"Remember, if it gets too much at any point, just come back to the lift, alright?" Mok told them, not for the first time, as the lift slowed towards their mysterious destination.

"We'll be okay, M, don't worry," Tuk said, patting her back.

"I'm being serious! The aetheric concentration down here is…"

The doors opened and for a moment it was as though a clawed vice clamped over Nar's mouth. Cold sweat broke out across his body, and whatever hair wasn't yet standing on end it was standing up now as needles stabbed at his skin, his vision swimming as everything took in a deep, dark gold and deep pink, with hints rainbow colors dancing at the edges of his eyesight.

"Cycle a little," the Old Man reminded them.

Nar did as he was told, and almost immediately, the air became easier to swallow, though it still scratched on its way down his throat.

"Everyone okay?" he asked, unbothered.

"I… Yeah," Cen said, passing a hand over her sweat-sleek bald head.

"Crystal," Rel muttered. "That was something."

"Now I know why you didn't bring us down here last time," Tuk said, his face pale and coated with sweat. "Crystal Above All… It feels like I'm standing outside in the confluence!"

Rel nodded with a pained expression.

"Really?" Cen asked. "It doesn't feel so bad…"

"As a caster, you have a lot more aura in you than they do, which protects you better," the Old Man said. "As for you, though…"

He looked Nar up and down. "You don't look like a caster."

"Meet Nar, the COO's disciple!" Tuk proudly announced. "And who's got more aura than half the party combined."

Mok gasped and took an involuntary half-step away from him.

Eh? Nar thought, surprised by her reaction.

"A disciple, eh? Fair enough, then," the Old Man said, undaunted. "Alright, let's make it quick. Come up to the glass, and if you can't take it, go wait in the lift."

The window, if it could be called that, was a narrow strip of transparency built into the opposing metal wall. It was an inch thick and three feet wide, and with a strange apprehension squeezing at his heart, Nar approached the narrow window from which that deep light emanated from. He was suddenly very aware of the wide metal walls that encased them as he did so, walls that the Old Man had told them were feet thick in an attempt to contain the early stages of a catastrophic aether leak.

Tuk lifted Cen up to the window, and her now neon eyes burned a fiery gold with a pink halo as they went wide.

"Are those… The aetherbanks?" she asked, her tone ushed.

Nar peaked in through the narrow window himself. Beyond the glass, was an enormous chamber, covered in enormous tubes and punctuated by massive, 50-feet tall and 10-feet wide cylinders.

As they stared, bunched up against that window, a loud thunk reverberated through their chests, and an enormous mechanical arm lifted a tube that glowed a blazing rainbow. Another mechanical arm lowered a different tube in its place, and the same thunk as before echoed through the chamber, more sensation than sound.

"What was that?" Cen whispered.

"We need to swap out the connecting tubes every ten minutes, or they'll disintegrate," the Old Man explained. "Channeling pure aether takes a toll on even the toughest aetherium, so you need to keep rotating them. Once the aether is split by aspect, it becomes a lot easier to handle though."

Tuk blinked hard and pressed his eyes open and shut.

"Don't look too hard. It'll burn your retinas," the man warned him. "Now, Cen. I don't know how helpful this is going to be, but have you noticed how the corridors are hexagonal shaped? Hexagons are strong and allow for uniform stress distribution, and when you tesselate them, that is, when you stack them together, it forms a very strong structure. Structures that can range from almost anything really, granted you shape them right. So ship hulls, weapons, buildings… Even reinforced glass, all tessellated."

He tapped at the glass in front of them with a claw.

"You see this neat rectangular shape, but the glass actually extends into the wall," the man revealed, his orange fur also morphing to tones of gold and pink. "And what I wanted to show you is that hexagonal structure, the many shapes forming the reinforced whole. Now, unless you had a really powerful [Sight], there's no way you could look at them. So, try with that one…"

Mok raised some sort of device that was essentially a handle attached to a thick glass lens.

"It's very low tech, but you still can't touch it," she said, apologetically. "I'll just hold it and you can have a look."

"Thank you," Cen said, her voice hushed but her excitement clear.

"Don't look for too long, though," Mok reminded her.

Cen nodded and Tuk took a half step back to allow Mok to slip the lens in between Cen's face and the glass without risking touching their aura cycling bodies. There should be no risk, given that there was no stray aether or aura going anywhere, but the engineer was careful regardless. Plus, there were always aura leaks…

"Do you see the lines?" the Old Man asked.

By his tone, he was just as excited as Cen was.

"I… Wait! I do!" Cen cried. "They're silver-gray… But with some more rainbow colors? Is this ditanium?"

