In the two months since arriving in the Splinter, Ana had learned to do magic. Very limited magic; she could act as a conduit for mana, powering ritual circles or Engravings on objects, and she could harden her skin to make herself less vulnerable to damage. She could do her arms, neck, head, and shoulders now, all at once — the most important parts, really. But that was all she could do.

Well, that and turn unaligned mana into weakly Earth-aligned mana, but that was a separate skill entirely.

As useful — not to say amazing — as those things were, Ana wanted more. Tellak agreed that it was time to learn something new, especially with how Ana's Shaping Skill seemed to have stalled out at Level 4.

Ana especially wanted to learn two things that she'd seen Tellak do. The first was to somehow increase the mass of her weapons. Tellak wasn't too locked into any one type of weapon, changing the shape of her weapon into a sword, hammer or axe as appropriate. That was impressive in itself, but whatever its shape, her weapon always seemed to hit with a lot more force than its size and speed suggested it should. And when Ana asked, Tellak had confirmed that she had a favorite Shaping that made anything she held heavier, and had agreed that with Ana's Strength, that would be very useful.

Tellak had also done the opposite to Ana, reducing her weight significantly to let a group of mages send her flying a hundred feet and more straight into the air. Ana could see all kinds of uses for making her opponents lighter; again, especially considering her Strength. Tellak had put the brakes on that line of thought when she said that messing with the weight of anything other than herself was far more advanced than they should bother with yet. Working on Ana changing her own weight, though? That, Tellak thought, might be within her reach.

Ana was not a large woman. She'd never paid too much attention to her weight, but she was shorter than average and even with her muscles she rarely came in above 115 pounds. The shorter stature could, rarely, be useful. The weight, though, was a problem in any serious fight. One that she'd trained to work around, sure, but when any serious opponent can pick you up, you're at a natural disadvantage. Besides that, form could only do so much for how stable she could make herself, and how much power she could put behind a blow.

On more than one occasion, she'd actually considered putting on thirty or forty pounds to see how that would affect her in a fight. But her job had her posing as a girlfriend or hanger-on of rich kids and twenty-somethings, and beauty standards being what they were… yeah. Then she'd come here, and cost and availability of food had been an actual consideration — even if the portions tended to be generous, to say the least. But if she could change her weight — or better, mass — at will? Yeah. Ana was excited.

So that was what she and Tellak were doing. While Touanne and Messy did alchemy things in the lab, Tellak tried to guide Ana through the process of shaping the right mana constructs to make herself just a tiny bit heavier. To aid in gauging her success they had a block of wood, a thick plank, and a cauldron of water which Tellak had adjusted the weight of to be just more than Ana's. Ana went on one side of the seesaw, the cauldron on the other, and they had a simple scale.

Now, if only Ana could make her end go down.

"I don't know what's wrong," Tellak said after they'd been trying for well over an hour. "I can feel the mana moving, and what you're describing sounds right. But either your Shaping isn't doing what it should, or the effect is too small for this improvised scale to show it."

"Yeah, time to call it quits for tonight," Ana admitted. It was getting late, and she had a busy day tomorrow.

"Don't worry. Few people manage on their first try. If we could both see the Shaping, that would be different, but this is how it normally goes. We'll try again tomorrow. Maybe we could ask Jay to help? She has the right Enhancement to see Shapings."

"I think she mentioned that, yeah," Ana mused. "If there's time. I'm probably going out the morning after tomorrow."

"We'll find time," Tellak said confidently. "Did you talk to Simt, by the way?"

"Not yet," Ana sighed. "I think she's avoiding me."

Simt, the Demi-fae Kineticist, was one of very few people in the outpost with the Craft of Force, and the only one with whom Ana had a personal relationship. Tellak thought Ana might have an aptitude for the Craft — Strength of will and directness were the usual signs, and Ana had those in spades — and had suggested asking Simt to test her.

But Simt was proving hard to get hold of, and Ana was sure at this point that it was deliberate. The tiny woman had left the cultists' camp with the first group of people, right after the White Obelisk fell, and that was the last time Ana had spoken with her. Since returning to the outpost Ana had only seen her once, at the square, and then Simt had disappeared silently before Ana could approach her.

Not that Ana blamed her. Simt had never been comfortable with fighting changelings or cultists, yet Ana had repeatedly talked — or browbeat — her into doing so. And while Simt had put on a brave face most of the time, she'd become less outgoing and vivacious with every combat.

It was the final battle that broke her. Sure, she'd been around afterward, doing what she could to help, but she'd been quiet and withdrawn, often lost in her own thoughts. From what Ana had heard she'd been terribly effective in the one short engagement her Party had, killing one of the cultists with a single blast of directed force and crippling several others, and it clearly weighed on her heavily.

Ana knew intellectually that she should feel guilty for pushing Simt too far. She didn't. Even if true guilt had been in her emotional range, she'd done what was necessary to give them all the best chance she could of surviving. But she did, perhaps, regret the consequences, and she hoped that the tiny woman would recover. Even better if she'd talk to Ana again once she did.

