I woke up a few minutes later due to Ink’s super-concerned trills.

  “What?…what?.. Ink, little buddy, calm down.” I tried to placate the concerned inkling. His trills were erratic and terrified. But I got the gist of it. He thought I died when I laid against the door to sleep and reset. I guess he now counted as awake and prevented the reset. That could be a problem.

  “It was just sleep.”

  confused trill

  “I don’t know if your kind sleep, but mine do. We actually go kind of insane if we don’t”

  frightened trill

  “Nah, buddy, I wouldn’t hurt you. Plus, I’d need a lot more hours of wakefulness for it to really start. The problem is I have to be asleep for the reset to work.”

  confused trill

  “It will take us back to the first room, the gray one without people in it. We need to get back there soon. I think you may sustain off of mana, but I still need food, and drink, and…other things. And that room supplies all that. It even heals me while I’m there.”

  greedy trill

  “Oh yeah, I want that power. I want it so bad.”

  agreeable trill

  “But we both need to be asleep.”

  confused but inquisitive trill

  “Sleep is where we close our eyes and let our consciousness drift. It’s like when I do any of my magic, but longer and with fewer explosions. Come…let’s try..together.”

  I rested my back against the door.

  “Now I want you to relax and not concentrate on anything.” Ink gave a warning trill and rippled my leg coverings and loincloth.

  “Yeah, that’s ok buddy, I’m not worried about being naked here.”

  I started to hum a similar cadence to his trills but deeper. He started to keep pace and I shifted to a lullaby. As I slowed the cadence and my breath, I could feel my clothing retract and Ink coiled up and formed a puddle in my hand. He tried to take his mushroom form, but the sounds were working their magic. He managed at least the top of his form and even gave out a tiny little yawn before collapsing back into the puddle. I could watch as a series of purrs rippled across the surface of it. I took that as my signal and shut my eyes as well.

  We both woke right as we arrived back in the recovery room. Its effects were almost instant on me. All my fatigue was gone. Ink’s too. He reformed my leather cladding and loincloth quickly as I stood up. It was cool looking. I imagine if I wanted to, I could go full spawn cape if I wanted to. I wondered if I could get him to change color, so I asked.

  “Hey buddy, can you change your color?” This was apparently the wrong question. He let out the angriest of trills and shot back into my body. It stung just a little. It took me a second to realize how I had phrased the question.

  “Not that color, silly. I wouldn’t change that even if I could. I meant the leather color. Apparently, he was relieved because he shot back out into full covering mode, only gold this time. So the leather was tight and form-fitting. When you add the luster of gold to that, it looks like form-fitting vinyl. I looked like I belonged in a rave or an all-male review. I really did look like a male stripper. The room provided for all of my needs. Not too much nor too little. Aspecting my physical stats gave me great muscles and tone. I was still a little smaller in frame, but all of it was functional muscle. I wasn’t Mr. Olympia material, but Men’s Health would probably call me back if I sent in a selfie.

  “Funny, little guy. Let’s keep the leather brown. I can’t wait to get you to a tailor.”

  Inquisitive trill

  “They are the masters of cloth and fashion. I’m hoping to find at least something better than this.”

  upset trill

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  “Don’t be sad, buddy, we need to get you samples and patterns. Trust me, my world has nothing like you. We would be super high fashion were we there. Now we have a few more experiments to go through. I have a whole bunch of coins that we are going to repeat the destruction sampling on. I also need to make you some more mass. I did have a question about that.”

  questioning trill

  “Does it hurt when parts of you get cut off?”

  minor agreement trill

  “So yeah, but only minor? Good to know. I want to try to do some experimentation to see if I can directly create your material. It wouldn’t give you new patterns to work with, but it would allow us to keep you as big as we need.”

  reluctant acceptance trill

  “Ok, I’ll work on getting better with the skills first.”

  Satisfied trill

  “Ass.”

  Self-satisfied trill

  We had only been together a few days at best, and he was already giving me sass. Yes, this was going to be a beautiful friendship. He was right, though, in that the coins were just money, and his material was part of him. I was pretty sure I could make the leather I knew easier than the coins I didn’t know, though. I wasn’t going to force him, though. He was a living, thinking being, and money was just money. I wondered if we could live on a single gold coin a day?

