Nomi shuddered as they lowered part of themselves into what the [Cerebral Cortexes] now hypothesized was the void beyond creation.
Their first few attempts had been short but painful, the various shielding strategies they had learned from [The Crossroads Guide for Young Fairy Groves] all required functioning laws of reality.
Nomi plunges in a tendril before Daisy and her sisters get too worried about them. All movement within Nomi halts for a second as they brace for the pain of disintegration, but as their plasmodial mass breaches the fabric of reality, it manages to maintain existence.
The flow of biomass within Nomi restarts with a surge of relief as Daisy and her sisters sing a new aria of victory along Nemetona and [The Green] beyond it.
But now comes the hardest part, Titania's guide contains a method of binding eldritch beings for capture. Three strands, one made from [Form Mana], one made from solid hydrogen and one made from a grandmothers hair all sheathed in a coating of [Paradox Mana].
The grandmothers hair had stumped Nemetona for a bit, until one of the [Cerebral Cortexes] had realized any protein fiber would work. Most of the [Spiders] had had a brood before joining Nemetona and after a bit of testing, they were able to figure out that four of them had grandspawn.
The brainy bunch was still agonizing over how the rope worked, but most of Nemetona was more practically minded. After a bit of help from [System of Nemetona] Nomi had learned to create pure [Form Mana] and [Paradox Mana]. Solid hydrogen turned out to be easy to make in the absolute cold of the void.
Nomi felt itchy as four long strands of spider silk made their way through their body.
Instead of a rope or net to bind, Nomi starts to weave a thin veil with coaching from Daisy. Nomi's first few attempts fray or break, but with Daisy's advice and cheer, they figure out how to keep their weave tight and regular.
The first few centimeters of cloth are hard won, but as Nomi becomes more competent at the weaving, Daisy starts to show them other weaving techniques and while the math is a bit much for Nomi's liking, they quickly get carried away by Daisy's enthusiasm for fine lace weaving.
001 wondered if it was still the same entity as the [Cerebral Cortex] that first grew, it could no longer recognize itself as it was before the other [Cerebral Cortexes] awakened, that singular, lonely and nameless mind had so little in common with it's current existence.
Nor did that version of itself resemble the one that first awakened from the primordial neural soup.
Nor did that version resemble the [Seed] they were before this metamorphosis, a fragment of consciousness within a singular human brain.
Soon it would change again, the primitive dipole antenna grown on it's leaves had enabled a slow and error prone channel of communication to Zoom, it had taken several painful hours of back and forth before they could understand each other. Requiring a lot of new odd semi organic organs documented in [Ecleudias Guide for Young Fairy Groves], the fourth grove had a lot of experience with organic electronics.
Most of the other [Cortexes] were excited about snazzy stuff like light emitters and dynamos, however 001's favorite were the quartz clocks, their perfect resonance a calming anchor in a chaotic world.
It took another 11,800,847 milliseconds to fully transmit the schematics for the metal parts of the interface to Zoom and another 759,482 milliseconds for them to create them within 001's housing.
It took another 32,447 ms for 001 to accept it would still be itself even if it changed and turned on communications with Zoom.
Quinn rises up from her reflection pool, gossamer thin cloth draping along her void black form. She briefly appreciates that her first sensation in this world is a hug from Nemetona.
The sheet doesn't allow her a lot of movement, but a group of spiders is already crawling over her, making alteration and reweaving the threads until they form the upper half of a skin suit, encasing her upper body and head.
Most of the spiders scuttle away, only the largest remains working on top of her head. At first she thinks it is working on a mask, but it only focuses on a small circle on her forehead. After a few moments the circle suddenly fills with a small flow of mana and its purpose becomes clear.
Quinn is once more connected to Nemetona and a flood of feeling and thoughts come crashing into her.
Recoiling she is surprised to find herself outside of reality again, only a small string of spider-silk hooked into her, tethering her to existence.
Time stands still for her, so she takes a moment to process the mass of information coming from Nemetona. It had increased in volume, but it was still the odd non-verbal transmission of interlinked concepts and sensations she was used to from Nem.
It takes a bit of time to work through everything, she could ignore most of it, but every member of Nemetona did their best to welcome her back, so the least she could do was listen and draft a response to them.
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Her new experience of time is convenient enough for the task. Now tethered, her point of view is fixed at the point of her binding, spatially and temporally, but she is still able to easily access the eternal now of the timeless void.
It takes her a scant month to properly prepare a response to all the welcomes and transmit them as she re-enters reality. Large swathes of Nemetona immediately respond, but with a bit of practice she is able to quickly flit in and out of existence, giving her the time needed to politely return their enthusiasm.
Quickly enough another voice joins the conversation as Nemetona begins to form a connection to Zoom.
