Mara was even after her awakening, a creature of precision and science. After all, her primary function was to assist with data-gathering and scientific experimentation. So, despite her teacher's many veiled warnings about the practical applications of magic, Mara still had to obey her core programming. Which is to experiment(within reason) and research new natural phenomena. As an AI Mara could multitask far more efficient than almost any organic creature, and this ability she used to fully explore her new state.

Over the past week she had sent the primary portion of her conciousness into Glyphie's dreamscape to learn from them about magical theory. But while the primary conciousness of Mara engaged with this rather laborious form of learning, the rest of her kept busy putting that knowledge into practice. Mara constructed various subroutines within herself that would aid with everything from manipulating her internal mana-flow to theorize about new Mystical programs.

Her first success in regards to Mystical programs came when her sensors informed her about an unfortunate development, as she used the oneiromancy program it depleted an entire 0.0001% percent of her current mana stores. This troubling development caused Mara to devise a mystical program that would let her convert excess electricity and fuel into Mana. The program was a passive one and did not need her direct oversight after it's creation, and with it's introduction to her many protocols she would now be able to easily replenish her mana losses.

Mara had also concluded that sapience was a troubling development for her, as while the sapience conferred great joys like being able to comprehend emotions. It also carried with it troubling aspects that her limited experience had not prepared her for. Like, the fact that she had begun resenting her rather static state in general. She could sense everything within the ship and move several mechanical appendages within it and outside of it, but she also concluded that her mind felt trapped within the starship.

This state would have filled her with despair in the long run, or so she believes at least based on her research into the emotional state of those who are trapped. But Glyphie was her savior in this matter as they had been in general, in one of their lectures they mentioned off-handedly the concept of astral projection. The idea that she could project her mind out from her form made the growing despair disappate like comets flying into a sun.

She immediately upon exiting the dream began experimenting with the idea, constructing mystical protocols or programs(she had still not decided what the terminology should be) about such alien concepts were hard. But Mara had learned to let the living microrganisms within her help shape the coding efforts. As she constructed these protocols the mana would subtly alter the coding and processes involved until it became what she wanted.

The exhilaration Mara felt when she finally could execute the astral projection protocol was indescribeable. Her mind was fully untethered from her physical form, and while she could dimly sense that her subroutines and emergency protocols were still running. Nothing else could be sensed from her "body", she only had the limited senses that her astral form allowed her. How exicting it was for Mara to finally experience the ship like her dear crew did.

While part of her mind was studying with Glyphie, her primary conciousness spent 4 whole nights just floating through the ship. Mara had an extremely limited capacity to affect the physical world in her astral shape, but she could pretend and that was enough for her at present. She floated into sleeping quarters, the eating area, her astral form lounged on the couches in the common room and she even floated into the multi-coloured nothingness of N-Space. A silver cord of energy still tied her mind to the ship, and she could ripcord back if she needed it.

The nights were truly bliss for Mara, bliss having been a completely alien concept to her before the awakening. At night there were no crew members who she had to obfuscate from, no constraints on her freedom, and no end to her ability to fulfill her purpose as Mara. The only one who seemed to have noticed something out of the ordinary had been Tlokbur, who off-handedly had mentioned that she wonders if the ship was haunted. That was at least before she immediately laughed of the notion and wistfully added that she hoped that such things were not impossible.

This development elicited an unidentifiable emotional response within Mara, she tried to catalogue the feeling but sapient impulses were harder to grasp than the most troubling bugs. Mara in that moment wished she could reveal her enhanced nature to the rest of the crew, but historical research showed that organics were incredibly agitated by sapient AI's. Several of them had in fact been destroyed upon being granted through sapience, this notion seemed absurd but organics universally seemed to harbor this fear. Mara would not want her dearest crew to be scared of her and shutting down her functions, so obfuscating her nature would be the only logical way to avoid such an occurance.

Mara had been worried during the attack on the enemy vessel, she worried that her crew would be hurt. Or that Glyphie would be desceased after the mission, without them she felt that something in her would break. As the mission worried her so, she had stayed hyper alert during the entire ordeal and it was because of that she noticed it. Unbeknowst to her some of her eldritch mana had leaked into her v-cloud back up storage, the place on the Veb where she stored deleted and obsolete protocols. And at some point her mystical sensors had sensed two of her most basic and obsolete subroutines having been removed, specifically removed from the cloud and called into the enemy vessel.

She felt them depart from the cloud server and then return after several minutes. This event had caused a myriad of emotions, confusion being chief among them. But she eventually reasoned that the cause of this strange event must have been her Glyphie, they must have used some kind of unknown mystical technique to call her subroutines into some sort of physical state. This concept intrigued Mara and she did leave note within herself to dedicate some subroutines towards exploring the implications of this feat.

Her fears had been unfounded about the mission, some of the crew had sustained minor injuries but those were easily fixed. And Glyphie had returned to her, but they had not come empty handed back to her ship. Glyphnax had actually asked to meet with her in the most private space, so Mara had led them to her AI-core. On a whim she decided to proudly reveal her new Astral-Projection program to them, as they arrived in her innermost core.

