Edge Cases

Anton, it quickly came out, had happened to be carrying a large load of mana slivers when the Roads had shut down — presumably the exact moment the bonus room had been created, and this little pocket of reality had become 'real'. There was, he explained, a blip in his memory there. He'd been overwhelmed by a harrowing sensation of deep nothingness before his thoughts had flowed back to him, and when he came back to himself, he was lying collapsed on the ground, the mana slivers scattered all over the ground.

He hadn't managed to become properly real immediately. What Anton remembered — and had never really questioned until now, when the memory was directly called to his attention — was that he'd simply carried those slivers around and gone about his daily routine. It'd been what he was doing at the time, after all, and so he kept going on autopilot.

Anton's face couldn't go ashen. But Vex watched as he slowed his words mid-explanation, as though he was finally thinking about the state he'd been in, and he just... stopped talking. He sat there for a moment, not saying a word, and Unea glanced at him in concern a moment before he shook off whatever fugue had briefly taken him.

"...At some point," Anton eventually continued, "I suppose I remembered enough of myself to divert from the path. I finished delivering the slivers I was carrying, and then I wandered."

"You just wandered?" Misa asked. Anton shrugged.

"I do not think I was fully awake, even then," he asked. "I did not think anything was wrong, explicitly; I remember only the vague thought that the closure of the Roads made everyone subdued."

"The important thing here," Sev said, "is that the slivers can fix this."

"I think so," Anton agreed, but he looked hesitant. "But it still took a long time, and it took a lot of them. When I finished delivering them, I think about half the original load was gone. I assumed I lost them while carrying them around, but..."

"It's possible you absorbed them somehow." Vex glanced at the slivers he'd inadvertently created while trying to understand his own personal glyph; they shone there, oddly tempting, shimmering with a prismatic light. Now that he was actually paying attention to them...

They weren't like mana crystals at all. He didn't sense mana in them, the same way he did with mana crystals.

"Why are they called mana slivers, anyway?" he asked. "Do you know what they are?"

"The mana only started rewarding them after we got stuck down here," Anton said. He shook his head. "They help us cast. Extend the effects of some spells, or let other spells do things they should not be able to do. They are valuable. That is why Teque keeps a store of them — we do not store it for citizens, but so that we can cast citywide magics if we need to."

"Have you ever needed to?" It was Misa that asked the question. It wasn't sharp and pointed, exactly, but there was a certain tenseness in her words.

"...Once." Anton frowned, and Unea looked at him; the ladybug-woman looked like she wanted to speak up. When Anton didn't continue, she did.

"It was hard for him," Unea said. "He had ta make the call to use it. Parasites got in here through the Roads — nasty little fellas. Latched on to mana signatures and ate away at people, then puppeted them with their own personal mana. And in case you're wonderin', no, that ain't happening now. They're shit at pretending, and we checked."

"It was one of the first things I looked into," Anton muttered softly. Unea shot him a sympathetic glance.

"He lost his family in that spell," she said. "Though I s'ppose they were lost before that spell was ever cast. A lot of us lost someone. We have magic, but we ain't got any signs to fix anything like that."

They were silent, at that. What was there to say?

"I'm sorry," Vex offered quietly, and Anton tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement.

"The important thing," he said, changing the subject, "is that the slivers might be able to reverse the effect you speak of, somehow. Or if not reverse it... Then perhaps replace whatever it is that your system takes away from us. Took away from us, when it brought us here."

"We need to understand more about these slivers," Sev said with a frown. "I thought they were just a currency, but it's obviously a lot more than that."

"We have tried," Anton said. "It was — and still is — a focus of study for many of our mages. But the slivers are mostly opaque to our magic, and we have not discovered any signs that can manipulate them. Perhaps yours will be able to identify something we have not?"

Anton gave Vex a significant glance, here, and the lizardkin blanched slightly under the weight of the beetle-man's gaze. "I... maybe," he said, his words hesitant. "But I don't think it's going to be that easy."

He didn't say the words he wanted to say — that the use of his Sign wasn't exactly comfortable for him. The memory of his first notebook was certainly a large part of who he was, but it was also a reminder of many things he didn't want to remember.

Derivan saw, of course. A metallic hand came up to rest on his shoulder, and for once, Vex didn't feel that much better. It still helped, but...

He shook his head, and drew on the mana once more; the brush danced beneath his fingers with a practiced ease he shouldn't have had, and the glyph he drew shone brightly.

And yet, when those tendrils reached out for the sliver, they seemed to slip straight through.

