Arrayed Information

Vivian led John down the street, Aeolia once again riding in his bag.

“You know,” John said, keeping his voice low enough that any passersby wouldn’t overhear him, “I figured people would have kept things like cars in a Barrier.”

“If they’re out of the way, maybe,” Vivian offered. “But you don’t want to pop back into the mundane world and get right into a crash. Safer to just rent a space in a garage.”

“Makes sense,” John replied. “How far is your garage anyway?”

“Just up the road.” Vivian nodded towards a several story tall building, mainly grey in color about a block and a half from them.

“So, why’d you choose to set up shop in Springfield?” John asked.

Vivian looked at him for a second before realization crossed her face. “Right, you’ve only been a part of this for a day. This town’s kind of up the upward swing of things. There are a number of naturally manifesting Barriers and a good number of groups that have begun to move in and stake their claim. The Cabal makes things a bit scary, but the Order’s presence at least keeps them in check, for the most part.”

John’s blank expression caused Vivian to giggle slightly. “I’ll fill you in on the details when we get to the car. Smarter to not talk about things out in the open.”

“Yeah. Probably a good idea,” John admitted. “Though people might just think we’re talking about a game or book.”

“Discretion is better than risking it,” Vivian said. “Better safe than sorry.”

John nodded and they walked in silence the rest of the way to the garage. Thankfully, Vivian’s car was parked on the ground level so it was only a quick jaunt through the enclosed parking lot to her blue four-door sedan, completely normal according to Observe.

“Yeah, no bonuses,” Vivian said, spying her car’s display before John dismissed it. “Just a nice and simple car.”

“Nice and simple isn't a problem,” John replied as he slipped into the passenger seat. “Sure beats the bus.”

“You can say that again,” Aeolia commented as she freed herself from John’s bag and sat down on the console between the front seats.

Vivian started up the car and drove out of the garage. Once they were on the road, she resumed her run down of Abyssal Springfield.

“Where was I?” she questioned, bringing her mind back to the roadside conversation. “Oh, yes. How things are on this side of the city. Unless you wanted to take over, Aeolia? I assume you’ve been around longer than I have.”

“Yeah,” the winged woman replied, her tone dull. “To be honest, I never cared about what other groups were doing. I was more focused on training and let my brother and grandfather focus on that diplomatic stuff. Probably should have. Only thing I know about them is the Order are a bunch of rule-abiding goodie two shoes and the Cabal’s way deep into shady shit like Mana farms.”

“Well, good thing I did my research,” Vivian said, “and that’s not too far off. The Order, well, The Order of the Golden Rose are pretty close to what people would think of as holy knights. They boast that the Lady of the Lake from Arthurian legend is the one that blessed their founders and guides their way to this day. They’re led by a trio of Wardens, three women granted powers by their Lady to seek out the evil of the Abyss and bring them to heel.”

“Sounds like they could help us,” John mentioned, the image of divinely empowered women smiting down evil like a bright light breaking through a dark cloud tickling his fantastical fancy.

“Yeah, they could,” Aeolia commented dryly, “but then they’ll want us completely locked in as their subordinates.”

“They aren’t that draconian,” Vivian countered. “They do have allies that aren’t **** to bend down in supplication. But from what I’ve gathered, they would tie their aid to us following their conditions. Not a good position to be **** into. There are a lot of people who would rather keep off their radar, even if they aren’t doing anything bad.”

“I can see how that’d be a pain,” John admitted.

Aeolia hummed in agreement. “I’d rather take down these guys without their help.”

“I think it’s a good idea to not take any options off the table,” Vivian chimed in. “We don’t know anything about our enemy, their numbers, abilities, goals. This whole thing could develop into something massive.”

Her statement caused a heavy silence to fall upon the occupants as for several minutes they were left with their personal thoughts, all three pondering just how deep the shit was they were in.

Vivian broke the silence with a question, “John, you said you can ‘farm enemies’, what does that mean?”

“It means fighting enemies to get them to drop loot,” John answered.

“Which is probably his most bullshit power,” Aeolia piped in.

“Certainly sounds like it,” Vivian agreed. “I’ve never heard of anyone with that sort of ability. It’s like you can generate Natural Barriers.”

“Natural Barriers?” John asked

“Basically, Barriers that spontaneously manifest,” Vivian explained. “Unlike the ones people can generate, these come into existence due to the flow of magic through the world. As a consequence of that, things in them can be taken out. Real creatures, plants, minerals.”

