Chapter 494 – What is Stasis?

Two days after they met Issvako, Xin’ri returned from Mazehold with Jax. Ci’an was not with them; she was on her way back to Izel. Her Clan needed her; she was one of only four people in Clan Aurora at the third upgrade and the destruction and disgrace of the Hilt and his Temple of the Broken Lord meant that Izel was weakened. It would pass, but Ci’an was needed to help defend the city until it did.

Xin’ri confided that she didn’t think that was the entire reason Ci’an was called home. They were a long way from the Skylands, so she couldn’t say for certain, but the power structure everywhere that had a Temple of the Broken Lord seemed to be in flux. Most places didn’t have the hidden tyranny Mazehold did, with the Blade co-opting the Guard so that she could kill whoever she wanted to, but the political repercussions of the loss of the Broken Lord and the new way to gain Spheres were still growing. 

Sophia half expected Xin’ri to ask her to return to the Broken Lands, but she didn’t. In fact, she asked Sophia to stay away; she thought things would stabilize faster without the actual presence of an Empress without an Empire.

Sophia suspected that she could claim control of the Broken Lands if she wanted to. It wouldn’t even take that much of an army; she had Cliff and Ansuz that meant she had control of all of the Challenges and the new entrances to the slowly-rebuilding Tower of Kestii. That was more than enough to start an Empire.

It was an Empire she didn’t want. She was perfectly happy to let the locals govern themselves and deal with each other. She didn’t even plan to interfere in their outside contacts. She’d take a page from her father’s book and let “her Empire” govern itself as long as it didn’t go completely off the rails. She didn’t have her father’s advantage of extremely visible power in his alliance with dragons, but if anything her power was more obvious because it appeared for everyone who chose an Imperial Sphere. 

Honestly, neither structure was really an empire. They weren’t even close. It was just the best word Sophia knew for a bunch of essentially self-governing countries that had to report to a higher collective power that wasn’t dependent on the agreement of the member states the way something like a confederation was. 

The name wasn’t the important part; the fact that she was going to let things settle out without forcing a particular solution was. She wasn’t from the Broken Lands; the people who were should know what they needed better than she did. It would be messy, but it would probably be better than anything she could impose.

Sophia had her own issues. In two days’ time, she’d barely scratched the surface on understanding the spell encoded in the bead nestled in the box that came with the note that was probably written by the Guide and delivered by the World Tree. She’d expected a spellform, but that wasn’t what was there at all.

The bead projected words. They were arranged carefully in a structure that somewhat resembled a ritual layout and came closer to a runic inscription, but the language used was Bridge. It was a terrible language to use for runes; the words had more than one meaning and there was no simple way to modify them graphically. You had to use more words. It wasn’t impossible to do; Sophia’s father wrote a simple runescript in English to demonstrate how it worked for her back when she was first learning. It was just a bad idea.

Using a common language meant importing the meanings associated with the words. All of them. The one you wanted the word to mean would be the most impactful if you did it right, but it wouldn’t be the only thing you’d get. That was a trick used by some runic languages, in fact; if a particular rune had a bunch of similar meanings, it could be useful if you knew how to handle it.

Sophia knew that only because she’d been told it. Her training, such as it was, revolved around a runescript specifically designed to allow more precision. It meant she needed a wider library of runes, but that was what books were for.

In the case of the runescript Serenity showed Sophia, it was nothing more than a spell that gave warm feelings as well as heat, but Sophia knew it could do more than that. Worse, human language wasn’t designed with the building blocks that told where power was supposed to be distributed and the limiters were fuzzy at best unless you carefully built each and every one of them. Sophia wasn’t a programmer, but even so her father’s analogy worked: it was like building the runtime compiler at the same time as you built the spell. It would work if you were careful and precise but it was far easier if you built the structures ahead of time, and that was what a proper runescript did.

The runescript projected by the bead was a mess. There was probably some underlying structure to it, but Sophia couldn’t tell what it was. She couldn’t even be sure if that was because there wasn’t one or because she just didn’t understand the display well enough to do anything with it. She was a practical spellcaster; this was anything but practical magic. It probably took weeks or years to create and required a ridiculous amount of mana to maintain. 

Of course, how much mana it needed would be affected by exactly how it achieved what it did and Sophia wasn’t even sure what it did. Sure, the Guide described it as “stasis” but there were at least three things that could be described that way. Sophia had a good guess which one it was, but that was from her knowledge from Earth, not her understanding of the bead’s spell. If there was something she’d missed or it somehow used one of the options she dismissed, whatever she did to kill the spell might not work and might even be catastrophic.

