((If she is willing, Glitch is Jack's GM in this dream that Glitch is having. Jack is a character in Glitch's dream(s). Glitch may or may not be in the dream - that's up to her as GM.  The All is telling me through synchronicities to take a day off and rest my mind, so I wanted to leave you guys with a way to keep playing while I'm away, and be able to take something away from it that I may not have thought of.))

Jack can't remember what happened but he finds himself waking to pain stabbing him in the back. As he stirs from his slumber his hands come down into the most disgusting of refuse. He was on mountains of trash, some bits of metal behind his back giving him a rather sore place to lay.

Looking around a quick glace shows him to be in a massive pit at least a mile or two wide in the middle of an abandoned city long left to dust and ruin, crumbling struchers around the edge of the pit, and the pit itself full of trash and scrap.... and.... cyborg zombies?  It was a good thing he woke when he did one was ready to make a snack of him now.

Not remembering how he got here, Jack immediately begins running away. Using low-impact diagnostic tests to try and figure out what he can get away with in this verse. He doesn’t remember dying, so it must have been a bad one!

This universe seams to have a tech bias but he seams to be able to get away with just about anything here as the tech here is advanced enough that anything he could do could be done by the tech. However the tech around him, in the very air, seams... damaged. In fact this world seams to be dying slowly as entropy is accelerated, he's actually aging faster here. It's not enough to be of any concern but it's weird.

Thankfully the cyborg zombie is slow, it's servos old and rusted affected time and entropy, however there are quite a lot of them down here with him. A better look around shows more strangeness, as looking up into the dusty sky he can see past the brown stained clouds a roof?  It must be miles in the air and there is a hole in it overhead where he can see it has collapsed, the roof itself must be thousands off feet thick and a cavity was beyond that. The collapsed roof was just overhead, so maybe it was why the large pit he was in existed.

One of the rats rummaging though the scrap cautiously approached Jack, and though it didn't speak he seamed to understand it. ~Queen is gone... not safe.. find shelter... it stalks.~

When he figures out the nature of the world he has found himself in, Jack immediately pulls out a feather and calls out, “Flight, moderate,” in the dragon-tongue. Causing the feather to dissolve into particles of light and then he takes off just out of reach of the cyborg-zombie. Once that is resolved, and the immediate threat isn’t about to try to eat him, Jack starts to layer himself with Order to offset the effects of the entropy. Healing the damage.

The words from the rat has him lean over and offer a hand for it to crawl up on to.

“Show me the way, little one. I’ll see what I can do!” he tells the little rat.

The rat was the size of a medium dog, and not that small, however if he still wanted it would crawl up onto his back. It was surprisingly clean for living in a garbage pit and probably the least foul smelling thing down here.  ~safe place?... For two legs?.... not here, up!.... then under.... where chemical/drug smell~ and pointed off in the distance.

If he asked about what stalked the area making it unsafe it also responded with ~Up!~  and pointed in a different direction ~Zip ways...~

Jack glances up and makes sure his being encompasses the rat on his back. Lifting his hands, he makes a few quick gestures and then vanishes from where he’d been hovering, using Order magic to teleport up to near where the hole in the roof is but not in front of it, relying on line of sight capabilities to cover the vast distance.  Drawing out his halberd, he scoots over to the edge of the hole and glances inside. “In there?” he asks.

The rat mildly panics at this digging it's claws into jacks clothing (and mabye his skin) as it clings to him tightly.... suddenly being miles in the air is not something it was expecting.

It looked like he was in a gargantuan 'room' or 'floor' in a 'building' of sorts?, one thousands of miles wide, though only a few tall. Though from the looks of things the structure he was in was not level or what ever was generating gravity was malfunctioning as the 'ground' was not strait down but at an ever so slight angle creating a polluted ocean in one corner of the floor. The floor though looked like something out of mad max crossed with an alien landscape. Post apocalypse with strange things like a forest made of metal trees growing branches of circuits, solar panels, and wires. There was also what looked like an ungodly large explosion moving in slow motion that time seamed to be slowing down more and more the closer you got to the center of it where time just seamed to stop. There was ruined cities and collapsed highways. The most activity he could see was off in the distance off shore in the ocean where there was large plateau that was cracked in half, it looked like a massive blade had chopped it in half and it resettled. However structures where built all around, in, and over it and lights where coming from all around and in it. He could see ships and people flying around it that appeared to be fighting.... in fact the whole plateau seamed to be engulfed in some sorta war or something.

Entropy's strength seamed to be stronger in some areas while weaker in others, where ever entropy was weaker the technology in the air worked better as did his powers. The place entropy was the weakest was the plateau which could explain why people where fighting over it.

