The 'Settlement Symposium' on Manawork was one of the densest things Mark had ever sat through.

It was not boring at all.

But did Mark retain any of that information?

… ehhhhhhh.

On the surface it was people talking numbers and angles and showing slides of atomic diagrams and electron orbitals and transition phases to mana based on angles and The Observer Effect. And in the moment, all of that stuff was supremely interesting. But after a speaker walked away and another one came on, the second person talked in entirely different directions on the same subject, completely obliterating the Understandings Mark had thought he had understood.

The same thing happened to a lot of the audience, too.

It was basically a debate, and the debaters were just gearing up. Laying groundwork. Stating theories and calling back to names that Mark didn't know but which everyone else did. Who was Daggerfall the Fourth of the Tenth Age? Who the fuck was Tim'Kala of the Fourth Age? Mark inferred they were important, and that they paved the way toward the future everyone was now in. But beyond that? Who the fuck knew!

Mark knew Einstein, though! He knew that one! That guy was from Earth!

Wooo Earth!

Every single one of the speakers knew each other, some intimately, according to their vectors. That was perhaps the thing Mark understood most of all, and which he tried, desperately, to keep out of the Understandings he was spreading into the room. It helped that the researchers were dense as bricks about each other.

All of the speakers, of which there were 12 out of 18 for that first day, were forming blocs with each other as they spoke on esoterica and the very rare exoterica.

'Everyone should know that…' they would begin, and then they'd list something that only 10 people in the audience had ever even heard of, but which every single one of the speakers knew left, right, up, and down, and a few more directions besides.

And then they'd go 'But here's a little known fact…' and rattle off something that only a few speakers knew, and which they were fiercely defensive about, which, of course, caused the next speaker to talk exclusively on that subject.

They fired barbs at each other that only they recognized as barbs. They formed alliances of distrust, disgust, delight, and getting-down. Mark was absolutely sure that halfway through that first day two girls and a guy went to a side room and got into a heated argument that had them getting down on the floor. They came back to the debate when someone went to get them, due to them being next on the list, and when they came back it was with disheveled clothes and even stronger words in their debates.

Mark learned a lot.

And then 5 hours later, Day 1 of the Settlement Symposium on Manawork was over, for now.

And Mark didn't know shit.

The hotels, restaurants, coffeeshops, and lawns in the settlement would be hopping that night, though, for the people who had just talked, almost all of them, were eager to continue the debates either in private, or in public, and a lot of them didn't care how those debates started or ended. They just wanted to have them.

After it was over and the people left, Mark was sitting in the Understanding building, and the Union was off. Eliot, Isoko, and Sally sat around the table with him. Sally was finishing off the remains of the catering options.

Mark spoke up, "Anyone else feel like something big happened, but you have no idea how to connect to it?"

"Oh yeah," Isoko said, flexing her hand in the air, silver flows catching in the air like windy mirages. "But I learned how to do this!"

She was convinced whatever she was doing was impressive. And yeah… maybe it was? Mark watched the wind flow for a bit. He couldn't figure out what Isoko was doing.

Eliot said, "I give up! What are you doing?"

Isoko grinned and then she gripped the air like a stick, and poked Eliot in the shoulder with solid air, saying, "Tactile Telekinesis and Wind Shaper!"

"Neat!" Mark said, and he meant it.

"I'm making shapes, dudes!" Isoko said, making a bunch of almost-visible solid objects in the air, TT'ing with the air itself in a way that was clearly new. "I'm gonna try flying tomorrow."

Mark was happy for her, but… "I'm happy for you, but… Did you learn anything from the day's symposium?"

"Not a single shitting thing," Isoko answered, with perhaps too much honesty. "But I thought I knew something in the middle there!"

Sally used a big spoon to pick up a whole bunch of tiny quiches, as she said, "That's the danger of Understanding magics, yeah? You know what's happening in the moment, but nothing afterward?" She shoveled tiny, savory tarts into her mouth.

Mark said, "I feel like I should have retained some of that."

Eliot said, "That shit was so far above me… But I can see the sky beyond the well's opening, at least."