"Of the highest grade," the Old Man said, nodding. "But see how the lines join to form the hexagonal shape? And then notice how they join together… The pattern of the whole… One that becomes many."

"I see it! They're… It's so… I…"

Cen went quiet, her mouth dropping half open and her words forgotten.

"Boom. I still got it," the Old Man said, smiling.

"Did it work?" Tuk asked, unable to see Cen's face. "Is she unlocking her affinity?"

"Keep still!" Mok hissed at her, struggling to keep Cen's eyes centered on the lens.

"Enlightenment," Rel said, her tone awed and with a hint of jealousy. "We won't know though, right? It could just be inspiration for a skill again. Hopefully a defensive one this time."

"Damn…" Nar whispered, staring at Cen's blank expression, her eyes wide and seeing and comprehending things he never would.

Would this be the time in which Cen finally awakened?

It's her fourth time already? Or how do we count it? He wondered. Does the rain in the cave and the sand count?

"Do you have any idea what her affinity is?" Rel whispered.

The Old Man shook his head. "I have some ideas, maybe. But I can't say it. I could be very, very wrong, and risk screwing it up. If she unlocks it, then we'll know. If not… Then, she'll just have to keep searching. It goes like that for you auramancers sometimes."

"We'll need to send a report to the Master of Aura," Mok whispered in his direction.

Nar snorted to himself. No need. She'll just read it straight from Cen's mind.

"I will send her something, don't worry," the Old Man said. "Hmm. We should've brought a stool or something. She might be able to take it, as her aura will probably protect her and hold her in place, but I doubt Tuk or you can stay still for that long."

Nar glanced at Rel while the other three discussed amongst themselves, and noticed the paleness and the sweat glistening on her forehead. Even her breathing looked shallower than before.

"Are you alright?" he asked her.

She rubbed at her arms. "It's getting a little hurtful."

Again, Nar didn't feel it. As soon he had cycled enough aura to clear his airways, the pain had dimmed to just a distant, pressing discomfort that he easily ignored.

"I can hold Cen," Nar said, interrupting their planning as he saw the same signs of distress in Tuk. "You guys can leave."

"Are you sure?" Tuk asked.

His arms shook ever so slightly, his 6 points of [Strength] unable to hold up Cen's dead weight for much looker.

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Nar nodded. "Here. Let me hold her."

"Careful!" Mok warned.

Working in tandem, all three of them managed to keep Cen's face and the lenses aligned as they transferred her to Nar's arms.

Tuk rubbed his arms when they were done. "Phew. I need more [Strength]..."

"Will you be okay?" Rel asked Nar, laying a hand on his back.

Nar nodded and offered her smile. "Don't worry. This is nothing for me."

"Alright. Hang in there, then."

"Mok, you mind sticking with them?" the Old Man asked. "One of us needs to head back to the office."

"All good," she said. "You take those two back with you."

"Cheers," he said, then he glanced at Cen. "Still, enlightenment, uh? If there's one thing I envy you auramancers for is that… That pure, and utter understanding of your affinities…"

Nar caught Mok glancing down at the aether bracelet on her wrist, her expression soft but sad somehow. Was that loss? Regret, that he saw in her eyes?

"Alright, kids. Follow me before you pass out," the Old Man said.

"Good luck!" Tuk called, as the door of the lift closed.

Then, silence descended in that deep, golden and pink room. Again, Nar felt the heavy reality of the walls surrounding him, and of the massive amount of power stored just a few feet away from him.

"Well, it's just us now, I guess," Mok said, smiling up at him. "Any idea how long these enlightenment moments last?"

Nar shook his head awkwardly at her. "I have no idea…"

**********

Nar's gaze was lost in the aetherbanks room beyond that slip of reinforced glass.

His neck hurt a bit from having to bend to be able to see through it, but he paid it no heed. He wasn't even sure what he was thinking of when suddenly, he felt Mok leaning against him.

He immediately went stiff, and besides him, Mok snorted with mirth.

"Relax. The more awkward you are, the more awkward this is," she said, smiling brightly up at him. "My tiny [Strength] has limits, and my arm is getting tired."

Nar nodded, allowing himself to relax as Mok found a more comfortable position to lean on him.

"Aren't you worried?" he asked her. "Earlier with Tuk…"

She looked down at her feet, and bit her lip.

"Yeah. You saw that, uh?" she said, her tone low.

She sighed and shook her head. "It's easy to forget you were once an auramancer. And after years of living as an aethermancer, and among them, it becomes harder and harder not to adapt their behaviors. Their beliefs. Their… Discriminations masquerading as cautions. Even if just to make things easier for yourself, and to help yourself fit in, and not stand out."

"There is no danger, is there?" Nar asked, looking down to where her side joined his.

