First, there was light.
Then, there was cold.
Oliver's last memory of an intentionally-malfunctioning teleportation platform was swiftly driven from his mind as he splashed into cold, cold water. His body reflexively inhaled, then tried to cough as saltwater invaded his lungs.
He went under the water, fighting to get his limbs working. Nothing felt right. His body wasn't responding like it should, too heavy and too light and what he could only describe as dull. Oliver flailed around uselessly, trying to get himself to swim, when something warm interposed itself around him and lifted him up, helping his face to firmly breach the surface of the water and get a solid breath of salty sea air.
"Hold on," Alyssa's voice instructed, "Don't speak."
Oliver was about to ask what she meant, but her second command cut him off. A wave crashed into the two of them, and Oliver tightened his grip, arms around her ribs, desperate to not be swept away. He couldn't tell what was happening, his every sense either overwhelmed or deadened. Even his mana sense, his arcanoception, couldn't pick up on anything more than Alyssa and a weird itching that was coming from the surroundings.
At some point, the waves calmed and Oliver felt something solid brush against his feet. A few moments later, Alyssa dragged them out of the water and onto something more solid. Being out of the cold water didn't make him any warmer though. The breeze and the sunshine on his skin only served to evaporate the water, cooling him that much more. He was so cold, he couldn't feel anything else. So, so cold and so-
"-In shock, damnit." he heard Alyssa say. Then, much, much louder, "Can you hear me?"
Oliver jolted into higher awareness. Shock. He could deal with shock. He reached for his spells, his magic, and found nothing. That didn't make the shock better. But he didn't need either of those. He knew how to deal with his body when it was misbehaving. Just a breath in, and a breath out. And meditate. And in, and... out.
"Are you okay? Oliver, talk to me," Alyssa's words became understandable again as Oliver brought his mind to focus. "Open your eyes. Wiggle your eyebrows. Do something, please."
"I... am," Oliver's steady attempts at speaking while regaining control were cut off by something between a hacking cough and vomit that tasted like salt. "I am soon to be alright."
"Oh, thank you." The sounds of shifting stones, and the way her place in his arcanoception - for all that the surrounding Tapestry itched in some way he wasn't used to - indicated she'd probably sat down on the ground. The ground, which was made of lots of pebbles. A rocky beach of some kind.
Oliver flexed his hands, feeling the stones against his palms and his fingers, and cracked his eyes open, pushing past the salt that was already trying to hold them closed. He instantly winced at the sudden brightness of unblocked daylight, and raised his hand to block out the sun... which didn't seem to do anything.
Through squinted eyes, he looked at the sky. It was blue, though maybe a slightly deeper blue than he was used to. And it was bright. But there was no sun. No clouds, either. There were a lot of birds, but no clouds.
He wiped away the last of the saltwater from his face, and properly looked around. They were, as he'd concluded, on a rocky beach. Most of the stones were a red, bricklike color, and there was an abundance of driftwood scattered everywhere. Then his eyes landed on Alyssa, who was sprawled out on the rocks a couple feet next to him breathing heavily, and then immediately skittered off to look at something else.
The Jump had, evidently, not taken any of their gear. Which included their clothing.
Oliver's personal mastery of his mind and body was stretched rather thin at the moment, so he simply kept turning until he faced away from the ocean... and saw where they'd landed.
A wall of green, an intimidating jungle, loomed overhead. The sounds of the ocean were momentarily drowned out by the calls of wild creatures, the roars of powerful predators, and the screeching cries of the seabirds above. The itching in his arcanoception finally clicked as to what it was.
Elemental Nature. Raw, wild chaos, and the magical antithesis to the order and progress of Technology. Of everything he specialized in as an Archmage-Enchanter. Nonetheless, Oliver reasserted control over himself.
"I thought..." Oliver started to say, his voice somewhat wavering. Then he cleared his throat and spoke with much more authority, "Aren't Jumps supposed to drop us in cities? Shouldn't we be appearing to a cheering crowd? You know, the hopeful masses whose sole chance of salvation from their onrushing calamity rests entirely upon us and our awesome magical powers?"
Alyssa sat up next to him, and Oliver kept his eyes transfixed firmly upon the wild jungle before him. "Most aren't like that. And about a quarter of recorded Jumps resulted in landing in the wilderness. Still, it's generally pretty close to civilization, just a bit of a walk, and usually with some kind of reason behind it."
