The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (95 page)

“Now then, was there anything else?”

“Ah, no.” Dren stated.  “And I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

“Your frustration is understandable.” Mark nodded with a smile.  “Thank you for coming by.  I’ll get started on trying to put a lid on all the weird behavior tonight after we eat.  I look forward to seeing you all again tomorrow at The Hall.”

The rulers and their staff made their farewells and departed, and after they were gone Mark grinned and declared; “I swear; that bunch is harder to baby-sit than you kids are, and by a wide margin.

The rest of his family got a good chuckle out of that.

“You know what I find funny?” Talia asked as she and Mark decided to join the crowd, and cast themselves as thirty meter tall Simulacrums.

“What?” he asked as the two reclined of the floor together with Alilia.

“Hilia has about two hundred thousand full-time soldiers and about two million militia.” she stated.  “Of those, about a third are void-qualified and took part in the last two exercises.  Alilia brought about two hundred thousand of The People of Life.  On the other hand, we command some four billion Sylvan and seventy million dragons who are void-qualified.

“Let’s face it, almost all of our fighters are Serminaki.  Yet for some reason, today everyone referred to all of those we commanded as Hilian forces.  I just find that very funny!”

“According to the law of Serminak,” Povon explained, “Zarkog who was Dragon Lord of Serminak was defeated and removed from power  by Mark who is Prince of Hilia, therefore, Serminak was conquered by Hilia.  Therefore, Serminak is now part of Hilia, as they see things.”

“All hail Lord Mark, Sovereign of The Hilian Empire!” Alilia laughed.

“The Serminaki would consider it entirely appropriate for Mark to declare himself emperor.” Povon chuckled.  “Or for him to rename the continent The Empire of Hilia.  To them Lord and Emperor mean the same thing anyway.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Mark said with a smile as he caressed Talia and Alilia’s huge forms.

“You know, this is very different, all of us being the same size.” Alilia giggled as she caressed him in return.  “I think I rather like it.”

“It’s nice as a change of pace, but I love that Mark is so much bigger than me.” Talia smiled.  “It makes me feel very protected when we’re together.”

“And it makes me feel very protective.” Mark chuckled.

“Hey, are you guys going to find a room, or are we just going to laze around for the rest of the day, or are we actually going to get anything else accomplished?” Fire asked.

“I suppose I should get started on trying to reconcile the peoples of The Just Alliance to the changes they’re facing.” Mark mused.  “I still find it hard to believe that just going around and talking to people will have much of a big beneficial effect, but I suppose it
is
my responsibility to try, at least.”

“Don’t sell yourself short.” Alilia smiled.  “You’re amazingly persuasive when you want to be, you know.”

“Besides, we’ll come with you for moral support.” Talia added.

“Can we come too?” Six asked.  “We haven’t done hardly any famous stuff yet, and we’re really famous now, so we should go out and enjoy it a little every once in a while.”

“Sure, come along, I don’t see why not, and you’ll take some of the attention off of me.” Mark grinned.  “But seriously, I want you on your best and most diplomatic behavior.  We’re trying to bring resolution to a bunch of youths and fools who are doing crazy stuff, not inspire them to anything new.”

“Yes Father.” his children chorused together, then giggled madly.

“We should investigate whether the youths and fools of Serminak are also exploring the new limits of extreme recreation.” Kragorram suggested to Povon.  “After this massage, of course, and perhaps after I return the favor.  But my thinking is this; while the parents and conservatives of Serminak are unlikely to be offended by any new foolishness among them, the youth and fools there are likely to be even more extreme than those elsewhere, particularly if they start goading and baiting one another about it.  I think we should make sure there are no new problems developing.  Even with the Healing, there are still the issues of potential property damage, and possibly harmful character development.”

“They don’t have to worry about property damage too much.” Val opined.  “My Work spell is like a Healing for inanimate objects.  Its Restore and Repair functions can fix almost anything.”

