Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Nikolai Kasatkin, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Chapter 41: White light/White heat
Special Circumstances headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension
Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)
The information obtained from the alien encounter generated huge interest among the magical theorists and dimensions specialists who were cleared to review it. At this point, Soth’s magic was fairly well understood and the structure of the Diankoran magic had been explored in detail, and interpreting the Diankoran dimensional magic in this context was not especially difficult. One important conclusion from studying the insect-reptile’s dimensional shift was that the target coordinates specified latitude, longitude, and height, thus indicating that the Diankoran dimension had a spacetime-structure similar to that of the Confluence dimension. Eventually the Expedition leadership tried to peek into the Diankoran dimension, but they discovered the dimension had been blocked off to such snooping. It would be possible to disable the protection, obviously, but the Diankorans might interpret that as a direct attack.
Investigating further, Confluence experts discovered that the Diankoran dimension was also protected from incursions using Divination-type dimension shift magics, which was the standard way of visiting other dimensions for Confluence explorers. There were also safeguards in place against the full-body variant that Confluence mages had picked up from Soth, but it appeared that protecting against this magic was not as straightforward. With time, detailed probing of the magics cast by the insect-reptile in Erd identified something like a communication flow attached to the dimensional magic. Even more interestingly, the insect-reptile’s magic appeared to have been modified so as to circumvent some of the safeguards protecting the Diankoran dimension against full-body dimensional incursions.
Confluence philosophers interested in the hitherto speculative field of alien languages would have been ecstatic to learn about the snippets of conversation that the SC agents had occasioned, but most of them unfortunately had to wait until the alien encounter was declassified. A few experts studied the brief conversation exhaustively, their main takeaway being that Confluence translation magics, developed on the basis of ancient and invented languages, generally seemed up to the task of deciphering Diankoran communications, although with considerable margins of error.
Meanwhile, the Erd author wrote Chapter 39, which described an SC board meeting; the agents thought it was great fun to read. The board and the agents held a meeting to plan the way ahead.
Center head: Welcome. The heat is turning up. What are your thoughts?
Sophie Strange: The consensus seems to be that we’re heading into the Diankoran dimension.
Right head: That could be dangerous.
Charlotte Ritter: I think we want to follow this to its conclusion. Of course, we’ll take every reasonable precaution, practice various scenarios, and generally prepare for it.
Watson Doyle: Like we did when preparing for the Erd incursion.
Left head: You will have to learn the full-body dimensional magic and explore its benefits and drawbacks.
Bob Rife: Yes. Or, more precisely, Sophie will have to master it and the rest of us will have to learn enough to collaborate meaningfully and to be able to trigger the return.
Center head: There are some complications, as you are aware.
Sophie Strange: The Diankoran dimension has protections in place. But the alien we encountered seemed to employ a range of metamagic tools to circumvent these protections.
Right head: One thing is to mimic the alien’s magic for entering Diankoran. Conceivably, you might need a different set of manipulations to get out again.
Sophie Strange: That is possible. Maybe the dimension has protections both against people entering and people leaving, and the two sets of protections need not be the same. I had not thought about that.
Right head: Which means it is possible that you would be stranded until you find a way to get out. Also, the protections seemed to have some geographical variation. One area was very strongly protected.
Watson Doyle: Possibly the city of Dat and its environs.
Right head: Sounds reasonable. Our impression is that the alien you encountered travelled to a location outside this strongly protected zone. We would advise you to do the same.
Charlotte Ritter: Seems like a sensible precaution. Also, if we cannot necessarily leave Diankoran when we want to, we should prepare for a long stay.
Left head: Bring a lot of energy. The Diankorans are really stingy with their energy, going to great lengths to minimize expenditure. Maybe, for some reason, there’s not a lot of energy around.
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Sophie already understood Soth’s magic fairly well, and it was not long before she started experimenting with jumps into Kirat and Erd. One idea that came to her was that it might be possible to maintain a Transmission field you share with someone even after you shift into another dimension, effectively making the alien dimension accessible to everyone who partakes in the Transmission and thereby may share the traveler’s perceptions. Such a thing was not possible with the traditional Confluence approach to dimensional shifts – and also not with life force projections – but she saw no reason why it should not work with the full-body version.
She tried it on a short trip into Kirat, and it worked fine – although it consumed a lot of energy. A trip into Erd found it working there as well – if they had known this before their shadow-snatching incursion, they might have shared their data in real time with Confluence experts and could probably have stayed for a much shorter time in Erd. Presuming that it would work for the Diankoran dimension as well, this meant that the travelers would be able to stay continuously in touch with someone back in the Confluence, which was obviously a great benefit.
