Chapter 81 – Post-queen

"That was refreshing." I smile lightly, walking out of a portal hand in hand with Letty, heading to Derrie's house. "Now back to business. How do we install that portal?"

"...You're just happy you could punch things." My girlfriend says dryly and I nod my head seriously, causing her to snort. "Well, I was thinking we could make a portable frame?"

"And place it somewhere later, you mean?"

"Mmm. I actually got about half of it done while you were having fun, so it shouldn't take long."

"Alright." I nod. "I'll message Derrie."

I do as I say and send a text to the girl. It's Sunday already, the time of the meetup, which feels kinda unreal. Like the day of an exam you've been waiting for, and it suddenly arrived without warning and hasn't internalized properly yet.

We're gonna meet the spirit now though, first because of the portal, but also cause she's already kinda onto the truth. It means mostly that I'd like to make sure we're on the same page when we do the big reveal to the rest of the group.

Is she a spirit now, actually? She's one in VOW, that's obvious, but out here it's a different matter. And I wouldn't think about it if a spirit was not drastically different from any physical being.

Thinking back to what I remember from her... yeah. She's quasi-physical. Her body is made out entirely of mana in the same way our are made out of particles, on a blueprint the spirit is, and just like regular mana she can choose to interact with surrounding matter. Which means she's technically not bound to anything on that side and could follow the tether back here to transform prematurely. Well, other people can as well, but it's way easier for her.

If she has the knowledge and ability to do that is another matter. She probably doesn't now.

I get a message in response after just a few seconds, much faster than I expected, and reading it brings a little grin to my face. "Derrie's home, we can come visit." I tell Letty as we stop for a moment in front of a rustic, metal fence.

"Is this the place?" She asks, looking up at the fairly small building fashioned as if built out of red bricks with an angled roof of black tiles. I see it's not quite true inside the walls, but it's no surprise. It's not exactly possible to incrporate all the temperature and air control plus other smaller systems inside bricks without tearing down half of them.

"Yep. Her parents are supposedly quite... well, obsessed, fascinated, with ancient Earth. Not to the point it's bad, but they're a little quirky. They're not home now though, so we won't be meeting them. At least not today."

"Mhm." My girlfriend nods as we walk up and open the gate, go through, then close it behind ourselves. "It's actually pretty close to buildings from like, twentieth century. Mom showed me photos and videos."

I only nod my head in response, not having the experience nor knowledge to comment on anything. Despite what media like to say about keeping up the tradition and continuing the legacy, the time before the Mechanical War is so badly documented it's almost impossible to find anything authentic about it. Most of what I've seen in school learning history were replicas and reconstructions based on rare personal belongings from that time, and who knows how much bias and noise there is in them.

But, no matter. We're here for Derrie, not her parents. So up to the door we go and ring the bell, and a couple of seconds later the lock clicks, indicating we can go in.

We do just that, arriving in a somehow both dark and cozy corridor with dark wood for the floor and white plaster with irregularities for the walls. I leave my heavy black boots on a little shelf in the wall, Letty does the same after she notices, and we head deeper in.

We pass a kitchen, a living room, and a small storage going to a garage, but I don't pry behind closed doors and instead go straight for the fluffy, carpeted stairs at the end of the corridor. We go up quickly and turn right, where I see Derrie through an open door to her room, sitting in her floating seat and staring at something behind the wall.

She's quite small and petite, although nowhere close to Catherine in VOW, has pale skin, and her hair is a dark, curly mess that goes all the way down to her chest. Wearing some casual blue shirt that matches the light blue of the walls, she would have looked like a perfectly ordinary high-schooler if not for her abnormally short, stick thin legs dangling over the edge of the seat. Supposedly a rebound of some ancestral genetic modifications.

And, well, she's a student. She looks way younger than she really is, although it's largely counteracted by the serious expression on her face and round glasses resting on her nose.

She turns when I tap on the floor, and drops the smoothie in her hand as her eyes go wide and mouth drops open. "...You're shitting me. Helia?"

"Been a while." I grin when she gulps and bends down to pick up the bottle lying on the floor.

With a frown, she stares at the cap I screwed shut on the way down, but shortly shakes her head and looks up again. "Yeah..." She says distractedly, then shakes her head energetically. "Damn, you threw me out of the loop. I suppose you'll explain to everyone at once so you won't waste time. Why did you want to meet? Oh, and hello, ah, Letty? How should I call you here?"

"Letty is fine." She replies with a small smile and looks at me questioningly.

"All in, Letty." I sit down on a jelly cushion and pull her onto my lap. Derrie raises an eyebrow as my girlfriend wiggles for a moment to settle in comfortably, then turns to me and raises the other one. "So you know how magic is real and all, yeah?"

The girl closes her eyes for a moment and sighs exasperatedly, pressing her hand to the bridge of her nose. "You know well I don't know shit."

"Huh." I let out. "Well, let's fix that then. Let's start from the basics." She nods. "Yup, so Neva, how the world of VOW is called, is just as real as this here, and so is mana and all other supernatural things. The pods are really an excuse to pull the souls between one body and the other. Souls are very real, by the way. Anyway, the thing is, this place doesn't have much of mana or anything yet, as you can probably feel." I raise my eyebrows at Derrie.

She nods, then freezes, and her eyes open wide as she leans back, staring at me. "...Helia." She says, a little bit of fear and awe in her voice. "What is with your body?"

