ATWinPC-19

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==Chapter 19 - A Toreel Wizard in Prince Davion's Court==
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===Reminders of results of past failures===
Jumpship Hank Morgan
Jump Point
Euschelus System, Taurian Concordat
October, 3025
Trisha looked too confused to offer a suggestion, so Chim decided on the closet in their quarters. 
She wasn't surprised that L'heo was following her.
"What are you planning to do, Chim?" he said.
"Don't worry," she replied. "Just an experiment. We'll all be perfectly safe."
"You remember the Celestial Heresy?" L'heo asked. "All the Celestine was going to do was ask the Archangels a question, and he ended up waging war on Heaven for a century with an army of automatons."
"Yeah," Chim acknowledged, "but I hear he got a cute girlfriend out of it, so it wasn't all bad." She tried to make it a joke. The Celestine's war on the higher powers was a touchy subject among those who studied it, either a cautionary tale of unchecked Wizards tampering with creation or a tragic tale of a guy who maybe had a point. 
"And Lothos the Destroyer," L'heo said. "He was just trying to work out the quintessence paradox and ended up deciding everything everywhere needed to die."
"I'm not going to kill everything," Chim said. "That is like the opposite of where this might lead. Hells, if Lothos knew what we'd just figured out he probably wouldn't have tried either."
"Lothos was a psychopath," L'heo said. "He was so obsessed with being right he didn't care about anything that said differently."
"All the more reason not to bring him up," Chim said as they entered their cabin. Once in front of their small closet, she pulled the door open and started pulling things out. There wasn't much, just a few bags and an old emergency EVA suit. That went on the lower bunk. "This is entirely about understanding how the universe actually works, not throwing a worldwide tantrum because nobody listened to me."
"Everybody says that until the screaming starts," L'heo said. "My point is that we have personally had to prevent a lot of terrible catastrophes caused by powerful people who started out just wanting to try something." 
"You know I'm not like that," Chim said. "You've known me since I was an infant." 
"I know nobody starts out wanting to be the Celestine or Lothos," L'heo said. "I also know we were both terrified of what we saw each time we jumped, and you're about to step right back into it without any protection and try to reshape part of it in your image because you have a hunch. Can you see why I'm worried?"
Chim sighed. "Yeah, but it's more than a hunch. You didn't see it, reaching in there fishing out that guy's soul. Sure, it's undiluted chaos, but it's also... everything. And not just everything that is, but everything that was, and everything that might be. All there, floating around in this unreal void. All the building blocks of all of creation itself."
L'heo blinked in surprise. "Okay, I don't know how you could know that. Sure, that plane is probably adjacent to everywhere, but past and future?"
"Oh, that was from their books," Chim said. "You read anything about this Einstein guy? Time itself isn't a fixed construct. Apparently this is something they confirmed a thousand years ago with airships and really good clocks or something. I don't know, the book didn't go into much detail."
"Well that's a great thing to base a theory on," L'heo said, rolling his eyes.
"I'm not..." Chim said. "I'm not to theories yet. We're starting small. I'm just going to reach in there and see if I can bring together a simple demiplane. And if that works, I'm just going to watch it for a while, see if it holds up. I mean, just that success would be useful right? If we have a safe demiplane we can go to, we can gate anywhere else we need to be on this plane." 
"I don't have a problem with that," L'heo said. "It's what comes after that worries me."
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===I was dead, but I'm feeling much better now===
"So magic, huh?" Bensiger asked.
"Yeah," Brett agreed. "You seem to be taking it well."
"I was dead." Bensiger replied. "More I think about it, the more I just know that's true. I feel it. Like they didn't restart a heart that had stopped or got me breathing again. I was gone. It's like I can almost remember what being dead feels like."
"Huh," Brett said. "What's being dead feel like?"
"You know how it's late at night, you're feeling down, and you start second guessing everything you ever did?" Bensiger said. "I almost wonder if that's what it's like. I have these flashes, like memories I could have had if things had turned out differently. If I'd asked out Rhonda Reddy in secondary school or if I'd tried to be a doctor like mom wanted, or stayed working in the mines like my dad."
"Sounds like normal regrets to me." Brett said. 
"Yeah, but I always ended up dying in the end!" Bensiger protested. "Killed in a traffic accident with my wife and newborn, stabbed by a junkie in the hospital, killed in a mine collapse, maybe while overdosing on dream dust... It's like, every path I could choose ends with me dying yesterday."
"Well that... seems depressingly fatalistic." Brett said.
"I know, right?" Bensiger looked around. "So we're prisoners?" 
"I guess?" Brett replied.
