Touchstone 1 - Stray

sun’s fully set. Tomorrow will be more training, but Maze said that if they’re happy with how it goes they’ll consider going into the Ena with me again, this time to kill things.
    Must remember to work the conversation around to different types of gates.
    Thursday, February 14
    Bubble worlds
    Morning was dodging practice with Mara, which went well except for when I dodged in precisely the wrong way and got a ball in the face. I’m not very good at predicting where she’s going to throw the things and that seems to be half of what dodging’s all about.
    I asked her if I was allowed to go swimming just for fun instead of it being for training, and she laughed and said yes and told me where to look to see whether anyone had booked the pool. But then later she said that for now it’d be better if she just added the pool into our training schedule, so I guess she checked with someone who decided there was too much chance of me drowning or something.
    Over lunch, she explained a little more about spaces and gates. Spaces shift about. Some move only a little, bobbing up and down. Others apparently rotate, like planets. A few even zoom about: little comets on an astral level. And when they move, the connections which were the gates between them shift also, vanishing altogether, or linking up with other spaces, or just phasing briefly out of alignment. Setari with Ena manipulation skills are able to ‘lock’ the gates, preventing them from shifting, but unless it’s between two relatively stable spaces, it’s immensely difficult to hold them for more than a day or two, and there’s even an argument about whether it’s a bad thing altogether, given that it’s similar to what the Pillars do.
    Four of the gates back toward the Pillar we found are stable, shifting only a little, and it’s become part of the regular ‘rotation’ of the Setari teams to go and firm the ‘locks’ up. The gate into the space with all the platforms is gone. There’s a different talent which allows you to ‘read’ the gates, and tell how long they will last, but they can’t tell for certain if and when that gate will rotate back. They think (are hoping really hard) that the platform space is a rotational space, and that eventually the gate will realign again and they’ll be able to lock it for another few days. Until then they check every day and puzzle over the readings they took from the space with the Pillar.
    I didn’t want to press too obviously about natural gates, how they’re different, and how hard it might be to find one.
    After lunch we joined up with the rest of First Squad, and this time all of Second Squad joined us. After testing the effect of me on their talent range, they worked with First Squad on a really big game of tag-team combat. They’ve been set a minimum time they have to wait between each person touching me, and then they have to keep track of how long the enhancement will last, which is a little over five minutes, always. Nils made illusory monsters again, and the two squads worked through fighting and enhancing while keeping to their rules. Then we took a break while Maze and the Second Squad captain, Grif, talked through different ways of managing me, and which talents it was best to enhance.
    I was sitting on a bench next to Lohn and Nils and asked: “Is worth it? Stronger, maybe, but so complicate.”
    “Definitely, absolutely,” Lohn said. “When I think of some of the situations we’ve been in, when the problem was sheer lack of fire power! The effect on some of the more esoteric talents, like Combat Sight, is incredibly hard to quantify, but I wouldn’t give it up.”
    “Just the speed alone is worth it,” Nils added. “It almost makes the thought of doing Columns Rotation bearable.”
    “Think how that last massive battle would have gone,” Lohn said, and they glanced at each other and looked away.
    “Massive?” I repeated. The word they used was ‘kadara’, but it seemed to have the same meaning as ‘ddura’. “Ddura?”
    “Different sort,” Nils said. He lifted his hand and conjured an illusion of a four-legged black thing as tall as the three-story room, with swarms of miniature Setari buzzing around its long, spindly ankles. Everyone else in First and Second Squad jumped and gave him a look, but he just waved at them. “They turn up very occasionally, crashing their way between the spaces rather than travelling through them, and end up in near-space. It took eight