“Good point.” Kragorram admitted as he rolled to the side a bit to give Povon better access.  “But there’s still character development to be considered, and of course the possibility of other unexpected problems.  With the Sylvan especially, the unexpected is always an issue, and we would be wise to not be complacent.

“We’ve also been delegating and perhaps neglecting some of our duties in Serminak.  As Dren said to Mark; first we were in the time-bubble, and since we emerged we’ve been occupied with other matters, mostly military.  Life in Serminak has changed more than in any other place since we emerged, due to almost universal compliance with our children’s new training and social systems.  I just think we should make sure there aren’t any major and potentially dangerous trends being established among them.  Find out what life is like in the streets and homes and barracks and dens of our people.”

“Those are very noble thoughts, my love.” Povon told him with a warm smile as she scratched between his wings.  “Of course, that’s why I hired you.”

“I was hired?” he chuckled.

“It was me who asked Mark to make you my second-in-command, remember?” she teased.

“Yes, but hired?  I’m getting paid for this?” he teased in return.

She leaned down and murmured in his ear; “Actually no, you’re my slave.”

“Oh I see!” he laughed with a hearty rumble and a big puff of smoky yellow flame from his nostrils.

“You do have the right to draw on the treasury of Serminaki Draconia as you see fit.” she continued in a more normal tone as she resumed his massage.  “But you haven’t, and until you do you’re my slave.  So we’ll just have to do exactly what you say when we’re finished this, and investigate the development of the character and culture of Serminak.”

“Of course, that makes perfect sense.” he chuckled.

“Everyone help me cast as much privacy as we can possibly manage.” Fire suddenly ordered.  “I have something important to say, and I’m having a hard time with it.”

Without a word, they each cast their strongest psionic shielding around the entire group.

“Thanks.” she thoughtfully nodded.  “I hope no one else out there picked up on my thoughts before we did that.

“These military exercises are really useless. Unless there’s an unbelievable absolute worst-case scenario, none of us are going to be actually fighting the demons.

“We’ve all been playing along in so many ways, when none of this really matters.  When we get killed in an exercise, we let ourselves stay dead, when in real life Father’s preset Resurrection spells would bring us back to life, and so would the ones we came up with to meet the immortality requirement in the Prerequisites.  We totally hold back in the exercises because we don’t want everyone else to feel bad when they realize that they’re completely superfluous.  We all do it, and we don’t even talk about it when we’re sharing our thoughts.  Maybe we’re afraid to face up to what we’ve become.

“We had all of our fighters go into the tunnels on Dehrla because that was the point of the exercise, when in real life we’ll do all of our fighting with automated self-powered spells.  I’ve already come up with one that automatically finds the enemy and casts Tithian’s Gate-to-the-sun attack on all of their exposed surfaces.  Nothing could withstand that.  And I’m still improving the hunting functions and reducing the effective time.

“It was pretty easy, actually.  I did it in an hour.  It’s not nearly as complex as Val’s Education spell or even her Work spell.  The hardest part was finding a way to cast the output portal in any shape I wanted, rather than a flat plane, so it conforms to the enemy and doesn’t leak any energy.

“Self-powered spells change everything.  Right now my power is only limited by the total output of Source and warlock power from the sun.  I could cast two collection fields completely around the sun and take all of it.  Compared to that, everything the gods and The Triax and everyone else on Kellaran could do all together is just a spit in a hurricane.  Father, Six and Val could do the same.  And any of you could direct our power to do it through our Link.

“Who knows what you’ll be capable of when you adults become gods?  When we do too, because I’m sure we will eventually.  I doubt we’ll resist the temptation for more than a few centuries.  Maybe we’ll be able to cast collection fields around every star in this section of the galaxy, or even around the core of the galaxy, or even the whole galaxy itself.  And if you cast a spherical Gate around a star you can take
all
 of the energy it puts out, of every kind, and put it wherever you wanted.  It seems we could do anything.

