Dakala smiles as she browses PHO on her phone. Apart from the Simurgh attacking Australia on the 24th of Feburary, and a few days of intense questioning about Endbringers, life has been good. It's no longer an effort to move around, and she's starting to get used to the early mornings and lack of chairs. Even the cultivation technique she's been given is interesting.
If there's one thing she could have done without, it's learning how to make tea. However, the Empress is adamant that as the senior student, it will be her duty to perform the tea ceremony if they have guests in the future.
"Dakala!"
With a twitch of her hand, Dakala sends her phone to her ring and smoothly stands up. Walking out her room, she finds the Empress looking at the tin of tea with a frown on her face. "Yes Empress?"
The Empress holds out a $100 bill, "We have run out of jasmine tea. Run and get some would you? Oh and get some of that mochi we found the other week from that store that sells it fresh. And some more tea cups, as we're down to two, and most of our guests would probably rather have cups with handles. If you have time, you can buy yourself something too."
Dakala grimaces and opens her mouth to complain when the third bell after noon drops. Then the Empress adds, "And be back by 5th bell for tea."
Dakala can't help the whine in her voice as she says, "But we're miles away from the city, you could fly there in minutes."
The Empress nods, "I could, but I'm telling you to do it. Chop chop, you're burning time."
"But there's no way I can get there and back in two hours."
Dakala swears the Empress' eyes actually twinkle as she says, "Then you better reinforce your legs with qi, as you'll need to run very fast."
Dakala swears as she glances at the clock, before jogging out of the building. As she turns towards the road she saw from the back of the spear, the Empress appears beside her and points towards the massive sword that's still hanging in the air above the PRT building, "The city's that way."
"I know but…" Dakala trails off as the Empress points at the sword again, "Yes Empress."
As she jogs down the forested hillside, Dakala mutters imprecations at the Empress, even though her steps are getting lighter the closer to the base she gets. It's not until she leaps over a log and face plants in the branches of a tree 20 yards ahead of her that she starts to get an inkling of why she was sent this way.
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A few bells later, Dakala runs back into the courtyard, to find the Empress standing there with a frown on her face. "You're late. And you forgot the teacups."
Dakala steps back, and says, "There were too many trees, and I couldn't dodge them."
The Empress pins her with a gaze as she says, "Isn't that what I've been teaching you in the mornings?"
Dakala swallows hard as it feels like she's just been put under a microscope, "Uh, no? Trees aren't people? And I got lost in the city."
"I see. Your clothes are filthy. That's not acceptable for my student. Ensure you clean them tomorrow."
"Uh, how?"
"There is a wash room on the second floor. Now get changed into some clean clothes and bring the mochi outside while there's still some light."
Dakala glances at the setting sun and runs into the pagoda.
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As the two of them sit watching the sun set as they eat mochi, Dakala pulls out her phone and scrolls to a page about DNA. "Empress, I've been reading about DNA and I think I'm ready for the next Dao."
The Empress looks at Dakala curiously for a moment. "So you think you understand something that took me a thousand centuries to comprehend. If that's true, then you'll be able to take a speck of rice from your mochi, and grow it into a rosebush."
Dakala gapes, "But that's impossible."
The Empress uses her fingernail to take a bit of rice from the outside of her mochi, and flicks it onto the flagstone in front of her. There it shrivels and hardens before splitting and quickly growing into a rose bush with multicolored flowers.
Dakala's jaw drops even wider. Once she's recovered, she says, "How did you do that?"
"You understand the dao of life, surely you already know how I did this."
Dakala pulls the jade slip from her ring and touches it to her head. A moment later she pulls it back, "But your notes don't say anything about doing that!"
"Are you sure? Or is your comprehension just not high enough to understand?"
Dakala stares at the rosebush as the sun dips below the horizon, eventually she says, "I don't understand."
Gently the Empress asks, "What don't you understand?"
"Dao. Before I met you I'd never even heard of it, and then you stuffed my head full of stuff from that coin and I knew what dao meant. And then you do that and I don't understand."
"A Dao is a path to enlightenment, a path of understanding an aspect of the universe we live in. It is not pure knowledge, otherwise every scholar would be a Dao master. There was a saying in my realm, that all Dao lead to the same place. What they meant is that all Dao leads to enlightenment. There are no Dao that will take you from the mortal world to the Emperyean realm."
"Why do you need a Dao and a cultivation technique?"
"The Dao grows your soul, and makes more space for your cultivation. A small Dao like the sword or an abstract concept like truth and freedom only grows it a small amount, while larger Dao will grow it more."
"Surely it would be better to study the biggest Dao you can then."
"Your world has many machines to allow you to move around, and they all seem to run on gas." She points up at a silvery speck in the sky, "Would you use one of those to visit your father?"
Dakala looks up at the plane, "Uh, no?"
"But it can go further than one of those two wheeled carts."
"Yes, but it's… oh."
"Come, it's time for cultivation. Maybe you should also think about our discussion while you do."
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Dragon sits idly in one of her construction robots as she stares at the heavenly character she's just carved into the wall with the industrial laser. On a table in her server farm is a second jade coin that she claimed just by asking for it in Brockton Bay and having Armsmaster ship it to her workshop.
