SSD 5.14 - Under Pressure

And we finally get into looking at that skill... which quickly gets weird. Spatial manipulation, when really thought through, gets very strange, very quickly.

True masters of spacial magic are rare. Gifted amateurs tend to die in a spectacularly messy fashion, unless they exercise extreme care. The best advice when fighting a spacial mage, is simply to not do so in the first place. If you must, engage with precision, overwhelming power, and from a place that they cannot see. If facing a master of spacial magic, surrender, and let a specialist deal with them, even if that specialist is more likely to be a diplomat, than a combatant.

-From, Military Doctrine of the Empire, standard issue for enlisted soldiers, IC 1742.

==Caden==

With the name “Spacial Elasticity,” I was understandably concerned about exactly where it would be appropriate, or rather safe, to test the skill.

Yes, a small amount of power directed into it would probably be manageable, but I wasn’t exactly sure what would be happening.

The name, sadly, offered too many possibilities to define what the skill actually did. With that name it could be related to portals, making areas larger or smaller in space, manipulating gravity, creating spacial twists and mazes in a Escher-esk fashion, or even a defense against spacial attacks and teleportation, with elastic space snapping back into place and being more difficult to cut or hold open.

The last possibility should only be dangerous if it ended up interacting with my own portals or teleportations. The spacial maze should presumably be the same, only dangerous on a larger level if it interacted badly with some form of other spacial or dimensional effect.

Probably.

It was hard to know anything for certain.

If I could take a smaller space, and then make it take up a larger volume, that could be very dangerous, as it could force the surrounding stone to buckle out of the way. Even if the skill was inclined more toward making mazes, twisting areas of space that already had things inside them might produce some very nasty effects.

Portals, as I had already seen, could be used as a devastating delivery system for weapons, or even cut things themselves. Still, as long as any portal was managed properly, it should pose minimal risk.

Gravity?

Who knows?

In the end I had decided to experiment near the surface, and at the outer regions under my control.

I had a small cube, roughly five feet across, hollowed out of the stone. For the moment, I was checking the skill itself. I could do live testing later, as that had its own horrific possibilities for going catastrophically wrong.

I didn’t bother to use one of my bodies, either. For this, it was just my pure perception.

For the first time, I engaged the skill.

Immediately, my spacial perception was enhanced, allowing me to feel the constant thrum of space around me. It hummed, timed to the multitude of gravity pulses from Otga and Shurum dancing far overhead. A gentle curve, or rather compression, caused by the stress of the mass of the planet, showed the gravity well that sloped toward the core.

I had no words sufficient to describe it.

It brought to mind the old experiments with a sheet of rubber and a ball. That demonstrated the basics, but failed to show the truth. Physical space wasn’t merely two dimensional, nor was it composed of a simple grid of geometric lines, which was another common depiction.

Here, where I stood, the effect of gravity was constant, but subtle. As applied to the cubical room, it felt as though the space at the top was slightly… larger, than the area at the top. Or rather, that the area at the top was… emptier, having less space inside it than the area below. And unlike most things, dense space didn’t push other things out, instead it pulled them in, as though it was trying to make the proportions of matter equal to what they were in the emptier space.

Which… is more or less exactly what is happening.

Kind of a chicken and the egg problem. Matter twists space, and then that increased density draws in even more matter, but dense matter resists further compression, trying to equalize the forces.

With my new sense, also came a vague feeling, that I could push, or I could pull.

Pushing sounds like the kind of thing that would create outward pressure. Probably best to start with a pull.

I targeted the room, gently pulling for a single second.

My spacial sense went haywire, and suddenly the room was insanely hot, but the surrounding stone failed to react at all.

What exactly am I feeling?

The room was still there… sort of.

From the outside, the perspective of the stone surrounding it, and any other sense I could muster, save the spacial, it was the same. Sure, it was a room with an intensely high heat, but it was still just a room.

Except, when I used my senses to feel the inside of the room…

It wasn’t really a room anymore. It was no more than a tiny cube a few millimeters on a side. All the air was contained in a tiny space, making it super heated. Normally, I would also say it was super pressurized, but the stone that surrounded it was reacting to neither the heat, nor pressure.

The spacial sense was the most interesting.

The space inside was now shaped oddly. The outer areas of space, where the walls met the interior, were stretched out, and then the interior area of space…

It’s almost gone.

Spacial elasticity my ass.

This has to be a case of The System being deliberately deceptive. Or, perhaps, describing what a skill looks like it is doing, rather than what is actually happening.

Need a science background to understand the level of insanity this represents.

The room now had less, well, space, making up the interior.

Which is why the walls don’t care…

From the perspective of the exterior, all that condensed air was striking over a much larger surface area. The exact same surface area that the air had been pushing against at the start. The condensed air was essentially plasma, but that heat difference would only matter because that air had grown hot enough to glow, and the infrared radiation would impact the exterior stone in a different way than the air would, though even that heat would be diffused over a much larger area, taking time to make any difference.