“So I can be a walking gold mine,” John said, the weight of what he could do settling on him.

Vivian nodded. “Very much so.”

“You’re going to want to take the next right,” Aeolia interjected as she noted their location. “Try to find a parking space near 12th Street. That’s the closest intersection to the base.”

“Understood,” Vivian replied, eyes cast ahead, focusing on the road and leaving the conversation on pause. Lucky, a free space was presented to them, far closer to their destination than the bus stop several blocks behind them. Aeolia’s eyes remained fixed on the faded brick facade, sadness and resolve flashing behind her yellow eyes as Vivian parked, only tearing her eyes away to slip back into John’s bag.

Aeolia secured, John exited the car, slipping the pack on carefully. He closed the door as Vivian rounded the front of the car, heading for the parking meter. Before she could pay for the space, John held up a hand.

“Hold on for a second,” John said. “I want to see if I can do something real quick.”

John cast his thoughts inward, focusing on withdrawing a few dollars in quarters into his hand. A second later, cold coins jingled as they manifested in his cupped palm. He held one up before slipping it into the receptor.

“Looks like I won’t have to worry about exact change,” John joked as he fed a few more coins into the machine, bringing the total time they could remain to three hours.

“Wonder if I could convert my money to other currencies?” he mused as they made their way towards the building.

“There’d be no point,” Vivian interjected. “Thanks to the Auction, everyone uses American dollars.”

She paused and took a breath. “So, what exactly is in there?”

Despite her attempt to maintain a measured tone, John could hear both excitement and nervousness bubbling up.

“A lot of messed up furniture,” John said, running a hand through his hair. “They took or broke everything.”

Vivian hummed, fingers twitching against her thigh. “I’ve been thinking about how I can help with the investigation. There might be a way for me to interact with your unique ability, but I’ll need to see it in action to read how it works.”

“You can do that?” John asked, the volume of his voice rising. From within the bag, Aeolia also shifted, her weight leaning closer to the redhead.

“I have a theory,” Vivian explained. “Your ability to glean information from things is rooted in being able to draw upon a person or object’s spiritual identity. I think I can craft an array that can pick up on that interaction and project what you can see, like a hologram, so Aeolia and I can see it too.”

John blinked as Vivian finished her explanation. “‘Spiritual identity’?”

Vivian flushed. “Oh, right. Got ahead of myself. You wouldn’t have heard of the Tri-Fold…”

“Nature Theorem,” John finished for her. “Don’t know what it is, but I do know that’s how you got in contact with Aeolia’s brother.”

“I’m going to guess you saw that with your ability,” Vivian said after a moment of thought. “And the theorem basically boils down to the idea that everything can be looked at as being made of three distinct facets: Its physical form, which is self-explanatory; its cognitive form, which is both how it and others views it; and its spiritual form, which is sort of the full potential, both good and bad, of the thing in question. All it is, could have been, and could be. I think you tap into that last part with your Observe which is why you can get such detailed information.”

John processed that information, Vivian’s explanation causing him to think back on something.

“I think I get it,” he intoned as they turned down the alleyway. “I tried to Observe the core of the Dawnseeker’s golem but got the same info I did when I focused on its face.”

Vivian nodded in understanding. “Yeah. According to the theorem, the core and the body would sync up as one entity. Same way your heart is still you.”

“I went with the arm in my analogy but that makes more sense given the context,” John half-joked as they neared the steel door. “We’re here.”

Aeolia didn’t wait for John to set the pack down, flying out of John’s bag and into the Barrier without a word. John and Vivian followed her, walking through the busted doorway to find Aeolia in her full size standing next to Clay’s remains.

“Think you can replay their entrance?” she asked Vivian. “I figure that makes a good starting point.”

“We can try,” Vivian replied, touching her choker and withdrawing a notepad, pencil and a soda bottle from her personal pocketspace, the drinking vessel filled with a silver powder. “Give me a minute or two to set up an array.”

Before Vivian could use that vial, John cast Observe on it.

John left the screen up as Vivian began to work, willing the silver powder to float out of the bottle, a thin ribbon forming a circle. More clumps followed, twisting into unknown symbols. While she worked out the array, John further examined the dust, tapping the Evocation.

