I finally settle into a sort of routine, deciding to use three days each week for various kinds of ‘work’ work, like making stuff to sell or upgrade the website, as is the first bigger goal. Right now it's functional. It does the job, sure, but it's merely functional. Given my education I'd like it to look and work great. Design work, though… I'll have to find good examples to steal borrow from.

I also want to spend two days each week on selling my stuff. Patterns and predictability are good for business, one of those two days will be a Sunday, but the other days I'll be flexible with. Especially the other ‘sales’ day, to catch people with varying routines. That leaves two days for other things, which might just end up being more work. Well, the first day was spent traveling to as many port stores as possibly. I don’t care for all the damn aquarium fish, but why didn't I think of this earlier?

With the Mouse aspect I make a sort of blueprint to use (consistency is key), with the goal to test the deeper mechanics of shapeshifting. Short term experiments include finding the limits, borders and effects of losing control over a puppet (less pain involved this time), but also to test a few… interesting questions. For example, if I were to use to puppets to make a baby, will it be a puppet, too? Some of these are not only tricky to test, but have ethical questions attached.

So I write those down and work on refining them into good research questions, planning to send them to the research ethics association in bulk for review. Well, before that there is plenty of things I can test, and some which definitely go under ‘self-experimentation’ which I will send a query about first. I do make sure to explain the relevant parts of my powers, of course.

A bit later more a week after we did the paperwork (and celebration), I get the papers for Leda’s personhood. For these things are pretty fast, but I don't think I agree with calling it ‘express’.

After lots of practice and experimentation, I can shape my mana bubble more or less freely. Well, it has to stay as a mostly round blob, and past a certain point all I achieve is to disperse my mana. But I am now at the point where I feel like I got a pretty good grasp on the mechanics of mana and manipulation of it. So I'm working on a ‘Magic 102: Three mechanics of mana’ video. Most of my previous ones were made with a few hours -or less- of work. This one has already reached a dozen.

It's a success! The first Terra Arcana patron meetup brought in a whole ten locals, three people from close to, but not in, the city, and one crazy dude from Germany. The latter is here on a vacation, and this date was chosen so that he could join, and the next couple days I'll tutor him on flying, the full package.

He’s a quick learner, though with a mana link and practically forcing aspects on people the threshold to learning is pretty low. When it comes to flight-capable aspects, I've decided to go with whatever is convenient, aside from Leda’s Wyvern aspect. In practicality that means sharing the various aspects I have, possibly using whatever birds can be found nearby to ‘fill in gaps’.

As such his flight-form is a bit of a mishmash of this and that, but the important part is that it has big enough wings. He quickly took to [Force Magic] further strengthening my hypothesis that it is significantly easier to learn if you already understand Newtonian physics. Conveniently he had [Air Magic] already, so he was ready to take flight already the second day.

That meant he had more time for other things, which he decided to use for sightseeing after ordering a custom flight jacket. It has a heating enchantment to combat the cooling autumn air and cold winds of flying. My tour guide skills need work, but it was pretty nice to fly around the city and nearby areas.

It also reminded me that I wanted to explore the not so nearby areas, so I've been spending a lot of time doing that, sometimes joined by Leda. The current goal is to explore the mountain range and the national park it overlaps. This includes stopping by various towns of varying sizes and asking around if anything out of the ordinary since the Upheaval.

The growing the earth had some interesting effects in areas with so low population but still close to a larger city, and there's a few species of beasts, but otherwise I haven't found anything particularly interesting so far. Well, I haven't covered that much territory and only look down from above.

Did make for a unique ‘walking and talking’ kinda vlog, though. Or rather, flying and talking. The videos take a bit longer to prepare for release now that I properly edit them, but it’s worth it, and the Patreon patrons seems to like it. Not like it’s longer between releases, anyway. And boy-oh-boy the Patreon… There’s even a guy, or at least I think it’s a guy, on the 200€ tier. I’ve been chatting with them (as per the listed rewards), but they don’t even want video chat, and don’t actually seem to be interested in the rewards.

