Having been asked to join Ionis inside the carriage again the woman had started with a somewhat irritating request. Liana was to cast her [Ocean Breeze] skill till exhaustion.

She did so, trying to keep the woman happy to hopefully gain further insight into her potential path.

So she danced, to her heart's content. She enjoyed the guided movement of the skills though they were starting to wear on her. The fun she had felt while dancing was still there while using the skill, though it had lessened. The need of having to follow the forms was subtracting from the overall joy.

Accelerated by the speed that [Dancing] lent she breezed through nine iterations of using the skill before her status showed her having reached zero flow.

She would have imagined that she had only eight castings available to her, but it seemed like she had been wrong.

Halfway through she had been pinged by the system announcing a change in her status.

[Dancing] has increased in level

Dancing had risen another level and she thought she knew why. She had used the skill to make minute adjustments to the position of her feet so as not to stumble repeatedly - something [Ocean Breeze] hadn’t initially accounted for. The skill would have let her do the movements only in rigid patterns, but they seemed to synergize; creating something better, more flexible.

The skills description had slightly changed too.

[Dancing] (Physical) Rank 1 Level 3 - Moving in forms and patterns comes easier to you and is remembered better. Agility during dancing is increased by 30%, Physique by 15%. ( + 1 Agility)

The boost to her stats effectiveness was welcome, helping her increase the speed with which she blew through the motions. She wanted to tell Ionis about it, but the woman had been too absorbed by the timepiece she was holding in her hand.

“What is your flow’s charge?” came the sudden question by Ionis while Liana was still musing about telling her master about [Dancing]. Then again she probably had noticed that herself. And what was this question about? Hadn’t she just asked Liana to empty her flow, which had been moments ago?

“Hello, anybody there. Liana… Could you do me the favor of responding,” Ionis insisted further.

“It’s still zero of course. You just asked me to empty it, no?” Liana said, wrinkling her nose and eyebrows.

“Mhhhmm… And now?” came the next questions moments later.

“Still zero! So I was wondering, you said you were intrigued by [Ocean Breeze], was that because you know other similar skills. Skills that you can teach me?” Liana responded.

“Pssh, this is important,” Ionis said, actually going as far as putting her finger on Liana’s lips to shut her up. Just a moment later came the same question about her flow again.

Over the next hour, Liana grew increasingly bored entertaining the woman's same repetitive questions. When they were finally done, she was finally allowed to do something else besides just responding every minute or so. Before she could get a question or complain out - she wasn’t sure which would bring more satisfaction to her yet - Ionis spoke up again.

“Hmm, your flow regeneration is quite abyssal. It is only half of what mine was at your age, and a quarter of what mine is now. We will have to do further measurements to determine external factors and such, but for now, it might be best to keep your flow pool rather topped up, but never full.”

“Yeah sure, so I was wondering, you said you knew other skills similar to mine. Could you teach them to me?”

Liana had decided in the end that what the woman had been doing that seemed to have been at least remotely important and who was she to question someone at least three times her age.

“I am afraid you have misunderstood, I do not know any other skills that I could teach you. Maybe someone who is a direct caster could, but I can’t,” she answered.

“But you are a real flowbringer, aren’t you? You didn’t swindle us, did you?” Liana said, putting her tongue out for just a moment, before realizing that antagonizing her master could very well result in uncomfortable consequences.

“Better watch out that we don’t go over a larger bump in the road the next time you do that,” came the grinning response. And Liana didn’t like how the woman's features contorted one bit. “But I’ve told you that already. I’m merely crafting-orientated. Which brings me to the main reason that I asked you to come back inside. I’m basically done with creating an armlet for you and it would prove an ideal training dummy to help you gain [Flow Infusion].”

Liana’s eyebrows rose. She might have felt some confusion at the contradiction in the woman's words, but would never admit to it. Regardless, the woman had told her she could teach a skill, so she was super interested.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve been meaning to ask, you frequently hum when you dance, has the corresponding skill been offered to you?” Ionis asked not leaving any room for Liana to consider the woman's words.