Once the rat calmed down it pointed to a stretch of ruined highway. ~it left for zipways~ He could see the occasional billowing streams of black smoke rising from spots on the ruined highways bellow.

Jack reaches back to cast Fly on the rat and flies up to the ceiling of the place and starts to work a massive mandala onto the surface, using the tip of his halberd to carve it into the ceiling, he works methodically. “Let’s see if we can’t change and heal the nature of this place, little rat,” he suggests as he attempts to work the ritual in a way that will make it self-propagate in a fractal manner, expanding itself outwards by absorbing the energy it transforms. Reinforcing itself with time.

Channeling his will into the magic, and reinforcing it with Order Nails at key junctions.

It floated uncomfortably squeaking as it didn't like this at all. ~rats not for fly.... rats for in ground...~

As jack works on the mandala he can see it start to brake down slowly as he builds it, little imperfections forming as it's made. It's not much but as he works it becomes noticeable, like a game of telephone the fractal patterns spread more flaws. The order nails help maintain them but they are not enough. Grand scale magic would likely take more than Jack alone and this place's Bias for entropy is just too strong. He could reinforce an area and protect it from entropy for some time but entropy would brake down his reinforcements and it would return to the way it was given time.

From the looks of things this place use to be a technological wonder, what ever happened here to cause such an exstreame entropic bias must have been devastatingly powerful and likely the cause of what ever apocalypse befell them.

Even Jacks flight spells were being eaten away at and he could tell they wouldn't last forever.

However people lived here, and if the battle on the plateau was any sign maybe even thrived here, so the entropy wasn't choking out life... just cutting it a tad short. Stella or the helmet would estimate people would live 60~80% as long as they should depending on where they lived.

Also every time he looked at the plateau his helmet would ping it with a mark, If he looked a legend to see what the mark was it said it was for "re-spawn points".

“Come here little one, we’re going down,” Jack says when he notices the effects of entropy on the mandala and goes around to collect his nails. He’d probably have to start much smaller and make the Entropy enforce it, but he doesn’t have the skills for that particular Order magic, yet. He’d never learned that from Mr. Magehammer.

Turning down toward the ground, he teleports to the ground so that he can drop and renew the magic keeping him aloft.

“So, who should we approach? I imagine we should find out what is happening here and see if there is anything to learn. I’m not feeling any pull, so there must not be any other versers,” he is talking aloud to the rat, but mostly just to himself.

The city they landed in was in ruin, the large pit created by the collapsed roof didn't help. Near the pit there was a city center where there was no entropy imbalance at all... it was a small park with a statue of an anthropomorphic ferret (at least you think that is what it is, it's rather rusted and worn apparently it wasn't always protected from the entropy) in it and a a small metal tree with shimmering metal leaves, merely a sapping. The park also had a 3 meter wide, 1 millimeter 'deep', vertical pool of liquid metal floating just off the ground near one edge of it. Oddly the helmet showed a level to the tree, however it was glitched, and marked the pool with a circle with a dot in it over top of it. Nothing Jack had could make sense of the tree or the pool. Though the tree seamed to be orderly while it's leaves where full of chaos, and the pool seamed to be quite full of order.  The anti-entropic affect seams to be coming from the pool of metal and don't have a very large range to it.

There was a path of utter destruction leading away from the pit up into the city, what ever had come out of the pit had did quite some damage to the city and must have been quite large. Least the size of your classical dragon in a story a true monster. It seamed to grow bored of trashing a dead city though and had headed off to the highway in the distance where it seamed to have damaged something if the billowing smoke was any sign.

The rat pointed in the path of destruction ~went that way~
This message was last edited by the player at 23:21, Thu 21 Apr 2022.

Turning into a massive cartoon Order dragon of his own, Jack starts to head in the path the destroyer has left behind, exhaling breaths of cold Order all over the place as he goes. Trying to contradict the actions of the creature it has decided to follow for the time being.

“Let’s see how this works,” he says to the rat as he trundles along.

The rat scrambles up onto Jacks back, not particularly a fan of the cold ground Jack leaves behind.

He soon comes up on the smell of burning diesel fuel and a woman among the wreckage of several vehicles trying to repair something that looks like a cross between a neojapanise race car and an off road madmaxian war-car. Cursing up a storm as she works on it pealing away and kicking to the side damaged panels of armor to get to the damaged machine parts underneath. All the other vehicles seam to have dead bodies or are abandoned, she's put the fire out on her's and is trying to fix it... or at least see whats salvageable.

