*1345.04.27*

Avi grinned as she regarded her opponents. They’d severely overestimated themselves, thinking that because she was Joram’s “friend” she’d go easy on them.

Hah, naïve children, she thought as she retrieved two water balloons from her storage rings and threw them in one swift motion.

*Ka-splash!* x2

“No fair, Avi! That’s cheating!” Xixi yelled out, echoed by the also dripping Zanth.

“Hey, if two kids whose cultivation is higher than mine can’t keep up… What can I say?” She said smugly as the two kids glumly accepted towels from a droid.

Both kids gave her the evil eye, though Xixi’s at least looked only half serious.

Avi worried a bit about Zanth. He’d taken it especially hard when Sulia had broken the news to him. She was trying her best to help distract the few remaining children, only 37 of the almost 400 survivors of the attack.

She didn’t now what else to do. Most of her references to keeping kids occupied originated from the thousands of movies and tv shows Joram had collected over the years. Now, she wasn’t entirely ignorant of the fact that most of those shows weren’t meant to be any sort of moral or intellectual guide for raising children. But there had been a few good ideas. Like the water balloon fight.

“How are you so good, Avi?” Zanth grumbled as he dried his hair, not bothering to change out of his swimming trunks.

Avi reached up and tightened her pony tail, sporting her own bathing suit in the form of a bikini top and Daisy-Dukes.

“It’s all about knowing where not to be,” she said sagely, crossing her arms and nodding.

Xixi and Zanth exchanged incredulous looks, then burst out laughing.

Success!

- - - - -

“We’re just…” Sulia began, but was cut off by Avi.

“Bored?”

Sulia blushed slightly. It didn’t seem that she was used to being cut off like that. Or maybe she didn’t want to be seen as ungrateful…?

Avi shrugged.

“That’s fine. I was stuck here for a thousand years waiting for Joram to revive. I can appreciate needing a hobby,” she said casually, causing Sulia’s mouth to open in surprise.

“You don’t look a day over seventeen,” she said very tactfully as she smiled.

“Meh, this body is less than a year old,” she said with a shrug, this time causing Sulia’s jaw to drop. Avi smirked. “Since you’re Joram’s mom, and I’ve seen that you’re a good person, I figured you should know more about me.”

Sulia nodded a bit mechanically. Avi was tempted to read her surface thoughts, but ultimately decided that making up her own interpretations of Sulia’s expressions would be much more fun.

“You see, I’m a product of both Joram and Altaea,” she started, then stopped when it looked like Sulia had swallowed a lemon.

Man, that was easier than I thought.

“You could think of me as a child of their minds,” she said to clarify, not wanting Joram to come back to find out that he was now an orphan because his mother’s heart had stopped due to shock. “Anyway, I was normally constrained to a small crystalline form, but decided that I needed an organic body to better help Joram,” she finished, nodding.

Sulia just stared at Avi, eyes studying her form for a few more seconds before she reached a hand over the small patio table they shared in one of the gardens, and poked Avi in the chest.

“I can’t find any difference,” she said absently, still poking Avi here and there.

“Well, I am a real… woman,” she finished, realizing that the original quote didn’t quite fit her situation. “About the only difference between me and you is that I haven’t started cultivating yet.”

“Ah, but I can sense Mental Strength coming from you,” Sulia said, a bit puzzled.

“That’s natural,” she said, causing Sulia to blush a bit when she realized that she’d poked Avi in the breast. “Well, that too. But I was referring to my psionic ability,” she said with another smirk.

“Aside from the hair, you’d fit right into the clan,” she murmured, still studying Avi’s body. It wasn’t hard seeing as how Avi was still in her Daisy Dukes and bikini top.

“Well, from what I can tell, Altaea founded your clan. I’m pretty sure that she used some of her genetic code when she made the first High Elan of your line.”

Sulia blinked, then blinked again. “She what?”

Avi took a moment to silently chastise herself. It seemed as though this wasn’t common knowledge. Or, at least, knowledge their clan remembered.

“Ah, well,” she started, staring awkwardly up at the purple blossoms on the branches above her. “Shortly after we first arrived here, Joram was fascinated by the Library and had me exploring it. I happened to notice you using a portal and started studying it when I realized that it was keyed to something.”

“I thought I felt someone watching me in there,” Sulia murmured, her brow creasing slightly.

“Well,” Avi continued with a grin. “It took a little while, but I managed to make a duplicate of the key.” She paused again for Sulia’s shock to wear off. “Anyway, what we found while exploring the Heavenly Archive led us to believe that Altaea had built it, leaving a few things behind for Joram to find.”

