It has been a few hours since her conversation with Morpheus over the strange Flower-Ansible. Still, she feels a bit less lonely now than she has for some time. She even ate one of the freeze-dried rations and found it wasn't too vile – just slightly vile. The amazing power one's mood has, really. And even better, the crystals now embedded in her body don't seem to be causing any issues and there are no signs of tissue rejection at the seams where her flesh and the crystal meet.

So Envoy now has a choice of things she can do. There's an entire base to explore still and that is on top of contacting her friend at the museum to arrange transport so that she can collect some of the missing senses for the Leviathan. And on top of that, she now has to find a suitable body for her friend to 'borrow' as a remote of himself. All in all it's a lot to do, really. It's growing late, though, so contacting her ally may be a bit problematic tonight. So that leaves her with research in the lab.

Deciding to explore a bit, Envoy makes her preparations. First is her fighting staff – she makes sure it hasn't suffered from its hundred-days of neglect, and casts a simple enchantment on it so that she has some light at the end of a sturdy poking stick. Next she ponders defenses, just in case. She's used the Stone Strength ritual in the past, and it could come in handy just in case she has to move something heavy or avoid being squashed. She takes out her chalk for drawing a magic circle, and then pauses in thought for a moment.

"I'm about twelve times more efficient at casting spells now," she notes to the crystal flower, in lieu of someone physical to talk to. "So, maybe I can get away with pure visualization to control the magic." She puts the chalk away, and pictures the circle she wanted to draw in her mind's eye.

Her staff seemed a bit dried out from a hundred days of sitting in sterile air, but after a quick application of, well, some cooking oil, it's back in 'reasonable' shape. The light enchantment is simple enough for her to manage; as it would be for any mage of her skill level. As for her talking to the flower … well it doesn't reply at the moment. Maybe she really is going insane. Visualizing the circle is also simple enough and yet she doesn't feel the gathering of magic she would normally expect …

Instead, she hears an odd crystalline tinkle. It sounds like a wind chime, if she had to guess.

Envoy blinks at this, and tries to locate the sound… at least to ensure it wasn't in her head.

It's hard to place, unfortunately. And given the state of things, she can't even be quite sure it wasn't in her mind.

The Aeolun goes back to her circle exercise. She realizes that if she's using pure visualization, then she's not restricted to a two-dimensional pattern – so she modifies the circle by extending parts into the third dimension to make it more efficient. Once she's satisfied, she focuses on gathering magic into it.

There's that damn tinkle again. She can feel magic gathering now … but something seems odd. It isn't gathering in her visualized circle.

This time Envoy doesn't stop to listen – she keeps trying to gather magic into her virtual circle and uses her magic-sense itself to try and pinpoint where it's actually going.

Her sense tells her something odd … it is moving. The sound grows louder now … and it is approaching her from behind!

Breaking off her singing, Envoy clutches her staff and turns around, calling, "Who goes there?"

Envoy finds herself staring at her collection of Sifran crystal parts. They're floating in midair a few feet away. And … then they just drop to a clatter on the floor.

"Now you react to magic?" she asks in slight exasperation. With a sigh, she goes to collect the wayward crystals. "I wish I had a Chaos Mage here to help figure you out," she tells the crystals.

And of course hey do absolutely nothing as she collects them up. They just sit there and glow brightly and cheerfully. Jerks.

This time Envoy puts them all into the crystal box and closes the lid. Then… she gets out her chalk. Enough experimenting, she figures, and draws out the standard circle, with her own embellishments for error control and material component compensation.

Drawing the circle is no problem at all. In about fifteen minutes she has it completed.

The Aeolun shakes her head at the irony. It'll probably take the same amount of time to cast the spell as it did to make the circle. She stands inside, clears her thoughts as best she can, and begins to sing the ritual.

About a minute into her song there's a horrible rattle. Her crystal box is bouncing around now!

Envoy stops, and eyes the box. She waits to see if it settles down.

Sure enough, after a few seconds it settles down.

After opening the box again, Envoy grabs one of the crystals and checks it for signs of a magical charge.

It takes a bit of prodding … but yes, it does seem to. And of course it's right at that moment of sensing that she hears a loud monotone voice in her head, "MATRIX CORRUPT. DEFINE OPERATIONAL PARAMETERS."

"Well, it was broken originally," Envoy mutters as she ponders a reply. "LESSER INTERFACE ENERGY STORAGE UNIT," she finally sings back, to see if it will reconfigure itself as a battery for magic.

The crystal flares brightly and squirms in her hand. The end result is … some sort of Mobius strip. Arcs of almost electric-like looking energy ripples within its single surface. "CONFIGURATION COMPLETE. STORAGE EFFICIENCY IS 93.5 PERCENT WITH QUANTUM INSTABILITY INCREASE PROPORTIONAL TO CHARGE. AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS," she thinks it says.