When she see's you coming along breathing fire all over the place she pulls out what looks like a gun of some sorts.... one cobbled together from a mixture of high tech parts and scrap laying around. "Oooooohhh fuck no. You best best turning around with that shite right the fuck now. Bad enough some 30 foot tall mecha-ratzilla comes through here trashing our race, but my zoommies leaving me behind, and now your fat scally ass.... you so much as look funny at my baby and I will blow your god damn eyes out the back of your fucking head!!!" She reaches pulling what looks like the kinda junk-punk grenades the girl on Arcane makes from a pouch too as she steps away from her vehicle.

Shrinking his size down to a more viable humanoid one, Jack turns into a person and gently reaches back and puts the rat down on the ground beside him. “I was just trying to fix things. Should I go and slay the ‘mecha-ratzilla’?” he asks, trying to think of some way to help this situation for these people.

She looks over Jacks and laughs a little "A Charmer like you? I...." She shakes her head putting her weapons way as she goes back to work "I can't say I've known many from Charm to be ones for fightin' but sure take you shot... least your not a toy of some kind so you got that going for you... but if your color starts to fad-" She blinks realizing what she said. "I would paint some color on you, if it starts to go all gray scale on ya' then ya' know your in trouble out here. More conseptials like you need to watch out where the Instantiator system is all buggered. It can't support no fiddly diddly drawing if the nanites start shorting out yah in a dead zone..... that happens best hope your backup is fresh."

Something tells Jack that she is using Charm as a proper noun and charmer as a person related to that proper noun.

She sighs and goes back to work on her vehical. "I superpose some gridshamans will get together and do something about it eventually, or someone from the table will see it as good old fun and games to smash it to pieces.... but in the meantime we are stuck with it.  I swear if this is part of some art war or some art project I'm going to find who did it and tie them to the underside of my rig next race.....  fuck might have to kill'em a few times.  Fucking assholes think that just because Down is 'a right fucking trash heap' it's real good fucking fun to unleash a god damn kaiju or two!" She yells up into the sky at no one in paticular "Well this right fucking trash heap is some peoples homes you right ass!!!!"

“I can paint myself,” Jack tells her with a smile and listens to her as she mumbles her explanation of what is happening her. “What is a ‘Charm’?” he asks, just for his knowledge.  Even as he talks to her, he returns to his cartoon form and then reaches up to the top of his head and unzips his skin from head to crotch, and steps out of the dragon suit as a Technicolor Dragon and then starts to grow again, though he's careful not to step on her things, he grows and keeps growing.

"What is.... " she blinks a little confused looking up "Charm, ye old land of positive emotions, all disgustingly happy happy happy toys and toons and people in creepy suits wondering around with nothing on there minds but spreading joy and happiness." She turns to him giving him an odd inquisitive look while holding a socket wrench. "Your not some charmer just offering to slay this beast because it will make people happier...ish?"

"That's.... weird... but what ever it's the mess (another proper noun)." she goes back to work.  "Huh... I'm not sure if your safer as a toon or flesh as I can't imagine transitioning from toon to flesh would be very ideal anywhere the Instantiator isn't running top notch.  But it seams to be working for you for now, so if you have anything non-conseptiual you can be I would do that out here.... this your first time in Down?"

I would note the roof of the place had a track on it that two large orbs ran across and many countless lights. The lights served as stars at 'night', while the orbs as sun and moon. However the track was broken and the moon seamed not only to be stuck over the ocean but was ether hacked or had some form of holographic devices set up over it making it project various images around it.... they looked like adverts.  The sun still moved on it's track, though it could likely only move back and forth over maybe half the track considering the poor shape it was in.  This left one side always in night or twilight, while the other half shifted from night to day normaly as the sun moved about and turned itself on and off.  Though this ruined any imagery of a sun and moon moving across the sky.

Then again the very notion of a sky was rather ruined already by the hole in it, so it didn't matter to much.

The sun still put out heat however it seamed to be malfunctioning so the amount of heat it put out varied and the days where seldom normal being ether too hot or too cold by at least some amount, thankfully the ground was heated to simulate geothermal heat.

“I’m not from this world, I’m from a different world entirely, one you’ve never heard of or seen,” Jack answers the woman and seems to be trying to puzzle out the meaning behind her words. “What’s an Instantiator?” he asks directly.