Isoko snorted. "There's an opening to this well?"

"Somewhere up there," Mark said. And then he decided, "Maybe I'll retain something tomorrow. It's all good. So how's the crystal construction going, Eliot? Those people were with you at the church yesterday, right? Conductor Timms, I think?"

"I said 'Hi' to that guy, but that was about it. Mostly I talked to Head Conductor Lissi and a few Constructors. I think I understand a few things now— I mean. The basics were right there. Shape a mana into some mana shape, and then it changes into other manas. Like with your adamantium drop experiment you told us about. But that's replacing-mana, and that's the fastest way it works. You can get whatever specific mana you want if you got a pure enough starter and enough ambient mana of the correct type that you wanna collect, but the problem is that the mana you want to collect is always the rare types. Like... You can't collect adamantium from the air around here. Adamantium is too rare. But you can do mana-collection that precipitates super-strong crystal, which is what most crystal construction is about. It's right there in the name.

"The jump from replacing-mana crystal construction to multiplying-mana crystal construction is a whole lot more complicated, though. That's the one that you need to master to make the crystal pyramids of Crytalis, and those teleporter crystals, and anything actually useful.

"That's how Dad's Crystals in Memphi makes their mana crystals that they sell to everyone," Eliot said, "I'm thinking of a trip to Memphi next gate opening to go tour their facilities, if I can't understand what's going on with this symposium here." He confided, "Which I don't think is going to happen; no offense."

Mark thought about that cursed dagger he had made that one time, and how it had seemed to collect poison mana of several types onto it, and grow larger. He had kinda stumbled into that. But apparently that was a major way in which mana crystals were created from scratch? As opposed to harvesting monsters who did all that inside their bodies, of course, which is what they did here at the settlement with farming monsters outside of the walls.

Mark said, "No offense taken. This stuff was beyond almost everyone in the audience, too."

"I knew who Einstein was!" Isoko proclaimed.

"Me, too!" Mark said, laughing.

"Everyone knows him," Eliot said.

Sally said, "I don't. Who was he?"

She was lying and everyone knew it.

"Oh you know who he is!" and "He's the atomic bomb guy!" and "No he's not! He's the relativity guy!" followed by, "I think he was the atomic bomb guy, too," then Sally said, "No that's Oppenheimer," followed by "He just made the first one; he didn't invent it," and then Sally was grinning as she lied about that, saying, "I really do think he made the original bomb, too! All by himself."

Everyone scoffed.

They shot the shit for a while and Isoko demonstrated a half-formed scale-suit of TT'd air on her body, sort of like Mark's black scales. It glittered a bit silver and she was very proud of it, but she said how it obviously wasn't ready yet.

Mark smiled as he joked with her, "Don't you go stealing my look! I'll have to sue you for copyright!"

That earned him a chuckle.

- -

Day 2 of the Settlement Symposium started off full of drunk and/or hungover speakers, depending on where they were in the healing process. Most of them had stayed up all night, having 'Revelations from the Mana!' as they talked with each other. One guy puked as he was at the podium, and then Mark cleaned him up, the guy said a rapid 'thank you', and then the guy kept right on talking with even more fervor than before.

They broke for lunch, which was a big catered affair, and two of the academics got into a punching fight with each other. Knock down, drag out brawling.

Mark heard later that the fight was all about the 'angle of divinity' regarding Neon. The words 'Angle of Divinity' piqued Mark's interest, but then he remembered that 'Angle of Divinity' had nothing to do with the divine at all. That's just what they called it. One guy was saying it was 70 bats (which was not the animal at all) and the other was saying it was 170 bats, which had some other guy saying it wasn't 'bats' at all, and they should all update to the new system, 'xeds'. That other guy got punched, too.

Mark almost grasped some revelation-like thing in the middle of the afternoon, and then the day was over and all thoughts fled.

"An empty head can be filled more easily," Isoko said, "But I'm just empty over here."

Sally snorted. "There are some researchers that can help with that."

Isoko grinned. "The red-haired guy is cute."