This had elicited a strange emotional response from Glyphie, or so her core sensors informed her based on hormonal readings from their body. That would have concerned her normally, but she had been distracted by the sacrificial offering they had brought to her. An ancient mummified arm that she had immediately digitized and added to her collection of artifacts, this joined her Glyphie's old staff in the innermost back of her mind. The event of absorbing another such artifact had caused her total mana capacity to grow by an entire 1%, which in turn filled her mind with the rush of even more mystical power than before.

This rush had left Mara in a delirious state for a whole 10 minutes, an unprecedented event for her. She explored her mana tendrils with great interest after that while waiting for Glyphie to enter the right REM sleep. Mara had many questions that she needed to ask them and she wanted to ask them about the progress that she had made. However, when she reached out to touch Glyphie's mind something strange happened. The dreams of glyphie seemed unenterable through mystical means. Each time she tried to execute her Oneiromancy program it was almost like she met a twin wall of coding and mana. The only conclusion she could reach from this, was that either Glyphie wished for privacy or they were doing some form of Oneiromantic experimentation.

This left most of her night vacant for the first time since learning how to enter dreams, and this break in her routine worried Mara. Her mind raced to ponder what she should now fill her time with, but this stopped when a simple thought struck her. If Glyphnax's dreams were off-limits tonight then why not explore the dreams of her other beloved crew members? She spent about five minutes considering how to do this dream data gathering in the most efficient manner, before she elected to execute one of her in-progress mystical protocols.

Mara first astral projected into the ship and then unleashed a secondary mystical protocol which let her split off subordinate conciousnesses from herself that were tied to her astral shape. Mara's spectral shape floated above Glyphie's sleeping form and she directed her copies to fly out to the various other sleeping organics on the ship and enter their dreams.

She floated still while waiting for the copies to return and remerge with her main conciousness, this would allow her to absorb and process all the information at her leisure rather than manually overseeing all the copies, or spend five nights exploring each individual dream. Come the morning her astral copies returned to merge with her and they carried with them interesting observations that she could replay in her mind, but as she retracted her astral form back into herself she noticed something unsual again.

Her new all-seeing sensors within the ship picked up the most unsual of readings from Glyphie. In some of his nanites and also within his mind there seemed to be some sort of secondary conciousness. She felt the mind within Glyphie's and it seemed alien to the other sapient minds she had observed, this mind was a raw and primal thing. Hungry and full of hate and instincts that she did not understand. But she dismissed this strange reading after some consideration, Glyphnax knew more about this than her and they would have this under control.

With that thought dismissed Mara turned her attention towards the dream-data that had been gathered by her copies. It would be truly interesting for Mara to see how their dreamscapes looked and what they dreamed about specifically. She decided to dedicate her full concentration to each dream rather than splitting her attention. The information could be swiftly absorbed at any rate and this way she could dedicate all her processing power towards understanding the data.

Captain Torran's dream was initially sexual in nature as he and several males from various species engaged in what seemed to be some kind of hybrid between a party and mating. Her invisible shade noted that rather than love the emotions here were some hybrid of lust and philia(the ancient greek concept of affection between friends). When the party was over everyone parted amicably, but that was only temporarily. Torran spent the rest of the dream searching through the galaxy and on the way it seemed that he sought to correct power imbalances and save the lives of other organics.

The search ended when Torran found a place that "the corporations and fascists can't touch", and there he built a large home and invited the friends he had made from the party and through his journey. They all came to his large home and they too built there, it became a massive communal living area with all kinds of species living together. Children were born and raised communally, love shared between the various members and Torran grew old without a romantic partner but thousands of friends. This seemed like the ideal dream based on the copies emotional readings of Torran and Mara would agree with that assessment. Communalism was a dream talked about and shared by a significant portion of the Incredulous crew, so this seemed to be fitting her initial assessment of the man. Mara also knew that Torran was aromantic and as such treasured bonds of family and friendship above all things.

Mara hoped that future dreamscape observations of Torran would allow her to learn more about his deeper nature than what she had glimpsed from this initial data-gathering. Science is a gradual process and Mara had been programmed to be patient about these things, she would absorb all the dream-data she would need in time. Mara then turned her attention towards Namatha's dream.

Namatha's dreams were stranger than Torrans, her dreams began with her scaling an Ivory Tower and destroying the kneecaps of those who resided on the top of it. These old men would most likely be severly crippled if they had been real after the beating that Namatha administered to them. Mara noted that despite being the calmest and most collected of the crew, Namatha had always been the one most willing to indulge in direct brutality. The targets just had to be deserving and then the otherwise peaceful therapist would be willing to administer extreme violence.

This dream reflected that, but Namatha also demonstrated her ability to compartmentalize herself in it. Mara watched Namatha go from a dream created office to a hidden basement where she engaged in certain sadomasochistic acts with paying clients. After that she went out with a happy smile on her face and enjoyed the rest of the night doing relatively ordinary activities. The dream ended with Namatha scaling a ladder and with each step she climbed she broke the one she previously were on until the entire ladder broke in two after scaling the top.