She rolls her eyes "Should have known you weren't a charmer.... tend to be made of Imilexene more often than anything else rather than some conceptual. I mean Imilexene is a lot more reliable and can do just about as much as you would like it to do as animated conceptual forms....  all in all fairly useful stuff. I use it from time to time on my rig."  When Jack says he's from another world she sighs. "Fuck, don't tell me your a Teran... it's not funny... listen there is no Earth some ones fucked with your head." She shakes her head and sits on the hood of her vehical. "The Instantiator is a system of nanites in, well everything. Fucking everywhere. You can think of it they will respond and do it... though some people have to use some interface device. Would have figured you knew this the way you had your Saizho on, but I guess who ever got you must have fiddled with your head to make you good at Saizho'n out. But yah you can mess with other people if you over power there will, which includes getting rid of there memories and replacing them with those of some other world that don't exist." While she talks she gets out some data pad and fiddles with it and then winces hard. "Shiiiiit, they got your back ups too. That's rough.... sorry.  Maybe who ever it was keep hard copies of your back ups on them and you can get them back and figure out who you use to be."

(something wrong?)

"A Terran? Never heard of the place. My homeworld was not called 'Terra'. But if you say so," Jack concedes that it is in fact possible, however unlikely, that all of his experiences with people like Mr. Magehammer and a cartoon world that let him turn into a cartoon dragon were just some fiction planted by someone for 'reasons.' "In any case, what's Imixelene? And what's a Saizho?"

"If you got retconed to be from some weird world that didn't exsist people are going to call you a Terran, due to the fact it was considered a lark to retcon people to think they where from Earth for a while there until the joke got REAL REAL FUCKING OLD." She moves around to rummage through a storage compartment in the back of her rig. "Saizho... it's.... um.. hum.  Shit, it's hard to explain. Frostbyte came up with the concept, he's doing it alot though I think he's only doing it because he's hitting that digital power-up drug he made, Ring. I think it tweaks his brain so he's in a Saizho mind set, though he's a fucking adict for the shit. But Saizho is like when you are so comely and totally disconnected from any normal sense of thought like gravity, hight, depth, width, weight, momentum, and the like... .just you know, general physics shit that it might as well not exist in your mind and you have INFINITE confidence in yourself. It's hard as hell to get into a state of Saizho and fucking impossible to sustain it unless you tweak your brain some how so you like forget what laws of reality are but some how do it in some way you still have a reference to whats going on, and delete every failer you have ever witnessed.  But, if you Saizho out your like completely fucking unstoppable..... you have a little bit of a Saizho vibe going the way your rocking the whole conceptual shifting about with no effort at all."

"AHHH here we go." She yells and retreaves a small perfectly clear plastic looking cube and walks out to some where tossing the cube on the ground. "This is Imixelene, Demo mode." When she says that the cube expands suddenly decompressing into a cube several feet wide. It starts shifting in colors, transparency, and material taking the form of verious rubber products from rubber tires, silicone, latex, a cube of bubbling oil, to nilon. It also takes several shapes that move around mostly animals and people made out of rubber products, at one point it's a fish made of oil swimming in oil. It's kinda wild to watch it move and shift so rapidly before it plumps back down and shifts back into a clear transparent block. "I don't know exactly how it's made, has to do with the latest generation of rubbers and imipolex, and of corse some magic mirror for the freaky shit going on.... how the managed to work with that stuff I don't know. But that means it is still ... still fuck what the hell is it called. Let me check the info-sphere." She looks down scrolling through her data pad. She says like she is reading something she don't know how to pronouce. "A biocybernetic supercomputing medium.... whatever.... means if your leg gets chopped off or you have a masive wound in you, you can just rip off a chuck and stick it on you and it will interact with you thoughts and flesh and form what you need. So makes for good field medic shit out here where the Instantiator is a pice of shit. Hell I could chop your head off, and shove your brain in there and you would be fine and have an Imixelene body. Storage mode" It shrinks back down to the small size and she picks it up and tosses it to Jack "It's a must have out here you should take it with you."
This message was last edited by the player at 07:16, Sat 23 Apr 2022.

Jack listens to the woman talk a lot and just says, “Huh. Not really something any use for me, but that’s neat. Well, I'll go try to destroy the rampaging thing, I guess?"

As a side note the rat that had been with him was now taking apart one of the wrecked trying to get to something, and seams to have forgotten about him.

The woman shrugs. "No use now, but you never know, so best to have some." She nods looking off in the distance. "Yah that would help out a lot, though I would get some weapons or something. Unless you plan on keeping up the Saizho stuff and going full on god mode on it. That would be fairly crash. It headed off to the old giant robot graveyard, probably looking fix itself up... or maybe make some friends." she shrugs and points off into the distance.