The most obvious method was keeping everything exactly the same inside an area, the literal meaning of stasis. Sophia knew better than to try that; while it could be done, it was horribly mana-hungry and there were edge effects that had to be managed really carefully. Freezing everything in the area solid by preventing any movement at all was only the most obvious and probably least harmful edge effect. 

Sophia was pretty sure that wasn’t what she was looking at because she was pretty sure that a single planet wasn’t enough to power that sort of enchantment continuously. She’d only ever heard of it being used as a proof of concept, never as something practical.

The second method was slightly more practical and in fact was commonly used for some things: destructive analysis, pattern matching, and reconstruction. Sophia thought of it as “Star Trek transporter stasis” because that was really a pretty good comparison. It was also far more common in more tech-heavy areas because the amount of memory needed to accurately reconstruct something was more common in higher tech societies. 

Sophia only knew about it because Earth was now one of those magitech societies and of course transporter technology was one of the things people tried to replicate even though portals existed. There were a couple of problems with it; like the first option, it was mana-hungry. It wasn’t as bad as trying to actually achieve true stasis, but it was still more expensive than just using a portal or (if the distance was short enough) true teleportation. 

That wasn’t its only problem, though. No one had quite managed to truly recreate everything; that was probably literally impossible. Close enough should be enough, except that it turned out that breaking something down and reconstructing it was bad for anything of sufficient complexity. The last she’d heard, they were still trying, but Sophia didn’t really expect them to ever succeed. They’d have to have some way to copy a soul or at least hold it in place without letting it be changed by the experience and that was not a trivial task. Even if they did succeed, Sophia doubted it would be practical (if only because there were some very strong people who would have issues with people freezing souls in an in-between state). 

Transporters were used for very precise short-distance teleportation in areas where spatial magic was a bad idea. They were also the basis for replicator technology, but as far as Sophia knew there was no practical use for that. Maybe it was used for some really rare mundane materials, but Sophia was pretty sure those were easier to get out of a dungeon if you had someone who could talk to the dungeon and get it to add the particular material you needed as a possible removable item. Heck, bringing it into the dungeon as a gift was often enough to get a dungeon to at least try making something weird.

It was also theoretically possible to ‘cut’ something out of its natural time and shove it into another time. Weirdly, that was both the cheapest form of time travel and the only one that Sophia knew of that allowed anything to go back in time. It occasionally even happened naturally when two ‘times’ became connected. 

There was something about temporal folding involved and how it interacted with place as well as time, but Sophia hadn’t taken that particular graduate study program. If it wasn’t done right, it was supposed to be messy; when it was done right, it usually didn’t lead you anywhere you’d want to go. It wasn’t practical for something you’d describe as stasis (and she was pretty sure that it wasn’t practical most of the time for anything else, either). 

That didn’t mean it had never been done; Sophia knew it had. It just meant that she was pretty sure it wasn’t what was going on here. 

No, the practical form of stasis was a sort of extended time dilation. The textbook example was A’Atla’s Vault. Its inventory, Amani Valles, was trapped inside during the war that sank A’Atla to the seabed; when she was released roughly two millennia later, she had a subjective experience of having been inside the Vault for hours or possibly a few days; she wasn’t certain because she kept busy trying to figure out why she was conscious at all. She shouldn’t even have noticed the passage of time in the couple of years she expected to be shut inside, but she was inside far longer than that. Time inside the Vault was apparently weird when it was dilated, but Sophia couldn’t speak to that; only Amani Valles could.

The same sort of spell was now used all over Earth for things that needed to be kept in pristine condition. The only downside was the mana cost; for food, it was far cheaper to use refrigeration instead of time-dilation stasis, even if you kept the dilation relatively modest. The problem there wasn’t the dilation itself, it was the fact that it cost mana every time you opened or closed it as well as while it was closed and keeping the interior properly time-dilated.

That limited the uses but didn’t eliminate them. The most common users were probably the high-Tier delvers who harvested perishables; if it cost all of the monster cores they recovered to run the equipment but still got the perishables out in good shape, it might be worth the cost.

Sophia tossed her latest notebook to one side and started a list of the four stasis types she’d come up with and the words that would probably be needed for them. She was having no luck directly analyzing the spell, but maybe if she built a rough framework in Bridge she’d be able to narrow something down.

If only there was someone she could talk to about it!