“No, I hum? I didn’t know that. Should it have been offered?” worry creeping up her face, tearing her muscles to form a slight grimace. Not only hadn’t she been fully aware of what she was doing which was a bit worrying, but she also hadn’t received a corresponding skill.

“No, I was just wondering. I’m only curious. I’ve never heard of a humming skill. There is the skill [Singing] but you were obviously not singing,” Ionis said, alleviating most of the worries Liana had. Missing out on a potential skill somehow felt much more worrying that not being completely aware of what she was doing.

With that, the woman handed over a multicolored armlet that could have gone around Liana’s arm three times at least. The stitching felt like a singular flat surface when her fingers slid across the fabric. If Liana were to compare it to other fabrics she had touched before, she couldn’t have found an appropriate material. Silk came the closest, but it lacked in the robustness this fabric obviously had.

“Uhm don’t you think that is a little bit too large?” Liana asked.

Ionis just chuckled in response and shook her head.

“What I want you to do is fairly straightforward. The most important thing is that you need to sense your own flow before you can infuse it into objects. For this it is helpful to mentally start using another flow skill, nudging it to almost go off. You will then feel a strain, it can take literally any form. For me it initially began flowing out of my fingertips into my needles while doing stitchings, traveling across the fabric I wore to get where I needed it. For others it is through the balm of a hand while swinging a hammer and feels like pushing extra weight through their bones,” she said, staring out of the window while speaking. “Go ahead, try it.”

***

Liana did, she really tried her best.

With the armlet in hand, she now drew lines across the fabric, following distinct patterns the color took to see if she could untangle the secrets of infusing flow that way. It didn’t work. Just like almost activating [Ocean Breeze] hadn’t worked. They had been at it for two hours when Liana had changed her approach. Generally, she wasn’t too upset at not having success after her instructor had mentioned off-handedly that she had been 20 when she unlocked the skill, it was frustrating regardless.

Regardless of how much Liana tried she simply couldn’t follow her master's instructions precisely enough to feel anything. [Ocean Breeze] prompted her to move, to direct her feet and arms in certain patterns, to flow through the world, there was no drag, no strain, nothing she could in any way locate.

She had tried to somehow incorporate [Dancing] into movements to imitate her other flow-based skill after a recommendation by Ionis but hadn’t experienced anything positive besides feeling very silly. Dancing was supposed to be fun, not whatever she was doing here.

She had traced out every single color besides black of the armlet when Thomas’ voice wafted in from the outside.

“Miss, we are almost in Larkos. The gates are visible now.”

“Thank you,” her master yelled back. “Alright, your time is up Liana. You will have ample time in the future to try without me watching over you. Please hand it back for a moment.”

With mixed emotions, somewhere between reluctance and relief, she handed it back.

At least it won’t remind me of my failure, or so she thought.

Within moments, Liana hadn’t seen where she had gotten the needles from, the woman punctured the armlet time and time again.

With each new combination of punctures another color literally vibrated through the coach and superpositioned itself over the armlets threads of the same color. Each time a distinctly different impression came over her.

At first, there was one of a long rest, with care and love throughout the carriage, red vibrated. Followed in quick succession by turquoise and oddly enough a feeling of losing thirst - for the lack of a better description. Brown came next, and for a moment Liana felt as though having eaten an entire banquette of food alone, of being completely satiated. Black came with distinct security in knowing where she was. For just a moment she had the impression of a sphere colored in multiple different colors in front of her mind's eye and knew she was on there - which made no sense since she was larger than that sphere. Green came with a wholeness, combining two things that wouldn’t have a connection of any type.

The last three were a bit hazy for her. They all had the same sort of color - a whiteish grey -, just the intent, the imagery was slightly different. There might have been something else, but that impression vanished quickly.