Avishraa Reloaded

Enneth had had mixed feelings about showing off Bubbles to Einriss. It was, after all, a personal creation, rather than one she'd done for someone else, for all that Dlyss had managed to subtly bully her into letting her in as well. It wasn't necessarily entirely private, but it also wasn't the kind of place she wanted tourism. You might invite someone trusted into your private den, but you'd probably feel differently if someone told a random person about all the cool stuff in had in it and suggested they show up.

And Einriss… well, certainly, he didn't seem like a bad person. She wasn't sure what he seemed like, which was the hard part. He seemed to be moving around in a different reality than she was.

…in a harmless but baffling sort of way.

In the end, however, following up on Dlyss' comment, she'd felt moved to give him an explanation: “Bubbles is one of the more unusual ones I've done,” she'd said, “biologically speaking. I wanted to see if I could get an unusual environment that was still habitable… and, well, it worked. Not like our world, but it worked. You sort of have to see to understand.”

Pride had won out over reticence, and she'd invited him to see it. For his part, curiosity had won out over what seemed to be a dislike of book travel, and he'd agreed. They used the book in Dlyss' library - she had a private book to her own area, but felt disinclined to go that far in sharing - and faded in gently.

The air was… strange. Not uncomfortable; slightly cool, but still warmer than an outdoors night in the Citadel, and quite humid, which suited takma lungs perfectly. But it seemed still, and indeed rather ripe: it smelled thickly of life in all its varying types and stages.

They were in a hollow in a rock wall, not deep enough to be a cave but not open enough to be outside. But the rock was… well, it had the shape of rock. But it looked like it was covered in something, like a clingy green membrane. It was all like that: walls, floor, ceiling. Outside, the membrane continued over the entire surface, disappearing below into soil and plants, and plastered all over the walls that seemed to curve forward to either side as if they were on the edge of some vast circle.

And overhead…

…it was hard to tell what was overhead. There was a brighter area where the sun apparently was, but the whole sky was a diffuse, pale green glow; it was like a cloudy day, except that it seemed far too uniform to be clouds.

Given the way the pages of the Linking Book to his unlikely laboratory had misled him with the promise of life, Einriss struggled in a different fashion to reconcile the all-encompassing nature of what he had manifested within. It was pulling at him from all angles, carving his attention out of his skull and scattering it in the wind, while a part of him insisted this had to be some kind of cheap illusion. Every fibre of his body told him otherwise, but he knew better than to trust his superficial impression of the world. He knew better than–

Sigh.

With a quiet caution, the first thing Einriss does in breaking out of his stubborn stupor is to reach down, forward, and in part stretch himself out across the membrane, in part simply sit to contemplate his environment. His wings press down against the ground with a strange gentleness and his fingers spread as his arms set down, as though he were providing what solace and kinship he could to an impossibly large creature.

Perhaps that was exactly what he was doing.

It rapidly becomes clear that even though his eyes are open, he is probably not paying very much attention to anything he's seeing.

“How… long has this been here?” he asks after a moment of this awkward silence, meaning three questions simultaneously without having the immediate presence of mind to clarify either of them - how old was the organism, how old was the ecosystem, and how long did Enneth have access to it already.

Every time Enneth thought that she'd reached maximum lack of understanding of this male, he managed to prove her wrong. She stared helplessly.

“It, er. Well, I only first came in half a cycle ago or so, you understand.” One question answered, at least. “I only know so much about what happened before that. This bubble network is a small one, which seems to mean it's young, but they also grow really slowly, so that's sort of a relative term… maybe a few hundred cycles…”

“The cold feels like… an inflammation,” he observes. “As though it's always too busy repairing the damage from the frost to grow.” Perhaps that was Lifegiver-speak for 'of course it's slow-growing, that makes sense, it is fairly cold after all'. “There's… so much of it,” he whispers, reverently. “It feels like it's connected to everything.” …uuh. Right. Okay. Maybe someone should gently try to tug him back off the ground, before his Mana loses itself in his attempt to grasp the entire ecosystem, or whatever it was in the process of doing. After all, if his intuition was trying to understand it all at once, they were going to be here for a while.

“Well,” said Enneth awkwardly, hovering around him in a fruitless attempt to non-invasively usher him off the membrane, “it is. Everything in this one, anyway. It's an ecosystem as a colony organism, I guess. But like I said, this is a small one, there are other bubble networks.” Giving up, she tried to tug at a foreleg. “Perhaps you'd prefer to see what I mean?”

“I already see–” he begins, but for a moment, enough lucidity grasps him that he realises, perhaps not that he's being rude, but that he has slipped a bit too far from his physical reality. He draws a sharp breath, almost laboured, his eyes widening as if they physically sought to draw the attentiveness back out of his mind, his muzzle slightly agape for a drawn out moment of tension.

Then he blinks and with great effort wills himself to let go. Revulsion snakes through his gut in rebellion as he snaps the sensory connection to the organism. No, no, stay. Another sharp breath and he's risen.

Without believing a word of what he says, he responds with an emotionless: “You're right,” and tips his head in agreement. “I can get back to this later.”