I could sense that, now that I looked closer, the tiny change in heat from that discharged radiation. Still, that exchange was happening far slower than would be expected, since the walls were, as all matter did, constantly exchanging infrared radiation of their own. And the larger surface area of the walls translated into disproportionately larger amounts of that heat heading to the tiny volume of air.

Hmm.

I teleported the compressed plasma out of the cube, replacing it with an equal volume of air at normal pressure.

An explosion rocked the air in one of the long empty corridors that lead to my core. And, back at the cube, the walls strained, and sections cracked, as from the wall’s perspective, the interior of the cube had become almost a vacuum.

I watched for a moment, reinforcing a few sections of the stone, then removing particles that had broken free.

Yep, thought so.

The air inside had begun to heat up. The larger volume of stone was transferring far more heat into the cube than the sparse air inside was releasing. Most of that infrared radiation would simply cross between the molecules of air, but then the stone on the other side would just release it again.

Leave this long enough, and the small sample of air inside would get hotter and hotter, until it was putting out just as much heat as was being absorbed.

This was, essentially, the perfect forge. I already had ways to maintain perfect temperatures, but this could let me push temperatures to an insane degree, because I didn’t need to worry about confining the heat. It I were to do this kind of thing with a vacuum, and just whatever materials I wanted to work with inside…

With a large enough area I could probably create an area hotter than the sun, and yet have the surrounding areas stay perfectly cool, even without my magic altering the environment.

The sun…

Oh.

Used carelessly, I could probably compress matter enough to generate a fusion reaction. Normally, I would say that was a terrible thing to do, since containing one could be very nasty.

However…

The same factors that made it the perfect forge environment also would make it a perfect place to contain a fusion reaction. The walls would resist pressure and heat with capacities that were far beyond what should be possible with any known material, simply because of the change in how those translated across the spacial gradient.

Still would need to be careful…

How stable is all of this? Losing that in the middle of a fusion reaction would be… bad.

I shook a phantom head at my substantial understatement.

The space I had deleted… wasn’t moving.

Probably for exactly that reason.

If I had just compressed it, or stretched it, it probably would have actually acted elastic, snapping back into place when not actively held in place.

Once again, I reflected that the name was highly deceptive.

So what happens to something entering?

I extended a tiny bit of stone from one of the walls.

Ugh, that makes me dizzy.

Or rather, it made me feel like I ought to be dizzy, a phantom sensation twisting through me as I watched the stone move through space.

From the perspective of that tiny line of stone, nothing odd had happened. It extended from the wall and then it was in a tiny cube of stone.

From my perspective, I watched the stone as it was distorted and stretched out along space like taffy, the matter entirely unaware of its path to get there.

Probably safe for living things then.

I pushed it farther, going all the way until it hit the opposite wall. I joined the stone together, and suddenly I had a section of stone crossing a few few of space… by traveling less than an inch.

Probably best I’m not in my human mode for this. It would probably manage to give me a headache. God, Gods?, this spacial alignment is already trying hard enough as it is.

Whatever my stone brain is made of, or however my brain is being emulated, it doesn’t handle this kind of thing much better than my old meat one would have.

Not much better, didn’t mean it wasn’t better at all. The ability to directly perceive the forces and stresses on everything in my aura meant that I could follow the way the space was altered, which did help a little, but it was still a challenge.

Okay, so what happens if something that is too large tries to enter?

Rather than extending a minuscule rod of stone, this time I started extruding one that was a little larger, at about an inch in diameter. I started, then stopped almost immediately.

The stone started to crack, as immense pressure from the contracting space condensed the stone inward as it was pushed forward. The mana I was using to create the stone, and move it forward, had risen sharply, as I had to push against the pressure of the stone resisting compression.

Compress a cube of material that is solid, rather than air… what would happen?

It would probably force that material outward… except from an external point of view the pressure would remain exactly the same…

It wouldn’t be like a hydraulic press, there would be no place where the compression was less, or unequal. More like being underwater, immense force expressed from every direction all at once.

It would have no where to go… So would it just compress?

Except, if it were surrounded my something compressible, like air, when the material fractured, it would try to move away from the internal pressure…

Right, incompressible things, like water or solids, probably won’t act like a gas, which just has pressure related to effective surface area. A liquid would probably be easier, but a solid, when it fractures, is likely to end up putting a great deal of force on small points...

It warranted testing.

A lot of things about this needed to be tested…

I left the original space alone, leaving it to see if there were signs that the spacial changes would eventually decay.

Now, as part of my additional testing, I started with something basic. I created a larger square hollow space, stretching ten feet tall, and about forty feet on a side, then added lights in the ceiling. Doing the same as I had before, I compressed another cube of air, this time ten feet across, making the targeted area flush with the floor and ceiling.