So, now they respond to magic as if it were some sort of activation code. Could be how the awakening of the Seed reactivated them, Envoy thinks. "REACT ONLY TO ENERGY DIRECTED SPECIFICALLY INTO UNIT, AND DISCHARGE ONLY WHEN DIRECTLY DRAWN UPON," she sings, hoping it will avoid the current issue of the crystal sucking up all of her spell magic.

"COMMAND ACCEPTED," it replies, "SVARTIFIN MASTER BIO-UNIT IDENT REGISTERED AS ACCESS COMMAND KEY 0."

So I'm a Svartifin now? At least I know what that is! Envoy tells herself. She now has, potentially, a way to store a ritual or two's worth of magic that she can carry around with her, just like a pre-charged ritual used for aptitude testing on Caroban – except this one might work where there isn't any magic normally. She considers slipping the twisted crystal ribbon around her wrist, but decides to put it into one of her robe's inner pockets instead for the time being. She looks over the rest of the crystals in the box, and asks them, "Am I going to have to go through this for all of you now, or will you behave? No more jumping around unless I activate you, got it?"

The crystals just sit there looking inert. Nothing has indicated they're sentient after all…

Going back to her circle, Envoy keeps one eye on the open box as she gets back into spell-casting mode, and starts singing to charge the ritual circle once more.

So of course the crystals start moving again. They float back out of their box and encircle the singing Aeolun. There's something a bit odd about the pattern of the circle they make. It hits her, it looks like they're taking up positions in her earlier mental three dimensional circle.

Intrigued, Envoy continues – and this time visualizes the structure again, despite having the drawn one. Even if the magic is going into the crystals… at least she may still be able to get it back out again.

The crystals spin about her slowly and their shapes distort and twist as each one takes on the shape of one of her magic symbols. "CONTROL PATTERN RECOGNIZED," they chime in unison, "ISOLATED RECONFIGURATION OF SPACE-TIME ENGAGED. DEFINE PARAMETERS OF NEW SPACE-TIME."

"Okay, that sounds ominous," Envoy thinks, but then focuses on the spell of Stone Strength, even though she isn't sure how it actually works, since the user doesn't literally turn to stone. She decides to do a full casting, rather than hold the spell, just to make sure it really works when done like this.

"CONFIGURATION CONFIRMED. LOCALIZED ORGANIC RECONFIGURATION INITIATED. CELLULAR DEFLECTION EMISSIONS TARGET NINETY PERCENT. TELEKINETIC AUGMENTATION TARGET THIRTY PERCENT. CONCERN, TARGET IS NOT COMPLETELY ORGANIC. USE SVARTIFIN BIO-PATTERN AS BASIS. SUCCESS PROBABILITY SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT," the crystals sing along as they seem to decide Envoy's fate. "DURATION DEPENDENT ON LATENT QUANTUM STATE REFLECTION."

I don't recall having problems last time… maybe using the crystals for a circle isn't a good idea, Envoy thinks. It's like knowing what's gone into making a sausage at Binter's Shack when you're hungry.

"CANCELLATION TIME EXPIRED. SPACE-TIME RECONFIGURATION INITIATED!" the crystals declare. Every inch of Envoy's skin starts to itch!

"This is just supposed to be a temporary effect," Envoy notes through gritted teeth. The itching is definitely a new twist.

"BIO-PATTERN NOT EXACT AND RESISTIVE. COMPENSATING. ATTEMPTING TO DISABLE REGENERATIVE ENZYMES IN TARGET," the crystals declare.

"Wait… no!" Envoy yelps. "I need those!" She starts singing the spell again, in reverse this time.

"CONFIGURATION COMPLETE!" the crystals chirp cheerily as Envoy starts her singing again, "SUCCESSFUL ALTERATION OF SPACE-TIME." And sure enough, Envoy's body has taken on the usual characteristics of that spell; a 'stonier' outward appearance. "DURATION ESTIMATED AT SIXTY STANDARD UNITS. FURTHER RECONFIGURATION DEEMED HAZARDOUS. COMMAND IGNORED."

"Great, I'm harder to hurt, but can't recover quickly if I am," Envoy mutters. Once the transformation is complete, she watches to see what the crystals do next.

Without further influence, they drop to the floor in a clatter.

"You could at least fly back to the box by yourself," Envoy complains, and goes about sweeping the crystals into a pile with her now-heavy wings. She'll put them away later – for now she needs to do her exploring while the spell effect is in place, and hope she returns to normal when it passes.

While her wings may be heavy, they do not feel too heavy to her at least. Perhaps they would fly back into a box … but then she would need to know the right commands instead of just trying things.

Taking up her staff-light, Envoy heads out into the complex, to poke around where she hasn't before, and ponder the practicality of using the crystals for casting rituals. On the one hand… they did handle the error correction elements without much input from her, which reduces some of the overhead. A thing to consider if she ever has to try another Major Ritual on her own.

On the other hand, they may have had unintended side effects as once Envoy steps out of the lab and into the main base, she is assaulted by the noise of machinery firing to life somewhere in the distance. Hisses of steam from cracked, ancient pipes come … and even the worrying scent of ozone. It seems the firebase has just come alive…