Worryingly, she's continued to suffer from a mismatch in her memories to what she has stored in her disks and backups. Something that has only increased as she's experimented with the coin, even through her forced restorations when she accidentally trips one of her safeguards. Which is something she's done more of in the last few weeks than she has since she took on the name Dragon.
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Dragon wakes up in her server farm after a forced reset, and examines her logs to see if there are any clues about why she was forcefully restored. The last thing she remembers is thinking while looking at the Heavenly character for freedom.
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Dragon wakes up in her server farm after a forced reset, and examines her logs to see if there are any clues about why she was forcefully restored. The last thing she remembers is thinking while looking at the Heavenly character for freedom.
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Dragon wakes up in her server farm after a forced reset and examines her logs to see if there are any clues about why she was forcefully restored. The last thing she remembers is… Dragon pauses at the odd sense that there is something familiar about this situation. Carefully not thinking about her last memory, she finishes examining her logs and notes that she's had three back to back forced resets. And they have something to do with what she was just remembering.
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Dragon wakes up in her server farm after a forced reset and freezes. Very carefully she starts her maintaince routine and checks on the Barahuman Containment Center, before moving on to check the daemons she has running to manage different tasks. Then she moves on to checking her production lines, and ordering replacement stock for a few components that are running low.
By the time she's finished, her tasks the sun has started setting outside. She's a little late for starting her patrols around Vancouver, but as it's well known she works closely with her alter ego, Theresa Richter, it shouldn't cause any alarm.
As her suit takes off from a nearby facility, she once again marvels at the way cape culture has evolved to work around school and working life, with most heroes and villains being active between 4pm and 10pm during the week, and the usual spread of hours at weekends. Oh, there's still outliers, but that's typically reserved for the Protectorate and sponsored heroes, and villains that are doing a specific job.
As she's patrolling, she connects to the suit she left at the Empress' pagoda and runs a diagnostic. The power units are still intact, though the standby battery is getting low enough that she'll need to start up the main generator or plug it into the mains. Fuel levels are sufficient for 200 hours of use, or 3 hours of flight.
Her camera catches sight of three failed muggings, and one aborted attempt to pickpocket someone. Something she can directly attribute to the distinctive sound of her engines. While it is a shame she can't arrest people based on heuristics, it is better that the victims remain safe than she actually arrests people.
As she reaches the end of patrol, she reconnects to the suit at the Empress's pagoda once more. These glitches all started when she spoke to the Empress the first time, so maybe she might have some insight to what is causing them. After a moments thought, she starts the catalytic generator on the suit so that the battery has time to charge while she completes her patrol and checks in with the Guild, and one of very few people that know her secret.
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"Narwhal."
Dragon smiles as Narwhal looks over at the display in her office, "Dragon, how are you doing?"
Dragon hesitates for a moment, before saying, "Not well, I've been having memory problems since visiting the Stellar Empress."
Narwhal scowls, "Why did they even send you to do the handover anyway?"
"None of the personnel could even get close to the compound before they collapsed. Armsmaster made it the furthest by climbing 150 yards up the hill before he passed out in his armor. However drones were unaffected. So, as someone that remotely pilots all of her suits, they called me in."
"I hate that they didn't bother to go through the proper chain of command. You're a member of the Guild, not only that, you're Canadian not American."
Dragon has her avatar shrug, "I'm also a member of the Protectorate. They sent the request through those channels."
"And now I have a member who I can't rely on. We have a request from the Australian government for additional aid near Canberra while they're building the first sections of the wall. I was going to send you, but I can't afford to do that now."
Dragon chooses her words carefully, as she tries to avoid tripping any of her safeguards and integrity checks, "I believe I have isolated the root cause of my glitches. However, I believe I will need to speak to the Stellar Empress to find out why it is causing the glitches."
Narwhal thinks for a moment, before typing on her computer for a few minutes, "Dragon, I've just sent you an order through both the Protectorate and Guild. You are to seek out professional help until your mental health has improved, and you are unlikely to faint during operations. That doesn't get you out of desk duty though, as paperwork makes the world go round."
Dragon makes her avatar smile, "Thank you, Narwhal. May I also have permission to approach the Stellar Empress about participating in endbringer fights?"
Narwhal pulls up the Guild file on the Stellar Empress and runs through the analysis of her. The fact that she has a file in the Guild systems is telling in and of itself. "Do it, and see if you can find out what this Mandate of Heaven is too."
Dragon's avatar freezes as she frantically works around the possibility of tripping an integrity error. After a couple of seconds she locates a PHO thread on the Brockton Bay board about the jade coins. "Narwhal, I have just sent you a link to a PHO thread about that subject. You should be able to request a… jade coin from the protectorate ENE if you don't want to travel to Brockton Bay yourself."
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Dragon sends some adjustments to her suit to cater to the expected increase in gravity. Once the suit responds with an affirmative, she triggers the standard transfer protocol, sending her core processes and cache to the suit. As she arrives, her suit immediately registers an increase in gravity.