"That's too bad," Tellak said, and that was that. She didn't ask why. They both knew.

Ana was still standing on the high end of the see-saw when Messy and Touanne came into the front of the shop. "Heard you talking," Messy said. "Does that mean you're done for tonight?"

"Yeah," Ana said. "Something's not working. I'll have to sleep on it and try again later."

"You're trying to make yourself heavier?" Messy said, looking at the contraption.

"Right."

"Did you dismantle the Shaping yet?"

"No, I've still got half my mind on it. Why?"

"Oh, you know…" Messy walked over so she was standing right in front of Ana. With three inches of extra height, they were eye to eye now. Then Messy bent her knees, put her arms around Ana's waist, and lifted her. "Yep. A little lighter for sure," she said, putting Ana down with a grin.

Behind Ana, Tellak sighed softly. "Ana," she said, "how did you orient the modulation? Exactly."

Then followed another hour of Ana trying and succeeding to make herself lighter, as confirmed by the seesaw. Making herself heavier, for some infuriating reason, remained elusive. Something with her not having learned the trick of reorienting the modulation yet, apparently, but Tellak, reliable as always, only saw that as an opportunity to learn a new aspect of Shaping.

"I don't see why you're so upset," Messy said as she and Ana were walking home. "You're so strong. Won't you be able to jump like a grasshopper if you reduce your weight? And that's to say nothing of your wings!"

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"I mean…" Ana grumbled, "it's not like there's no upside. But jumping is a lot less useful in a fight than you'd think. Makes you really vulnerable, you know? Especially if you don't weigh much, which…" She trailed off, sighing. "How could you even tell, anyway? I couldn't have managed more than a ten pound difference even once I knew what I was doing."

"You don't think I know how my girlfriend feels in my arms?" Messy asked with mock surprise before smiling roguishly. "Besides, you know how much I like throwing you around."

Ana snorted. She did know that. "Sure. Seriously, though. How could you tell?"

"My Level 3 Jeweller Ability," Messy replied smugly. "Precise Measurements. I can pretty much tell the exact weight and size of anything I can hold. Intended for smaller things like a ring or a precious stone, sure, but as long as I can lift it, I can measure it."

"Fucking magic," Ana muttered.

"Fucking magic, indeed," Messy grinned back.

Ana got up early the next morning, something she very rarely did. Monstrously early by any normal standards; while she could stay in bed for however long she wanted, drifting in and out of sleep, three hours had her better rested than a full night's sleep used to. Most people here only needed six or seven hours to be fully rested, and could get by on four or five if they had to — Messy could do three hours per night for a few nights in a row thanks to Ana's Companionship Ability, but it made her seriously irritable.

So, that morning, hours before dawn, Ana fought past Messy's unhappy grumbling and grabbing and left her to get her full six hours. She dressed, left the apartment, and went to the small yard that lay between the several apartment buildings that made up the neighbourhood. It was a very practical space, with a few fruit trees and herb and vegetable patches, and was ringed with chicken coops. Quite nice, really, though Ana could barely see anything in the dark; she may have 80/20 vision — or should that be 20/5? — but her nightvision wasn't much better than it had ever been.

But that didn't matter. If anything, the darkness and silence may help. What she needed was the feeling of the earth beneath her bare feet, letting her tap into the source of pure Earth-aligned mana below her. It was growing fainter every day, little by little, as the Waystone recovered from its… infection? Was that the right word? — but even with the Waystone at full capacity there would have been more than enough for what Ana wanted to do.

All she wanted was to not need to focus on channeling. She wanted a pure source of Earth-mana to draw on, so she could commit all of her attention to her shaping.

She couldn't let go of her failure the previous evening. She wasn't embarrassed about it — she'd thought about it, analyzing her feelings, and that definitely wasn't it. But she was frustrated. She'd felt like she was doing everything right, but apparently she'd had the most important part of the Shaping entirely the wrong way around, and she just couldn't figure out how to fix it!

So there she stood, at three in the morning, barefoot among the fruit trees. Mana flowed from the earth, filling the mana channels of her ethereal body — as Touanne called it; Ana didn't really understand those parts — and passing through her. The vast majority returned to the earth, but some went into her Shaping, letting her create the mana constructs she needed.

She created the power source first; though she preferred to think of herself as the source, and the construct as a kind of transformer. Then came the effect, which was, to her, simply the concept of "weight." The transformer didn't connect, since pumping mana into "weight" did nothing. What point was there in powering something that was physically constant? With an effect like "toughness" you could get away with it, for whatever reason, but "weight?" No, for the mana to even connect to that effect she needed a modulation. That was where her problem lay.

She created the modulation just fine. That wasn't the problem. The modulation connected to the two other components of the Shaping, and the stream of mana that flowed through her diverted into the transformer, not in the neat packages she'd used to create her constructs, but in a small, steady flow. From the transformer it passed through the modulation and on to the effect and, if she diverted one of her two lines of focus, Ana could imagine the strain on her joints decreasing by the tiniest bit. It was hard to say, as strong as she was.