"He's like 40!" Eliot said.

"Still cute," Isoko said.

"Yeah, still cute," Sally said, "Even I can see that."

"Well if we're talking about that," Eliot said, "How about Miss Blackbelts?"

Sally's eyes lit up. "With the tits hanging out and trying to make moves on Glasses-guy all day long?"

"Yes!" Eliot said. "She's fucking gorgeous—"

Mark asked Quark, "Quark? Are there monsters to fight, Quark? Please tell me there are monsters to fight."

"There are always monsters to fight, sir!"

"Thank the gods."

Sally threw a bread roll at him.

"No monsters!" Isoko got up, excited, and said, "Let's go flying!"

- -

Mark floated in the air, three kilometers up, in the chill of the golden clouds far above the twinkling lights of the settlement below. To the side, Eliot and Sally enjoyed the warmth of Eliot's spiderbot, with Sally at the controls.

Isoko stood on the roof of the spiderbot, platinum air flowing around her body, stretched along the direction of the wind. And then Isoko gripped the wind, her Tactile Telekinesis spreading like threads, like fractal feelers, far away from her body. She was combining Union and Wind Shaper and Platinum Body all at once, all in harmony. Her normally-contained astral body began to fan out, to turn wispy and distant.

Mark could feel what she was about to do, for she was doing things that Lee did, with his Sky Shaper, but on a much, much smaller scale. Smaller than even most true Wind Shapers. But she was doing it.

Isoko did not take off. She did not launch in any direction at all.

She became one with the wind, and the wind was going that way.

Isoko grinned and giggled as the sunset breeze pushed Isoko toward the south, rolling her off of the hoverspider and tossing her down the side, only to catch her on the underside of the vehicle and send her flowing back into the air.

Mark was holding on to the hoverspider with his caltrops so that his downward-flow of wind from his rotor didn't disturb Isoko's flight. He spun up his flight now, though, and sent turbulence into the sky. Isoko was a good hundred meters away, her peals of laughter filling the world as the wind tumbled her and she struggled to understand how it worked, so now was a good time to close some distance.

Mark hovered close, but he pulled back when his downdraft caught Isoko's net of Wind Shaper, causing the edges nearer to him to fray and scatter, and Isoko to yell something at him that Mark did not catch. She was tumbling in every direction, anyway, so it wasn't like Mark had made it worse, but her vector said what her voice could not; 'Back off!'

Mark smirked and backed off, calling out, "You need help?"

"NO!" Isoko said, rolling to float upside down, and then rolling again to float on her left side. "I got it!"

Mark watched Isoko turn every which way, twisting her Wind Shaper into directions that he didn't quite understand, but which were clearly not intended. Isoko was getting frustrated. Isoko remained frustrated for a good 10 minutes, floating far beyond the edge of the settlement and into open territory to the south. There was nothing up here, though; Mark was sure.

Finally, Isoko called out, "Okay! Rescue me now!"

Mark moved in with a seat of adamantium, happily saying, "That was amazing!"

Isoko grabbed onto the seat with solid winds, sitting herself down and catching herself with her feet, laughing as she said, "It's not as easy as they make it look on the shows!"

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"It's like learning to walk again," Mark said, and then he pointed up at his rotor, which was spinning much faster than he could physically move his adamantium under normal circumstances. "Can you do this with a Decouple?"

Isoko shook her head, then pointed at her ears. She wasn't able to hear him that well over the sound of the rotor.

Sally moved in close with the hoverspider and Mark floated them that way, into the vehicle.

Mark repeated, "Can you do a Decouple ritual?"

"Ah! That's what you were trying— No. I can't." Isoko said, sitting down in one of the passenger chairs. "That would break the Alteration. I need to learn how to fly without Decoupling. And I was close!" She smiled. "Getting off the ground is pretty fucking hard, so it helped to fly up here. Thanks, Eliot."

"No problem, Isoko," Eliot said.

They had a small party at the house, and it was great.

- -

Day 3, 4, and 5 of the Settlement Symposium passed much like the first 2 days.

