Dana was… less than excited about her familiars, at least compared to the eagerness that she had shown when she first started her summoning. From a practical standpoint, she was fully aware that being able to mass produce fully working clones was a powerful ability, especially as each one of them could summon their own familiar. However, there were some things that she had to test first.
Her first test was to try to leave the familiars operating in the real world while she returned to the Admin Room. After summoning Heaven’s Gate, Dana stepped through and began to count down from sixty. However, to her surprise, her familiars were already in the Admin Room upon her arrival.
Clara grinned playfully, looking at Dana. “Looks like you’re stuck with us.” She said in a teasing tone, Sienna simply nodding her head in agreement.
Dana clicked her tongue at her two familiars, finding that this experiment was a failure. She had been hoping that her familiars would be able to operate in the mortal world like Tsubaki’s Servant avatars, but neglected the fact that familiars possess complete souls, making them a different type of entity than a simple avatar.
With a shake of her head, Dana returned to the Sky Citadel together with her three familiars. The next thing that she tried to test was whether or not the familiars could create their spells themselves, or if it was still Dana who personally needed to create a spell for them.
The result for this was… rather surprising. Despite the familiars having all of Dana’s power, they were unable to initiate the process of creating their own spells. While they could undergo each individual step, the final spell would not settle in any of the ‘spell slots’ available to a fourth-tier familiar. Only when the spell came from Dana itself would it settle.
“That’s interesting…” She muttered, but she was honestly thankful that this was the case. If the familiars were able to casually create their own spells, there was the chance that they would be able to make something over time to turn against her. Was it really considered having trust issues when the person that you were having a problem trusting was just a clone of yourself? Well, maybe…
The last test was to see how far they could operate independently from Dana. Clearly, she was not able to leave the mortal world while having them act, but what about going between different worlds?
To test this, Dana sent Sienna to Fyor, and Clara to Lorek. What she found confused her more than anything else. Sienna operated perfectly fine, able to walk around Fyor and function entirely without interference. Clara, however, found herself slowed to an almost crawl as the world sped up around her.
Seeing that reminded her of when the Virtual reality had just been released, the Keeper’s Virtual self experiencing a similar situation. This is probably less of an interference from the familiar system itself, and probably more due to whatever happened with the Heaven’s Gate.
With this, Dana believed that she had everything she needed in order to fully make use of her familiars. If she wanted to, she could even create several dozen more, but she decided against doing so for the foreseeable future. As long as there were only two of them, she could still manage if something went wrong, but that would not be the case if the numbers increased too drastically.
The next thing that she had to do was to create the spells for each of the familiars, determining the roles that they would play. Given that they each had her magical talent, there was no need for any basic spell that she could reproduce with another magic system. Instead, it was better to create spells that she could not easily use otherwise.
To do so, she found the information that had been sent to the Citadel regarding the imagination system, and examples of some of the effects that one could create. It was hard to describe the limits of the imagination system. Simply saying that it was limited by one’s imagination… while accurate, also limited it further. If you give someone too much creative freedom, they will often be unable to come up with ideas as elaborate as in cases where they are constrained to a set of rules.
This was the primary reason why Kione had lagged behind the other worlds in its magical development, the simple fact that they had too much freedom with their magic. Now that there were guidelines and established methods being ‘discovered’, people continued to push the boundaries of what was possible.
“Sienna, I’ll be giving you mostly utility magic.” She explained, her hand placed on the back of her familiar. “Once I’m done, I want you to personally manage the training of the monsters in Deckan’s shadow. Take Stone Father with you, and help him with his training, too.”
Sienna’s eyes briefly widened, and she gave a firm nod at the command. In fact, Dana knew that Sienna wouldn’t object to this order. Giving personal training to the shadow monsters was something that Dana herself wanted to do for a long time. Now that she essentially had an extra body, there was no reason not to offer this chance to her familiar.
“What about me?” Clara asked, eyes wide and almost sparkling. “Am I going to be playing games with you and Tsuba? Or maybe working in the workshop? We never finished the new design for the Sky Chariot, after all!”
Dana grinned playfully, looking at Clara. “You’ll be in charge of void patrols.” Clara’s face immediately fell at Dana’s words.
“This is prejudice! Why does she get to train all the shadow beasts, but I have to hang out in the void all day?” Clara asked, pouting her lips. Dana couldn’t help but laugh at the exaggerated reaction.
“The void is growing more dangerous by the day. Fifteen years passed out of nowhere, and we don’t know to what degree the void beasts have evolved. You can be considered a Fallen God, after all. It’s only right for you to do this. If I could take your place, I would.” Dana spoke in a righteous tone, Clara immediately pointing an accusatory finger at her.
“Then trade places with me! I’ll stay here to play with Dale and Tsuba, and you can go run around in the void!”
“Nope.” Dana glanced off to the side shamelessly. “That’s what I have you for.” Clara simply collapsed at that comment, arms spread out on the ground.
