Degritone focuses for multiple seconds, imagining the space itself in front of his hand gathering together as if a baseball were in his hand before increasing the contraction beyond the distortion a baseball would create. He keeps pushing, and after many seconds, the tendons in his arm start to hurt from being tense for so long.

He pops his wrist before pulling in his hand, quickly popping his fingers one by one, including his non-knuckle joints. As he gets to his middle finger on his left hand, he stops and says, "Wait, I'm stupid. This is an actual image system. I can just use Flash, Flash Space, and maybe Super Flash. In lore, Flash Space was found first, as entering it is the easiest step, then Super Flash was found, which is technically the actual Flash, but blah..."

He waves his hand in front of his face then goes back to finish popping his fingers. "Going straight to Flash would be the most convenient, but, while I technically have the knowledge of how to normal Flash by making entering Flash Space, activating a Super Flash to the location I want, then leaving Flash Space all happen at the same time, I don't actually have the in-universe knowledge to do that, so let's start where the people of the old RP's lore started, with Flash Space."

He finds a comfortable stump and sits down before closing his eyes. "Hopefully..." he never finishes his thought as he starts imagining himself in a grayed out, frozen in time version of reality. He imagines running quickly before entering this space, only to stop in place, as if he had no momentum whatsoever, before walking a few steps left in this grayed and frozen place, then starting to run again as he returns to reality as if he had instantly teleported to his left slightly.

In his imagination, he pulls at a tree leaf while in flash space, only to have it be completely and utterly stuck to the tree, absolutely nothing moving except him. "What other properties did it have...?" He puts his elbows on his thighs and starts tapping his forearms with his fingers. "Well, I don't have a good way to imagine it beyond Super Flash, but space was kinda... malleable? We never did flesh out what exactly made teleportation inside, and into, Flash Space only slightly harder than thinking."

He sets his mind on repeating the images for the properties of Flash Space. After about half a minute, his mind starts to wander and he starts thinking about all the other Skills he really wants.

He idly thinks about how Omen of Death could potentially go about its cloning and revival, such as scanning the soul of the target, recreating it with mana as his other Omens do, wrapping the real soul with a thin web of mana, and then destroying the mana soul to lure in the real soul when it would try to escape due to death.

Then he thinks about his first and only adventure mode run of Dwarf Fortress where he bee-lined toward a necromancer's tower to check every piece of literature to find the secrets of life and death to become a necromancer before going around the world, cutting out the throats of anyone he could find so he could reanimate the throats, which were near-indestructible due to the fact that they could just be reanimated should the magic animating them ever break, due to the muscle never breaking enough to be considered unusable.

His mind wanders to his play through as Masochist in Divinity: Original Sin 2, where he maxed out the amount of damage reflected and got every healing and shielding ability he could, only ever damaging anything that wasn't immune to, or healed from, its own damage type by letting them break themselves upon his body.

Finally, he thinks about how fun it was to play Jhin in URF and buy 4 Runaan's Hurricanes, a Trinity Force, and speedy boots to go faster than many projectiles before realizing he's gotten off topic and brings himself back to figuring out Flash Space.

Finding it hard to focus back on it, he checks his skills and finds a couple new entries, as well as 7 new levels in Visualization, bringing it to 157.

??? lv0

???

He raises his right eyebrow. "It was that easy to get Flash Space to 94.7%, but I didn't get even a single percent toward some lightning shooty Skill during my hourish trek through the intro dungeon?" He crosses his arms and leans back a bit, letting his head fall back and closing his eyes. "And Omen of Death got to 81.9% off just that?"

He goes quiet for multiple seconds. "Maybe it's because I actually knew the mechanics of what I wanted to do, where for lightning, it was just 'shooty shockboi lines.'" He wobbles his head a bit. "Or maybe it was because I," pause, "Visualization, though I don't feel like it should have that big of an impact."

