PSTH2: Chapter Five

The Glade Leafwing Butterfly was a species found locally in the southern areas of Oceanseed, usually around Silica City, and it presents a fascinating case in Primal existence. Though the continued habitat destruction resulted in the extinction of the butterfly, the Primal known as the Pruinanaea resembles its physical appearance to an uncanny degree, as seen in diagrams I to IV. What does this mean about essence hearts, and the nature of essence? I posit that… 

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The Butterfly and the Primal, published circa 400 Modern-Era

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“And those are the three main things you can do to become a Tamer!” I said, watching over the crowd of rowdy youngsters. Next to me, Scales let out a little yip of agreement, while Hex and Zale remained in the same position. Zale was curled up in a circle, like  a boulder sized pill bug, and Hex was curled up like a cat on top of a warm boulder, purple smoke drifting from her tail. 

I thought my presentation had gone fairly well, all things considered. The three points I’d made were all boiled down, over-simplified versions of what needed to be done, but getting a look at the Primals had kept the kids mostly interested while I’d gone through it. There was a lot more technical skill to taming than to work hard to awaken your essence, love and respect your team, and then work with your Primals to train both of you. But while there were more details, that was really the soul of what taming was, as more than just a sport, but as a way of life that harkened back to freedom from the Obsidian Kings. 

“Do you all have any questions?” I asked, looking around, and a kid’s hand shot into the air.

“Can we see their battle forms?” 

I flicked my gaze over to the small cluster of teachers and the principal. She shrugged and mouthed the word ‘safe’ to me. I nodded, then extended a hand towards Hex, whistling and mentally tugging at the lazy cat through our bond. She was probably the safest choice. Scales’ second battle form was a lot… sharper… than his cute and cuddly unenhanced form. Zale’s battle form, meanwhile, was a bit too much like a giant centipede. That might be cool for some of the kids, but it would frighten others away. Hex, at least, just looked more like a black bobcat crossed with a fox, and with a lot of purple and cyan glowing magic – potentially scary, but far less than Scales, and far closer to her cute form. 

Hex stretched, yawned, and then forged her pneuma shell, growing larger and sharper, and though a few covered their eyes, several others let out oohs and ahhs. 

“What’s Vincent Angon like?” asked someone else, and I put my hand on Hex as her form dissolved. 

“He’s nice,” I said. “He loves his Primals very much, and was very excited to find a new one.” 

I wasn’t sure if I’d oversimplified or not, but the answer seemed to be 

“Can we see you and your Primals fight?” another kid asked, and this time I shook my head. 

“Not today. If you ask your parents, you can find videos of it, but if we sparred in here we might break things that don’t belong to us.” 

“What’s sparring?” 

I opened my mouth to answer, then had the mental image of the kids whacking one another with sticks, saying it was just sparring. I altered my answer. 

“It’s a type of training that looks like fighting, but nobody gets hurt?” I said. I still wasn’t sure that was the right answer, but I’d given it my best shot. The kids lobbed several more questions at me, before the hour was up, and they had to go back to class. The next two presentations went similarly, though I was careful to avoid the word sparring this time. That wasn’t a can of worms I wanted to open. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop them from latching onto other random words I used, like ousia, and asking for explanations. 

Though I thought that they did pretty well, I did learn something about myself: while I might consider working in conservation at some point in the future, I did not want to work in childcare. It wasn’t that I didn’t think that kids deserved good keepers, or to have questions answered if they had them. It was just that the skill of trying to come up with an answer that wasn’t an outright lie, but that still fit their level of development, while also not trying to slip up and use any words I shouldn’t was absolutely exhausting. Even though I’d only needed to give three presentations, and was more prepared each time, I was still drained. 

“I don’t see how you do it,” I said, shaking my head as the principal, one of the teachers, and I all worked to shift the chairs back into storage. “I’m exhausted just from talking this long, and my throat is scratchy. I’m pretty sure I did a terrible job, too.” 

“Your voice gets used to it,” the teacher said. “And you were far from the worst presenter we’ve had, especially for your first presentation.” 

“Thanks,” I said. “Though… I am glad to see some of them seemed genuinely interested in Primals. Even if they never become a researcher, conservationist, or even a tamer, at least they’re interested.” 

“Even a tamer?” the principal asked. “I’m surprised to hear you rank your own profession so low.” 

