“Hold, dammit!” Brilliant roared.
“I’m not sure it can take it,” Assistant cried out. “It’s going to overflow!”
“It needs more power! Give it everything you’ve got!”
“We can’t do any more, the matrix will collapse!”
“A little further,” Brilliant urged as the mana surged and frothed. Dimensional boundaries were cascading around them and she could peer into them all, flashing images of twisting reality that bent and warped themselves around her.
They were so close!
“It’s gone! Run!” Assistant shrieked, and Brilliant was vaguely aware of her followers ducking for cover or diving into the blast cages. She herself didn’t move, of course, transfixed as she was by the beauty she beheld in front of her.
“So beautiful,” she whispered.
A moment later, she was spear tackled and knocked from her observation platform.
“Experimant! What are you doing?!” she yelled.
“Saving your life, again,” the ant replied, flicking her antennae with irritation. “It’s a little difficult to make use of your insights if you die in the process of getting them.”
A point the Eldest had been at pains to make, numerous times, but Brilliant merely laughed.
“Danger can’t hope to find me,” she boasted, “I see it coming a full stratum away.”
She moved to stand up only for Experimant to yank her back to the ground. Then the explosion finally happened, the haywire mana discharging as purple lightning that arced over the walls, searing jagged patterns into the rock.
“Oh, right,” Brilliant muttered. “Forgot about that.”
They waited another minute before the mages and carvers that made up her merry band began to emerge from the reinforced concrete bunkers someone had decided to install in their research chamber. She strongly suspected Assistant was the one responsible, but she couldn’t quite prove it.
“Well done, everyone,” Brilliant rushed around the team, giving everyone an enthusiastic tap with an antenna. “Fantastic experiment, another rousing success! We are getting ever closer to our goal.”
“A-are you sure?” Assistant asked as she finally emerged, still hugging the floor as the last few sparks danced across the walls. “It seemed like it went rather poorly to me.…”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Brilliant chided, snapping her mandibles to emphasise her pheromones and mimic the human sound. “How many times do I have to teach you? Only a truly successful test will end with a multiple manifold-collapse. We were able to peer deeper into the weave than ever before! Our goal has never been closer than it is right now.”
Not willing to waste any further words on those who didn’t share her clarity of vision, she raced to the enchanted array embedded into the floor beneath the great stone edifice she had dubbed the rift-arch. Reinforced behind thick layers of hardened ice and embedded within a holding structure of living stone, the array was a sophisticated piece of enchanting, the only one of its kind within the Colony. Smithant herself had been consulted on the crafting of it, to the specifications of Brilliant’s groundbreaking, mad design.
“Look!” she crowed. “Just look at the readings! One-two-three… sixteen identifiable threads. Our spatial pathway managed to make it a third of the way to its destination before collapsing!”
“Yes,” Experimant drawled, “which means any ant who travelled through it would be liquified. Not quite the result we are aiming for.”
“Bah! We are making great strides. Great strides. You don’t discover the secrets of teleportation magic without exploding a few gateways. If you could see as I do…”
“I’m not sure my brain could handle it….” Assistant said.
“I still don’t understand why this is so difficult…” Experimant huffed, clearly frustrated, her antennae swinging low. “If we only want to travel through regular space, why is it necessary to map such a difficult course? Why bother with these other dimensions at all?”
Brilliant rounded on her helper, contempt evident in every line of her carapace, but it was Assistant who interjected first.
“There i-is no such thing as r-regular space. It is a dimension. Everything i-is a dimension. If you punch a h-hole in one, you punch a hole i-in all of them.”
“Exactly right!” Brilliant declared, sliding the protective screen clear and fiddling with the delicate instruments attached to the matrix. “It’s almost as if we aren’t looking to find a destination in three dimensional space, but rather find our way back to it. Right now, all we are doing is shooting bright light into the dimensional weave, illuminating the darkness so we can better understand it. Once we have a clearer picture, we can step with more confidence.”
“But can’t you already move through space?” Experimant pressed. “Is it that much harder to make a functional gate?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! For one, I am an incredible genius! For two, you are comparing an ant slipping through cracks in the wall, to knocking a hole in the thing and building a tunnel through it. I am protected by my vision, knowledge and Skills. How do we construct a path that will allow any ant, who has none of those things, to pass through safely? You’re comparing tea and biscuits.”
All around them, the team had come to life, examining the data, conferring with each other and adjusting the runes scratched into the rift-arch using the special plates that Brilliant had designed. An ant crawled up the arch, gripped the scorched metal sheet in her mandibles and pulled it from its slot before returning with a new, non-melted sheet and sliding it in place.
Brilliant was in the thick of it all. She rushed from group to group, cajoling, exhorting and haranguing every individual and group she came across. The ants who worked on this team were used to it and endured her ranting with otherworldly patience, following the directions they could interpret until, finally, everything had been ordered to her satisfaction.
“Excellent!” Brilliant cackled as she beheld the new configuration. “I have high hopes for this one. Very high! How are the dimensional mana banks, Assistant?”
“Th-they’ve reached fifty p-percent and rising, leader.”
“Experimant! Is the matrix holding steady?”
“Readings are stable, leader.”
The little ant rapidly climbed back up to her observation post, looking down directly into the rift-arch.
“I’ve told you so many times,” she chuckled, “call me BRILLIANT!”