Shrugging, he returns to having his elbows on his thighs while saying, "Well, I'm this close. I might as well finish Omen of Death. I can probably use the knowledge of what Scan does to help with the scanning portion, and Soul Grasp to help with the yanking. From what I know, which may be wrong, mana souls should automatically create a body around themselves, like my other Omen Skills do, so no need to worry about that.

"Only hard part would be fusing the Soul to the body and detecting when death should have happened. Something like Soul Sight, or whatever, should help with figuring out how souls are kept in the body, as well as what happens to them when death happens, assuming monsters have souls and their souls behave the same as sapient souls on death.

"And I don't really know what happens with Scan. Maybe Soul Sight could help with that, as well, though maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the soul, but let's think back to when I used Soul Grasp on myself and..." Finally finishing his monologue on a cliffhanger, he thinks back to when he tried to use Soul Grasp on himself, trying to figure out where his soul would be located.

He got a headache from the experience, though that's where his mana pool is, and he doesn't think that a soul and a pool would share a location, so that also rules out his heart. "Stomach?" He shrugs. Looking down at himself, he absentmindedly adds his 5 new PP to his Rookie Path and starts imagining the yellow of his soul as a small orb a little behind his belly button.

Not long after, he receives a notification.

Congratulations! You have created a skill!

Soul Sight lvX

Tilting his head to the right, he wonders, "Why didn't I," pause, "Soul Grasp? Or maybe I did and didn't pay attention to it because frightened." He snaps his fingers, leaving his right hand pointing up for a few seconds, as he raises his head and, temporarily, his eyebrows, saying, "Ah, maybe I subconsciously read it and that's how I knew how to Soul Grasp during my fight to save Victoria?" He shrugs.

Turning on Soul Sight, the world gets slightly faded as he looks at his stomach once again. He sees a yellow orb the size of a golf ball, with three dark lines cutting the surface into thirds. One of the sections takes up over two thirds the surface area, while one of the smaller ones takes up a little under two thirds of what remains.

Continuing to look at his soul, he tilts his head to the left. "I would have assumed it was solid. I wonder what those lines..." He continues to stare for a few seconds and notices that the surface of the, presumably, normal colored regions is flat, as much as a round object can be, but the dark lines indent slightly and appear to have slightly fuzzy surfaces, appearing as a visible, moving gas between its deepest point and the height of the normal regions.

After staring for a while, he shrugs and says, "Soul, soul, soul," while looking up and around. He doesn't have to look long, as as soon as he looks around, he sees hundreds of fuzzy, yellow dots. He uses Soul Grasp on the nearest one, watching as thin lines of yellow energy escape from his forehead and rapidly approach the soul he's targeted.

Nearly instantly after activating Soul Grasp, this process has finished, a yellow hand grabbing the soul. He pulls it closer to him, and sees it was a tiny spider. He picks up a leaf from the ground and drops the spider on it, deactivating Soul Grasp, and looking at it more closely. It skitters to the other side of the leaf and starts repelling down.

Rolling his eyes, he starts rotating the leaf to pull it back up and tries to get a better look at it. Just like the lines on his soul, the entirety of the spider's soul is fuzzy, though it is not a sphere at all, instead taking up the entirety of the spider's volume. He looks for a name to click to use Scan, but finds none. Tilting his head, he puts the spider down and deactivates Soul Sight.

So, souls aren't system interfaces, or whatever, since the spider had a soul, but nothing to Scan. I guess I could try Scanning without a name, but I have no idea how to activate it without underlined text... He wobbles his head for a while. "Skills?"

Activating Soul Sight once more, he looks at his own soul while bringing up the popup for a random skill, not paying attention to which one, in hopes that Scan would have a part in it in any way, though not expecting it to. His expectations are proven correct when nothing happens beyond the popup appearing.

As he is about to stand up and deactivate Soul Sight, Dan, his dog (well, technically his sister's dog, but she doesn't live with them anymore,) comes up beside him and he hears, "There you are," from behind him, the voice that of his dad. Turning just his torso, he looks at his dad.

