BECMI Chapter 463 – Forget Feathers, We Want a Demiplane in your Cap

“Well, I guess we’ll be doing some alchemy while we’re here and you’re putting up the Pyramid,” Thor agreed readily after hearing my tale. “The Gallivants should be able to help, of course. I’m sure they all have at least basic knowledge in alchemy and can assist, and at least four of them are masters of the craft.”

“Yes. Most of them, actually, although Catleya and Chardon don’t like to admit it, and certainly are not into mass production. Dame Adama knows because it is foundational, core knowledge that touches on many disciplines. Iatro knows because of healing applications. Lunia knows as a foundational trade for the betterment of mortals. Helos knows it as required arcane knowledge, and Arbor is familiar because of the intersection with herblore and raw materials.”

They were impressed. Then again, the avatars were superhumanly intelligent, and had been expanding their gifts to the limits they were allowed to.

“More to the point, are you going to go through the Arch with them? I think a Source leading the way would be good for all concerned, actually.”

Thor looked back at Sif, who appeared to think it over, and then just sighed and nodded. “It’s time to do it on the class side,” she agreed lightly. “Our racial side… well, we’re going to be at that for a lot longer, you know.”

“I do!” I nodded along with her. “You seem to be somewhat resigned about the fact. Are you thinking about children instead?”

“Will we still be able to have them after becoming Eternal?” Sif asked warily. “We can totally put it off if not…”

“That’s… a really good question,” I had to admit. “Sama had Thor before stepping through the Arch. It hasn’t been all that long since then, so I don’t know if they’ve been trying for more since.

“My gut instinct is yes, there should be nothing stopping it. If I recall Sama’s words correctly, your entire Curseline springs from a post-mortal Sama Rantha. There should be no difficulties, especially if it’s only Class Levels.”

“Good to know. We’ll go through, then. I’ve a feeling it will be important,” Thor growled.

“Oh?” I could hear something in his voice.

“Pressure,” he conceded to me, making me frown. “There’s push-back against what we are doing. I think becoming an Eternal Source is going to be necessary to push the timeline in the direction we want with massive pressure. Immortals are going to start taking more personal actions, as opposed to sending mortal champions to bedevil us.”

The things an Immortal could do to bedevil a mortal kingdom or nation was a death knell for said kingdom, only capable of being stopped by another being of equal power. Since that basically resulted in stalemate at best or destruction of whatever they were fighting for, Immortals were supposed to be largely barred from taking direct actions on the mortal plane.

Eternals, not so much, but they weren’t aware I was one, yet.

“Really going to turn this place into Heaven, huh?” Sif asked, casting a skeptical pale green eye around.

“It’ll look a lot different with a hundred thousand years of change and a whole lot of Light and positive energy,” I noted for her lightly. She snorted, but nodded after another moment of thought about that…

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Making the Pyramid wasn’t all that hard now, of course. I’d done forty-steppers before, and several of the Gallivants could help directly with making blocks. That was important, because at least for the first hundred miles of radius, another level of blocks was going to be needed to be added, then one more level every additional ten miles up to a thousand, then another every hundred miles up to ten thousand miles… at which point the Pyramid would be three thousand feet tall and pretty much able to grow on its own by then as the center of the Plane.

In other words, growing the Pyramids was going to require a LOT of block-making, but it was nothing Clones and Sims of the Gallivants couldn’t handle jointly, just keeping up steady production every day.

The Gallivants pulled out their own resources and magic to adorn the central temple inside the Pyramid, while I worked around their design to form the Domain, with each of them having their own ideas on what to input and modify for themselves to construct what they wanted done here. After all, a new Heaven had to be inclusive of both sides of the Good axis, not at war like their Evil opposite numbers were.

In between that, they helped Sif and Thor with some very high-end alchemy stuff. To no one’s surprise, I had the best-equipped lab for the work, although it had to be expanded with a dozen people crowding into it. My Sim Abigail who maintained the Sanctum had no problems cleaning up for them and helping expand the Mansion-turned-personal demiplane.

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Potions, no, Elixirs of Master’s Luck were only some of the things they came up with that might prove of use. There was at least one Philosopher’s Stone, and a true Elixir of Youth, able to reset a person’s age all the way back to young adulthood, that came out of the lab during that time. There was also at least one dose of Universal Solvent, an Elixir of Life, and four doses of Panacea.

Nothing to give the Exemplar Template, as I knew to be possible, but something to give the half-Celestial Template was totally possible… if you had a Celestial to donate some blood, which we didn’t, and I wasn’t going to ask any of the local Archons, who were of Axiom and totally ineligible.

But my focus was on a starting 40-step Pyramid, while the Avatars concentrated on getting their own Sims in place to help maintain the place and start the revisions that would happen upon completion.