“Wait. How did you come to that conclusion?” Sulia asked, now genuinely curious.

“Well, the biggest giveaway was the transporter system.”

“I know that teleportation arrays are exceedingly rare in the world these days, but that really don’t explain much.”

“It was the physical design of them,” Avi explained. “The design came from Joram’s world. But that alone could have been a coincidence, albeit a ridiculously farfetched one. We also found a few manuals that partially contained a substance unique to Joram’s world, while the other components were a type of plant that Joram had made. It was a bit of a giveaway.”

“Joram made a plant?” Sulia asked numbly, a bit fixated on that point.

“It was while Altaea was training Joram,” Avi said by way of an almost useless explanation. “Anyway, those many clues got me thinking. If Altaea had made the Heavenly Archive, had she left it to be discovered by just anyone? Or had she left it as a legacy?

“It wasn’t hard to start analysing the genetic makeup of your clan,” she said, then realized that Sulia didn’t know what genes were. “Genes are the basic building blocks of living beings. Each person has a unique genetic code, but families share basic traits. Like how you know someone is related by taking and comparing blood samples,” she said, going for an explanation that Sulia would understand. The Clear Knowledge Clan had, after all, used blood samples for important lineages in their genealogy department.

Seeing that Sulia caught on, Avi continued.

“I found that the main line of the family still had the genetic markers of High Elans in their line, likely due to marriage practices set up by the founders of the Clan,” Avi finished, then waited for Sulia to finish processing what she’d been told.

“What’s a High Elan?”

Avi nodded, glad that Sulia was keeping on point.

“They’re a psionically created psionic being,” she started, then continued the explanation. “In Altaea’s original world, there was a psionic race called Elans. They weren’t a natural race. I’m not sure how the first Elans came into being, but they could only continue as a race by using their psionic abilities to alter other humanoids, changing them into new Elans.”

“Wait,” Sulia raised a hand. “Did they forcibly change people?” She asked, taken aback by that part of the history lesson.

Avi shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know that by the time Altaea was converted into an Elan it wasn’t by choice, exactly. You see, she and her friends had stumbled upon an ancient ruin of the Elans. She’d been separated from her party when she found one of their conversion chambers. This one designed to function autonomously. There were a few other factors, but in the end she became the only living Elan on their world, effectively bringing back the Elan race from extinction.

“Fast forward to after they saved the world,” Avi said, skipping ahead much to Sulia’s regret. “Altaea made sure that any new Elans she created were all volunteers and knew exactly what they’d wind up being.

“Fast forward some more time. Altaea was then a unique being of gestalt nature. She remembered how hard it was giving up the ability to naturally give birth to a child. So, she studied long and hard, working through countless hypotheses before getting to solid theories that eventually bore fruit.

“Not long before she… left her world, she managed to complete her research and became her first test subject,” she stopped, seeing Sulia’s aghast expression.

“Altaea wasn’t willing to subject anyone to an experiment like that. She was nice that way,” Avi said with a smile. “Anyway, it was successful. She managed to take out, what she suspected to be an intentionally limiting factor for Elans, along with a few other minor changes. She called the new race High Elan. Well, race is a bit of an exaggeration seeing as how she was the only one at the time.

“But then she met Joram, and then the High Elan race became two.”

“There are so many questions I’d like answered,” Sulia said vehemently. “But the first would be: did Joram become a High Elan willingly?”

Avi snorted. “Even I’m not sure what connection he and Altaea had, or have, but I do know that he was the one who asked to be… converted. Much to Altaea’s shock, from what I gather.”

“So, what are the traits of a High Elan?” Sulia asked, now very curious.

“Well for one, they’re naturally psionic. And quite powerfully so at that,” she said, amused at Sulia’s rapt expression. “For another, they can sexually reproduce. That was one thing that Altaea wanted for her people. It was hard, some decades, to get many volunteers, even in her kingdom.

“You see, one of the racial traits of Elans is that they’re naturally very long lived. Well, technically, they don’t have an upper limit to their lifespan, and they do age up to a point, but much more slowly than the other races. Most, when they felt they’d lived long enough, just chose to pass away.”

Sulia blinked, her mouth opening and closing for a minute before she could properly organize her thoughts.

“Are you telling me that they were effectively a race of immortals?”

“Yup,” Avi replied simply, causing more surprise for Sulia.

“Do you know just how much you could study?! How much research and progress you could make?” Sulia was practically vibrating in her chair with her excitement.

Did Altaea somehow incorporate a learning mania into their genetic code? Or is this just a cultural thing? Avi pondered. Either way, Joram wound up in the perfect place.

