Under the Dome

A gnarly arthritic hand reaches up to stroke a long snowy white beard.

Sousauryoku considers the documents before him. They are on crinkled paper, bits of papyrus and other improvised material, but the carefully scrawled script is all the same - it is the meticulous foreign hand of the Anakarix sage Jin-Kalys. Reading it is like trying to decipher an alien mind, not unlike deciphering First Mind writing really, a process Sousauryoku is very familiar with. Frequently it is unclear whether it is all a bunch of worthless arcane drivel, but once in a while something disturbingly accurate creeps through the endless equations. It is enough to keep him searching.

A young Allskin boy brings him a steaming cup of tea and bows ceremonially three times on his way out the door.

Nuisance, that. Sousauryoku had grown accustomed to being something of a celebrated rebel before all this business started. He was either known as "the Allskin innovator" or "a traitor to tradition" depending on who you spoke with. He liked both epithets. He'd earned them by his unorthodox scientific opinion that First Mind Artifacts were really just an advanced form of Cheldrun technology that society had somehow lost the necessary knowledge to duplicate. Where most Allskins treated anything connected to the First Minds with something like religious fervor, praying to them, wafting incense over them, and hoping that they would magically start working, he thought it should be possible to dissect them and learn their fundamental mechanical nature in order to recreate it.

Advice to anyone who wants to be popular among Allskin traditionalists - don't start breaking their precious First Mind Artifacts in order to find out how they work.

Of course, he'd been right, well partially. He had to admit that he hadn't been able to conclusively demonstrate any of his theories, but from time to time he'd managed to get an artifact to do a new trick, or self-destruct in dramatic fashion. Proof, as far as he was concerned, that they could indeed be manipulated predictably. If you could predict some rather surprising results.

What made him even more of a controversial figure was his adamant attachment to all the usual outward expressions of Allskin tradition. He still wore a kimono. He kept his beard long, to show his age and status. He visited his parents shrine on a monthly basis, and so on. Maybe he was just cantankerous. Maybe he just liked the lifestyle. Regardless, he never changed his mind because of popular opinion.

However, his social role of rebel genius was seriously compromised, and against his will, when that Anakarix sent the dome roiling into the sky. Because the artifact had been his, and because people were fools, he'd somehow gotten part of the credit for that feat, and now with a full blown war on their hands the citizens of Stardown had elevated him to mythic-heroic status and he could no longer go anywhere without someone idiotically bowing and scraping their faces on the floor.

Nor did it help that he'd accepted the title of General, in the newly minted Stardown Defense Force. He'd had to. He had no military expertise, but there was no one else in this 2-second operation with an ounce of good sense. Well, except for that Daitokuji fellow. And the lizard. The lizard who might just know more about what the hell is going on than even Sousauryoku.

He tossed the papers down on the desk in frustration and acknowledged Jin-Kalys who had been sitting by the window soaking in the sunlight this whole time.

"Which piece is the bloody beginning?"

The Cheldrun language sounded strange rolling off of his reptilian tongue, "None of them. The Nine branches interweave, they do not evidence an artificial priority. The quintessential aptitude of the logician is residing in the whole rather than dissecting the parts."

"That sounds like a clever way of saying you've forgotten."

Normally that might have gotten a rise out of the sage, but he was too happy in the sun to let it bother him. "Not at all. If you wish I can arrange the pages according to a variety of sequences which may increase intelligibility for a mind unaccustomed to polyvalent temporal-symbolic mathematics. Would you prefer the order in which I penned the material, or the order of increasing complexity?"

It was at that moment that Head-Like-Steel, one of the Zipsum couriers the SDF was using lately, burst into the room.

"The machine thingy got worse again. Three people got frozed. We pulled them out, but we broke two steel poles doing it. Still no one can get near."

Sigh.

This was apparently a side-effect even Jin-Kalys hadn't counted on. Since the First Mind artifact was activated, the dome had been thrown up, yes, but so had an inertial dampening field in the vicinity of the artifact. Jin himself had barely escaped the field when it activated and now no one, literally no one, could get close to the bloody thing to figure out what was going on. Those that attempted were either rebuffed or else frozen solid. And this was no harmless cryogenic stasis either. The victims often died, or if they lived they lost digits and patches of skin to the frost. What was worse, is that the dome appeared to be growing day by day, and as the dome grew, so did the inertial dampening field. It had already completely claimed the old facilities of Stardown Technology and Research, Sousauryoku's company. It was starting to leak out beyond the walls of that facility now.

Sousauryoku stroked his beard a few times in silence before dismissing the Zipsum with a nod.

"Change of plans. We'll assume this isn't a load of rubbish, or at least that you can use the same skills you used to activate the device in the first place, in order to control it or shut it off..."

Jin-Kalys interrupted, "Deactivating the artifact at the present would be a catastrophe! We..."

"Well, then you'll want to find a way to control it, won't you."

"But no one can get to it at the moment. We'd need someone of miniscule stature and almost impossibly fast..."

"Are you telling me that the work of the sainted and eternal lizard sage, Asterakalys, the Helio-Synthesis model, as you have applied it through nine-branch formal logic is not up to the task?"

Silence.

With a jaw like iron Jin Kalys asked, "Did you retain the schematics of the artifact from your former facilities?"

"Of course." Sousauryoku couldn't help but give a satisfied smirk at that.

"Then let us get to work."