Though Oliver was deliberately not looking too closely at his teammate, the fact he couldn't pick up on any Passion coming off her through his arcanoception was a bad sign... if he'd lost [Perceive Emotion], it was going to be a true pain to get it back. He mentally reached into his soul... and found it so incredibly bare. That wasn't great.
[Status]
At worst, Oliver had expected nothing to come up. He'd made preparations for being away from infrastructure, putting his System Engineering degree to good use in giving him backups of the most critical System functions, but he was prepared for disappointment.
He wasn't prepared for a sudden blinding headache to slam into him, and a shiver through his soul that felt like glass fracturing. It didn't injure him, but that had... really hurt. A faint curse escaped his mouth, though fortunately it was just words.
He didn't let himself think of himself as broken, because he wasn't. He was just... temporarily disadvantaged. He'd known that the Expedition wouldn't be entirely in his comfort zone, but there was a big difference between acknowledging in a handful of briefings that he'd grow from new experiences and actually being in a new and uncomfortable situation.
"Yeah," Alyssa spoke up, "It's a brutal start. Wilderness, team separation, gear loss, body refresh, and level reset. I'm down to one skill. You?"
"Wait, body refresh?" He hadn't noticed that one, but a dedicated glance at his forearms did confirm they were markedly less tattooed than usual. He flicked his fingers, trying to trigger the magic he'd used there, but couldn't even get a spark. Damnit. He'd had some of those since he was twelve. Casting was going to be a pain without them.
"Yeah," Alyssa confirmed. "Full reset to human baseline."
"Baseline human, or baseline-to-human?"
"What?" Alyssa asked.
"Technically, we were born with a bunch of bio-mods compared to what's historically been considered human."
Alyssa paused for a moment. "Baseline to us. Not to legacy-human. I don't think it's possible to be reset to something we never were."
That was good, at least. Legacy human bodies were decidedly mediocre at magic, and might even have issues with their System. And if that had been the reason for his broken [Status], he didn't know if he could fix it. That it wasn't the reason was both good and bad, but he'd been asked a question, and he poked around his soul and looked for magical resonance.
"I've got three skills," he eventually settled on, "I think. Yeah. Three, all of them fully on-class. [Appraise], [Scrollcast], and [Cogniprint]. What did you keep?"
"[Leafstep]. I'm not thrilled, but it's not like we didn't know this was a possibility."
"I didn't expect it to feel this bad," Oliver groaned, "It feels like someone's rubbing my insides with electrified sandpaper, and I don't think that's just the Nature."
"Really? It's not that bad for me. Like yeah, it sucks to lose almost forty levels, but it doesn't feel that different from a normal class swap, when you're adjusting to the different Majors and Minors."
"Definitely worse for me," he groaned. "And my System mods aren't working."
"Really?" Alyssa asked. "And do you suppose those might be connected at all?"
"They should have been fairly robust... doesn't matter," Whatever happened was something he could look into once they were somewhere safe, secure, and underneath an actual roof. "Do you think the others are alright?"
"Well, if we all fell into the ocean, I didn't see any of the others, but I only barely saw you," she noted. "I can't imagine Jacob or Henrietta having any issues."
Oliver chuckled tiredly at the idea of Commander Inq being hindered by anything as mundane as an ocean in her way. She'd already been on an Expedition, after all, something that even Jacob couldn't boast of. Between her experience and awesome magical powers, mere water was nothing to her. As for Jacob, being both their Warrior and an actual veteran of The Binding Wars, he was probably fine too. That just left their Healer, "And Clark is almost certainly using a Water class," he mused. "So he's probably fine."
Alyssa nodded, "I hope everyone made it. Some Jumps don't take everyone."
"There's more that could go wrong?" Oliver groaned. There had to be some kind of lower limit to how badly a Jump could go, right?
She patted him on his shoulder, "There's always more that can go wrong."
She paused for a moment, "You've got a spell that will help us find the closest town, right?"
"Divinations aren't really a spell in the typical sense," Oliver clarified. "A spell-"
"You can magic up some information for us, yeah? Do that, I'm going to find us some leaves or something."
Oliver was about to protest at the phrasing of 'magicking up information,' but given how quickly Alyssa was darting down the beach, there was no chance she'd hear him. It wasn't like he could just snap his fingers and instantly learn everything he wanted to know. Even back home, divination towers were needed to get that actually functioning.