The agents repeated their practice preparing for the Erd incursion. Although it was unclear whether retreating from the Diankoran dimension would be as easy as it was for Erd, it seemed prudent to have each agent learn as much of Soth’s magic as was necessary to trigger a return. Making each of them master the magic fully would have taken too long, though, so they were probably dependent on Sophie for a way back home. Other than that, Charlotte was still responsible for obfuscation and Watson for Transmission, although Watson’s task would only be necessary if the Transmission field extending back to the Confluence dimension broke down. Otherwise, the SC board would maintain the interdimensional Transmission, staying in touch with the agents, drawing in specialists as needed for specific tasks, providing an energy reserve, and supporting the agents with various magics. In particular, the board would support Charlotte’s obfuscation flow and take care of Divinations. If the Transmission held up, that is.
If Watson was not needed for Transmission, he would serve as a backup for other tasks and be responsible for any looping that might be necessary. Bob’s conjuring skills would probably be useful for producing whatever material gear they might need in Diankoran, and if the interdimensional Transmission did not hold, he would be responsible for Divinations. Sherlock for his part had important responsibilities related to the analysis of smells and maintaining enthusiasm levels. As with the previous incursion into Erd, the agents would have to take a pause from their daily group meetings, but this time around it was easier to explain (of course, they shared no details).
The preparations took some time, and both the board and the agents wondered if the Erd author would catch up with them somehow. Instead, the author seemed to lose interest in his writing project and focused on other tasks for a while. The board had decided to pay closer attention to what he was up to, but none of it was especially noteworthy. The author seemed convinced that this Confluence story was just something his mind had invented, and while he noticed some changes occurring in his world, he did not consider the possibility that these might be a product of the events occurring in his book. Instead, he believed in what seemed from his perspective rather more likely, namely that his writing was influenced by what was happening in the world. While his book presented the notion that he was being influenced by a very powerful mage from the Confluence dimension, he did not actually believe that this was happening. According to his understanding, his mind was inventing a weird story about an alien magical dimension serving as a sort of parent to his own dimension, none of which he for even a moment believed was real.
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The incursion into the Diankoran dimension took place on a Primidi, which was the traditional start of the work week and thus, it might seem, appropriate for starting something new. The agents had also started to joke that if these Diankorans were responsible for the Demonic wars, they might consequently be referred to as demons, whose home was traditionally referred to as Hell, and it seemed reasonable to assume that a trip to Hell would be more work than leisure.
The Special Circumstances section set up a shared Transmission field, and then everybody collaborated on a full-body dimensional shift into the coordinates that the insect-reptile had used to escape from Erd – only two hundred meters up. This location had been chosen through careful deliberation. On the one hand , it seemed that the location might be appropriate for someone needing to sneak into the Diankoran dimension – the insect-reptile arguably did not seem to be on an official mission as they had operated on their own and utilized what appeared to be improvised modifications to bypass Diankoran security. On the other hand, it was possible that the setup was a trap, and that the Diankorans were waiting for someone to spring it.
This possibility was not taken lightly, and it was hard to know how the Diankorans might be thinking. Most likely, however, they would realize that anyone who had the capability of replicating their magic would also be able to manipulate its basic parameters and might be inclined to do so in order to avoid arriving at known coordinates. If the setup were a trap, jumping in two hundred meters above the specified coordinates with strong obfuscation at a time the Diankorans presumably could not predict seemed adequate to avoid capture. And if it were not a trap, the specified surface location was presumably weakly defended in terms of dimensional safeguards and also likely unoccupied. The dimensional magic used the Confluence’s standard conveying procedure, so that the conveyed party would land on the nearest unoccupied location relative to their target coordinates, but there was still a chance that the dimensional shift would leave the agents inside solid matter – possibly living beings – which would then probably be disintegrated by the pocket created by Soth’s magic.
No one could estimate the odds that there might be something in the air two hundred meters above the insect-reptile’s arrival coordinates, but it seemed a reasonably safe location. The pocket would take care of the agents’ survival – most importantly by providing breathable air – and while it seemed that the preservation of three-dimensional space would not be an issue, the pocket would also maintain a Confluence-based passage of time. In order to properly explore the Diankoran dimension, nevertheless, the agents would have to abandon the pocket.
Most objects could be readily constructed via STEM magics in the Diankoran dimension, so there was not much the agents needed to bring. The only exception was their formal robes, which were exquisitely crafted and, besides looking very impressive, offered some protection against physical harm. The agents decided to wear these robes when they entered Diankoran – some of them had several robes to choose from, but all ended up wearing their Diviner white.