She definitely didn't feel anything different from when she'd been working with Tellak, and that was what she wanted to focus on. It was the last tip Tellak had left her with before they called it quits for the second time that night. Focus on the feeling, not any measurable effect. Ana knew what making herself lighter felt like. Now she needed to change the modulation until she felt something different.

The problem with that was that she couldn't figure out how to do it. If she tried to create the modulation in any other way, it just wouldn't stabilize. When she tried, it collapsed into ambient mana that floated away on the ethereal breeze — or was vacuumed up by the Waystone, more like. Tellak kept talking about orientation; for her it was very simple. She created the modulation in one orientation for "heavier," and in the opposite for "lighter." Nothing in between worked, so it was pretty much impossible to do it wrong. But when Ana tried to do just that the opposite orientation, as she visualized it, simply did not work. Clearly she needed a different approach.

When she'd been learning to channel, polarization had worked as a metaphor. She'd thought about how turning her shades had changed the shimmer of sunlight on the waves. Unfortunately, shaping was much less conceptual than channeling, and more mechanical, and mechanical engineering wasn't exactly her forte. She knew something about simple machines — levers, pulleys, and such — but she didn't see how…

Or did she? Was the problem that when she and Tellak talked about "orientation," they weren't talking about the same thing? What, exactly, happened to the mana in the modulation construct?

Ana's high Connection really came to use there. It had annoying sides in that it made her pick up on the emotional auras of others and made her own stronger and easier to read, but it did so by making her more sensitive to mana. Sensing and interpreting mana was a whole skill in itself, but it was like lifting weights: technique is a big part of it, but carrying around a ton of muscle lets you brute force most problems.

Of course, that didn't help if there wasn't much to sense in the first place, so Ana cranked up the flow of mana through her Shaping as much as she could, focusing one half of her attention on keeping everything stable, and the other on what happened to the mana.

The first thing she realized, once there was enough of a flow, was that no matter what she did she couldn't sense anything inside the modulation construct. It was basically a black box where mana entered, unknowable, eldritch things happened, and mana came out again. But that wasn't the end of it. Her constructs weren't perfect, so there was some leakage between the transformer and the modulation, and more between the modulation and the effect. So she shifted her attention to comparing the mana entering the modulation with that leaving it, and tried to find a difference.

That quickly turned out to be incredibly tricky. Sensing any kind of detail in the mana, using any kind of metaphor — color, temperature, texture — took a full line of focus. Comparing the mana at both ends of the modulation simply wasn't possible with only half of her attention.

Screw it, she thought. Fortune favors the bold, nothing ventured, etc. Then she dialed back the flow of mana until she could only barely sense what was leaking, and shifted her attention from stabilizing her Shaping to watching what was happening at both ends of the modulation.

To be fair, this was how most people did it. Not everyone had an Acuity Enhancement, and of those who had, not everyone had Split Focus. They simply had to be confident and experienced enough with their Shapings to use them without giving them their full attention. But Ana had about a month of experience, and she was pushing as much mana as she dared through her Shaping, and she simply didn't have the skill, or the Skill Levels, to maintain that for long. But before things inevitably unravelled, before she had to abort and dismantle her Shaping safely, before she gave herself an aneurysm, or set her own heart on fire, or whatever she might accidentally do to herself, she did find something. Something that made her sigh with exasperation and think, Screw it, huh? Yeah. Screw it.

Because to her, it did indeed look like the mana coming out of the modulation was rotating. Now all she had to do was figure out how to make it turn the other way.

But that would have to wait, because while all of Ana's focus had been on thinking about mana and how the whole System seemed determined to balance out her unfair advantages by frustrating her as much as possible, the sun had risen. The first thing Ana saw when she opened her eyes was Messy sitting on a bench in front of her, watching.

"Ah, there you are," Messy said, amber eyes slightly narrowed. There was just a hint of annoyance there. "Welcome back. Breakfast?"

"Yeah," Ana said, her mild irritation vanishing, burned away by her excitement at the thought of telling Messy what she'd discovered. "Breakfast sounds great."

"Good! We'll have to do something nearby, because I need to be at the shop in half an hour. And there was a message for you from Falk, right at daybreak. He's getting the Stolen together in the square at noon. At least that's the plan." Messy's slight irritation softened. "Are you still up for it? They're really not your responsibility."

"Yeah," Ana sighed. "They may not be my responsibility, but they could easily become my problem. Everybody knows I'm one of them. Technically, at least. If I can keep them from doing something stupid, that'll make my life easier in the long run."

"So what're you going to do?" Messy asked as they left the yard, heading for the small local eatery where most of the neighbourhood got their breakfast from. "Give them a stern talking to?"

"Nah, Mess," Ana said, "I doubt that'll work. They didn't reason themselves into being angry, and I'm not going to be able to reason them out of it. So I'm going to do the next best thing."

"And what's that?"

"I'm going to put the fear of God in them."

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