  I sat down and began the process of learning material for both of us. I was going to take a sliver off of the silverish coin I pulled out of storage, but I realized I was denying myself practice. If I learned the material from the coin, I could produce it, at least a small piece, for Ink to learn.

  I held the coin in my hand to get a feel for it. It wasn’t silver, it was too heavy and had a slightly whiter color. I started to stop using my eyes and use my abilities instead. As I focused on it I felt the object pop into my object sense. There it was, just the coin and nothing else, just a coin in the darkness. As I held it there, I started to get a feel for it. I could feel my ability reaching back through my thoughts. I wanted to know what this coin was before destroying it, and my ability wanted to tell me. I don’t know how long I sat there and focused; the room kept me alive and refreshed, so it could have been hours or days.

  Ink waited patiently the entire time. I wondered if he was studying the material too. I couldn’t see his tendrils, but in the sense I had going, it was literally just the coin. I didn’t want to back out of it, fearing I would lose the connection. Finally, I realized my mistake; I was looking at the coin as an object. I knew what it was; it was a coin. Hopefully, one day I would get more info, but no free identity spell for me. The object wasn’t the goal, though. The material was. I focused deeper on one section of the coin. I pushed my vision to the limit, looking as close as I could to where I could see the grainularity of the metal. I was no metallurgist, so the grain meant nothing to me. I was lamenting the limits of my vision when it dawned on me. My eyes had limits, but I wasn’t using my eyes. This was magic, and I wasn’t even looking directly at the coin. My eyes were actually closed, just as my hand was closed around the coin. My vision existed in my head and was fueled by magic. Fueled by the mana I could still feel circulating around my body. My luck channeling mana through the ability nodes in the Loci was not the best, so I tried another way. I held the thought of mana in my head and pushed it against the thought of zooming in closer. I felt a weird, not reluctance, but confusion, almost from the mana itself. As if I or it didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to know the material, and I began to imagine the farthest I could go.

  My vision shifted rapidly; I rushed through what felt like deep space. I could see stars all in the distance, surrounded by dozens of planets, spinning so rapidly in crazy orbits. I could see giant, wispy, megastructures connecting the stars, spanning what must have been light years. Who could make such things, and where did we fit into it? As I pondered, I began to notice the pattern. The stars were not randomly placed, nor was there variance in the planets. I was not seeing space as in outer space. I was seeing the space between things. I was looking directly at the atomic lattice of the metal. There were not stars but atoms. The wispy megastructures had to be molecular bonds. I focused deeper on one ‘star system’. As I rushed in, I could see that the odd planetary orbits were the inner electrons, not part of the molecular bonds. The ‘Star’ was a huge collection of spheres. I called them spheres, but they were slightly hazy, more the concept of a sphere. I wasn’t sure if this was reality or my brain making sense of reality based on the physics I knew. It took a few moments of staring at the almost two hundred spheres for me to get the difference. They were, from my perspective, closely orbiting each other but slowly. It was slow enough for me to focus on individuals long enough to feel a difference. Certain ones had a slightly different hue, and as they passed by my perspective, I could feel a force pass through me. Like a game with no tutorial, it took a second for me to turn around. Every time I felt the force, it helped me confirm. The force coincided with a slight pull on the electron planets behind me. I started counting.

  Seventy-eight. There were seventy-eight protons and one hundred and seventeen neutrons, those with no force. I tried to rack my brain for a periodic table, but to no avail. I could feel my mana draining, slowly but surely, so I decided to back out of the vision.

  Shifting back to reality, my head started to swim. The difference in the two perceptions was a bit much to handle.

  comforting trill

  “It’s ok budd…..”

  I started to heave. Technically, I had not eaten anything for two to three years, so a vomit at this point was exceptionally painful. I probably laid there on my side for a full hour. Ink made comforting trills the entire time, just like a BFF holding your hair back and rubbing your back. As I lay there in my stupor, one good thing did happen. A memory of a periodic table came flashing to my brain. Number seventy-eight was even highlighted. Platinum. The coin was Platinum.