The dimensional shift pushed the group a few meters off the target coordinates in order to place them outside the perimeter of a flock of birds, who entirely failed to notice the agents’ arrival. Nevertheless, the birds moved forward at what seemed to be an unnatural speed. No one had time to consider this just yet, since other concerns were drowned out by a feeling of great relief coursing through the Transmission field as everybody found themselves still intimately conjoined with each other – including the board members back in the Confluence. The agents floated quietly in the air; no one else seemed to be around. Sherlock whimpered at being so high up in the air.
A flurry of activities took place, mostly involving various Divinations. The air had the same general composition as back home, but with so many pollutants that breathing it seemed unhealthy; this meant that when the agents wanted to move about, they would have to construct an environmental shield around them to filter the air. The agents were floating above a clearing in a forest; in the distance they could see farmland and simple cottages.
Having established that the agents were in no immediate danger, the board members started analyzing the agents’ return options; they had experts at hand and believed that agreeable options would be available within a few minutes. The Diankoran flora and fauna seemed generally similar to Confluence counterparts, but everything moved unnaturally fast; on closer scrutiny, this celerity extended to such processes as photosynthesis and the decay of radioactive particles. After further analyses, the board concluded that Diankoran time ran about twice as fast as Confluence time. To stay in Confluence time, the agents would have to remain inside their dimensional pocket, which seemed impractical and would leave them at a disadvantage should they face hostilities.
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Far in the distance, something seemed to be gleaming. The source of this impressive luminosity was identified as a city – which looked utterly resplendent, although the Confluence observers soon noticed that the whole place was under a glamourous illusion. At this point, it seemed unnecessary to probe beneath the illusion; the apparently resplendent city was in the middle of the geographical area previously identified as strongly protected from dimensional incursion, and everybody assumed this was the city of Dat.
The agents had arrived just after sunset, and at first there were no nearby Diankorans to observe. Soon, however, one of the cottage doors opened, and a person exited the building to head towards a smaller building nearby. The person looked nothing like the insect-reptile they had observed in Erd; instead, he very much resembled a Confluence male, only substantially shorter. This Diankoran male wore simple and rather filthy clothes that offered only rudimentary protection from the elements; a closer analysis revealed that the man was cold, hungry, tired to the point of exhaustion, and suffered from several loathsome diseases, some of which appeared to result directly from inadequate nutrition.
They silently observed this pitiful character entering the small building in order to defecate. His surface mind was embroiled in some sort of conflict with the other people living in the main building, but the conflict was driven not so much by actual events as by an underlying worry about when the tribute collectors would arrive to deprive them all of the little food they possessed. It was clear that these people lived in constant dread.
As if summoned by the worried thinking, the Confluence observers became aware of a group of people riding down a dirt road about three kilometers from the cottage, heading towards it. There were four people dressed in battered plate armor riding their own horses and a carriage drawn by four horses, with two plate-armored coachmen and someone important inside.
Center head: Well, this is interesting. Look, it’s another insect-reptile.
Right head: Hiding under a flimsy illusion. So weak it almost falls apart on its own.
Watson Doyle: But not for them. These peasants are magic-deprived, deprived of everything really. They can’t see through even the most basic illusion.
Bob Rife: We’re getting a situation in our lap right away, aren’t we?
Sophie Strange: Should I stay or should I go now?
Left head: Either way there will be trouble.
Center head: Yes. This may turn ugly.
Charlotte Ritter: And then we have no choice but to intervene. Right?
Bob Rife: Someone has to be the good guys.
Right head: But if you attack them and then let the insect-reptile get away, they will raise an alarm on you.
Charlotte Ritter: Yes. But the insect-reptile looks smaller and weaker than the one we encountered in Erd.
Sophie Strange: So, if we are forced to intervene, we could maybe capture it? Or them.
Watson Doyle: Is our return figured out yet?
Center head: We think so. But don’t bring the insect-reptile into the Confluence.
Right head: No. But, you know, the Yavin outpost in Kirat could be a good spot. Should be safe.
Charlotte Ritter: What about the metalheads?
Sophie Strange: We don’t want to kill them. They’re probably much like the peasants, deprived in every way, forced to work for their occupiers.
Left head: Send them to sleep, wipe the past half-hour of their memories, transport them somewhere far away.
Center head: Oops we lost our fat bald guy and we have no memories of what happened. Might work.