“I mean, what’s the worst that happens?” Jack shrugs and starts growing some more before he takes off flying toward the robot graveyard. He doesn’t much care for this world and their nonsensical way of speaking, so he’ll just fight and maybe die, and hope the next verse is a bit less insane. Or he’ll kill the problem, and help repair this place to be a bit less of a trash heap. Win-win.

What Jack found was a large crater in the ground, that opened up in places to the under ground like the pit had, exposing water pipes and electrical wires that ran through the structures ground. In it was what was clearly some ancient battle field where large machines of war had fought, mecha of every size and large robots littered the battle field in various levels of disrepair and being striped of parts. Some looked nearly pristine save for the wares of time and weather, others had been hacked or blown to pieces, or striped down to nothing but a frame.

In it he found a sizable machine stalking about a tare in reality. Some rift had opened up into what the compass had told him was a spiritual realm and various spirits of entropy, pain, and suffering where flowing out of it to swirl around the machine.

It had the body of a mechanical rat, though it was held up by several spider like legs (one of it's front ones was sheared off at the end), along it's back where several long electrified quills, and it had a scorpion like tail that ended in a M61 Vulcan that some one had thankfully melted the firing mechanism to slag. Between his equipment he could tell it was possessed by a very powerful and monevelent spirit of pain and darkness and it's level was in the triple digits. It had trapped several 'people' of various races on it's quills electrocuting them conscientiously so the smaller spirit where drawn out to feed on there pain and suffering.

It had gathered a pile of corpses in front of the largest most intact mecha it could find and was smearing blood on it in some sorta runic patern.

Yes, it did seam it was making friends.

Pausing at a distance, Jack layers himself in protective and enhancing magic. Stoneskin, blur, true seeing, enhanced physical capabilities, haste, an additional layer of flight and then Order invisibility, and a renewal of his Order enhancement to make himself even more powerful, loading himself up with counter-runes.

Once he’s set, he approaches to his maximum distance and starts to bombard the mecha with strafing runs of Order breath.  Hitting as broad an area as he can.

(I'm going to assume that Jack is avoiding breathing on it's back where the people are stuck on it's quills... let me know if I'm wrong there)

Jacks Order breath don't seam to affect the machine that much, if anything it seams to improve it's condition a little. Cold and order are rather useful for machines and the spirit seams not too be affected yet.

The other smaller spirits however that get caught up in Jacks breath however slow down, and seam to be stalled up as bits of order cling to them... one becoming calcified in order unable to move and frozen in air.

The machine moves to the rift and starts pulling it open while giving out a cry that causes Jack unimaginable pain hearing it. It seams to cause pain to the people impaled on it too, even Stella and hearts in Jack's sword seam to suffer from the cry.

Something tells Jack it's calling another of it's kind.

Deffently in pain from her voice responces. "The foul mouthed racer mentioned Saizho, that your able to do anything if you believe in yourself enough and don't disbelieve it's possibility.... Your already a toon here, all your magics work here. You have nothing to lose."

Jack alters his cartoon self to remove his ears, because if he's going to be bothered by screaming nonsense, why bother to listen at all! Hearing the words of Stella, he understood to begin with, but her words serve to remind him to take advantage of the trick while he still has such power in mind.

Reaching a dragon hand up to the top of his head, he slithers out of his skin, and now has three heads. One red, one green and his normal head.

The red one starts breathing intense flames while the green starts breathing great deluges of acid.

Saizho is a kind of zen in a way, and being in a dream and an order mage, doing zen is a little easier for him. So while the pain isn't coming from the sound believing it is from the sound is just barely enough to protect him from the pain. Breathing acid over the machine was much more effective melting parts of it away, though it was more effective on the parts he didn't breath order on.

The machine was dead set on widening the rift, though jacks attacks made it harder for it to do so as he took out it's legs.

The more into the zen like state Jack got the more effective his attacks where, he didn't seam limited by anything more than what he believed what he was capable of doing. However the tiniest amount of doubt was devastating.

Seeing the effect of his attacks, Jack gets excited to have found something new and to know he is saving these people from a mecha-tyrant. Like a flying Godzilla, he continues to blast downwards, though his Order head pauses briefly to throw out Dimensional Anchor. A blast of green energy flying from his mouth now (that’s new!) as he prevents any further usage of dimensional energies and seals off the Gate.

Once he has the Gate sealed, he throws the beam at the mecha.

“Your tyranny ends now, mecha-jerk!” he pronounces and then starts to inhale Order from the mechanical monstrosity, drawing it inward.