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The four-sided Pyramidal capstone was set in place, a true capstone since the altars on this one were inside as opposed to the top of it.

Runes lit up, circuits of magical diagrams wrought in stone infused with a lot of pyromana gleamed crimson and Good as Holy energies devoured fiery power, and began the process of turning it all into the Light.

Immortal Energies harvested from the conflict above and a dead Theggla-Mu gathered to the Pyramid and began to empower it past what mortal magic could attain, energizing the Pyramid’s Domain and expanding it, allowing it to draw in more power in a virtuous cycle of efficient supply and demand.

We watched the transparent golden shell wash outward slowly. The temperature dropped a good hundred degrees in mere seconds as condensed fiery energy flowed out of the air and came streaming to the capstone, whoseHeat Sinkeffect devoured it all and sent it down into the stones, filling up and lighting the levels of Rune Circuits up one by one. Each level was larger and required more mana, but expanded the Domain as they did so, accelerating the amount of mana to gather and being gathered as they lit up in series, one by one.

When the bottom tier of forty by forty blocks lit up, the Domain hit the edge of the Veil here and latched on. True absorbed Immortal power wrenched at dimensional positioning, and for the second time, yet thousands/millions of years earlier than its counterparts, Shadow Kheper’s dimension coordinates were shifted out of association with the Sphere of Death, and lifted up, up, and up!

Up in a direction that actually was not there in this universe, as there were no Source Planes of any Alignment here, for all that the Death and Entropy-aligned planes were almost universally dominated by Evil creatures!

This place needed a Heaven, and now we had one on the way.

At the center-point of the Pyramid was a boulder carved from purest white jade and wrought to 40 QL in the shape of an utterly magnificent gold, platinum, and jewel-inlaid altar, magnificent yet sublime. It was pulsing with the power of the Gold, Silver, and Rainbow, throbbed and took in that energy, become a new source of Eternal power.

In Spellcrafting terms, it could generate 5000 XP a day to power magical spells. Which wasn’t a whole damn lot, but if it was only ONE particular magical spell, that changed things.

That spell wasGenesis, and now that Altar was going to fuel the expansion of this entire dimension… once the Veil was suitably reinforced and stabilized as its multiversal position changed. It might only grow fifty feet a day… but as the plane of New Elysium settled into its new planar coordinates, the sky shifted towards a glorious and welcoming blue as a connection to a greater Light was reached and the temporal acceleration dimmed to a mere ten thousand multiple.

Five hundred thousand feet a day was close to a hundred miles a day outside. A 3500-mile radius world was the size of Nown, meaning that in a month outside New Elysium was going to be the size of a habitable planet, and only growing under the guidance of Divine minds.

The Gallivants’ Sim Avatars were at Level 21 (60% of their 36 Apex), which was sufficient to cast IX’s. They could not, however, use the Ur-Priest Class schema, as that was a Class for mortals only, and thus, they didn’t have the boosted Caster Level shenanigans that I used.

Thus, no CastingWishspells on their own, but their true selves totally could grant aMiracleon their behalf, and instantly turn them from Sims to Level 21 living derivatives of themselves, effectively independent avatars of the Avatars. They were able to Level up on their own and thus were eminently suitable to be caretakers of the world as it grew, guiding its development and the new world(s) that would be arising here.

The Gallivants wouldn’t be able to attract Good souls here until they were Divine, however, and that required first passing through the Arch of Eternity and picking the Divine path, stepping along the path as a Demigod or Saint, and then continuing up the scale.

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We were enjoying one lastHeroes Feasttogether before setting out back to the Prime Plane. We’d see the changes in the nested planes as their links now led Up towards an unknown Heaven instead of Down to the Sphere of Death. Each of those worlds in turn was going to need a caretaker and someone to monitor them, necessitating short stops by us to make more Sims there to watch over things, and Pyramids to lock in their Planar stability and isolate them from intrusions from the Astral Plane… which would almost always be curious Immortals.

“I am curious to know how you’re going to set up the afterlife for Good souls here. Idyllic realms of peace and industry, glorious weather, fine scenery, bustling nature, fine sunsets, burbling brooks, golden sandy beaches…” Sif smirked as she swigged down something that could probably peel paint off the walls, and smelled like raspberries.

The Avatars glanced at one another, silently decided it wasn’t that big a secret, and let Lunia take point. “We were more thinking of making it more video gamer-like. Exudar IV and some of the Dungeons you’ve created are great guides for the kind of thing we could do, but naturally it’s much easier with spirits because everything need not be ‘real’ in the way it is for mortals. We can have endless worlds to pick from, death doesn’t need to stop you, and you can indulge yourself in countless ways, even if those ways are just to sit back from tending your farms and fields and enjoying a golden sunset.”