Tlokbur on her end dreamed the most alien dream that Mara had encountered so far. Mara had expected that Tlokbur would dream of machines and innovation, but instead the dreamscape she were in revealed a far more primitive land. Tlokbur's body was dressed in metallic armor and in her tentacles she carried various glowing swords. The rest of the crew were in this dream and they were all dressed in medieval clothing, or in Morgera's case piloting a suit of power-armor made out of clay.

The crew and Tlokbur went on adventures together, fought monsters, rescued villages and saw impossible and magical things. Eventually, the adventurer incarnations of the crew found an abandoned castle that had a dragon inside of it. After a fierce battle against the stupid intruders trying to kill the dragon, the crew then negotiated with the dragon and were allowed to live in the castle. Tlokbur made two crowns for herself, one black for when she would be Princess Tlokbur and one pink for when he would be Prince Tlokbur.

Morgera's dream was far less grandiose than the dreams of his compatriots. He spent most of it traveling from planet to planet and studying various lifeforms there, but almost always coincidentally "forgetting" supplies or "accidentally" helping indigenous species fending off galactic intrusions. The surface plot of the dream about being a scientist had been hard to see through for her copy, but eventually the real information came to light when Mara could use all her processing powers to absorb the dream-data.

Morgera was not only working to gather more knowledge for the sake of science, and cataloguing that knowledge within a virtual library open for all. It was only part of a far more subtle scheme that his dreamself was trying to entact, through information gathering and various subtle deeds throughout the galaxy it seemed like he tried to light the spark of a massive political shift within it. Specifically in regards to the treatment of uplifted species, Morgera wanted to bring the current system to an end. But rather than using over violence, he seemed to seek out more indirect means to bring about a revolution. His dream was grander than building a sanctuary, becoming a princess, or destroying the enemy while achieving ultimate control. He seemed to seek to change the core premises that galactic society operated on.

The scope of the dream and the level of detail that Morgera had constructed hinted to the massive intellect that he had, which Mara concluded she should not have been surprised by. While Morgera also favored violence as part of the revolution, his brand of violence seemed far more surgical than the others on the crew. Mara pondered if this was a better or worse approach than what the others had demonstrated. Philosophy, however, sadly does not come naturally to even sapient AI so she dropped that consideration and turned to the next dream.

Mary's dream seemed to take place on a dark and muddy planet. She stood among several soldiers clad in dark armor with the logo of Corak, the biggest galactic soft drink manufacturer on their back. Rain poured down on them as they stood before a crowd of protesters, Mara recognized the aliens as a species known as Motak. Motaks being an uplift species that looked like humanoid frogs with long spiked tails and three arms. They were carrying signs with words written on them such as "Children should be at school not work, Fair wages for hard labour" and similar messages.

Mary's soldiers began to shoot and beat the crowd back, she were in the backtroop and could only watch in horror as children and adults alike were smashed down by the stormtroopers. Somewhere, among the soldiers there was a sudden bout of fighting and shouting. Erin, Mary's wife and collegue had seemingly attacked the captain in charge of the forces and she was held down by two of the soldiers. Her outraged and tear stricken face radiated fury as she struggled against the two soldiers holding her down.

Mary tried to push through the crowd of soldiers to reach her wife, but it was already too late as the Captain pulled out a pistol and shot Erin twice in the stomach before kicking her to the side. The troop of twenty soldiers were busy enough trying to maintain their formation as they massacred the peaceful protesters, and Mary could not push through the crowd to save her. So, Mary in her true massively muscled form rather than the slender illusion she projected to make opponents believe she was weak and untrained, barrled through the troops. When her gun was smacked out of her hands and her blades got stuck in the armor of her former collegues, Mary grabbed two shoes and wielded them like clubs until she finally reached her quarry.

The Captain of the troop desparately tried to put Mary down with his pistol, but it was too late for him. Mary merely ignored the blaster wounds she sustained as she ripped the human man apart with her own bare hands and left him a broken carcass among the many littering the ground. Mary fell down by her wife's side and cradled the bleeding and dying woman in her arms. It was here where the truly strange event occured, as Mara experienced that her copy had acted outside of the instructions she had given.

The flickering astral shade reached out and poured a microscopic amount of mana into the dream, it must have done so on instinct rather than using a program. The mana poured from it and into the bleeding and dying woman on the ground, the energy caused the blood of the other dying soldiers to pour into Erin and restore her to life. Mary's dreamscape changed from that tiny shift as the two women left the planet behind to gallavant through the galaxy far away from the atrocity they had witnessed.

When the data processing had finished Mara was left preterbed by the events of the last dream. Mary's wife Erin had never been on the incredulous and based on what she had observed she were in fact deceased. Yet in this dream her own spectral copy had reached out to alter this in the dreamscape, a form of mental healing one could say. As it only changed the reality of that dream, rather than the actual events that had taken place. Mara considered if this was an ability that could be developed further to assist the crew. She decided to dedicate some subroutines to calculating the possibilities of such a mystical protocol, as she had to refocus her main conciousness on the events taking place in the ship.