The gate closes, the order energy quite effective as reinforcing up the walls between realities, a good thing too as something truly horrifying and nightmarish was about to come through. It turns it's attention to Jack a this point and starts launching it's quills at him, including the quills with suffering people impaled on them.

Regardless how he deals with the people sent his way, inhaling the order seams to do the job, the mech starts to rust and brake down as brakes and systems fail. When it finally fails and the horror that is the large spirit of pain and darkness starts to leave it, Jack has absorbed plenty of Order to breath back onto it and calcify it like he had done the smaller spirits it had summoned.... Another statue for the graveyard.

Jack reaches up his hands and using good ol' cartoon logic, pushes the three heads together into one, adding some red and green scales to the sides of his Order head. Annihilating the remainder of the mecha-monster, he brings out his halberd and smashes it down on the remains of the broken monster. Leaving nothing to recover.

Only when that is done does he fly back to the woman he'd been talking with earlier.

"What now?" he asks as he lands and starts to shrink back down to normal person size.

Once free of the pain the people free and heal themselves in various ways.

Jack found the woman trying to start the rig back up, it supttering and trying to start but the engine failing to catch resulting in some cursing from her.

"What? ... Oh hu? You beat that thing?" She shrugs. "I don't know, do what ever you want... You could head to the park and check out some of the various warps and see what suits you the most. Or if you still looking for a fight you could head to the table. Something tells me your not to keen on Down though.."

 Oh, were there still alive people there?! Jack takes the time to use Order magic to put them all back together!

“I mean, what can I do to improve things for you people before some random circumstance comes along and kills me and sends me to another universe,” he explains and looks up at the sky. Maybe he could use his blacksmithing skills to repair the sky? Or find their insantiator thing and fix that?

She stands up and stretches her back out. "Eh kid, I know you got retconed but your really not getting it.... this place is just the way it is, there isn't much changing it... least not for good or any big changes on your own. You got to work with people to make any big changes. People come here because they like it when life kicks them in the balls now and again... they don't want to live some easy cushy ass life. They want the sweat and grease on there hands. IF you want to help some one, find some one who this place kicked them a little too hard or where shits hit the fan. That or find some one doing some art project and help them see it through." She laughs "IF you want to help me you can help me figure why this piece of shit won't start so I can get back to my art, kicking the fucking ass of anyone zip who thinks there faster than me. But hell you will find your place"

She draws a circle with a dot in the middle in the sand "If your helmets got a standard interface it should see the mirror to the park with that symbol.... any mirror with that will get you back to the hub. Take a tour, see how you feel.... just stay out of strange."

Jack looks at the conveyance and remembers the effect that his order breath had on the other machines. “I believe I can fix it,” he tells her and pulls out his halberd and starts to use Order to heal the machine. Tapping it a few times to get its parts all running again, he keeps prodding on it until it starts working.

She seams exstactic about it. "Aw crash, you even fixed the gridshaman steel glyphs that ward off the rust of this place." Jack's actions do seam to have activated a few order magics over the vehicle that are protecting it from the entropy. "Saved me a trip .... shit... you fixed them better than one of them did." She laughed. "Maybe you should hang out with them, there off in the silicon woods, defiantly got the makings of one hell a shaman of steel. I'm guessing you not to skilled with spark drives then though are you? This thing could use a big more of a kick..." You could guess she might be talking about the power supply? It was a compact punk-hazard zero point device giving off a fair amount of chaotic energy..... not the safest means to power a vehicle but it likely made it go quite fast.
This message was last edited by the player at 04:49, Mon 25 Apr 2022.

“No, I have no need for a carriage, I just use magic to get around most places so far,” Jack answers with a smile and then nods a bit. “These Shamans, can you introduce me? I’d love to learn their magic,” he says enthusiastically. Warding off Chaos? He could do wonders with that, he could probably fix this place with the right warding sigils. Or given some time, maybe he could invent some.

She rolls her eyes some. "Psssshhh I only go to them to to get some steel wards thrown up so my baby goes a bit longer with out a need for maintenance. I don't really know them, I just get there help. Most don't even ask for art or info for it.... don't know if they are stupid or just good folk." She shrugs getting in her vehicle. "Just look for them in the big building near the silicon forest.... only damn forest out here that isn't fucking dying. Can't miss it."  Jack had seen a forest of 'trees' made of metal, wires, machines, and solar panels.

“Oh, okay, well, thanks for the information, car-lady. See you around if you head that way to get your stuff re-marked,” Jack says.

Jack then indicates the direction he’d seen the ‘forest’ and once he has confirmation, he nods his dragon head and recasts his various buffs on himself. Just in case, and grows to a proper size for flying. Then he takes off in that direction.