“And done,” Vivian said, drawing John’s attention away from the Observe output to her complete array. The silver dust formed a circle about a meter in diameter. A second circle, just wider than John’s closed fist, sat in the center, attached to the outer ring by four lines at the cardinal points. In the quadrants created by these lines, several arcane symbols floated, some quite rigid while others shifted slightly like the bubbles in a lava lamp.

“How does this work?” John asked, dismissing the dust’s screens.

“You cast your spell through the central ring,” Vivian explained, brushing back a bit of her hair. “The fluid symbols will react and change, giving me a look at how your spell works. After that, I’ll see if I can tweak the array to project what you can see.”

“Alright,” John said, calling Senka to his hand. “I’ll just do a one minute recall”

Vivian moved the array, positioning it above Clay’s remains. John stepped up, staring at the broken golem through the center ring. He drew in one Dark Mana from Senka and used it to cast Observe.

The fluid symbols began to shift immediately while John remained still. Vivian quickly jotted down notes as they changed while Aeolia watched the zoned out John.

“Is it working?” she asked, breaking her observation of John to look at Vivian.

“Well, it’s giving me an output,” Vivian replied absentmindedly, eyes flickering between her array and notes. “I’m going to need to really look at it once John’s finished to tune it to project what he sees.”

John shuttered as he came back to himself, the minute of recall spent. As he blinked away the repeat performance of Clay’s last moments, his eye focused on the bloodstain that colored the major crack upon the golem’s torso.

“Hey, Vivian,” he addressed his newest companion, “you think if I focused solely on a piece of something, as its own distinct thing, I could Observe it instead of the whole thing? Like a button on a coat?”

“Yeah, that should work,” the redhead muttered as she jotted something down on her paper, before pulling the array closer to examine it in more detail.

“What are you thinking, John?” Aeolia questioned, her tone taking on a dangerous edge.

“There’s blood on Clay,” John responded calmly, pointing at the stain. “I’m pretty sure it came from the muscle guy that dealt the final blow. If I can Observe it, we might get a name, maybe more.”

Aeolia bent down to inspect where John indicated before turning back to face him. “Why didn’t you try this yesterday?”

“Well, you took me up to your brother’s room right after,” John answered. “Then we got caught up using Observe to try to track their movements. And after the wall thing, we kind of needed to take a break.”

Aeolia shifted her eyes away from John, shameful heat coloring her cheeks.

“Hey, it’s in the past,” John said, trying to soothe away her guilt. “And I’m aiming to be more careful. Going to go with normal Observe, just to see if I can get a name.”

His cautious approach seemed to ease Aeolia’s discomfort. “At least your being smart about it.”

“Intelligence is my highest stat,” John jokingly boasted. “Though I think not jumping headlong into things is more of Wisdom’s thing.”

Aeolia cracked a smile. “Just get on with it. The sooner you do, the sooner I can either relax when nothing bad happens or start looking for more first aid when things go to shit.”

“No need to be so pessimistic,” John said.

“Just being a realist,” Aeolia countered. “Better to be ready than not.”

“Gotcha,” John responded before focusing on the bloodstain. His earlier comparison of a coat and its button wasn’t quite an appropriate one for this but it helped get his mind on the right track. His thoughts zeroed in on the blood and not the surrounding body, he cast Observe.

“What the hell?” John exclaimed softly, a sentiment shared by Aeolia’s perplexed expression when he caught her looking at the display.

“You said Clay got punched, right?”

“Yeah he did,” John recounted. “That’s the last thing I see. That muscle guy knocking him down.”

“Perhaps he’s some kind of homunculus?” Vivian suggested as she drew up to them, dragging along her array. The silver series of circles had changed, growing larger to encompass five more circles, giving the whole construct a target like aesthetic, magic symbols filling nearly every empty space.

The four cardinal lines now only extended from the central ring to the second most outer one, a circle filling the space between the two outermost rings where the lines used to cross. The upper and lower circles were empty while the left and right were dominated by a single symbol; to John, it looked like two ‘C’s, one slightly larger than the other, the smaller one mirroring the other one and nestled within its brother; a solid dot sitting in the center finishing the design.

Vivian levitated the array into place while John had to ask, “A homunculus? Like, the thing from alchemy?”

