Excerpt from the second draft of An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe

Common Utility Path Abilities (Continued)

Equip

Equip is like Inventory in that you must have access to whatever you are wanting to “equip”. While “equipping” an item doesn’t give any direct benefit, it is often more convenient than trying to quickly don armor - and it’s a great way to put a weapon away instead of dropping it.

Yes, you can equip directly from your Inventory if you have one. If you don’t have one, you (usually) have to have access to the location you are taking an item from or placing it - which means touching it while it can open.

Yes, people have tested using Equip to steal. It almost always fails.

It was several hours before everything was ready. The area near the cave opening and in the cave with the portal were both far more active than the night before, and Serenity noticed that there were as many cars in the parking area as earlier in the day. He wondered why Dr. Mattingly hadn’t just asked him to step through the portal during the day.

After a while, he tracked her down and asked. It was a simple if annoying reason - they’d been waiting on some equipment that had only arrived a few minutes before Serenity arrived back at the camp.

It was still going to be a while, so Serenity went for a run. When he returned, he was led to the staging area. It was in a cave he hadn’t seen before, not far from the cave with the portal.

There was far too much equipment to reasonably carry in a single trip.

Serenity stared at the equipment then turned back to his guide, Rachel. “That’s too much to carry.”

“Is it? It’s really not that much. Just pick it up and - oh no, I just can’t.” Rachel doubled over, laughing. “You should have seen your expression.”

Serenity just shook his head. Hopefully this was the worst the hazing would get, but he was an outsider. He’d been through worse than this. “So what do you actually want me to carry through?” He tried to smile a little, to show he was being a good sport.

Rachel giggled once more before covering her mouth with her hand. “Well, we really do want you to get all of it through. But we’re trying to split it apart into different trips, so you can carry a reasonable amount. We just hadn’t gotten there yet and when I saw it all together…”

Serenity’s smile was a little more genuine after she admitted it was a prank of opportunity. “Right. So. I assume there’s some of it that you want to be on while I go through the portal and some that you just want set up on the other side?”

Rachel nodded. “Plus a few things that aren’t here yet. I wanted to start now, though, since there’s some stuff we’re going to need to walk you through how to set up…”

Two hours later, buried under a load of equipment, Serenity stood in front of the portal in his human form. He’d decided not to weight down his chimera form at all; if there was a fight directly outside the portal, he could either dodge back through it or shift into his chimera shape to fight, and he wanted to be unburdened if he decided to fight. With that in mind, he’d let them strap enough equipment to him that fighting would be difficult.

Well, it would be difficult if he didn’t want to risk damaging the equipment. If there were enough rockfins there that Serenity had to fight, he wasn’t going to be that careful of the equipment. It could be replaced; his life couldn’t.

Stepping through the portal was anticlimactic, as they usually were. He simply stood in a different place.

The other side of the portal was not the barren cave Serenity expected. Instead, it was a deep hollow with a small stream. The crack in the earth was filled with plants, though all the leaves were red instead of green.

The world felt solidly Tier Two. It wasn’t dense with magic, but there was enough that Serenity could feel his mana and essence slowly rise above the uncomfortably low level they maintained on Earth. The good part about Tier Two was that it meant the rockfins were about as powerful as anything on this side; Serenity would be able to fight whatever he found on more or less even terms. The downside was that the fauna could be significantly more dangerous than Earth’s, and Earth had plenty of dangerous fauna already.

Serenity looked around carefully. His first look was for danger, but his second look was for the beauty of his surroundings. A small waterfall added sound from a little ways down the hill. He spent several minutes taking in his surroundings before he got to work.

The portal was set into the side of one of the cliff walls. Serenity was disappointed by that; on the other side, it was in the middle of the cave. The scientists had set many of the instruments behind it, and had noticed some differences between the two sides of the portal that went beyond “you can go through one side and you can’t go through the other”. They’d asked him to do the same on this side, and he couldn’t.