"Car lady... cute, It's Madilne cutie. Got to catch up with the others." She closes the door and takes off at breakneck speeds that are just way to fast for roads in the condition they are in. It seams fairly certain she will wreck if she keeps driving like that but none the less she's off before suddenly turning off road and driving more recklessly off into the distance.

He passes through a few areas where order/choas is weakened by entropy and the color fades from his scales... but it returns as he enters into more stable areas. The forest seams to be a stable area and dose have the ruins of a half collapsed skyscraper near by along with several smaller buildings. Perhaps what was once some kinda research complex considering there look and the forest by them.  The forest has a few mechanical/silicon based life in it to go with the tree's and the buildings seam to be used as hosing and one as a temple of sorts for a group of tribal humanoids. They have various degrees of implants though Jack questions there usefulness... many look more for spiritual or aesthetic reasons. Such as glowing wires weaved through there skin. While most are humanoid few are actually human... most are alien to him.

(Think Sylens from the Horizon games: https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Sylens )

There also a handful of rats hanging out with the humanoids helping out.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:08, Mon 25 Apr 2022.

Landing, Jack turns himself into a normal human in fitting with those he’d seek as teachers and walks forward, looking for someone who looks like they know what they’re doing, something related to their shaman skills. When he finds someone that fits that description in his mind’s eye, he speaks out, “Excuse me, I’d like to learn how to work your magics, is there anyone here that can teach me?”

And older man laughs some as he sits smoking a pipe. "Can one truely teach another art?" He looks up with a smile "We can only guide one who chooses to listen to find what art they already know with the lessons we share."

"Sounds great! I'm ready to listen," Jack says with a smile and seems to be listening to whatever the old man has to say. Thinking of how he looks with his wizard hat, the young looking wizard wonders if he could pull off smoking a pipe as well. He'd look wizardly, but perhaps a bit absurd, since he's so fresh faced. Maybe he should grow a beard. Nobody would know how young he looks then.

He don't have a wizard hat, he's bald with a bit of skull showing actually with some chips and implants directly onto the exposed skull. But he dose have a beard. "Well a good place to start is the primary forces of the universe. There are three grate forces that govern and create all things: Spark; Steel; and Rust. We gridshamans practice the way of the spark, steel, and rust... and are often attuned to one of these forces." He took in a deep long draw of pipe and blew out creating a fog of multi colored smoke that shifted and swirled about chaotically in the air. "The spark is the, well, spark of creation. The eruption of life energy that explodes forth into existence with out form it is the inspiration that drives us. But the spark has no form no shape of it's own... it is life with out meaning or with out purpose on it's own." the swirling clouds start to take shape earth forming, vines growing, buildings rising in the smoke until a city scape rises up out of it. "The steel is the order that gives life shape and meaning, guides it into a form that lasts long enough to remember itself. The order allows life to function in forms that can be maintained and understood but when order is to strong..." the plantlife starts to die out as machines spread and take over, the city becomes more advance but life soon disappears from the scene until the city grinds to a near stop besides a algorithmic repeating pattern of movement in machines and light. "The life the spark brings dies out and there is only stagnation and stasis. This is why there is the rust... entropy works to brake down the forces replacing them with the other seeing that one dose not become so strong that life can not exist.... the rust keeps the system in balance."  the machines brake down, crash into each other and the buildings crumble, and life slowly starts to reclaim the land.

The smoke show drifts apart as he looks off into the distance. "No one is quite sure why the rust has become such a crushing force here... but it is not something that would smother out life here. Maybe the ancients tried to dominate the rust rather than shape it and this is there punishment..... but this is the way of things here and there is a balance to it."

Jack watches and says, “How interesting. I’m not certain that we have that sort of problem in every universe, but that certainly seems to be the case here,” and idly thinks about the nature of his Spark and Steel. He’d need to really dig deep to learn how to use Rust, since he’s an Order Mage, but he can probably do it if he tries hard enough.

"You could make for a talented steel shaman, the steel spirits would listen to you call." He sits back and takes another draw. "Everything has a spirit, though most things the spirits are weak and asleep unaware of there own existence.... The older and more important something is the more likely it is the spirit is awake. There some up in Top that say when something is owned and loved for 101 years it's spirit awakens. Such beliefs help make it so, as dose the care for it. " He offers you the pipe, sharing it with you. The helmet shows it is some sort of drug, rather similar to marijuana only a bit stronger and slightly hallucinogenic. If you turn him down he just takes another draw on the pipe and ether way he continues. "We don't so much do magic but command the sleeping spirits, and make requests of the awake ones. Or guide them to be bound into objects. With some help another spirit can temporarily rest in the physical form of another if you give a point for them to rest. It helps if you add material to the object in question for it to bind to. This more powerful spirit can lend it's powers to the object creating a fetish, an object imbued with spiritual power."  He nodds to some one who is in a trance. "Some even make very temporary bounds to create thorns, weak and lose fetishes that only last a single use.... for even such things as enhancing drugs for a spirit quest." There was some weird magic around the drug the guy in a trance had used but it was fading.