Or you can get back to this now. His teeth clack shut. The brief infatuation with the alien lifeform, he tells himself, will pass. It's simply new to him - it's necessarily exciting for the very intuition he uses to guide his Life and Substance magic.

Enneth eyed him warily. She'd heard that lifegivers got weird around some kinds of new experiences, but with Einriss there was so much weird in one place that it was hard to tell a particular strain apart.

“There's a good view of the real outside from up the slope,” she offered, “if you're interested.”

Yes. No. Yes. He dithers, still attuned, in some fashion, to the monstrously large creature that's all around them, still attracted - in every sense of the word, if he were to dissect the emotion. Infatuation had been a good word for it. Was, currently, a good word for it. It takes him a significant moment longer than it otherwise would for him to turn his attention to Enneth properly, and offer up a humbly intoned: “Please,” posture one of a slightly distracted but ultimately eager student.

Enneth gave him one more askance look, then, with a shrugging twist of the head, led him out of the hollow, and up a steep path set into the wall.

There were a few places where soil had collected and supported plants; there were many more where things like mosses and lichens were growing out of the membrane itself. But nowhere, nowhere at all, was there bare rock; where it should be, the membrane was clinging on firmly. Much of the path they walked on was composed of it; it was soft and yielding in its own right, almost spongy, which made it easier going than it would otherwise be.

And at the top? From here, it was easy to see that the valley they'd emerged in was indeed circular - very much so, like a bowl, except that there appeared to be some kind of hill or rise in the center - and that they were perched on the lip. And all around the edge, the membrane stretched up and over, like another immense bowl turned over.

And, outside it - for here, it was stretched thin and, just barely, transparent - outside it, filtered through a green haze, was a vast, rocky, blasted landscape, with nothing but stars and sun above it. In the distance, other green bubbles of life were barely visible.

Einriss felt no less dazed as they reached the outlook - and no more. Perhaps if he had been looking at the landscape with a clear mind, the appearance of the strange beauty of it all might have brought a surge of curiosity and elation with it, but the way he was still tuned to his immediate surroundings only made the new information resonate with what he already felt.

“How did this come to be?” he asked, without that he was quite fully aware he had spoken the question at all. In truth, he already had a first intuitive grasp of precisely how it had all come to be, so it was strictly speaking a nonsensical question, even if it would take a while for his mind to make sense of what his gut already knew.

On the other hand, by asking it, he left no question about where his interest lay, in case there had been even the slightest doubt.

“I can't go outside to look more closely,” Enneth murmured, “but… I think this was all a living world once. In some places, you can still see where the rivers were. But the air and the water went away.” She stared out at the landscape. She was captivated by the sight of it, as she had been since the first time she'd come. “And these bubbles… they lived underground in dry places, stored water. There are still some that live like that.

“But some, the bigger ones, were a refuge to life. They inflated with air made by the water plants, and life from the land found their way in as well. And then the outside was dead, but here and there, there were these bubbles, still living. They're fragile, but less fragile than they look; the animals and plants know how not to damage them. And, every once in a few eons, two bubble-networks will meet and reproduce - they share their seed, and they share the life that's taken refuge.”

It felt like a particularly beautiful metaphor for all macroscopic life - each creature an oasis in relative deserts, providing warmth and nutrients for its inhabitants.

Of course, anything macroscopic within a macroscopic organism was usually either parasitic or the result of procreation. Here, the rule of thumb did not hold. Here, the symbiotic or neutral relationship the inhabitants of the Bubbles had with their host was a testament to its immense size, with the inhabitants taking on roles vaguely akin to bacteria in takmar.

Not that Einriss knew to call them bacteria or could describe their form - but he did sense that there were traces of something in every takma that was quite different from the takma itself… and he knew to draw the life out of these traces if they were making the host sick.

“What might have happened to the air?” he half-mumbled, staring half out at the view, half through the whole implied structure as if his vision might impart him with a map of all that lay underground.

“I'm… not sure,” Enneth admitted. “Sometimes rocks fall from the stars, and make valleys like this one - smaller, but they scatter debris a long distance. Possibly, in the past, one of the larger ones that made the valleys scattered the air. But I wonder if it's the sun here that has something to do with it - it's dimmer than Mikurmiya. An energist I brought here once” (she decided not to add “on a date”; she'd been embarrassed about that trip enough as it was) “said that it felt old and sick.”

That seemed to draw some partial lucidity out of Einriss. “Will it last?” he asked, his gaze still lost in the landscape, his tone part admiration, part humbleness. Nothing lasted forever, of course. The 'how long' was implicit to the question. Thousands of years? Hundreds? Millions? He could feel how much energy the world needed now, but he had no sense for the stars - how long could it supply what these scattered biospheres needed? At what time scale was it stable? He could only guess.

Enneth twisted her head in a shrug. “You know, once, when I was here with Dlyss, I asked her. She said, 'define 'last''. When I asked her how long the bubbles would keep living here, she said 'long enough'. She didn't really seem interested in the question.”