Limitless Path

Beth didn't have to wait long, as the Hall Master was able to clear out a little bit of time to meet with them. She came down in person to escort them up to her suite on the top floor, one which had an office attached. Baelvyr had a suite similar to that at Beth's home Hall, but she knew he hardly ever used it for anything, whether that was work or rest. The Hall Master here, who was some kind of sapient beast, though Beth was having trouble figuring out her species without using Identify, apparently spent a lot of time in her suite's office. The Hall Master saw them seated, giving Blood a small sniff as she did so, which Blood unabashedly returned rather more vigorously. Beth used that momentary pause in the interaction to scan the Hall Master with her eye power.

Christina Wulla, Level 280[12] Stellar Ursine

So, she was some kind of bear. Beth wouldn't have guessed that without using an Identify skill on her, and it was also likely why Blood was giving her a few more sniffs than was polite. Though Beth had no idea what was polite between sapient beasts; she didn't go around sniffing other people, but Blood did, and those people never really complained. Blood seemed to find the Hall Master curious, but the sniffing didn't extend any further, either in time or content, and Christina sat in a chair at the head of the little formation at the side of her office. She had clearly scanned all three of them, Beth able to feel it, as she wasn't subtle about it, but it was quick and didn't cause any issues, so Beth shrugged it off. It was considered a little passé to comment on someone using an Identify-type skill in almost all situations as well, so people generally politely ignored it.

"What can I do for you? The desk worker said you had some questions about the area?" Christina asked.

"Just wanted to stop in and ask a few things," Beth replied. "We got a job from our Hall to survey the area. We did flyovers first, but now the follow-up job is in-person inspection of all the places that we marked as having any interest in the first round. Wanted to get some info from someone who had been overseeing the area on what's what."

"Right, you three have that mission," Christina said with a quick shake of her head. "Honestly, I would have loved to have somebody from this Hall do it; it would have looked good on the reports to have people here tackle Gold missions, but we just aren't prepared. We have forty people total who had the interest in, and that met the pre-requisites, to pass the Silver test, and none of those forty are close to Gold. The other main branch that is within the heart of the high-mana area is up in the city of Chicago and they're in about the same situation as us, maybe a bit better, but none of their Silvers are ready to start tackling Gold missions. It's honestly pretty surprising the three of you are, though I'm guessing the lady from the Black Dragon Clan isn't exactly a native?"

"No, I'm not," Sera said, waving a hand lazily, her other arm being wrapped around Beth on the couch they occupied. "We met when these two went off-world to…broaden their horizons, let's just say. We formed an instant connection and I joined up with them; haven't regretted it for a moment since."

"It's nice when you find someone you're comfortable with," Christina said, giving a rather smoldering look to Blood, if Beth was any judge. "So, what exactly do you want to know?"

"Any of your Seniors or you been out in the area? Anything they could tell us of the high-mana zone?" Beth asked simply.

"I made two trips out there in the few years we've been here, though the first was not that long after we arrived. I went with our commissar and set up some monitoring equipment in a few places; nothing complex or robust, just enough to pull in some general data from a wide swathe of land. I have the basic reports, but you should go down and ask him if you want all the gritty details. That was before the mana started piling up like old socks in a gym locker and things took a decided turn south, no pun intended, considering how many people fled south. The second trip I did was about a year ago; I took a couple notes, just a basic sketch of things, on a handful of anomalies. If you've been doing this a while and are getting ready for Gold, you should know an awful lot can change in a year, but I'll send you the couple pages I do have," Christina explained.

"Let me trade with you. We've explored one site, not that far away, though we haven't fully mapped it. Some portal underground that's popping out wraiths at a steady rate; we got some weird ore outta the walls, though we only found a tiny amount of it. Blood scouted around and found the source of the disturbance, which was definitely a portal and not a standard dungeon from the looks of it, and we left," Beth said, tossing her small file on the wraiths to the Hall Master.

"No essence harvesting equipment or death-breakers?" Christina asked.

"Exactly," Sera responded. "We weren't exactly prepared, which kinda sucks to admit, but we don't have the tools for wraiths right now. In fact, we don't have a very big stock of extraneous tools like that at all, which is something we should probably correct here pretty soon."

"We can take a weekend to do a shopping trip," Beth said, hiding a grin when that elicited a small groan from Blood.

"We don't have much of that equipment on-world," Christina said. "But we do have a bit. You should check with the commissars and see who has what and what you can requisition for this exploration."

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"We'll do that," Beth said, it being her turn to groan now.

"Short of money?" asked Christina, clearly misinterpreting the groan.

"No; our commissar is a total asshole. It's a pain to deal with him," Beth answered.

"Wait, who's at your Hall?" Christina asked, eyes going distant for a second while she looked it up.

"Jaq," Beth said at the same time Christina answered her own question by saying, "Jaq Rezzar, is it? My sympathies."

"He's not that bad," said Sera, getting frowns from both Christina and Beth and a scoff from Blood.

"I'm not a people person and I can tell he's an asshole," said Blood.

"Well, sure, but he's not actively hampering us or anything. He's just a bit rude," Sera said.

"A bit?" Beth asked with some venom in her voice.

"A bit," Sera defended herself. "Trust me, once you meet my family, you'll think Jaq is small potatoes."

"Oh boy, that sounds fun," Beth said, rolling her eyes.

"I know; I can't wait for it, either," Sera said with a wicked grin.

"Ahem, anyway," Christina cut in, refocusing them. "I'll pass these notes to you. You should head down to the commissary and ask Sazz about the supplies and about the data from the monitors he had setup."