“Anyway, I could absolutely eliminate that rock full of demons right now, and I don’t see why I don’t.  We could let our people get back to a more normal life.  Or trying to figure out a new one, actually, since everything has already changed.  The nexus is fulfilled, and nothing will ever be remotely the same again.”

There was silence for a moment as they considered what she’d said.

“We’ll have to test it.” Mark thoughtfully stated.  “There’s no doubt we’ve been holding back to some extent, because as Pakdag said; the point of the exercises is to train everyone.  We just weren’t willing to intentionally lose the last exercise to do so, so we didn’t use most of our combatants on-site.

“The new training they’re talking about will be a different story; the soldiers’ exercises will be run without our power, and only their fighting and our leadership will be tested.  Though they might allow us to fight as well if we limited ourselves to a five thousand combat score, but there wouldn’t be much point in that unless it was right at the end of the battle and things were getting close.

“We should be tested to our limits in both the exercises for Strike Wizards, and when we train with the gods.  We can show everything we can really do.

“And we should know what we can really do.  So we should go to the void on the opposite side of the sun from where the demons are and really test it.

“If we really can cast a collection field around the entire sun, for either Source power or warlocks’ power or both, and really use all that power, then we need to know that.

“If we can, then we can make a very strong case for a decisive first strike on the demons right now.  But I’m not willing to do it without the approval of the full Assembly, because frankly, I don’t want to take sole responsibility for it if it goes wrong and leads to an attack on our people before they’re as ready as they could be.

“On the other hand, when I first met the elves and started to take part in world affairs, I often made the mistake of not being fully aware of the true scale of all the forces I was dealing with.  Quewanak pointed it out the first time we met him.  And I strongly suspect that you’re making the same mistake right now.

“The output of the entire sun is so colossal that I really doubt we could cast a collection field around the whole thing; it’s just too much power to process into usable magic.  I think your other idea of being able to cast a spherical Gate portal around the whole thing is actually more practical, because it doesn’t have to transmute all that power into another form of energy, it just has to move it to another place through the Translocation medium.

“But really, when you consider the biggest collection fields and Gate portals that’ve ever been cast, or even the biggest amount of energy that’s ever been cast at once in any way by anyone, including all of our gods and the Triax’s together in their training, that’s still just a drop in an ocean compared to the output and area of the sun.  I strongly suspect that there are theoretical limits to what we can do that way that we’re not yet aware of, and I’d be surprised if we can use more that a tiny portion’s of the sun’s output in any way.”

“All right, let’s do it.” Fire stated decisively as she resumed her true form.

“Let’s do it Linked.” Povon insisted.  “Let’s do it
all
Linked.  No mortal of Kellaran has even attempted to Translocate as far as we’re jumping now, or even a tiny fraction of that distance.  The other experiments you’re attempting are almost beyond comprehension.  We should all be checking every step of every part of it and be absolutely sure of it before we cast.”

“Agreed.” Mark nodded.  “Let’s start out as far from the sun as Kellaran is and see how big a collection field we can cast first.  Then we’ll try it closer to the sun until we know how much intensity and area we can transmute.”

They all assumed their true forms and Linked fairly deeply, then cast Void Protection with all the latest improvements, including adaptations Povon had made of the new Xervian methods.

Povon was given control of the Translocation due to her skill and experience.  When everything was ready, she initiated the jump.

They emerged in what seemed like black emptiness, despite the millions of stars all around and the blazing sun, which was dimmed to viewability by the visual protections in the Void Protection.

They all just floated there and absorbed the view for a moment.

“You know, we get so caught up in what we’re doing that sometimes we don’t pay any attention the incredibleness of it.”
Six commented. 
“I’ve only gone to the void to test voidcraft and void-proofing, and to take part in the exercises.  I just kind of thought of the void as just night, only all around you.  It seems like it, even with the sun in sight.  I just did what I was doing and didn’t pay attention to it.  And Kellaran was always there, looking huge even when we were farthest from it.

“But this is really… powerful.  This is so far away from anything, in the absolute middle of nowhere.  It’s really kind of scary.”