One of the speakers tried to murder another speaker on the fourth day.

Or at least that's what the victim claimed.

But it turned out the 'murder attempt' was a difference of opinion on the value of 'High Mana Elements', meaning Uranium, which had no known mana counterpart at all. People were split on if the 'murder attempt' had been an 'atomic weapons attack' inside the city (which most people assumed would never have worked anyway because of Reasons that escaped Mark) or it was all just one guy really, really hoping to make a big name for himself. The prosecution fell apart. Verdict: No attempted murder.

On day 5, the would-be-murderer formally apologized to the would-be-murdered, and it was such a disaster of an apology the aggrieved picked up a butter knife from the catering display and tried to stab the first guy.

It devolved into a brawl.

And then one of the speakers had a eureka moment and wrote something impressive on the chalkboards that went right over Mark's head, but a few people Understood.

Mark tried to help more people understand, but it was such a fragile understanding that Mark knew if he took from those who understood and tried to use those embers of knowledge to light flames in the cold hearths of other minds, then there would be no fire at all. So Mark left it alone.

Rekaro gave a short speech at the end of it all, saying, "Thank you all for coming, and for the lively debates. And thank you Mark Careed for helping to spread Understanding where there was only confusion before."

Mark stood tall and strong with his full armor on and shards of adamantium floating behind him, looking properly strong, because that's what they expected of him, and then there were photos for posterity. Mark pretended to know what the speakers were talking about when they shook hands with him and said this or that, when they personally thanked him for helping with this or that, and then it was over.

Mark sat down with his team again, saying, "I think I can name every mana type out there, but that's about it."

Isoko said, "So I'm Prismatic Mana based, huh?"

"I told you that the other day!"

"Yeah, but it didn't make sense then. What I want to know is if I can get adamantium-rich off of it," Isoko said, smirking.

"That's a 'no'," Mark said.

Isoko laughed.

Sally said, "Still special-as-fuck people, all of you."

Eliot teased her, "You're a diamond, Sally."

Sally liked that.

Isoko also teased her, "More like charcoal."

Sally did not like that. "Can I shave off your platinum hair and run some mana experiments on it, Isoko?"

"I will cut you," Isoko said, very serious, but also hamming it up. "Also! I don't think you could, anyway! Not strong enough."

"Those are fighting words!"

"Right now! Let's go."

Sally got up, saying, "Thank Drakarok. I want to punch someone who can't demolish me, Mark."

Isoko said, "Mark is so unfair."

Mark scoffed.

"Completely unfair," Eliot said, piling on.

Mark got moving, saying, "Let's go! Go go go! I wanna spar, too!"

"Ain't nobody fighting you!" Sally said.

"You can watch, though," Isoko said, winking.

Eliot laughed. Like really fucking laughed, and Mark wondered what—

Ah.

A sex joke.

"Blegh," Mark said.

Laughter.

- -

Despite the jokes, watching Sally and Isoko spar in the coliseum was a fun time.

Isoko was fast and she was learning how to kick off of the air itself, to get different angles. Sally was strong. Obliteratingly strong. A 15x Strength modifier would do that. Isoko only had a 2.5x Strength and Speed modifier, and only while Full Platinum.

Mark watched under the effects of a low-level Alacrity/Slowness so that he could keep up with the visuals. Eliot was recording so that Isoko and Sally could look back at the spar and do better next time.

Isoko dashed off of the ground and then ran through the air, feet tapping on platinum platforms that were more like bundles of wires, visible only when she was kicking off of them. Sword swept back, the rest of her angled forward, skin glittering like the cables of wind under her feet.

Sally positioned, holding her massive sword in one hand, angled back and ready to swing, her bracer-covered forearm forward, ready to defend. Her vector was solidly defensive. She moved onto her back foot as Isoko leapt at her.

The wind-cables under Isoko's feet broke as she put pressure on them, but she reoriented fast enough and dashed across the ground, sand locked tight to her TT. She angled around Sally, not willing to meet her sword head on. Wind flowed in her draft.