“If some schmuck who wanted to become an Obsidian King was to pop up, I’d fight them,” I said. “But how often does that actually happen? I can save a few people, save an essence heart, even. Maybe some day Frostbranch will build a naval fleet and attack us, and I’ll have to defend our home. But ninety-nine percent of the time – maybe more – I just play a sport. I provide entertainment to a few people. A researcher or conservationist is putting in the good fight day after day after day. Of course I rate them as higher. Frankly, I rank you all higher too. I don’t see how you can do it.” 

“Thank you, but really, you don’t need to be so humble,” the teacher said. “I know that when I was a kid…” 

We spent a while talking about the relative impact that people can make in relation to the value that impact could make in the future. It was mostly a pointless thought exercise, but it was fun, after which the principle pulled out her augpad, then sent me a hundred credit payment for the job, which I accepted and thanked her for. 

“Oh, and here, take this too,” she said, pulling out several sheets of pressed seaweed paper with writing on them and passing them to me. “I’m not sure if it’ll be of any use, probably not, but you’d be a better person to log it all into the public domain than I would.” 

“Oh, sure,” I agreed, flipping through the pages. “Do you know what it is?” 

I could see several symbols related to essence, and a good bit of math, alongside several diagrams, but I’d need longer to actually break down what it was. 

“Not really,” she said. “My great-grandfather was a tamer, and we just got around to going through his effects after his passing. Those are some of the notes he had that looked essence related.” 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, though it felt rather platitudinous, if I was going to steal a word Gawain would use. 

“Thank you, though it was a long time coming. He lived a good life – a hundred and twenty three. But… yes. Since none of us are tamers, we figured we’d either give it to old man Edwin, Alyssa, one of the kids, or you. But Edwin’s old and curmudgeonly, and he’s terrible with technology. Alyssa’s a magian and a shop owner with two kids of her own. And the kids aren’t even officially tamers yet. So to you it goes.” 

“Well, thank you. I’ll take a look and try and log the information in the right spots. I can send pictures of it over to a friend of mine, a magian, and get his opinion on it as well, just in case.” 

I put the papers in my bag, and helped finish putting away the chairs, then called my Primals into their storage-gems. I said a few more thanks, then headed out, checking some maps on my augpad as I walked. It was about a four day bike ride to Silica City, basically a straight shot downward along the coast. But it was already afternoon, so if I left now, I’d have to bike through the night on the roads… No, I’d just say here for the night. I returned to the hostel and left another tip, then grabbed a quick snack of cheese and pickled onions, before texting my friends and spreading the papers out on the table. 

I was far from an expert on essence theory, and when I looked over the pages of math, it was clear that I was looking at something that was far from my own areas of expertise. I could follow some parts of the math, but not enough to really make a difference. The diagrams and the written sections, however, made it seem like this was a research paper waiting to be typed up and sent off. Unfortunately for me, parts were missing, as if the grandpa who’d written it had done a lot of jumping around, and never really finished their work. Maybe he’d even kept his notes buried in some testing apparatuses and referred back to them. 

But while there were clearly a lot of sections missing, there were some things that I was able to suss out from the text without issue. It was clearly the development of some sort of cultivation technique, but a very strange one. It referred to five points in a pentahedral position, serving to utilize training-based essence production alongside ambient essence gathered. The ambient essence seemed to be used in a way more like moving cultivation exercises than any of the streams I knew.

After pouring through the diagrams several more times, I thought I’d managed to figure out that the five points were indicative of a tamer and four Primals, and that there was some sort of effect produced by the clashing of so many different elements at the base of the ‘pyramid’ meeting within the raw essence at its ‘peak’ and trickling back down. Converting essence always came with a loss, but I thought that was kind of where the parts like moving cultivation came in? It was an incredibly complex technique, far more than any of the ones I used, and probably made worse by the fact that it was incomplete. 

Even if it worked, it would need to produce a tremendous amount of essence to be of any use for tamers and their Primals. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that it had useful information at all. Lone people or small groups did sometimes make discoveries, there was no doubt about that, but it was rare for them to be anything dramatic. Often, it simply rediscovered things that were already known. 

I lifted my augpad and then spent a while scanning each of the pages in, before uploading them to the Tamer’s Consortium for public use, posting them on a handful of taming-related and essence-cultivation forums, and into the groupchat with my friends. Finding out how to upload them into the Oceanseed public domain archive took a bit longer, but with a couple of tutorials I managed it. I was finally pulled out of my thoughts by the rumbling of my stomach, and I rose up, tossing the last few essence-infused mints to my Primals, before heading down to eat.