“Yes, but for a person that came from a race that wouldn’t normally live longer than a few hundred years, at best, the weight of centuries was heavy. You tend to watch the other races, your friends, grow old and die, along with their children and their children’s children. Not everyone had the mental fortitude to live that long.”

Sulia nodded, suddenly more serious. “But wouldn’t cultivation help mitigate that problem?” She asked, now genuinely curious as to why people wouldn’t surround themselves with other long-lived people.

“Ah, that’s another thing. Cultivation doesn’t exist on Altaea’s home world,” Avi explained. “Both Altaea and Joram came from worlds where cultivation as you know it, doesn’t exist. Heck, as far as Joram knew, magic didn’t even exist in his world.”

Sulia’s jaw was getting quite the workout.

“Anyways, back to High Elans,” she said, bringing the conversation back on topic. “As I mentioned, High Elans are able to reproduce sexually. Another big change to their physiology Altaea made was that they are now able to control their bodies to an amazing extent.

“For example, they can control their hair growth, and even its colour. Another is how they ‘age’. They can choose how old they look.”

Avi stopped there, recognizing the glassy look in Sulia’s eyes.

Once Sulia came back from her mental tangents, Avi continued. “Yes, a High Elan can look like a child one day, then a toothless elder the next. And they still have no upper limit to their lifespan.”

“Altaea truly created a race of immortals, didn’t she?” Sulia asked, her tone sliding to that of reverence.

“Well, as far as I know, there’s possibly only two High Elans in existence, so that shouldn’t be an issue.”

“Well, there’s you and Altaea,” Sulia said in confusion. “How would there be more?”

“Well, I’m not sure Altaea is still alive, you see,” she said, then continued when a very confused look appeared on Sulia’s face. “Then there’s me, of course. But there’s also Joram. Yes, yes, I know that doesn’t make sense, given what you know. And no, I haven’t made Joram into a High Elan behind your back.

“When Altaea made Joram, he requested that she make him into a being just like her. Now, she couldn’t do anything about his Base Form, him being human and all while Altaea had started off as an Aasimar, a distant descendent of a mortal and an angel.

“Anyway, the process to make someone like her is a bit long and very, very, specific. It took a lot of training on Joram’s part, but eventually he met the conditions to become a gestalt being like Altaea.”

“But what does that have to do with Joram also being a High Elan right now?” Sulia asked, evidently wanting Avi to get to the crux of it.

“Well, to put it simply: Joram also has other forms he can shift into. When he was reborn into your family, it only added another form to his being.”

This time it took Sulia several minutes to organize her thoughts and ask the most relevant question to her.

“How?”

“Being a gestalt being, his forms are tied to his soul. They’re, effectively, expressions of his soul. If you somehow had the ability to see souls, you wouldn’t be able to differentiate his physical self from his spiritual self. They’re one and the same, just like Altaea. Heck, just like most Planars from Altaea’s home.”

“But if that’s so, how was he able to be reborn as my son?”

“Another good question,” Avi said, nodding appreciatively. “I don’t know. We’re still investigating the how and why of what happened to Joram after that practitioner killed him.”

Sulia took another moment to process things, so Avi poured them a glass of iced tea. There were a number of medicinal herbs that they’d collected, while Joram explored after leaving that mountain, that made for a wonderful tea once dried. Never mind the various fruits and berries they’d also brought to the Realm.

“So, you’re saying that Altaea made a High Elan in the distant past and they somehow became the founder of our clan?”

Avi was really starting to like her.

“Basically, yes.”

“So, all that is how you came to the conclusion that Altaea created the Heavenly Archive for Joram?”

“More or less.”

Another pause. “Is that why Mental Strength is more common in the Aneath line?” She asked, now looking more closely at Avi.

“Probably,” Avi said with a shrug. “Your line is diluted enough to be considered normal humans though.”

“So, I’m not somehow related to Joram other than being his mother?”

Avi nearly snorted out her tea through her nose.

“No.”

Sulia seemed to relax then. But Avi continued.

“Well, maybe in the sense that you might have a common ancestor that’s twenty-thousand years in the past. Heck, even I took a bit of genetic data from Altaea, making up the difference with Joram’s.”

It was Sulia’s turn to almost spray tea out of her nose.

“So-so-so-so… you’re Joram’s daughter?” She stuttered out, a drop of tea coming out of her nose.

Avi sighed a bit. “No more than you’re Altaea’s daughter,” she said, shaking her head. “There are genetic traits that every person shares. Like the ones that give you your basic human shape. Two eyes on the front of your head, the same opposable thumbs as other humans. That sort of thing.”

Sulia slumped back into her chair, relief evident on her face.

