating the runes with broad, confident strokes. He wasn’t sure his blood counted, but it wasn’t absolutely necessary that it did, either.

“Clean that up a little, would you?” Garth asked Halo as soon as he was done. The metal-sheathed crystals crowded around the mirror, and in seconds, the blood lettering shifted, becoming perfectly even, with lines that looked like they had been stamped on by a laser printer.

“How’s that?” He asked again, holding up the book.

Passable. All you need to do now it touch the mirror, Pick a marker, and cast the spell.

Garth closed his eyes and touched the mirror, picturing the complicated spell in his mind, temples aching as he contorted the Space and Time mana into the proper shape and sending them through the mirror.

He could feel it warm up under his hand, and mentally nudged the Halo to start Practicing the mirror again.

Scry the Past.

Garth opened his eyes. He was in the halls of

“Marker, Marker!” Jim shouted, running down the ribbed hall like a lunatic. Garth took a step after him, aiming to figure out what the prick’s hint was before he heard another voice.

“You two have a lot in common.” Sandi said, causing Garth to freeze.

He glanced behind him and saw himself staring after Jim with a disgusted expression.

Ghost rules, I guess. Garth heard the sound of Jim’s footsteps retreating down the hall and reluctantly tore his eyes away from Sandi, chasing Jim at his top speed.

The tall, athletic man tore open a door and ducked into a sideroom just around the corner, shivering, sweating and rocking back and forth.

“Marker, marker, markermarkermarker.”

Garth’s hair stood on end as he watched his brother devolve into some kind of mental breakdown state of extreme stress.

“The hell is going on?” Garth muttered to himself, squatting down to observe Jim’s bulging eyes. If he hadn’t been furious with him at the time, he would have realized that Jim wasn’t upset or sad, or even crazy for being told off… he was terrified. Gun to the head terrified.

“Stumbled on something you shouldn’t have, did you?” a voice came from the corner of the room, drawing Garth attention.

A…shadow emerged from the corner of the room, advancing on Jim. It looked…kind of like Pala, but it was decidedly masculine. Garth had spent enough time around Pala to know that the deity didn’t want anyone to have any clue about any aspect of his/her identity.

This shadow walked and talked like it had a dick.

Interesting.

“I told you not to overuse that ability. Didn’t I tell you that? Then you went begging to my sister for help, and nearly ruined everything. She’s already suspicious enough.”

The shadow walked forward, and some buried survival instinct in Garth made him move out of the shadow’s way. Even in Patrick Swayze Mode, something told him this shadow was bad news.

“Please, don’t,” Jim blubbered, tears streaming down the star quarterback’s cheeks as the shadow knelt in front of him.

“Don’t worry, all you have to do is zone out, like you’re watching TV. I hear humans can waste their entire lives like that.”

A tiny black portal opened in the air, and a squirming thread of black mana writhed its way out of the abyss, curling into a sphere in the shadow’s palm.

A flicker of defiance passed across Jim’s eyes. “She told me what to do. He’s going to see this. he’s going to come.”

“Really? Because I don’t see him any-“ The shadow’s head came up suddenly, and it’s neck twisted to look directly into Garth’s eyes. Its gaze forced a thread of ice down his spine that raised every hair on his body.

“Son of a bitch.” The shadow sighed, raising its hand toward Garth. A wave of black fire rolled toward him.