The woman named Trisha, who had been keeping a respectable distance, chose this moment to speak up. "For now, you're... I guess... involuntary passengers?" She shrugged. "We've locked up your weapons and I'd appreciate it if you didn't do anything stupid, but beyond that you have full freedom to move about as you want." She also looked around the dirty cargo bay. "I admit it's not much, but you and your friends have your own cabin and you're welcome at our table."
"A table sounds really good," Bensiger said. "I think I came back empty."
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===A Summoning===
G-class cargo carrier dropshipIn Transit
Euschelus System, Taurian Concordat
October, 3025
What Chim was trying to do wasn't a simple matter. To reach out and manipulate the threads of that other plane meant that she kinda had to be there. Only kinda though. What that meant was while she was standing chanting inside a closet on a space ship, she was also halfway into that unreality beyond the bounds of... normal space? Honestly, you didn't think much of it back home because the Astral and Ethereal planes you'd be working with were so relatively forgiving to... well... life. 
Here though, she could feel it pulling at her, gnawing at her... No, that wasn't the right term. Bending her, trying to fold and reshape her to fit its own rules. In a way, it gave her another little insight. It wasn't really another space or place, it was the same space, folded crosswise to material reality. Everything was there, just like she thought, everything, everywhere, everywhen. She felt like she could reach out and touch it, understand it all, if she reached a bit further...
But the further she reached, the further she felt herself warp, her perceptions twisting, consciousness warping to the point where it wasn't recognizable. Like a band stretching past the breaking point. If she were actually there, real and entire, it might consume her, bend, twist and remake her into something that she couldn't recognize, that couldn't recognize her. She'd be gone.
Fortunately, the spell was built with a safeguard. Because she wasn't fully in the other plane, the spell's collapse caused her to snap back to reality, finding herself lying on the floor with L'heo staring down at her, concerned. All told, better than being unraveled into functional nothingness.
"How long?" Chim asked. 
"You were casting for three hours before you collapsed." L'heo said. "You didn't lose consciousness though."
"Huh, neat," Chim said. "This spell gets boring when you can perceive time." She got back up to her feet and stretched a bit. She didn't feel any worse for wear. Maybe a bit hungry. "Okay, let's try this again."
"Chim, it just failed."
"That was my fault," Chim said. "New exotic environment, I got distracted, tried to grab too much without really knowing how. This time will be different."
She didn't wait for his objection and started casting again. The sensations were the same, the sense of wonder, the sense of totality... the feeling of potential power just beyond her reach... No, focus. Small, familiar, grasp what you can see, what you can understand.
In the waves and eddies and twists and turns of things and concepts and natural laws, very little made sense, or could make sense. But she realized this reality did have structures, things almost recognizable as things. Little balls of something like quintessence, maybe even souls, floated through the void, so many to be beyond number, so close as to overlap, but also so far apart that they might never touch. Black voids, or shells of nothingness, or perhaps barriers hiding what was within were popping in and out of existence. Other things moving through the the swirling mathematics, swimming effortlessly at right angles to common sense, with something like intent, maybe even hunger.... 
She was getting lost again, she needed to focus. Don't lose yourself in the concepts. Grab a chunk, make it yours.
So she reached out, she didn't waste time thinking on what she was grabbing, she just grabbed it, took it in hand, her will pouring into it, taking it, shaping it...
And she could see herself, herselves. stretching out into infinity like mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, each image almost, but not quite, the same as before. It was overwhelming to behold, but to look away would mean letting go... so she tried to concentrate, don't get lost in it, embrace it. Let it wash over you. As those images poured in around her, she felt the strain abate. Most of those infinite variations weren't really all that different, just slight twists of the same theme. She could handle them. 
Still, as unreality began to collapse and fold itself into a recognizable shape around her, some stray parts of those variants lingered with her. She could see her sister's triumphant smile. She could remember savoring the taste of fresh blood in her mouth. She could feel the excitement of years of study and research coming to a head at the three tones of a jump alarm. 
As the magic drained out of her she dropped to her knees, finding herself by a babbling brook, among a forest of pear trees surrounded by a serene white mist. Just behind her to her left stood her sister, showing an emotion that Chim didn't think she'd ever seen before, pride in someone other than herself. 
"The fruit trees seem pointless," her sister said. "But otherwise, good work, my servant."
On the other side of the brook stood a young woman. Her face, her eyes, her hair, her slender figure all seemed to match Chim herself, but she was clearly human, wearing clothes not to dissimilar from the locals Chim had already met, and clearly, deeply, both confused and terrified.
For the moment, Chim decided not to pay the human any mind and instead looked up at the tall lithe, irresponsibly sexual form of her big sister. 
Then she raised a hand and shot a disintegration ray directly into her stupid face.
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