“I still have a long way to go to catch up with Joram, though,” she said wistfully. “I plan on becoming like Altaea as well one day so that I can be a better help to him.”

Sulia sat up again, focussing on Avi. “Aren’t you already an amazing friend?”

She smiled at that, for some reason glad that Joram’s mother saw that.

“Don’t you ever want to be more for those close to you?” She asked, not quite rhetorically.

Sulia sobered at that, then nodded. “Always. If I’d been stronger, had a better magical foundation…” she stopped there, eyes tearing up.

“Exactly,” Avi said, placing a hand on Sulia’s shoulder, giving her a light squeeze. “It was hard waiting a thousand years for Joram to return, being powerless to help. The only thing I could do was keep the [Astral Seed] safe and build up his Realm.”

Sulia looked around, following Avi’s hand as she gestured to their surroundings.

Sulia took a moment to compose herself before speaking again.

“This is a pocket realm, isn’t it?” She asked, then continued when Avi nodded. “Did you find this place when you were exploring. You know, before Joram died?”

Avi smiled lightly at that. “No, this Realm is a part of Joram. Part of what made, or makes, Altaea unique is that she had the ability, amongst others, to take people or objects into what she and her friends initially called her ‘mind space’. In reality, it was a minor realm that had formed in her… Knowledge Sea, but was later separated and attached to her being, her soul.”

Sulia’s jaw, once again, dropped.

“She can do that?”

“As can Joram,” she said with a soft smile. “Because I’m, in a sense, a part of him, I can use the same psionic powers that he can. That’s how I helped this Realm grow and develop.”

“Wait, back up,” Sulia held up her had. “You’re part of Joram?”

Avi wanted to laugh at Sulia’s expression, but held back.

“Are you familiar with how some powerful cultivators will leave what they call a ‘wisp of consciousness’ in an item?”

“Yes, it’s usually to forge an artifact that is intelligent, or to leave behind a legacy after their death…”

Avi waited, watching as Sulia picked up on what she was hinting at, then process it.

“Well, that’s a bit like what Altaea had done with me,” she said, taking a sip of iced tea. “You see, Joram is able to make what’s called a psicrystal, a crystalized shard of his personality that’s usually used as a helper for most psions. Kind of like having a familiar.

“Before Altaea left him, she’d been working on making an assistant to help Joram on his journeys without her,” she paused, remembering just how hard Joram had taken Altaea’s sudden, and unannounced, departure. “She didn’t quite have the resources to put together what she’d originally intended, so she improvised. She took his psicrystal and merged the culmination of all her work together, resulting in, well, me.”

Sulia was at a loss for words, Avi could tell. The biggest giveaway was Sulia doing an impression of a fish out of water.

It was several minutes before she was able to say anything.

“So, you really are his child.”

Avi face-palmed, then sighed.

She’s a bit fixated, isn’t she?

“If you want to stretch it that far…? Sure?”

Faster than Avi could see, Sulia was up and hugging Avi tightly to her bosom.

“I have a granddaughter!” Sulia gushed, causing Avi to want to join Joram in seclusion.

* * * * *

Kinkade watched as Sulia embraced Avi and smirked, then sighed. He was going to be in for it. The fact that Sulia, his mother, was so fixated on Joram having a child throughout their conversation should have raised more than a few red flags for Avi.

Well, live and learn.

He continued on, heading to the mundane gardens to gather a few things he needed for his research. Creating a replicator wasn’t nearly as easy as one would think, even if they thought it was impossibly complicated.

Now, he wasn’t sure if he was going about it the right way, even if there was a “right” way. But it was the way he was choosing to go, so he shrugged.

He’d been creating a Crystal Library of every ingredient and dish that he could find, copying over the information from [Delve] one by one. It was a somewhat tedious task, but he thought it would be worth it.

The project was going to be a huge power sink though. He wasn’t quite sure how he could streamline the efficiency of the process so that it would require less energy to function. As is, it took a level 9 Power to work, which was something that anyone from Altaea’s world would boggle at, for they had cheap magic items that could produce set kinds of food. Heck, they even had divine spells to do that.

But here? He was pretty sure that there weren’t any gods lazing about, just waiting for someone to pray for their daily allotment of divine spells.

So, he had to go with what he knew. Sure, he could go with cheaper options that had the item vanish after a day or so, but that would turn out poorly not only for the poor soul consuming the replicated food, but for any item that used a part they’d replicated for its use.

Hence his quandary.

He needed something permanent. He had played with the idea of installing several cognizance crystals, a type of psionic battery, to power the unit, but then it could only be used so many times per day. Never mind the cost of creating said cognizance crystals.