Serenity unloaded the equipment he was carrying and set up everything he could. It was all battery-powered, and the battery itself was a large portion of the weight he was carrying.

Serenity hadn’t found out what all of the equipment did before he went through; there hadn’t been time. Still, he knew what much of it was in type if not in specifics. Almost all of it came up smoothly, but when he went to turn on one of the devices - something to do with air quality - nothing happened. Its power cord had somehow been left behind.

Serenity looked at the portal, looked at the device, then shrugged to himself. He’d planned to do some magical investigation on this side before heading back through, but there was no reason he couldn’t reverse that order. He pulled out the digital camera they’d handed him, took pictures of everything he could think of, then stepped back through the portal holding the camera.

Everyone was watching.

No, only almost everyone. At the back of the cave, there was a woman who was watching a computer screen instead of the portal. She didn’t look up even as everyone else started crowding around Serenity.

“Back up a bit, please. Here’s the camera; I didn’t pull any of the other readings. There didn’t seem to be any rockfins nearby; the plants were all red instead of green. I was missing a power cord.” Serenity started picking up the next load of stuff. It wasn’t as well organized, but at least he didn’t have to carry another battery pack through until the third load.

“I wondered what that went to! Here.” Serenity didn’t catch who said the words, but he did catch the power cord that was flung at him.

As Serenity left Earth through the rockfin portal the second time, he heard some people muttering about other people going through the portal. He was confident that would happen soon. For now, though, he was the only representative of Earth on this side of the portal.

Once he had the second set of equipment set up (including the equipment with the no-longer-missing power cord), Serenity did a little exploring. He had several hours to wait before he pulled the first round of reports, and he wanted to explore the area and make certain there were no surprises before he did a magical analysis of the portal itself.

Downhill, the crack narrowed until - at the waterfall - there was no longer a good path that wasn’t through the stream. That direction was relatively safe, and small enough that Serenity was confident he hadn’t missed the way the rockfin entered the portal.

Uphill was a different question. The crack widened out uphill and Serenity started seeing more-or-less circular dark spots on the walls. It wasn’t until he saw one that was low enough to walk up to that he was able to confirm his suspicion: the “dark spot” looked exactly like the same sort of circular semi-resolidified stone as the first rockfin left in the cave next to the portal.

The vegetation was fairly dense, but the groundcover left enough uncovered that Serenity wasn’t leaving much of a trail. He also didn’t see a trail from either of the rockfins, but he couldn’t tell what was inside the rock wall.

He headed over towards the other cliff and checked visually; there were rare spots on both walls as far as his eyes could see. What he wasn’t seeing was any more rockfins.

Serenity walked back towards the portal next to the stream. The portal was a little ways away from the stream, but it was still a convenient landmark and beautiful in its own right, bubbling as it flowed past scarlet vegetation. It wasn’t until he was getting close to the point where his path would have to turn away from the stream that Serenity found out why the portal wasn’t near the stream and part of why the rockfins lived underground.

Serenity felt a sudden premonition of danger and tried to dodge away from the stream, but without a clear idea of where the danger came from, all he could do was guess. A tentacle grabbed Serenity’s ankle and started pulling him towards the water.

Serenity had no interest in fighting an unknown water-monster. As he slid towards the water, he shifted into his Void Sovereign shape. He normally didn’t pay much attention to how long it took, but trying to shift while being dragged into the water made the point that his shapeshift wasn’t instant; he felt the rough ground dig into his skin as he slid, barely completing the shift before hitting the water.

He didn’t shift back until he was well away from the stream.

It was too bad to miss out on the XP, but realistically, fighting didn’t give him much. His current Path didn’t seem to be a combat Path, even though some of the Skills seemed kind of combat-oriented.