Progress is being made on all fronts, not just for me. There's research being done all over the place. Proper research, not just what I've been doing, which is like proper research, but not as proper. Err, not as strict? I don't follow all the rules of doing science, which is acceptable for making hypotheses, but it does mean the result is ‘weaker’. Ahh, empirical, that’s the word!

Uhh, what was I thinking about…

Oh yeah! In addition to research there's exploration, with the changes of the Upheaval being steadily mapped. They're fixing what was damaged then, too. The GPS system has been back to almost 100% operation for a while, only having occasional spotty service here and there.

My own exploration is going fine, and I've shared relevant parts with the official New World mappers. Which in this case means a few spots of notably higher mana, some fancy species of plants and in general noting down the things which seem like they might be harmful.

Leda is doing… whatever she usually does, but she's been called in for that non-human intelligence research several times to the point where she went ahead and learned the weekdays so that she knows what's going on when. Her egg (at least what's inside) is growing nicely, and at this point it has a slight bit of that natural resistance to external mana every living thing seems to have.

In fact, the whelp is now big enough that I can sense which body part is which, or at least what’s a wing and what’s a leg. It seems to innately have a mana physique, though it might have something to do with it not only slowly absorbing mana, but Leda actively giving it mana. I’m surprised it took me as long as it did to notice…

As far as I can tell it doesn’t have a mana core yet, but I suspect that will come too, just when it is closer to hatching. I don’t know when that will be but if I had to guess I’d say some time around december, maybe a month earlier, maybe two months later. I am terrible at estimating time. No, it’s not that. I could say that I think it will happen in early december, but I don’t want to be wrong, so I cast a really wide net.

On a more defined and short term timescale, there’s the stuff with the space guys. They don’t have the equipment or facilities for testing what we want to test, but it was decided to cooperate with the university. Even they don’t have everything we want/need, but but so far I’ve been able to make up for that with magic.

In practice that means I’ve been casting magic surrounded by instruments of various sorts, so that the science folks can see how well I replace the equipment they don’t have. Turns out, the air magics are excellent, if a bit imprecise, for creating a vacuum. It’s not quite as good as what a modern lab creates, but good enough at this stage. Their eyes really lit up, however, when I showed them the magic vacuum box machine.

Okay, the name needs work, but it uses the magic boundary framework I made and just removes the air within the boundary. This version even has an actual ramp-up, so that it doesn’t create air bursts. With the vacuum field in place they hooked me up to miscellaneous medical equipment (including a giant needle and a blood pressure armband) to see how I do in lower air pressures.

At first the range was 0,5-1 atm, but curiosity got the better of us and now I have a picture of how I’d look if I were a bodybuilder, thanks to how the body expands in vacuum. In other words I handle lower pressures really well with the changes I’ve done. On the really low pressures I had to wear an oxygen mask for obvious reasons. Well, I did do the ‘air in subspace’ trick for short durations to get some data on that.

Progress! The first tests of the magical jet engine (upgraded by people who actually knows how they work) in ‘low altitude flight’ is complete! The quotation marks because four kilometers up is hardly low. Well, relatively speaking it is, being 1/25th of the way to the goal. Power tests indicate that it isn't as strong as modern rocket engines, but still strong enough to get me high enough up that it becomes useless from the thin air.

As long it has mana, at least. And it will. The science guys had to triple check their calculations, as the energy efficiency of a mana crystal seems to be 50-90% of its weight. Apply E=MC2 and you get, scientifically speaking, a fuckton of energy, which is pretty good. Now, at most it can throw me to the heights we want, which while stylish is not good enough.