The most abundant resource available to him was mana. Which meant that he needed to somehow reverse engineer the [True Creation] Power then remake it as a spell.

Well, it wasn’t like he had much else to do.

Like making sure everyone was all right, even with Asura going about helping where she could.

Well, maybe not. He just really wasn’t looking forward to diving into magical theory as he much preferred psionics and tech.

Oooh, maybe he’d work in “magitech”. He was already good at “enchanting”, creating psionic items. So how hard would it be to shift that over to making magical items?

Kinkade grinned, then started chuckling, then laughing.

* * * * *

Asura looked over to where Kinkade was laughing maniacally at his desk and sighed. She was pretty sure that it was a portent of weird things to come.

She left the lab then, not wanting to get involved in whatever might come of that.

Instead, she smiled as she ran into Xixi as she and Zanth were helping care for her sisters while being supervised by Annalee and Thuridan, Tillia’s parents.

Asura was glad that Zanth was managing to adjust so well, even going as far as helping with the other kids, even if he really wanted to just head off and practice with his sword. No euphemism intended.

Through her connection to Joram in the Network, she could tell that they were chatting telepathically with each other as they played with the toddlers. As much as she was tempted to listen in on their conversation, she knew that it was a breach of privacy that Joram wouldn’t condone.

So, she continued on into the small hospital Avi had made a while back, then headed into an elevator. From there she descended a few levels and got off. She passed through a few rooms, mostly empty save for the last room that contained a desk with several monitors on it, all but one showing empty cells.

The one cell with an occupant showed a young woman with raven black hair dressed in a simple shirt and pants. No shoes, no socks. The cell was kept at a comfortable temperature, even if she hadn’t been a cultivator.

Asura observed Bai Lian for a time, noting that she’d eaten the meal that had been delivered to her.

She’d made progress over the last week and a half, which had greatly surprised her. They’d assumed that it would be hard to get any information out of a disciple of one of the Sects. They’d been a bit wrong.

……

“So, you’re telling me that there were more than a few people in your raiding party that didn’t know they were on a mission to wipe out a peaceful clan?”

Bai Lian nodded. “We were led to believe that you were a force that stole teachings from all across the world, and that you were planning on dominating the world using those stolen techniques.”

Asura pinched the bridge of her nose even though she as just a hologram.

“Do you know who the mole in the clan was?” Asura asked, not quite able to stick with her previous line of questioning. The answers had been too… naïve.

“No, but they were probably higher up in your organization. Though, we did have a spy posing as a food vendor in the town.”

“Ah, what did they sell?” Asura asked as casually as she could.

“Meat skewers, I think?” Bai Lian replied with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter, they probably left with everyone else…” she said, then deflated as she once again realized that she’d been left for dead.

“And why did you participate in the ‘mission’?”

“Because I needed real-world experience. I hadn’t ever left the sect before. I just studied and practiced. My master saw that I was stagnating, so she recommended me to the expedition. And because I am- er, was, one of the best in my year, they agreed.”

“… And you had no problem with the idea of killing a clan?”

Bai Lian raised a hand, lifting her index finger as though wanting to make a point.

“’An evil organization of thieves bent on world domination’,” she corrected. “We, or at least I was led to believe that our cause was righteous.”

Typical brainwashing, she thought as she kept those thoughts from touching her face.

“Sects often go out to annihilate clans?”

Bai Lian shook her head at that. “No, that’s a very rare occurrence. Only when a power would threaten the peace of all do the Sects do such a thing.”

……

Asura was having a hard time disliking Bai Lian. She was just too… naïve to hate. Once Asura had explained a bit of the Clan’s history, and their philosophy, it had shaken Bai Lian’s beliefs. A bit of logic, like pointing out how if they were a clan bent on world domination, why weren’t they more powerful? Why didn’t they have layers upon layers of defensive arrays that would have kept their attack force out?

Why weren’t there more body cultivators? Any techniques or martial arts that could have easily repelled any invading force?

It had been easy reading Bai Lian, especially being in the Network. All those emotions and even stray thoughts that came from her helped immensely.

But even though Asura was starting to like Bai Lian, that didn’t negate the fact that she’d participated in the attack. She claimed, and Asura was inclined to believe her, that she hadn’t killed anyone, merely disabled them. And when she had seen that most of the people they were attacking were woefully weak compared to them, well, it had planted the seeds of doubt in her heart.

Heck, even Bai Lian’s description of the argument she’d started with the other two disciples she’d been with had been in line with what little Avi had observed before wiping out their party.

At length, Asura decided that this was above her paygrade and turned around to leave. She’d let Joram deal with it when he finally returned from his seclusion.

For now, she’d get back to work on her orbital station.