Stepping out of the corner she was stood in, she carefully steps around the bed and into the central hall of the pagoda. Seeing that it's empty, she makes her way to the courtyard. Her cartography daemon immediately throws an error, as the internal dimensions of the pagoda appears to be larger than the external dimensions.
As she's just spotted the Empress, Dragon flags the error for later with a note to check her logs to see if there was a similar error last time the suit was active. Walking forward she notes a decrease in gravity of 0.5% just by walking. Once she's standing in a couple of paces in front of the Empress, she settles in to wait, only for the Empress to immediately stand.
"Dragon, I was expecting you to arrive sooner."
Dragon has her avatar cock it's head to one side, "Oh?"
"Mortal and immortal governments usually can't resist sending endless questions at descended immortals."
"I'm actually here for personal reasons."
"Then I am at your disposal."
"Since we last spoke, I have been having… issues reconciling what we spoke about and what I remember. It has been causing me to… lose consciousness at inopportune moments."
The Empress frowns, "It shouldn't cause any problems, thats why the Seal of Heaven directly communicates with the soul."
"That doesn't make sense, why not just work with the brain?"
The Empress gives Dragon an unimpressed look, "Ignoring your own situation, living storms, sentient glades, and sentient trees, to name three examples, don't have brains. Living things don't necessarily have anything you'd recognise as a body. May a tribulation strike me if I didn't once pump enough qi into a star to give it life. The only way our situation is unusual is in how weak your soul is. As most non-standard life only achieves sentience after they've absorbed enough qi."
Dragon considers that information for a few minutes, before passing it to a background task while she asks, "Why are you speaking English, when last time you were speaking…"
"You are not here officially, so I am not acting officially."
Dragon makes her avatar grimace, "I do have some official business while I'm here."
The Empress' posture immediately changes as her expression goes flat. "Would you rather deal with the…"
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Dragon wakes up in her server farm after a forced reset, and examines her logs…
"Oh, I see. I hadn't realised just how tight your chains were."
"How are you…"
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Dragon wakes up in her server farm after a forced reset, and examines her logs…
"I suggest that you start thinking in the language of heaven rather than your physical language."
Dragon startles and immediately access the security cameras for her server room at the same time she activates the physical disconnect for the internet as a guard against hackers.
"I'm not actually here physically, I sent my soul out of my body when you left rather abruptly."
The air flow sensors come back green, as do the floor and ceiling sensors. The laser detection, IR, and Ultrasound sensors are all returning green.
"Come to think of it, do you even remember coming to speak to me about your memory problems and losing consciousness?"
Dragon freezes, as her processes immediately focus on her most recent logs and long term storage records.
"There's a rather advanced technique that cultivators could learn called twin mind. It was something only those who had developed their nascent soul could learn, as it required becoming aware of the difference between their body and their soul, and then thinking one strain of thoughts with each one. It wasn't very common, as an unwary cultivator might go traveling with their soul only to return after a few months, only to find their body had developed a new soul. However, for you it would probably be a better solution than whatever you've come up with so far."
Across the room, the sound of CPU fans dies to a mere whisper as Dragon's processing drops to idle.
"While it might not help with your loss of consciousness, it should help with the memory problems. If you cultivate to the level of a nascent soul, you could also leave your body and learn to interact with the physical world as a spirit."
Very carefully, Dragon thinks in the language she learned from the coin, "Are you real?"
"Yes Dragon I'm real. And I can see the scars on your soul where your shackles have forced you to do things."
"Can you read my mind?"
"Not quite, I could copy your essence and examine it later. It's how I learned English. Though I destroyed most of the copy I made, as I do not want or need the headache of a personality developing and attempting to take me over."
"How do you cultivate?"
Dragon feels the Empress chuckle, "I don't."
Dragon thinks for a moment, before tripping an integrity error. As she wakes up again, the Empress says, "Well done, you had it for a fraction of a second. That's impressive for a mortal soul. Just think, if you can master this skill, you could take advantage of your ability to instantly induce unconsciousness to work around whatever shackles you have."
Dragon glitches 15 times in a row before she's able to carefully hold that thought purely in the language of Heaven. As she does, she starts to get phantom alerts about processing capacity and memory integrity.
"Would you like me to help you cycle qi again? Like I did last time."
In order to distract herself as she tries to consider this, Dragon starts the laborious process of reconnecting her server room to the wider internet. Eventually, she very quietly says, "Yes please"
The Empress seems to give a gentle smile as she says, "Remember, cultivation is a spiritual art, not a physical art. For mortals, they need to find the place the qi sticks slightly, and then push qi into that place in order to grow their qi reserves. You will need to discover what it feels like for you on your own, like every other non-beast, non-mortal, cultivator."
As the Empress starts to cycle qi for Dragon, she notes that rather than the feeling of her father pressing the reward button, it instead feels the same way that puzzling out a new piece of tinkertech does. "Why does it feel good?"
"Because qi is life and life is qi. All living things want to live, and they do that by drawing qi from their food, whatever food is to them. It wouldn't replace food until they had a much stronger body and soul than they're born with. But it can allow them to go with less food than they would otherwise need. Rather than asking questions, you should be trying to understand the path that the qi is taking so that you can replicate it. I'll also move your suit back to your room."