"Will do," Beth said, recognizing a dismissal when she heard one. "By the way, what's a stellar ursine."

"We're star bears," said the woman with a shrug. Beth had noted she had rather thick hair and it seemed to extend into a mantle like Blood's, but she could tell little else through the woman's clothes and armor other than that she had her ears as fully human. "Supposedly, our ancestors were some kind of bear species that wandered space and even lived on stars when they became powerful enough. I don't know that that's true, but I am really resistant to a lot of cosmic forces, and I have a couple skills that give me more physical strength and toughness that I haven't heard of anyone else using."

"Cool. Didn't mean to pry, was just curious," Beth said as they were walking out of the office.

"No problem; it doesn't really bother me. If you ever find somebody bothered by it, they were probably raised by people or in an environment with people that displayed a lot of prejudice, and for no good reason. People like that can get prickly when asked about their heritage, but I'm proud of my lineage, or what I know of it, at least," Christina said with a shrug, seeing them out the door before returning to whatever paperwork she had been doing before they asked to meet with her.

They made their way down to the commissary, finding the place basically packed with people, to the point they had to wait in line just to get a minute of Sazz's time. And that was after the other person working the counter, because the commissary here needed more than one worker, substituted for him. They asked him about the items they needed briefly, and he redirected them to, funnily enough, Jaq to make the requisition, which made Beth feel like she was just chasing her own tail a bit. As to the survey data he had, he warned that most of it was old and that most of his installations weren't working properly anymore, but he gave them a large data packet and access to the feeds, no charge. That was one of the good things about being on a mission that was official CRA business; other members would help to the best of their ability without charging anything, or barely anything. The data was likely worth at least a good few gold coins, even if it was heavily outdated, and it was nice to not have to dip into their pocketbooks to get their hands on it.

After that, Beth decided it was more investigation. She didn't want to go back and listen to Jaq harangue them for being unprepared, and maybe they could get a better of idea of what they should even be prepared for if they explored a bit more. That meant their next destination was decided, and Beth had the three of them slip out of the Hall. Well, as much as they could, considering they had parked an airship in the parking lot, and they deployed it at the far end of the lot again when they were leaving. Beth laughed at all the exclamations and looks of surprise when she re-deployed the airship, some people going so far as to leap out of the way of the ship, even though they weren't even close to where she had it unfold.

Blood took the helm and had them up and away, Beth glad that nobody had lodged any complaints yet about Blood piloting without her license. They flew back over the city, leveling out at quite a bit higher altitude this time, as Beth didn't want any more blue-on-blue incidents as they departed. Luckily, nobody took any shots at them this time, and they were out of the city and away, heading towards the next point of interest they wanted to explore. It was about twenty minutes of flying if they kept the speed to just under the speed of sound, a few hundred miles covered easily and comfortably.

The next site was on a large, raised hill, set apart from the rather flat land around it, with mana visibly pulsing out of the top of the hills. Blood took them in low and fairly slow, circling around the hill from only five or six hundred feet in the air. At that elevation they didn't even need any of the enhancing capabilities of the bridge to zoom the images on the screens in; their vision was more than enough to see everything they needed without any assistance. Even without any kind of enhancement or filter, they had a very good view of waves of white and golden mana roiling up into the air. Beth wasn't exactly sure what to make of it, but she could easily look it up, considering they had a connection to the Net while the ship was deployed.

The golden mana was likely some kind of holy mana, based on what a quick search turned up. It wasn't something she had encountered before and was distinctly different than the celestial mana that her skill generated. The white mana that was combined with it could be a whole slew of things, from a secondary effect to air or wind mana to even frost mana. The only way they were going to be able to figure out what was going on was a combination of scans from the ship and hands-on investigation. The data they had got by stopping at the New Orleans Hall didn't have anything on this, so it had either changed or emerged since that data had been collected.

The ship's sensors gave a decent picture of what was happening, at least in the air above the hills, even if they had trouble looking much deeper. The mana was indeed holy mana, which Beth had figured out herself without thousands of golds worth of equipment, but the secondary mana was not air or wind or frost but sacred mana, which sort of made sense considering the massive amounts of holy mana. Sacred mana was a more complex and more powerful type of mana that had similar alignments as holy mana but was harder to produce and control. Mana types themselves had a sort of increasing hierarchy of complexity and power. Sacred mana was more powerful than holy mana, but if one thought about it, it took more effort or more baseline, neutral mana to generate sacred mana.

One of the ways this manifested was, for example, when someone cast a skill or spell, but skills in particular. Because skills, as Zane had explained, were using rudimentary forms of runes, a lot of the control and conversion of the mana came from the caster. Somebody creating some fire on their fist using a silver[0] skill wouldn't need to spend quite as much mana or exert quite as much focus and control as someone projecting a beam of sacred energy from their fist using a silver[0] skill, assuming both skills were the same tier.

The differences weren't exactly monumental, but they added up over time, and they spoke to a power gap that would develop at higher tiers. Beth's spatial and celestial skills would have a bit of an edge over simpler skills, or skills using simpler mana types, when those skilled were compared at a higher level. Her skills already being in either Gold or Platinum already demonstrated a lot more power than the skills of others, though a decent chunk of that was due to tier differences. What wasn't due to tier differences was due to mana differences, with the types of mana that Beth used being of a more complex type. This could have been a real drain on Beth, but she had neatly sown up that problem by building a Mana Physique five rebirths early.