She shook her head.

"Aether in the body is controlled aether, and aura in cycling is controlled aura," she entoned, the words sound practiced. "That's what my Master of Aura told us, all those years ago. Even if it leaks a little bit, at our low levels, and with all this ambient aether, they just burn each other off. But… It's easy to forget this, and even inside Tsurmirel, the "auramancer" guild, as they call it, there's still a lot of stigma and separation between the two peoples."

Nar nodded, then he winced as Cen's head bobbed slightly. Mok shook hers at his side.

"Don't worry. Once enlightenment begins, it takes a lot to break it," she told him. "It is a soul thing, you know? Very, very strong…"

He glanced at her, checking for any signs of that regret or loss that he thought he had noticed earlier in her tone, but if they were there, this time he didn't spot them.

"Come on, chat a little!" she urged him with a playful smile. "I was on an aethermancer ship for a long time, and even though this is my third year aboard the Scimitar, we don't actually get that many apprentices dropping by."

"The aether?" he asked, thinking of the suffering the others had endured.

"Yeah… Really puts a damper on showing you guys around," she said, with an affected sigh.

Nar snorted lightly. "I guess."

He glanced at her.

"So… You were a Climber?" he asked her.

She nodded.

"Born and raised under crystalight… And no matter how many years have passed, or how much bigger my repository gets, my skin, my hair, my eyes and name… They always betray my story," she said. "Some people don't make that much of a deal about it, once they find out you turned to aethermancy, but others still do… It's fifty-fifty. You never know how it's going to go down."

"Right," Nar said, unsure as to how to reply to that. "And is that… Is that why you're out here? In the Labyrinth?"

She giggled.

"You mean down here, encased in metal so deep into this ship that I often go days without seeing natural light?" she asked, her tone warm with mirth.

"Erhm…"

"I'm joking with you," she said. "But, yes. It is in part."

She adjusted her weight, but she didn't dare swap the arm holding the mirror.

"When I exited the Ceremony, my party fell apart," she said. "Not all of us made it out, you know?"

Nar again glanced to his side, and noticed that she was staring deeply into the deep golden and pink in front of them, and another loud thunk reverberated across his body as pipes switched beyond the metal wall.

"I was a party leader, and those are always in demand, so I took Tsurmirel's offer and boarded an apprenticeship."

She scoffed at herself. "It wasn't a fancy, elite apprenticeship like this, of course. Just a normal one, and one year was all it took us to be done with our apprenticeship."

Oh, wow, Nar thought. He had always expected it to be two years, or even more, thinking that perhaps the Scimitar rushed and pushed them hard.

"But, after the first dungeons with my new party, I realized that I just couldn't do it," she said.

"You couldn't trust them?" he asked.

"No… It was more that I couldn't come to terms with knowing that they could all die at any moment, and that I would be the one responsible for it," she said. "My orders would be the last thing they ever did."

Nar nodded.

And I think that's what's been hitting Kur, he thought.

On the outside, their party leader looked the same. But within, Nar harbored the suspicion that something wasn't quite right ever since they had exited that corrupted dungeon, and Gad's words had only confirmed it.

I should talk to him at some point, he decided.

"And so, I quit," she said.

"And changed your class?"

"My class, my power source… Tsurmirel needs engineers as much as it needs party leaders. All I had to do was pass the test," she said. "And who knows, I might even change my name too at some point. I haven't decided yet."

Nar winced, and she mirrored it.

"Yeah, it's very expensive. And probably not that worth it without a full body makeover," she said, looking down at herself. "I could have the longest name in the Nexus, but one look at me would tell everyone exactly what I am. No matter if it's skin, scales, chitin, feathers or anything else, our colors are just lacking something… And that lack marks us, brands us as forever ex-Climbers. It's like our sin washed off the very vibrancy from our bodies…"

She sighed. "Hence why I hesitate to spend XP on the name… There's no point. If anything, I should probably change my body first."

Nar turned his head towards her, his mouth half-open in shock.

"Yes. You can change everything if you have the XP for it. Everything!" she said, laughing at his expression. "That's the power of aethertech. Once I changed… Once I got my implant in? It was like a whole new Creation opened for me! Things… Foods… Comforts I had never even known I was missing were suddenly available to me and I wondered how I had even lived without them in the first place!"

She shook her head. "Well, not all. Some things are just too expensive. Well, a lot of things are."

"Right…"

She stiffened besides him. "Shit! I'm so sorry! I didn't mean…"

"Don't worry," Nar said, facing back forward. "I know there's loads of things out of my reach, and it's just the way it is, and I don't really care about it. But, out of curiosity… Is it really that different?"