Left head: If you had to hide under an illusion, what would make you choose obesity and baldness for your cover?
Right head: Maybe that’s how tribute collectors are supposed to look. Anyway, none of this may turn out to be necessary. Maybe the peasants just give these guys some stuff and they go away.
Left head: You wish.
The SC group watched the armored riders approach the cottage while performing a variety of searches and analyses in the background. There were a few other cottages nearby, as well as stables for animals, outhouses, and sheds. Most of the area was either farmland or forests; the farming tools were simple things made of wood, iron, and leather. Inside the cottage that the male they had seen had now returned to, there was a total of eleven people spanning three or four generations.
One of the riders dismounted, then went up to pound on the door. The male opened the door and there was an exchange about tribute collection; the male sighed and invited them in. Another rider dismounted and the insect-reptile / fat bald guy got out of the carriage, then these three visitors entered the cottage, where the women were busy preparing some sort of hot drink based on local herbs. As soon as the insect-reptile was seated, it started drawing energy from everybody who lived here; within a few minutes, their meagre reserves were almost entirely depleted.
The male stuttered shame-facedly that the family had almost no food left and was already starving; he had nothing to offer. They also had no valuables to offer as tribute. The insect-reptile did not seem to care much, but the two armored guards were very upset; presumably they would get a share of any such material tributes. Tempers flared while the insect-reptile just sat there, not touching the hot drink, just waiting for the anger and frustration to build up, then after some time they declared that if the farmer had nothing of substance to offer in tribute, he would instead have to offer something else. This seemed to please the two guards, whose surface minds were now concerned with which of the peasant’s daughters they would claim for themselves; the male peasant for his part objected vehemently.
Sophie Strange: We have seen enough, haven’t we?
Charlotte Ritter: Time to get ready, at least. Should we go down there?
Bob Rife: If we rescue these people from an attack, maybe they are willing to talk with us afterwards. Might be beneficial.
Watson Doyle: Let’s go then.
The first thing the agents noticed when they allowed the pocket they were in to dissipate was that the board members over in the Confluence suddenly seemed very slow-minded. It was hard to breathe the Diankoran air, so they surrounded themselves with an environmental shield to filter it. As they floated down towards the cottage, things were heating up inside – the male peasant and the two guards were hurling threats at each other, the former being backed up by his wife and his two eldest sons. The guards outside were starting to move towards the cottage door when they suddenly fell to the ground, fast asleep. None of the people inside noticed anything.
Hovering above the cottage, Charlotte blasted the whole thing with a cancellation attack and immediately followed up with a wrapping maneuver that engulfed the insect-reptile in cancellation magic. The other people in the cottage gasped when the fat bald tribute collector transformed into something like a giant insect, paralyzed by fear yet unable to tear their gaze away from what they could not see as anything other than a demon. As the two armored guards collapsed, the demon growled as they tried to resist the incoming attack, moving frantically around in the small space before they, too, collapsed. The cottage turned eerily silent.
The agents landed, exempted the people in the cottage from their obfuscation, and walked in. Sherlock sniffed around outside, the horses being oblivious to his presence. To the peasants, the four people entering their cottage must have seen like angels: they were considerably taller than themselves, dressed in radiant white and silver, looked as clean as nothing they had seen before, and had a demeanor mixing the peasants’ notion of a benevolent king with that of a traveler from another world. One of the children, mesmerized, walked towards Sophie so as to touch her, coming to halt only when the adult woman, presumably her mother, barked something at her.
In the background, the SC board immediately started analyzing the woman’s utterance. Bizarrely, the language seemed to resemble what they had previously heard from the insect-reptile in Erd, the woman using her tongue, throat, and her few remaining teeth to produce noises replicating those made by her overlords. Her vocal cords were largely uninvolved in this endeavor, to which she was clearly not well suited. The Divination analysis indicated that the woman had most likely been saying “No!” followed by the child’s name.
After a brief discussion with the group mostly on a feeling level, Sophie, with some magical assistance, replicated the sound presumed to be the child’s name while smiling and reaching out towards her. Overcoming the hesitation imposed on her by the barking parent, the girl touched Sophie’s hand while making shy clicking sounds that were interpreted to mean either “What is your name?” or “Who are you?” For a few moments, the group considered how they might translate Sophie’s name into the clicking sounds, then decided to abandon this hopeless undertaking and instead had Sophie offer her name as pronounced in the Confluence. The girl and her family looked bewildered at the alien sound emerging from Sophie; when the girl attempted to repeat it, she could not pronounce the two syllables and instead hummed the name as if it were a snippet of melody. None of the people present knew that this little melody would eventually turn into something like a secret cipher among the Diankoran peasants, used to refer to “the Strangers” or “the Radiant Ones” or “the Wise Ones” (the peasants never could quite agree on what exactly the Confluence visitors were, but gave them various epithets based on local religious beliefs).