No, for higher altitudes we can't rely on air. Magic to the rescue! With subspace storage you can cheat normal physics and bring a bunch of stuff without actually having to move it all the way there. Well, I haven't ever tried storing enough stuff to really make a difference, but it should be possible, and every bit helps. There’s a reason why every kilo to space is like…

Wait a minute, can’t I earn a ton of money if I manage to make a standalone subspace container? Uh, that’s a big if. Anyway, I’ve also been working on forms to take the role of a space suit or ship. The current plan has me change from the flight-form to whatever the space form ends up as.

Among my shapeshifting ‘toolkit’, the ability to make a hard chitin exoskeleton sticks out as being probably useful, and I feel like the Slime aspect can be used in some way, but I don’t know what. Oh, and then there’s the Metal aspect. I have small amounts of metal in the subspace storage, but I dunno where I got it from.

I knew I couldn’t possibly have gotten this much metal from regular consumption. Regular being the key word here. Consumption brings to mind eating, and that is how I usually take in material for shapeshifting. But the metals? Those were consumed in fire. I had a nagging little hunch, and testing verified it: The little puppet I didn’t find any real use for lets me consume metal for the shapeshifting storage.

I’ve also noticed that less and less mass is absorbed to the storage, it seems like I’m reaching a soft cap on how much I can store, or at least how much is naturally stored. But that’s still a whole lot of stuff. So I thought: what I can use that much stuff for? Going to space, of course! The first ‘stage’ will be a flight form, possibly assisted by some sort of magical thruster, but the rest of the way?

Once I get high enough I can change my form to become a lot more streamlined, covering myself in a protective layer of chitin. Metallic chitin. It looks like I can form an airtight but see-through ‘mask’ of sorts around my face, and oxygen can be supplied from bottles or something. I can then form a thruster of Metal and Fire, and use that to fling the stuff backwards, thus pushing myself upwards.

Physics, bitches!

Of course, it is sliiiightly more complicated than just coming up with the idea, and I don’t know of any rocket-powered animals to base it off. Squids are kinda rocket-shaped, though. Either way, a lot more experimentation is needed. For example, can I just kinda drop the shapeshifting mass into the real world? Will that hurt?

I’m gonna have to test that carefully, I wouldn’t want to find out halfway that I’m doing the equivalent constantly of slicing off thin parts of myself. As for testing, I think I want to test it in a slightly more extreme manner, but I don’t think I should fillet my main body. Or any body with a sense of pain, for that matter.

Okay, so some people are going to find this statement controversial, but getting hurt sucks, and dying sucks more. However, aside from literally feeling the pain, getting my puppets hurt doesn’t really seem to affect me, and I can just fix them. Now, killing that one testing mouse was an accident, but it hurt. I’m 90% sure it’s some sort of phantom pain or something, but if souls were a thing I’d say mine hurt.

Just losing the connection to a puppet is nowhere as bad, though it does give that strong compulsion to ‘reconnect’. Even that compulsion fades, and it will ‘reconnect’ automatically if you touch it with your mana. What’s interesting however, what it does when not directly controlled.

Broadly speaking there are three levels of control: Full, partial and no control. When partially controlled it’s very hard to directly control it, but I can still make the puppet move around, kinda like an RC car, but with AI. ‘Go there’ and ‘eat that’ and other seemingly innate actions work fine, but something like ‘pick up that ball and throw it to me’ is executed… awkwardly at best.

And after a full day, it does not automatically reconnect. It even move without ‘orders’. Poorly, like a newborn or someone who need physical rehab, but as far as I can tell it is very much its own… thing, acting on instincts. And then, to see if I can, I reconnect. It is… different to do manually, and the puppet feels a bit… foreign for a while afterwards.

I return and disassemble the puppet while pondering if that counts as killing an animal and to which degree it’s different from using regular puppets. I should definitely not let human puppets or other ‘smart’ puppets become independent. As long as I control them I’d say that they are just a part of me, but if I lose control of them long enough for them to become independent, intentionally or not, killing them would be like killing a newborn.