Isoko went around Sally.

Sally followed her with her eyes.

Isoko's wind splashed glittering sand into Sally's eyes, which instantly sparked gold outward, through the wind, to strike at Isoko like a thousand golden sparks. One for each grain of sand. Isoko's skin darkened where the sparks hit and a Union of Good and Bad swept away those injuries.

Isoko tried to be sneaky with Union, latching on to Sally, and that caused a golden Retribution to follow the Bad right back toward Isoko, to shatter her Union and injure her in the process. But not much. Isoko hadn't pressed too deep with that Bad part of the Union.

Isoko ran around Sally again, almost leisurely walking, saying, "That Retribution makes you hard to hit!"

"That's the idea!" Sally shot back.

Isoko kicked off of the ground, right at Sally, stressing speed, imparting a Bad/slow into Sally, and taking the hit even as she darted under Sally's swinging sword. Isoko swept at Sally's legs and Isoko's sword was edged with strength.

Sally decided at the last second to not take that blow without reinforcing it. She TT'd up her greaves with all of her strength, guarding with everything instead of counter attacking. Her Retribution would counterattack enough.

Isoko still cut past Sally's armor, into her legs, and then she was out.

Golden Retribution followed Isoko, hitting on wind shields that she conjured out of the breeze. The Retribution still hit her, but it hit her astral body, mostly. Isoko winced as her vectors shrank precipitously. She ran away, recovering.

Sally pursued, aiming for limbs, blood trailing and greaves cut. "Nice cut, Isoko!"

"Nice Retribution, too!" Isoko said, kicking sand into the air and then pulling her astral body away.

Sand struck Sally and the resulting Retribution still dashed through the air like sparks, but Isoko outran the effect, and the golden sparks vanished in Isoko's dust.

Sally opted for a different strategy. She kicked off the ground and went sailing forward.

Isoko knew she was gonna do that, though; her vector told as much. With Sally in the air and unable to change directions, Isoko changed directions faster, cutting backward and aiming a hand at Sally's head. Wind shot out like a breeze, doing nothing but blowing sand off of Sally's face.

Sally touched her sword to the ground long before she would have naturally hit the ground and she TT'd through the connection, her strength flooding into the sand and giving her a perch Isoko didn't expect. Isoko was right there, 3 meters away, and Sally went for it.

One giant sword and 15x Strength against one speedy platinum girl. Her footwork was immaculate, her strength completely one-sided, and Sally was twice the size of Isoko, but Isoko had enough speed to exchange blows a few times and do retreating maneuvers. Isoko blew wind in Sally's face again and was pissed when it didn't work, and when a golden softness shot back at her, injuring her astral body, weakening her strength.

Sally was weakening, too, though.

Isoko could eventually wear Sally down through pure resources because Isoko could renew herself with Union, and Sally could not renew herself with Retribution. Retribution was a warrior's Power, though, and it went very, very far in the right hands, and Sally's Giant Strength hands were better than most.

Isoko tried to blow wind in her face again. Whatever she was doing it was the only reason she was staying so close to danger, remaining in melee with Sally.

Sally struck over and over, each blow parried or dodged either by decimeter or centimeters, and she asked, "Why the wind in the face?"

Isoko parried and dodged, breathing hard, saying, "I'm trying to wrap your head in wind and suffocate you! Now hold still a moment!"

Sally laughed and then held still.

Isoko tried again, and the wind held for a moment around Sally's head, but then Sally moved and broke the effect.

"Shit!"

"Nice idea, though!"

The fight lasted a good long while because every time Isoko attacked she expended some of her power, and Sally soaked that power in, though at a reduced rate. It wasn't as good at Union about regaining strength, but it was 'good enough' for a warrior, for themselves.

The fight ended when Sally buried her sword into Isoko's guts.

Mark was very quick on the healing, and Sally was even quicker on stopping the fight. Soon, Isoko was merely laying in a puddle of her own blood on the sands, instead of dying with her guts spilling out.

No one had expected that, least of all Sally.