"I said I was going to find the node," he says. Wait, he thinks, raising his hand to poke his dad's name. He watches as a thin line of yellow energy goes from his name, wraps itself around his dad's soul, and returns, all happening near instantly, slow enough to notice when you know a process is happening, but fast enough that it would seem instant without looking for something happening.

His dad shivers slightly and says, "Look, Don, it's dangerous and-"

"We've already been over this. I," pause, "am the person with the most survivability out of anyone," pause, "and we need the node to die, especially now that monsters will," pause, "be level 7. I can heal myself. I take," he brings up Mana Armor, "seventy one point fi-" he shakes his head, "one five percent less damage. The only thing I'd need you for is to find the stupid thing, as, somehow, giant cockroaches don't leave trails. If a monster spawns on one of you, there's a good chance you'll die, while the entire point of half my skills is to be unable to die."

As his dad retorts, he imagines the process of scanning, but instead of producing a popup, it produces a mana soul clone, while leaving a cage of soul energy surrounding the soul, only to yank the real soul into the body of the clone to replace the mana soul once the real soul's body dies.

Congratulations! You have created an original skill!

Omen of Death

He stares at the notification for a while. Wait, Soul Sight wasn't original, was it? He thinks back to the Soul Sight notification and realizes it wasn't original. He shrugs, thinking, Weird, but ok. Realizing his dad's still talking, he says, "How about this. I have a skill called Summon Ally. Lets me," pause, "bring anyone on my friends list to me." Sending his dad a friend request, he finishes with, "Have anyone who might want to join in on the 10 seconds it'll take to break the node send me a request."

He snaps his fingers, leaving his hand pointing up for a few seconds as he says, "Ah, right, and make sure everyone has a class and is rested for tonight. It'll probably be really hard tonight, with the monsters being a little over 7 times as powerful, and we don't want the house undefended." With that, he casts Omen of Death on himself. It nods at him and heads out into the woods, equipping its own Mana Armor and Mana Sword.

"And what's that?" his dad asks, pointing at the receding figure of his clone.

"A skill I just spent the last few minutes," pause, "working on. Makes a 55 percent strength clone of someone and revives the person if the clone is close enough. Gonna have it scout around as," pause, "I work on," pause, "a different skill. Now leave."

"Fine, grumpy grumperson," his dad says, going back to the house.

Nodding, he deactivates Soul Sight and stands up, stretching his knees, while thinking, For Flash Space, I just need to figure out entrance and exit, right? Didn't it technically turn time into a spacial dimension or something? It's been like 4 years, so I forget the specifics, and that doesn't even totally make sense, but neither did half the stuff if we applied it to the real world.

But, assuming I don't have to figure out how to manipulate the time dimension into a spacial one, how does entering Flash Space happen, beyond willing it to happen? He finally sits back down and intertwines his fingers over his belly. Friend requests start coming in, and he starts absentmindedly accepting. It's not, say, moving to a fourth spatial dimension, as the three normal ones are still technically there, it's just that time is stopped...

Well, no, I guess it is kinda like a fourth spatial dimension, just that that any coordinate value other than zero for the fourth spatial dimension is a time stopped copy of reality, and having a fourth spatial coordinate other than zero allows you to ignore time, as well, so really, it's just about being able to take a step in a direction I don't physically have the capability to do, like a 2D person trying to step off their paper universe.

So, it's just stepping "up" the fourth dimension. Simple in th-

Congratulations! You have created a skill!

Flash Space lv1

-eory and it just gave it to me without having to break my brain on how to do it. Cool. While looking over the skill from the announcement, he realizes that the announcement didn't say "original." Pulling his head back, raising his left eyebrow, and slightly lowering his right in confusion, he says, "He already got it before me? Or maybe it's a common skill that already existed...? Well, the RP did end on them going to other pockets of creation, maybe they're real and-"

He stops as he gets hit in the chest by an arrow.