From where I was watching, the cube looked almost the same as it had before, and I could still see clearly through it to the other wall. A faint shimmer in the air, from the change of the air to plasma, was all that marked the outlines of the cube. If I wasn’t looking for it, it would be a challenge to see.

Hmm…

I made the lights a bit brighter, shifting a few of them to different colors, adding some very faint shades of red and blue.

I smiled.

Now, that cube of air was almost impossible to see.

Probably plenty of adventurers with better sight than me, but that is okay, they are allowed their advantages.

Still… does it work the way I think it does?

I placed a body into the room, which promptly toppled over when I didn’t step into the overlapping space fast enough.

Well… I’m glad that didn’t happen outside.

I put the body back into storage, then brought it back, oriented upright once more, this time affixing it to the floor slightly with fused stone.

Then I stepped into it and the body became me, rather than just stone and metal.

I took a breath, leaning closer to look at the cube.

The shimmer of the cube was more obvious when I was very close, but I doubted many would be able to properly see it from more than a couple of feet away.

I reached out my hand, and it stopped as though the cube was an invisible wall, and I smiled widely.

Invisible walls.

I pushed harder, but it was utterly impenetrable, not budging in the slightest.

I pulled back my hand, punching as hard and fast as I could. And that speed was considerably faster and harder than my human self would have been able to manage. Not just because I was working with stronger materials, but simply because our bodies naturally limited how much strength we could exert, so we don’t hurt ourselves, and we naturally hesitate in performing any action that might harm us.

I wasn’t afraid of any pain.

This body might feel, so long as I was inside of it, but it still wasn’t human, and it didn’t feel pain. When I had broken off pieces before, there had been no pain.

And so, at full force, my fist hit the faint shimmer, and stopped dead, sections of stone cracking as the force was stopped. All the forward momentum was transformed into an attempt to compress the forward edge of my fist, and the resistance to that pushing backward completely halted it momentum. I pulled my hand back, and sections of stone flaked off my knuckles.

Worse than just hitting a wall of solid stone.

I had watched the forces, when I stuck the barrier. Unlike any other surface, anything made of matter, there was no give to the spacial compression. The only give was in my fist, and the stone that made it, fracturing as the forward momentum was suddenly counteracted by a sudden compressive force at the point of impact, the almost orthogonal compression squeezing that point of contact.

Doesn’t look like the way this body works impacted anything, at all.

That had been one of my only real concerns. People had a constant mana… presence, and the mana in them acted differently. However, when I inhabited it, my stone body had the same thing.

Pretty sure that has something to do with how people cast spells and use certain skills. Which… is just one more thing I’ll need to work on. Eventually.

I was fairly sure that physical force was not going to be enough to damage the spacial compression, either. Still, I was going to test it.

I sent my physical form back into storage, simply observing in the phantom form.

When I was situated in a corner, and had heavily shielded the room with steel, I was ready to observe. I teleported a very dense piece of steel, which had been traveling at insane speeds inside a vacuum, and let it impact directly into the center of the barrier.

A number of things happened very quickly.

The entire cube of compressed space and air flashed blindingly bright, sudden additional force acting to compress the air inside even further, which raised the temperature inside to absurd levels. A massive explosion of force reverberated from the cube in every direction, the air bowing out of it in a shockwave, and the cube abruptly stopped glowing, as the relatively small internal volume of air was completely displaced to leave a vacuum.

This new shockwave of air, even though it had entered the uncompressed air of the area outside, was still compressed enough to form a visible and glowing wavefront.

It was, of course, met by the shockwave where a supersonic piece of metal had abruptly be halted in midair. It would have fractured no matter what it hit, but the additional compressing and rebounding force meant that all of its kinetic energy was conserved, now spread through tiny fragments which promptly vaporized fully into a blast wave of superheated metal and air.

The two blast waves met, but mostly moved through each other, vibrating through the air and then rebounding against the steel that now functions as the walls, each wall dozens of feet thick. Even so, the walls were gouged, melted, and sections had visibly bowed outward from the vastly increased internal pressure.

And yet, through all of this, the structure of space, stretched though it was, had not so much as quivered in reaction to the force.

Hitting this with extra force just means that whatever you hit it with is subjected to increased and highly unpleasant compression forces.

Invisible, and, indestructible walls. I absolutely have some uses for this.

If nothing else, making a maze out of this would be hilarious. Could even make it three dimensional… Standing on this stuff should be no different than attempting to touch it from any other direction.

Well, if nothing else, I now have a way to make the ubiquitous unassailable waist high fences of legend.

Who knows what happens if I make shapes other than cubes, too…

I could make some truly dangerous things with this, and I haven’t even seen what happens when I push, instead of pull.