"Holy fucking shit, Isoko! You bounced off of that same attack twice but this time— UGGGGHH!" Sally was furious at Isoko but then, after a second, she was horrified at herself. "I'm so sorry!"

Isoko, meanwhile, was chuckling and recovering. She said, "It's my own fault. I think my Wind Shaper got damaged. I need to repair it."

"Done for the night," Mark simply said, as he healed all wounds on both of them.

- -

Back at home, in his workshop, Mark managed to accomplish something important with Manawork. Mostly, he wrote off the entire language, but parts of it were useful.

Mainly, the targeting parts.

Mark Shaped a bit of adamantium into 'adamantium shape'. Adamantium's Manawork mana-shape looked something like a soft-edged quartz crystal. It was about 3 centimeters long, 1 centimeter thick, and it was perfectly mirror smooth. Still absolute black, of course, but it was so purely organized into flatness along each crystalline plane that it actually managed to reflect some light. Not a lot. But enough. Mark smiled at the mirror finish. It kinda resembled a knife or thick scalpel from most angles.

Mark knew he had finally succeeded.

"Quark?"

Quark was already scanning the object using the workshop's cameras. He chimed a confirmation, and said, "Irregularities are at 0%. It is molecularly smooth on every plane. Honestly, sir, I did not think it was actually possible, but there you go."

Mark chuckled. "The books said it was possible, but yeah… Graphene is perfectly molecularly smooth, too, right?"

"Yes, and that takes a great deal of machinery and technique to achieve."

Mark nodded.

"Then let's move on to the next part," Mark said. He picked up a glass pillar about 10 centimeters tall and put the adamantium bit onto the pillar, and then he began to sign at it, 'From-the-head, from-the-heart, from-the-sight, I sense the strongest mana like it is a separate piece of myself, sensing what is far away from my senses like a light in the dark. This chip of the whole is a tool for finding others of its kind, and it finds others very well.'

Mark's astral body drained away as he signed, and when he finished, he tied off the whole thing with a mirror-sign, to reflect the spell back into himself, hopefully allowing him to sense other adamantium out there like it was a piece of himself. What he had done the other day in his experiments with adamantium-sensing, that had almost knocked him out directly over that water elemental, had been way, way too strong. This cantrip here was weaker and more focused.

And as he finished the sign, and the spell took hold, Mark could sense, barely, the adamantium fragment sitting on the glass stand.

Mark reached out and grabbed it, and that's when his sense of adamantium really came online. It was like a sonar-pulse. Everything Mark had put into the fragment suddenly released, and Mark briefly sensed every bit of adamantium hidden throughout the entire settlement. A few bits were readily identifiable, like the pieces down in the various Builder's, Artificer's, and Enchanter's Guilds, located south-ish, to the west, and to the west but a bit north.

The gate had adamantium, too, which Mark wasn't aware of until now, but yeah. Giant enchanted thing? It had adamantium, for sure. Maybe even Mark's own adamantium, based on how bright the brief flash of sense seemed to be.

But it was like seeing fireflies in the dark. They were out there, yeah. Good luck finding them, and especially if they didn't light up.

Mark grinned, even as the sonar pulse ended, and the adamantium-shaped adamantium in his hand lost its significance. It was still solid mana and adamantium, but it was no longer the center of Mark's little ritual.

Mark headed down to the basement.

He put the crystal of adamantium right next to the crystal of Warming Fire he had made a while ago, to see if the adamantium crystal could 'grow' like it might be able to grow. 99.999% chance that nothing would happen, though, and that any adamantium it grew would just be Mark's own adamantium, just moved around on to this thing.

But crystals did tend to grow if they were made well enough.

The tiny drop of orange/black Warming Fire that Mark had made earlier was now a good hunk of crystal, about the size of a thumb. It was less black, and more yellow, and it made Mark feel warm to stand next to it. But it was pretty useless. Other people, like Dad's Crystals in Memphi, built empires on making crystals, and Mark's little experiment was nothing compared to their factory productions. The only good thing about it was that Mark had created a self-propagating mana crystal.

And that was pretty neat.

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