"I was about to get to that." I grin. "That there is no mana here is just how it is now, but it's gonna change soon. Pulling it from there to there is just a matter of ability, and it's only easier because of the channels between one body and the other. And in around two months mana will arrive here in massive quantities, which will cause everyone playing VOW to transform into a form they're comfortable with, somewhere between the one here and the one in VOW."

Derrie slumps down in her seat and rubs her eyes. "...Just fucking great." She stays silent for a long while, but shakes her head soon enough. "Well, I suppose I can wait for a while with an existential crisis. Continue?"

I nod. "You might have noticed I never said there's completely no mana or any other energies. There's just no, like, background energy. But I and Letty, in our greatness," Derrie rolls her eyes. "Did everything ahead of schedule, as you can probably feel."

The girl nods stiffly as I gesture at my chest. "To my magic sense, you feel like you're one massive clump of energy that would kill me if I just touched you."

"Huh." I look down reflexively, then focus on my body. It shouldn't be that bad... and she said no such thing back in VOW. Did something change?

...Ah, I rebuilt my body from Primordial Energy. Um. Yeah, let's just... conceal that fact... "Better?"

"Way better." Derrie nods again, this time also with a quiet breath of relief.

"Alright, so. We are right now basically the same as in VOW. Both our bodies and power." This has her frowning as she leans back ever so slightly. "Yep yep, I know I don't have horns and all now. That's cause they would attract too much attention. I can hide them." I focus on my body and revert it back to the state it was earlier, with massive black horns, white-yellow sparkling hair, digitigrade clawed feet, and tail from the most noticeable things.

Derrie's jaw drops at that and she stares for a long while without saying anything. When I revert my body back to the plain... well, not exactly plain but less unusual human appearance, she finally slumps down, again, and rubs her eyes, again.

"And you're saying whatever happened to you, something similar will happen to everyone in VOW in two months." She deadpans.

"Mmm, more or less." I smile and she waves her hand tiredly.

"Wipe that smirk off your face, dang it." She sighs. "Well, okay. I'll need way more time to process this. There's got to be a reason why you're telling me all this now though?"

Sharp as ever. We have long unanimously agreed she was the smartest of our small group, and while that might have changed a little considering what I am, she certainly did not get any dumber.

"Not particularly, but it's kinda a preface to what we wanted to talk about with you." I turn to my girlfriend with raised eyebrows.

"So, basically, since we're living on spaceship now, we wanted a way to meet with you... and help in case something happens, that would not involve at least days of travel through wormholes." Letty explains. "The method we came up with was a portal that we want to put and conceal here." She taps on the bed underneath her as Derrie stares.

"...I'll need more information than that." She shakes her head slowly. "How is it going to work? And conceal how?"

That brings us to quite a long explanation about our powers and what we can do, which I'm pretty sure is met with disbelief until my girlfriend pulls out the prototype frame from a point in space that doesn't exist, courtesy of Nihility. It's basically a modern looking, black ring that has two and a half meters in diameter and barely an inch in thickness. It's way smaller than I expected it to be, but it makes sense; Nihility isn't constrained by the same physical limitations as modern technology.

Derrie did not expect any of it. It's obvious by her expression that's honestly a little lost and very confused, but at the same time somehow filled with anticipation. I'm guessing we broke everything she learned about magic up to now, and it's like she's lost in an unknown world but eager to learn everything she can.

After she soaks up all the information we have to tell her, it all goes quickly. My girlfriend focuses on finishing the portal, although she goes outside in the unlikely case something goes wrong enough to cause damage, and I stay with Derrie talking about some smaller things, such as her body, her mana sense, and my body.

She had gotten used to her dysfunctional legs over her life, to the point she did not bother saving a ton of money for an expensive replacement, be it biological or cybernetic, and spent it on something more useful to her. Still, it's no surprise that given the chance she will want to get rid of that defect.

And now that I think about it, I heavily suspect that is largely what made her a spirit. Just like it was constraints and limitations that made me wish I was free and powerful, her legs made her want to be unburdened by her body. A spirit is a soul given a magical body though, one only limited by their own capabilities. Add to that her interest in magic as well as inherent curiosity and drive to learn, answered by spirits ability to interact with matter and various supernatural energies directly and naturally unlike physical beings that generally lack both the capability and the need in the first place, and it feels like a race tailor made for her.

Granted, I could be matching answers to questions there, but once there are enough coincidences, one cannot help but think it's all orchestrated by someone.

And once I start thinking about it deeper, thinking about Cathie, about Vulcan, about Crimson, about Xethu, there are suddenly way too many coincidences to chalk it up to chance.

Take Catherine. The girl had gone through some terrible things in her past, some of them she doesn't want to tell even us. She had lived years fending for herself without anyone to help her. And what is she now? A wolfkin, and a powerful one, yes - but a person doesn't change that quickly, and the strength she had built up will always remain within her, even if it is hidden an unused on daily basis.

More than that, however, she is small, cute, and open; she wants to be held, to be protected, and to be cared for. To feel safe. And her body? It matches that perfectly.

It is, frankly, a bit uncanny, as if a theater play orchestrated by someone so inconceivably greater than we that I, the sole actor who received the script, has no idea where it all starts and ends. Even despite the fact that I am now involved in its creation.

"Uh, Helia?" Derrie asks me at some. "Um, Cathie just sent me a video." She shows me the screen, on it a video of me and Letty obliterating a Voidling with a blast of energy, and I grin.

"Seems it's high time we met with the rest." I announce and stand up as The girl looks between me and the screen with a blank expression, as if she was just connecting all the facts.

True to my thoughts, Letty enters at that exact moment, having finished with the portal frame.