Annoyances with Alyssa's phrasing aside, Oliver could point them in the right direction for a town or a city, once he knew what he was looking for, but there were just so many possible interruptions and fuzziness around civilization and...
Start with Identify World, he reminded himself. He had prepared for this, and he needed to get his head on straight. [Scrollcast], despite its primary use-case being copying a pattern from a scroll or spellbook, worked just fine with divination, and Identify World had been designed with effectively this exact situation in mind.
It took Oliver a few minutes to get himself situated. He couldn't really prepare his environment in any meaningful sense, but he wandered the beach until he found a large flat rock with plenty of room to maneuver. It needed to be far enough from the water that he was in no danger of getting wet, but also not quite in the wall of incredibly scary wild nature. The margins he was working in were a bit uncomfortably small, and he needed to chase away some remarkably brave critters when they were drawn in by something he was doing.
He had a number of false starts, the wild currents of Nature tearing apart his [Scrollcast] like so many cobwebs, and for what was probably the first time he could remember, Oliver wished that he had more generic stat points in Mana Cohesion. [Erudite Enchanter] had four... but they were all specialized into Control, and didn't include spell toughness or potency.
He really, really needed to get to a workshop or a tower or something. Anything, really. Just anything but this raw, unfettered chaos.
On the fifteenth try, Oliver finally managed to figure out how to keep strands of mana intact long enough to actually get usable information from them, and he quickly moved into the divinations he was looking for.
[Scrollcast]
"I am Oliver Smith, the [Erudite Enchanter]. I call upon the flows of the world, and request they grant their due upon me... Damnit."
He hadn't even gotten to the actual divination part yet when his magic was once again torn apart. Oliver calmed himself and reaffirmed his grasp over his mana before trying again, mindful of the sudden bucking the Tapestry had subjected him to.
[Scrollcast]
"I, the [Erudite Enchanter] Oliver Smith, do call upon the ethos of this world, seizing the knowledge due unto myself, oh come on."
Oliver grumbled. It had collapsed before he'd properly started the divination again, and he decided he truly hated Nature magic. If this kept up, then generalized divination might well be impossible until he actually got to somewhere with slightly less unpredictable mana flows. As a discipline, generalized divination wasn't true spellcasting because it didn't seek to impose change on the Tapestry. Instead, it sought to read the Tapestry, utilizing the subtle tweaks in the motions and chants as a means of effectively 'talking' to the local mana. The 'spell' was supposed to collapse eventually, and a good diviner was one who could get a lot of information from both the collapse and everything that lead up to it.
Identify World, for example was supposed to start with establishing basic things, like the fact they were in the Mortal Realms, then narrow down from there to determine details about the local magic system, the sorts of practitioners who utilized it, and eventually what calamity they were facing that acted as the Jump Nucleus.
But if Oliver couldn't even get to the first line of the actual freaking point without the magic collapsing randomly thanks to the unbridled chaos of the wilderness, then basically any divination he tried would be meaningless. Because how would he ever know if the spell had stopped because he'd spoken something incompatible, or just because the Tapestry decided to be weird? The normal balance of good arcanoception, a clever wit, flexibility with mana control, and intuition went out the window in favor of pure luck.
He was a Knowledge-based Archmage! He was great at divinations, he thought they were awesome. But these were just... awful.
"Be careful with these," Alyssa's return pulled Oliver out of his own head as she handed him a massive leaf, easily eight feet long were it not folded in half, and a thin vine a few feet long. She was already wearing a similar leaf, much to Oliver's relief, her head poking through a slit in the top and a vine cinched around her waist acting as a belt. "They're pretty fragile, but they'll work."
It certainly wasn't the most modest clothing Oliver had worn, but it was better than literal nothing, and he gratefully finagled his way into it. It wasn't comfortable either, but once again... better than nothing.
"So, what way do we need to be heading?" she asked.
"I don't know," Oliver sourly replied.
"What, isn't that your job?"
"Doesn't mean I actually know it. The mana here is really painful to work with, and nothing's working."
After a moment without Alyssa replying, Oliver returned to his casting. He needed to adjust his motions slightly to account for the fact he now was wearing a giant leaf, but that was pretty simple.