“Yes,” she nodded, lips pursed into a frown, “a composite lifeform made from repurposed flesh. I supposed that could lead to it having composite blood, but their blood should link back to them, according to the Tri-Fold Theorem. Their identity would override the doner’s.”

“We can worry about it after we try this thing,” Aeolia interjected, eyeing the array warily. “How does this thing work, anyway?”

“Well,” Vivian began to explain, excitement creeping into her voice, “John will use his ability like before while we provide mana to the array, which will also synchronize us to the output. The central portion will pick up on the psychic wave from the golem and replicate the signal, and the rest will translate it into a format we can receive.”

“Just like that?” John questioned, holding off on using Observe in favor of Vivian explanation.

“More or less,” the redhead responded. “I’ve put in a few functions to draw in ambient mana to reduce the amount Aeolia and I need to provide, but we can’t overuse that since it will make it harder to link us to the vision.”

“Let’s just get to it,” Aeolia interjected impatiently, her figure tense as she stared at Clay through the array.

“Right, no point in delaying,” Vivian said, extending a hand towards the circle at the western point, the symbol in its center beginning to glow as she funnelled mana into it. “John, just do like you did before. Right through the center. Aeolia, start focusing your mana like I’m doing.”

Aeolia followed Vivian’s lead and channelled her mana into the eastern circle. Once it was glowing, pale green in contrast to Vivian’s off white, John drew in a point of dark mana and cast Observe, once again treated to the replay of Clay’s last minute. When he came back to the present, he was greeted by the heavy breaths of his companions on either side while the array in front of him decayed away, several pieces of the inner area turned from bright silver to burnt black that fell down onto Clay.

“Did it work?” John asked as he turned his head to look at Vivian and Aeolia, taking in their haggard state.

“No,” Vivian responded, her voice reflecting both exhaustion and disappointment, “and I’m not sure just what failed.”

“You guys okay?” John asked, studying both of them. Their health bars remained unchanged, though their mana had been drained. Vivian’s was down to around a third, while Aeolia’s was just under a quarter.

“A little drained,” Aeolia answered wearily, before she looked over at Vivian. “But that’s it. Any idea what happened?”

“Just a hunch,” Vivian explained, eyeing her collapsing array, focusing on the parts that had burned out, “but I think I vastly underestimated just how much mana would be needed to duplicate the vision. The central portions got overloaded trying to replicate it as it passed into you, John. I didn’t construct them to hold that much mana or psychic energy so they burned out. At least it was at the point before it did any output so no damage done.”

She let out a breath and shook her head. “I think I can rework the array, but I’ll need to come up with a way to compensate for the power issue. And I’ll need a lot more Shine Dust.”

“How much is the stuff anyway?” John asked as Vivian disassembled the salvageable dust, willing it back into its container.

“Around nine hundred dollars for five kilograms,” Vivian said, “not that much really, but as you can see, the stuff can be rendered inert if pushed too hard. I do have a little bit more back home.”

“So this whole trip was pointless then,” Aeolia groused.

“Maybe not,” John said. “There’s still the wall thing.”

Aeolia grimaced while Vivian looked at the pair confused.

“‘Wall thing’?” she repeated.

“I tried to use my dark Observe on one of the walls,” John explained. “But I got overwhelmed and knocked out by visions from both the wall in here and it’s original one outside the barrier.”

“You saw things from both!” Vivian exclaimed. “Yes, that makes sense. This building is a copy of another, so at its spiritual core, they’d be linked. If the output could be isolated, that should let you see only what the barrier wall was replaying.”

Vivian’s eyes drifted over to the blood spot then to the error message it had produced.

“And I think I’ve got an idea how to test that theory in a way that won’t backfire,” she asserted, picking up her notepad and pencil to sketch out her idea. “And, if it works, it should give us something on that blood. Think of it like a prism, breaking the stream of info into its component parts. Adapting this for the wall should be easy.”

She regarded her work with a critical eye before she willed some of the remaining dust into a new array, closer in appearance to her first circle. Once it was in place, she nodded and told John, “Give it a try.”

“Okay, here we go,” John said, dismissing the first attempt and casting Observe through the array at the blood. This time, instead of one display reporting an error, at least a dozen popped up, obscuring John’s vision. Next to him, Aeolia let out a choked noise.

John turned to look at her, finding her eyes locked to a pair of screens, disbelief and horror reflected in those yellow eyes. John followed her gaze and felt his stomach drop as he read them.