The important thing at this point was to get the peasants to say something, so that their utterances might be analyzed. To achieve this, the agents tried to get everyone in the family to say their name, hoping they would add some other words to the presentation and thereby increase the group’s Diankoran vocabulary. The adult male of the family, presumably the father, was the most generous in this regard, as he saw fit to mention, in its most likely interpretation, that he and his family were hard-working peasants who had always paid tribute dutifully, were true Diankoran patriots, and fully supported the Ruling Council. Furthermore, he was proud to inform his visitors that the family possessed some sort of farm animal that helped with plowing (or perhaps some other such task), although two other farm animals of a different type had to be slaughtered some time ago to feed the family during a drought. At the present point in time, unfortunately, there was not much food available, but the tribute collectors had no right to rape his daughters because the family was out of food and had nothing to offer in tribute. He finished by expressing a worry that he and his family would be blamed for what had happened to the tribute collectors. This brought everybody’s mind back to the insect-reptile sleeping on the floor, with several family members making some sort of hand movement that seemed ritual and religious in nature while making sounds that probably meant something like “demon” or “monster”.
One factor which greatly facilitated the agents’ attempts to speak the Diankoran language was that everything they learned instantly became shared knowledge. The board members analyzed utterances in the background and had already brought in several language experts to help with this task. If an agent wanted to say something, these people in the background constructed sentences for them based on the Confluence’s continually expanding pool of Diankoran words, which could be pronounced magically (it was agreed that the agents would move their tongues and mouths in basic correspondence to what was being said, in order not to confuse and frighten the peasants more than necessary). Thus, the individual agents did not actually have to learn the Diankoran language, as they could simply allow the board and their experts to speak through them.
Charlotte – more precisely, this was a collaborative effort by the whole Special Circumstances section – tried to ask the family what they knew about the insect-reptile, but it seemed they either did not know anything or did not want to say what they knew. She then tried to assure the peasants that there was nothing to worry about, and Watson and Bob proceeded to carry first the insect-reptile and then the two guards outside. (Sherlock sniffed the insect-reptile thoroughly and declared, mostly via Watson, that it smelled of iron oxide.) When the family members could no longer see what happened, the agents carefully conveyed the six guards to a suitably far-off location and deleted any memories formed over the past half-hour. Then they obfuscated the insect-reptile, let the horses run off, and disintegrated the carriage.
There was the question of what to do before the agents left the family behind to take the insect-reptile to the Yavin outpost in Kirat. Arguably, the family had been of great help to the Confluence, especially in terms of expanding their knowledge of the Diankoran language, and it was out of the question to just leave the family to its bleak fate. One of the children had a wound on their leg, and Sophie asked if she could have a look at this. The child complied, and, after inspecting the wound, Sophie put her hand on it – this was just for dramatic effect – and, collaborating with the board members in the background, proceeded to heal the wound as well as a few diseases the child was suffering from. This occasioned much useful talking among the family members, and Sophie ended up taking a full round, curing everybody of infections and compensating for other damage.
Background analyses of every item in the cottage had already been performed – besides a few simple household items, they had some meagre food supplies hidden away – and Bob was able to replicate these food items using conjurations. He then entered the cottage carrying several big sacks of grains and dried vegetables which he offered to the family. (The sacks were constructed on the basis of materials found in the cottage, but Bob had inadvertently strengthened the fibers considerably. The peasant family did not recognize the unique durability of these sacks until much later, but eventually the Diankoran peasant community came to regard these sacks as objects of veneration.)
As a last gesture before leaving, Charlotte and Watson shared a small amount of energy from the hoard with the peasants while making farewell gestures with their hands. The peasants, who immediately felt better, believed they had been blessed, and the Confluence goodbye wave eventually formed the basis of a Diankoran blessing ritual. To make their departure look a little stylish, the five of them levitated up into the air – obfuscated from everyone but the peasant family – before shifting over to the Kirat dimension with their prisoner.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Abstract Expressionism, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Aleksei Venetsianov, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Gustav Klimt (top) and Félicien Rops (bottom), as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Gustave Moreau (top) and German Expressionism (bottom), as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Diankoran peasant home and visitors, in the style of Mikhail Vrubel (top) and Punk Art (bottom), as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