Maybe if I'm faster, I can get more information before it randomly collapses? [Scrollcast].
"I Oliver Smith do pluck the strings, that the knowledge I seek... that was even faster."
"What was faster?" Alyssa piped up. Right. She was here.
Oliver waved her off, "Don't worry. I'm working on it."
[Scrollcast]
"I, Oliver Smith the [Erudite Enchanter], speak unto the skies and the stones and request that they tell me a tale- Oh."
"Oh? Oh what?" Alyssa asked, but Oliver gave a brief wave to dismiss her and thought properly, mind racing.
This... wasn't random, was it? Once was random. Twice was suspicious. Three times was a pattern. Four times...
Estuivii. My Own Existence, Myself. Every time, either it specifically or a synonym for it had been responsible for the collapse of his spellform. Was... was that the result of the divination? That would be really weird, Myself was believed to be one of the very first concepts imprinted upon a local Tapestry when mages first mastered their craft. But, this was a new world and it wasn't like local magics always followed the same trends. Maybe, the magic of this world was something incredibly distributed, less focused than most examples?
That would actually be really cool! Maybe the magic here was strongly slanted towards artifice, or perhaps it was about large groups of people, or maybe it was generational or strictly other-focused? If it was the former, it would mark the first form of magic that the Empire had encountered that was truly item based, and that was... absolutely, indescribably, amazing.
With newfound excitement, Oliver recentered himself and began to cast again, this time with a trickier and less typical chant, but one he could still manage, "The histories of the world, as graven on stone and leaf, told in the roar of the waves and by the rushing wind, I call forth to speak of the glories wrought by the hands of…"
He frowned. It had collapsed the moment he tried to call upon an imperative tone. Probably not artifice-based, then, if it was averse to change being enacted upon it. A divination tradition? He wouldn't mind that one.
"The histories of the world, as graven on stone and leaf, told in the roar of the waves and by the rushing wind, do speak of the glories they have witnessed take place at their own hands."
Oh hey, he actually got through the entire thing without it collapsing! It wasn't a good form for a full Identify World, but it did lend credence to his idea about this being a divination system. Though, there was always the possibility it was deeper than that...
"The legacy of this world, so seen in tree and sky, told in the roar of the waves and by the rustle of the branches, sing of that which has taken place at their own hands.
"They speak of a land of opportunity, of grand potential merely waiting to be claimed by…. Yeah I was hoping for too much there."
"Oliver," Alyssa waved her hand in front of his face, "What are you hoping for?"
"This to work. One minute, I need to try something," a faint thread of worry had infiltrated Oliver's mind, and now that he'd thought it he needed to eliminate it as a possibility.
[Scrollcast]
"Ages have passed in this world, a storied past witnessed in river and mountain and spoken of by the roar of storms and the trickle of waterfall, all of whom remember great change undertaken by themselves.
"For this they have done for untold eons, allowing the waves to crash as it may, the wind to carry what it wishes. The stone speaks its own history, for none other has been told to it. Mighty beasts may wander the land and sea, yet they care not for their own stories nor that which the wind and waves speak. Yet now, the arrival of something new has begun to send the winds whispering among themselves, the waves to peer curiously at a new sight. For five new beings have arrived, their minds alight with knowledge and purpose incomprehensible. They are the first, and the stone and the leaf find themselves being seen and understood by a being other than themselves.... No, no, no, nononono no DAMNIT."
"Oliver!" Alyssa shouted back at him, "What is going on?"
Oliver's legs gave out underneath him, and he fell to the rocky beach below with a clatter. The leaf he was wearing tore slightly, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He just stared at the ground, eyes wide, desperately trying to get his breathing under control.
There... there isn't... there's...
"Oliver!" Alyssa slapped him, "Talk to me."
"Ow!" he protested, "What was-"
"You're freaking out," she was mere inches from his face and shaking him, "What the hells is going on that's so terrible that you're going back into shock?"
"There's... there's nothing," he explained in a soft voice.
"Nothing what? Nothing wrong? No new magic? Nothing that we can do? Is the calamity already here and gone?"
Oliver shook his head limply, his voice barely above a whisper, "No. There's nothing. No mages. No cities. No people. This world is empty."
"So wait, does that..."
"If we ever want to get home," Oliver finished, his heart falling, "We'll need to build a portal from scratch.
"Alone."