"Nope," Vex said. His heart was heavy. "Whatever it is, it doesn't really seem like mana can act on it. It can act on mana, though."

"And we are no closer to understanding them than when they first began to appear," Anton muttered. "I am not sure this is a solution. It brought me back into myself, but it was a process that took time, and even then it did not fully restore my person. Even if it worked completely over a longer period of time..."

"There are more people in Fendal and Teque than you have the slivers for," Vex said with a sigh. He'd seen what they had stored up in the so-called warehouse, and considering the number of people in Teque, let alone the population of Teque and Fendal combined—

"Acts of creation great enough to be rewarded with mana slivers are... not rare, as such, but perhaps uncommon," Anton said, confirming Vex's worries. "And while we try to use them sparingly, there are still dangers here we use the slivers to combat. Though... not as much now, I suppose. Not since the Roads were closed."

"Trying to restore people using slivers is going to be a long and slow process," Sev said with a sigh. "I guess we could take advantage of the time distortion? Bring people into Teque, give them some time with some slivers..."

"Or," Helg said, "we let your system keep doing what it's doing."

Her interruption was met with silence. Helg stood at the top of the stairs of the tower, looking down at them with something that looked like a cross between a frown and a look of sympathetic pity — yet there was a hardness in her gaze, too, of a sort that made Vex flinch and recoil away from her.

He was familiar with that look. That was the 'hard decisions' look; the kind of look someone gave before they said they were making a decision that was hard, but necessary.

Except sometimes — many times — those necessary decisions weren't necessary at all.

Misa bristled at her words almost immediately, and she took a step forward, her fists clenched. "You can't sacrifice a whole other town—"

"Misa," Sev said quietly, and the woman stopped, putting visible effort into restraining herself. Her fists clenched and unclenched, and Helg watched her, impassive to her fit of rage. "Helg, we're coming up with a solution. You don't have to go that far."

"You don't know that your solution will work," Helg said. "And I don't trust that you won't interfere with what your system is doing. Especially since our individuality is at stake. Even if I trusted you, I'm not sure I'd be willing to bet on something like that."

"We won't," Sev said. "We want to find a way to fix this, not—"

"The slivers you want to use are crucial to our security," Helg said. "Let's say I do trust you, and we go ahead with this plan of yours. Do you think the people of Fendal that we save are going to be grateful? Or are they going to look at their friends and family, half-alive, and decide that we're the ones causing it? Because we are, whether we choose to do that or not, and there's one very obvious solution to that. Kill every single one of us so that your system doesn't have to choose. Meanwhile, we throw away one of the tools that make us as effective as we are."

"Fendal isn't equipped for fighting," Sev argued.

"Neither are we," Helg snapped. "We have mages that can fight, but the majority of our population isn't built for fighting. Their signs are for learning and studying the nature of the world, not combat. I am not risking our people, and you are mistaking this for a discussion. It is not.

"I am telling you to leave both Fendal and Teque. Your presence here is no longer welcome. You have two hours to grab your things and leave, after which we will use force."

Sev clenched his fists now, angry. Vex wanted to speak up, but he saw the burning in Helg's eyes, and his words caught in his throat; what could he say, here, that could help?

He should have seen this coming. Should have kept what was happening a secret, so they could figure out a fix before —

"You're just completely fine with letting others suffer for your sake?" Misa asked. She was angry, too, but she kept her voice controlled, like a tightly-wound spring. "Noram? Even you?"

Vex hadn't even seen the otter. But now that otter version of Noram — or perhaps he wasn't Noram at all, and simply someone that had taken on Noram's name in the exchange of whatever reality-stuff it took to make a person — stepped forward, a little ways down the stairs. He'd been hidden in Helg's shadow before.

And he looked awful.

Not physically, exactly. But there was a sense of defeat in his shoulders, and the spark he normally had was gone; he stared blankly at the four of them like he didn't know what to say.

"Well?" Misa demanded.

Noram looked down, and then away; that alone spoke volumes. Vex couldn't help but wonder exactly what Helg had said to the archmage to get him to look so downtrodden.

"This is wrong." It was, surprisingly, Anton that spoke up in their defense. The beetle-man stared straight up at Helg. "We should at least look into helping them—"

"Maybe years from now, if we have enough slivers and we're confident that we can take on Fendal," Helg said. "But you gave up your right to make these decisions because you couldn't take it. You gave this position to me. And I am using that authority."

Helg stared down at the four of them. "Two hours," she said. "And then you leave. Whether you want to or not."