"Well… Yes," she said, hesitant. "It was like… Like hearing through my hands, or opening my eyes for the first time… I-I wish I could show you. I wish you could experience it…"

Nar chuckled. "I have three [Aura***] attribute modifiers. I don't think I could change even if I wanted to."

"And… Do you?"

"Nah… I'm happy with my path," he said, and knew he spoke the truth.

It remained to be seen how he would feel once he made it to the Nexus someday, though. Without the need for power to save his dad anymore, he wondered if he would ever come to regret embracing his aura.

But I don't think I will, he decided. To deny is aura was to deny himself. Perhaps, that had been what he had seen on Mok's expression. Loss. Grief. Longing?

Who knows… I'm not the best people reader, anyways.

"Was it hard?" he asked.

"What was?"

"Making the change, I mean," he said. "Was it hard? Painful?"

She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Oh, it was painful alright. And yes, it was not easy. Aura had, for better or worse, become a part of me, and to cut it out…"

She sighed.

"Let's just say I still miss it sometimes…" she whispered. "Like a missing limb, sometimes it still feels like it's right there, but just out of your reach."

Hmmm. So I was right after all, he thought. The confirmation did not earn him any satisfaction though. If anything, he felt sorry for her.

"It's alright," she said, as though she could read his thoughts. "I didn't really Climb to be a delver anyways. I wanted out of that cubeplant and into a better life, and being an engineer is pretty awesome!"

She grinned at him. "Better than having to go out there and roughing it in some insect riddled jungle for 4 months!"

"Ouch!" Nar said, grimacing. "Yeah. Not looking forward to that."

"It is supposed to be beautiful there, but be careful. It's also a really nasty place from what I heard."

"So I keep hearing too," he said. "Tomorrow we finally know about it."

"Good luck!"

"Thanks…"

A moment of silence passed in between them, and Nar blinked his heavy eyes.

Maybe a nap wouldn't hurt after this, he thought.

"You know… I knew a guy like you once," Mok said. "He was driven by a dream. Maybe saying that he was consumed by it is the better word... And in our cubeplant, we used to call the O-Nex the City of Dreams, the place where everything you ever dreamed of could come true. Could be made real… But once we got out?"

"What happened to him?" Nar asked.

She grimaced. "Reality. Dreams can be a powerful driving force, but they can be great deceivers and con artists too. If you're not careful, a dream can steal your everything, and leave you with nothing to live with. Like it did for him."

Mok pulled away from him and faced him.

"I say this because you have the same air about you," he said.

"That I have a dream?" he asked, his throat suddenly tightening.

"That your dream didn't work out."

Nar's breath froze on his throat.

"This was not my dream. I didn't Climb thinking of all this metal and fake light, and I certainly did not Climb dreaming of the discrimination that I would face. The Nexus was not a place of dreams we all thought it was going to be. But I've managed to make it happy enough, and the people aboard are kind, funny and smart," she said. "I have good food, my own room, and a growing bank account. I have a future in front of me. I have many possibilities and potential paths I can take in life… And so do you, Nar."

She rested her other hand over his arm, reaching under the one with which she held the lenses for Cen.

"You can make your happiness here too. This is still a reality beyond better than the cubeplant ever was, and there's a place and a future out there for everyone," she said. "You just need to be open to it. And it might not be perfect, but nothing ever is. It just needs to be enough to look forward to when you lay down to sleep, you know?"

Nar stared at her, at an utter loss for words.

"He-llo?"

"C-Cen!" Nar cried, prying his eyes off of Mok's.

He lowered her gently to the floor.

"Are you alright?" Mok asked, kneeling beside them.

"I… Yes. I think so," the caster mumbled. "My eyes hurt, though."

"It's from staring too much into the aether," the engineer said. "Just close them for now. You'll heal."

The lengos nodded and dutifully closed her eyes.

"Did you get your affinity?" Nar couldn't resist asking.

Cen shook her head, but one of her eyes opened with a glint of triumph.

"No, but I think I got a really good idea," she said, her voice shaking with exhausted excitement. "I may be able to get a defensive skill after all!"

"Hush!" Mok said. "Let's get you out of here first."

By the time they reached the lift, Cen was already fast asleep in Nar's arms.

"Think about what I said, ok?" Mok asked, as they waited for the lift. "It doesn't have to end just because the dream did. Not unless you chose to make it so. When one door closes, it's not so bad to look for another…"

He nodded, and Mok would never know how close her word choice had cut him.

He was not angry with her. He knew she was right and that she meant well. They all did, from Tys to his masters, and everyone else. But he wasn't ready yet to look for another door.

For now, all he could was focus on his party, and do his best to keep it together for them.

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