“Well… what kind of magic are you going to give me, then? If Sienna has utility magic to help her with her monster training, what about me?”
Dana thought about that as she finished injecting another spell into Sienna’s body. “Combat and detection magic. Sienna is logistic support, while you are going to be a pure battle familiar. Also, we need to learn how to sync up our experiences. If you can use all of my abilities, I need to learn how to share new abilities that I learn later, as well as how to get abilities that you learn yourselves.”
Sienna’s eyes flashed at that. “Absurdity…”
Dana simply nodded her head. “That’s right. You girls aren’t going to be the only ones busy. I am planning to work on mastering the Absurdity of Fate while you are both taking care of your tasks. I need to be able to transmit any mastery I obtain to the two of you.”
“That’s cool and all!” Clara began, before her face fell. “But can we even use that technique when we don’t have all those fragments?” As if to test that idea, she stood up from the ground, brushing off her skirt.
Clara held her hand forward, bringing her index finger and her thumb just an inch apart. She looked at one of the tools on the counter, positioning her hand so that the tool in her perspective fit neatly between the tips of her fingers. After a moment of focus, she moved her hand, the tool teleporting and shrinking to be the same size that she had ‘perceived’ it as.
“That would be a yes.” Dana nodded her head. This was one of the advanced training methods of Absurdity of Fate, using perspective to warp the world around you. “I expect you to put that back at its proper size, by the way.”
Clara’s eyes widened at that, fumbling with the much smaller tool in her grasp. “A-Ah, right!” She nodded quickly, bringing it up to look at the table again. She adjusted her perspective, bringing her hand closer and further away, shifting the angle to try to get it just right. Afterwards, she released the tool, and it dropped down onto the table at its full size. “Okay, so we can still be as absurd as ever.”
Once Dana pulled her hands off of Sienna’s back, the latter’s body melted into the shadows at her feet, leaving to carry out the orders that Dana had given. “If that’s the case, I’m almost worried what would happen if you created your own familiar…” Dana said, looking intently at Clara.
“Oh! You mean if I ended up only having a talent for making clone-types, as well?” She mused, before quickly shaking her head. “Maybe if I went to the Underworld, shattered my soul, and let it marinate for a few centuries. After that, I guess I’d be at the same standard you were before? Though it’s equally possible that clones can’t make more clone familiars.”
Dana gave a small nod, before looking at Clara. “In that case, what type of familiar would you want?”
Clara rolled her eyes playfully. “Obviously, I’d want the same type of familiar you’d want. Let’s see… I’d want a planet!”
Dana’s eyes widened at the unexpected answer. “A planet?” She looked at her familiar incredulously, wondering how she had come to such an answer.
“Well, yeah!” Clara grinned. “Wasn’t there that case of the living planet god not long ago? And you can make inanimate objects into familiars. If that’s the case, what’s stopping you from getting a truly massive familiar? Oh! We should ask Accalia if that’s possible!”
Dana’s brow twitched, but she did indeed make the call. Accalia… what is the largest familiar that is possible to obtain with Kione’s magic system?
Hmm? Seeing how distracted she sounded, Accalia must have been looking elsewhere, not paying attention to the conversation of the Dana clones. Let’s see… it depends on the size of the soul used as a material. Though, bigger familiars also require material components and a longer summoning time.
Okay… but what’s the upper limit?
There was a moment’s pause, Accalia looking through the information. U-Uhmm… there’s the Celestial Body familiar? It starts off as a small star that can fit in the palm of your hand. Every rank up, it gets extra planets that orbit it. And… at the fourth rank, if enough mana is provided, it can expand to become a full-size solar system. If you want familiars that are massive from the start, there’s the Building type?
Y-You’re kidding, right? Dana gulped, eyes going wide again. How can a familiar become an entire solar system? What would the mana requirements for that even be?
It depends on the size. However, I doubt we need to worry about anyone doing this. To get a celestial body familiar, you need to use an actual star as the material component for the spell, opening an Underworld gate right in the heart of it and throwing your soul in. More importantly, because the familiar is so large, I don’t advise using it, as its main purpose would be space travel. That, or just hurling planets at a target.
“I’m doing it!” Clara said with determination. “My familiar’s going to be a star!”
Dana let out a deep groan. “Why? What good is hurling planets at a target? The projectile speed would be too slow, and most enemies you’d want to do that for wouldn’t even take that much damage from colliding with a planet.”
“Still doing it!” Clara grinned broadly. “And I’m going to make it the location of our new workshop.”
Now that… that Dana couldn’t argue against. A workshop built on a planet controlled entirely by them, in a solar system that only they could command. “We’re going to need a lot of mana.” She said with a sigh, though Clara only chuckled mischievously.
“Talk to Dale. Presumably, a planet-type familiar would have naturally occurring resources. If we convince him to give us a large enough vein of Mage Heart in one of our planets, we’ll have all of the mana we need to maintain its full size.”