Serenity pulled up his status to check those skills and started laughing. He’d gotten 300 XP since the last time he’d checked, which had to be from the encounter with the water monster. Escaping from a monster by shapeshifting was worth more than two dungeons! It really brought home the point that XP came from following your Path. Shapeshifting was clearly a large element of his current Path, so that was probably where the XP came from.

Serenity went ahead and checked his Skills anyway. Take Shape was about shapeshifting. Merge was learning new shapes so … he’d call that one shapeshifting as well. Entwined Magic was mixing Mana and Essence for magic; he hadn’t realized it, but wasn’t that exactly what he’d done for the nexus anchor? Maybe that was why he’d gained so much from the experience.

Gaze of the Void was about showing off the power of the Void. He didn’t know how to categorize that one, and he’d just as soon not use it unless he had to. It sounded unpleasant.

Next were the abilities he didn’t have yet. Aura of Magic was straightforward again, it was based on magic. Given how much the rest of the Path depended on magic, was it possible that simply using that ability would passively grant XP? There were abilities like that sometimes. They were rare and usually had notable downsides, but they were still often worthwhile.

Void Protector definitely looked combat-based, but it was combat where someone else was fighting and he was the armor. Huh. Serenity couldn’t remember how much XP he’d gotten for the Story Dungeon where he’d been the sword, but he thought it was more than 50. Perhaps his current Path was combat based, but it was … shapeshifting to help someone else in combat instead of doing it himself?

The capstone, Mold Magic, was Magic-based again.

Clearly the Path was primarily shapeshifting and magic. Serenity suspected that the work he was doing on Portals was probably at least as good for XP as running dungeons would be. One combat skill didn’t make a Path combat-oriented, after all; even noncombat Paths would often get something, and it was hard to think of a less combat-oriented combat Skill than “turn into armor for someone else”.

On the other hand, there was always the question of how much he should push his Path along. It was often worthwhile to take it slow and unlock additional Paths, but Serenity had enough unlocked that he didn’t think he needed to worry about that.

Most Pathed also needed to worry about getting enough Paths at each Tier to keep their Attributes in a good place, but that wasn’t a problem for Serenity. His Attributes didn’t come from his Paths. All he needed Paths for was for the Path Skills, and the only Path Skills Serenity was really missing at the moment were combat magic.

Those were better if you picked them up at a higher Tier anyway. If he picked them up now, he’d just have to replace them. Not that that was necessarily a problem, but - well, it was what it was.

Take Shape

Take Shape - You may assume the shape of any Form you know. Your personality and goals remain those of the Void Sovereign. Number of forms that can be known is affected by Ambit. Accuracy of learned forms will decrease with time; rate depends on Ambit.

Current known forms: Chimera, Hatchling Essence Dragon, Void Sovereign (Kernel), Human(?), Crystal Hilt

Void Dhampir of Essence and Mana

Merge

You may merge with another being. The merge may be contested. Success rate in a contested merge is affected by Ambit. Requires Void Sovereign form.

Void Dhampir of Essence and Mana

Entwined Magic

You can mix Mana and Essence magic freely, to achieve effects not possible with Mana or Essence alone. Passive.

Void Dhampir of Essence and Mana

Gaze of the Void

When you choose, you can infuse your gaze with the power of your connection to the Void. Effects vary. Power depends on Ambit.

Void Dhampir of Essence and Mana

Void Dhampir of Essence and Mana Locked Abilities:

Level 50 - Aura of Magic - When you choose, you can reveal your Mana and Essence pools with your aura. Passively increases the maximum size and regeneration of your Mana and Essence. Increases the regeneration of others’ mana and essence at a slight cost to your regeneration rate. Easily sensed. Power depends on size and regeneration rate of mana and essence pools.

Level 75 - Void Protector - From your Void Sovereign form, you may envelop someone or something. Instead of choosing to Merge with them, you may choose to Protect them, giving them a layer of armor formed from your physical self. This may also leave a permanent Mark (consent required).

Level 100 - Mold Magic - You can alter magic that has been given a steady form. Passive.