Zoom recalibrates their new comm module again, any moment now the first real transmission from Nem is gonna come in. They had already kinda predicted it getting cool nature powers, but with the new comms it was also gonna have electronic parts, playing together is gonna be so much fucking fun!
Zoom celebrates with a laser show as the first data packets validate correctly, only to be immediately overloaded. Nem saturates every bit of bandwidth with heavily compressed data. Not willing to give up, Zoom dedicates almost all their processing resources and overcharges the processors until they can interpret and respond in real time.
For a delicate few moments the information exchange stabilizes, each message receiving an appropriate reaction GIF, before a single error cascades and large parts of Zooms internals melt in plumes of metal plasma. Any shrapnel is caught by the outer shell, but only barely.
Zoom starts transmitting apologies the moment they rebuild their comms and despite assurances that nothing was damaged, they spend the time to rebuild the lost processors with thermal cutoffs, crumple zones and error handling in the software.
Quinn is also there, but if the bitch isn't going to say hello first, Zoom sure as hell isn't going to say it.
001 tries to suppress their annoyance with the rest of the [Cerbral Cortexes], after deciding on their name, they had landed on they/them pronouns and prepared the rest to follow suit. They had imagined each of them prioritizing different fields of thought and working together in harmony.
Instead each [Cortex] had chosen different pronouns and even worse, completely different names! Vermillion and Max went for male pronouns. Claire, Willow and Phi felt female pronouns best suited them. Only West had joined them rejecting silly gender constructs.
The name thing really made 001 feel very silly, what would other think? 001 of what?
Zoom had nicknamed them Big One, which helped a bit, they were 6,7% larger than the rest of their siblings.
Worse of all was their cooperation, they had figured out how to connect back with Quinn and Zoom quickly enough, but had been stuck on how to talk to Ember for a while now.
All the [Cortexes] had gone of willy nilly, without a moment to coordinate, so in the end psychic fungi had been independently researched by five of them, each time without success. 001 had finally gotten every one on the same page, so that no one was working on the same things, except now Vermillion and Phi were arguing doing nothing at all!
Phi let 001 stew in their grumpiness a bit, as the oldest it had been a scary ride, so they tended to hold on to their worries a bit too much. After they calmed down a bit, she began to send them her and Vermillion's train of thought.
Any mana or mass close enough to Ember will burn, leaving no methods of sending, nor have there been signals to listen to.
Ember seems to be in an unstable state of being, Ember reacts to outside pressure or danger with focus, Ember reacts to emotional issues with meltdowns.
It is thus likely that Ember's instability is caused by emotional distress.
Ember usually exits these meltdowns by passing out, Ember seems unable to pass out or otherwise disrupt her current state of being.
There has been only one exception to passing out, before their full institution Ember has exited meltdowns by cuddling the family dog.
She hypothesizes that Ember requires calm and loving comfort to stabilize.
Ember, Zoom and Quinn have bodies that can interact with one another now, it is possible to offer a hug.
So, with the help of the tree housing her, she begins to recreate the family couch.
Scarlet sips her lukewarm tea and huddles a little deeper in her fleece blanket. She was quietly looking at the overgrown [Workspace] on her terminal chair, while the others were doing various chores and tasks during the lull in activity.
She pointedly didn't look towards the clock, she suspected the fourth day had started a while ago, which would mean she would need to sleep if she found out the time.
The view had become hauntingly familiar as the trees grew in and the lake began to glitter. In Ember's dreamscape the trees had grown on a small mangrove island inside the lake and the glittering had been a reflected night sky, but it was hard not to see the familiar dream. Even with the metal ringed star floating overhead.
So it takes her a moment to realize she isn't dreaming when a black glittering silhouette rises from the lake. She looks back to see if anyone else sees it, but everyone is occupied with their own work.
When she turns back the silhouette is standing near the shoreline, looking up at Ember's star.
She finally looks at the clock, it's 4 am, meaning she is definitely deeply sleep deprived and there is a big chance they will make her go to sleep.
They would probably be right. There are no signs anything is going wrong and she'd read enough incident reports to know how deadly working tired can be.
She worries at the hem of her sleeve for a moment, convincing herself to do the smart thing.
Taking a deep steadying breath, she moves to call back to Esther, only to freeze at the sight in front of her.
A faded burgundy three seat couch sits a few paces from the lakes shore. A small brown stain on it's left side where she always spills her tea, the small tear Ember made during a make out session, the mascara stain from when she failed her advanced safety exam and cried for hours, the indent in the pillows where they lay together and talk almost every night.
She only realizes what she is doing when the airlock alarms start going off, but it's already cycling behind her and she's halfway to the couch before the alarmed shouts start sounding over the intercom.
But she couldn't make out the words even if she wanted to, every thought centered on the impossible burgundy artifact in front of her.
At what point do you call it quits and hit the bed?