Jack listens to how it is done and nods slowly in understanding, receptive to the lessons about how this spirit based magic works. It seems odd to his way of thinking, to rely on spirits to do things.

*Jack learns Spiritual Shaman of Steel, Rust and Spark*

(Saizho too if the writer is fine with that, though it won't level easly)

The man explains that he is best to start working with awoken steel/order spirits that he can deal with. Offering up some of there spiritual energy or to compleate tasks for them that they can not in exchange to them to teach some of there power or a task from them. He tells Jack controling sleeping order spirits will be easier for him when he's able to sense there and his own spiritual energy.  Rust shamanism will be harder for him, and he will find the spark to be the hardest as his tendency for steel is so strong.

He notes "Spirits treat those that aproch them with respect and that offer up gifts, making offerings for there services much more appealing than those that might try and be forceful... even when controlling a sleeping spirit offering up your energy to it and using a guiding hand rather than a forceful one is best. Being forceful may get results but you will find more and more resistance as the spirits turn on you.

He offered an drug after altering it in a way that added a fair amount of order energy to it. He laughed a little "You are young and seam to wish to learn quickly, it's the equivalent of diving into the deep end before you know how to swim.... but this will help you learn to sense spiritual energies.... it will put you on a spirit quest and you will be aware of things more as they are, you may even enter the spirit world. But we will be here watching you. So it won't matter even if you don't have a recent backup."

If Jack isn't comfortable with a drug he offers to get people together for a ritual but it will take a little longer. Drugs are just a part of the culture in the mess as they have little long term affects that can't be countered by the instantiator system.

"I'm willing to try," Jack says.

The ritual / drugs help exspand Jacks senses and he starts to see the spirits in things and around him. Old buildings draped in old fadding strands of order like spider webs as spirits moved about, tending to them trying to keep them from collapsing, while other spirits fed on the strands causing them to strain and brake away. There feeding releasing small burst of chaos to balance things out that weak plant spirits desperately took in. He could see the air sparkling with the life of the weak sleeping spirits of the nanites. And he could feel the entropy in the area....

But the more he felt the more he could feel an underlying chaos, shifting and flowing and as he looked on it the rest seamed to fade away as under it all he saw a purple sea of sands with jaged crystals rising out of it and a large multi faceted crystal hanging over head like a moon/sun in the sky. Though the more he looked the more the sands under his feet seamed like broken up crystals tiny as they where he could see into there facites ... he could see his own reflection and a scene playing out before him... one drawing him in.

Then a hand grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him, making him stagger back and to his senses. He was no longer with the shamans or the strange entropic dystopia but in the purple sanded exspance fully and it seamed real to him as anything else. "Are you crazy?!?" A nine foot tall Jackal man in Arabian garb asked him. "You do realize your trying to ingage in a spirit quest, a very intense dream like vision, while you are inside an intense dream vision... inside ANOTHER PERSONS dreams." He just looks at Jack dumbfounded. "Look I know that dreamseption movie was popular and everything but this kinda behavior is dangerous. I know a lot of young magi come to the asteral realm or play around with oneiromancy because they think poking around is safe place to learn and train, but the dreamtime is not as safe a place as one would think.... we should get you back to your own dream."

The perception of spirits in things is interesting, and he wonders how common that is. Not very, he surmises, on a multiversal level, though he's always open to surprises. At the arrival of the Jackal to expel him from the dream-dream-dream, he looks up in consideration.

"I just wanted to learn something, but I suppose I did get to see spirits a bit more clearly. So, at least I saw something while I was here," Jack says to the Jackal-man and lets himself get shoved back to wakefulness.

The man rises up to the vast crystal like sun/moon and he shows a face of the crystal for jack to touch. "This will lead you back to your dream." If he is paying attention he notices a faint sliver strand of light leading from the crystal to him, which is likely how he found the spot to take him.

When Jack returns to his dream it's quite easy to wake up when ever he wants, and in the waking world still find he has the Imilexene cube in his TARDIS, and can see and talk to spirits (just about anywhere) if he tries to.