(Rose)
B - So let's say I'm like a flower, only my roots are not materialistic and the cycles of...
R - Stop. No more metaphors please. I've had enough. You were weak, now you can lift a tank, you are afraid, but you can lift a tank! You're telling me one thing after another about energy and I've had enough feeling like the rules change every time you try explaining something, with metaphors that in the end don't work. So please, how does it really work? Without detours.
B -Alright then.
She begins explaining what she thinks is true.
The world is filled with a fluid energy at random amounts and varying concentration over time and space, or place.
It's an energy in a form that exists independently from the real world and mostly doesn't interact with (baryonic) matter. So it's as if another invisible ocean covered the earth, one we couldn't see.
This water is the energy potential. It flows here and there, for various reasons, and remains mostly undisturbed.
So far I follow.
Beings-like-her are lifeforms born within that invisible ocean, their world ocean.
They are shapeless and hardly resilient things since they are structures made of and flowing in this water.
At some point, they use this water like their own air, their blood as well as their own flesh.
Not that it helps me understand.
What? Blume retries.
They're made of specific patterns that spontaneously appear in that ocean, and are made of this energy when it becomes structured.
As it randomly goes along its flows, they become like lifeforms, they propagate, they grow, slowly expanding their structure by transforming this potential energy around them. They're like growing crystals or bacteria colonies.
Feeding, growing, evolving.
After some specific quantum are reached, they can turn this energy into something more; the ability to interact with matter. Beyond a concentration, their energy is no longer oblivious to the other aspects of reality like matter, gravity and electricity.
And afterward, all they can think about, is becoming real.
But what they build toward reality is like puppets whose strings are pulled from their ocean and their structures that created those threads reaching out to our level of reality.
Okay...
Blows purely physical don't hurt anything but what they create like puppets or mushroom, they remain below.
Over time, over luck, over hardship, they can concentrate this flowing energy, accumulate it into themselves even more. They can use it to create more solid shapes for themselves, and even harvest more energy.
They consume some to live, some to think once they have a well-structured brain, but most of all they consume a lot to interact with the real world.
Concentrated enough, this energy can interact with reality, influencing real atoms over their weight, their momentum, their chemical and electrical potential and intensity. The possibilities encompass everything that physical changes can be it would seem.
Once these processes become thoughts, random chemical reactions have already become a metabolism of some sort. Even if the body is nothing animal or plant at all, they become a presence akin any other lifeform in its patterns and principles.
Though the way some trains need to burn far more coal starting to roll and achieving a speed, then keep consuming fuel to keep that speed, so they do with energy. (metaphors!)
They burn their energy to keep a presence into the world.
Thus their self below requires to vacuum a lot of this water to process its energy, and maintain a viable method of doing so, until they can achieve a fully fleshed but more importantly self-sufficient body inside reality.
It seems to be the highest of achievements for beings-like-her. Creating a body able to fully sustain itself in reality, to be independently alive.
To transmigrate into reality for good.
Once they have this body, they can live on both sides. If they die on one, they go on living on the other. And if it's the world ocean they remain in, they can simply restart from scratch, just like Blume did.
~
Bridges between the worlds are hard to keep and the ocean seems rather unpredictable.
So when two beings-like-her meet into in the ocean, most of the times they really are just bumping into each other blindly, without noticing, since they don't have any sense or perception ability, or nearly none. It's a world with less variety in physics than ours.
The thing is they very seldom bump into each other. Probably they are structured in a way that has a repulsive layer over them most of the time, so they don't mix or cluster.
Still they all vacuum some energy to exist, and a lot more to reach out toward reality. Here their energy is transformed into atomistic or cellular orders, then it dissipates.
They don't need to eat in their primal forms here as their energy comes from the ocean below. It's always like that at first.
Once they have a self-dependant body, like the mermaid, most of the other weird plants and animals I met, or Blume in a way, a true body, then they can separate the two energies incomes. Chemical energy from food for the real body, and the ocean water for the original being that remains there and don't need to burn it toward reality anymore.
B - And once the body is self-sufficient here, that makes us able to use more of our energy for other things than keeping the body altogether and alive.
So they can use non-essential energy for changes outside of their body, which becomes magic.
They can accumulate it if their invisible body is able to. The power they can have and process depends on what they are in the ocean, how they are structured. And then on how much energy they have stockpiled in condensed form and how much they can breathe in permanently.
They can use what's around them like air we breathe, or use what they saved for later.
And vacuuming energy from the ocean, or funnelling it into use in reality, both make waves inside the ocean.
Waves some are sensitive enough to detect and smart enough to decrypt.
Then, when beings-like-her meet in reality, they might be able to detect the puppeteer's work behind each other.
Blume is less good at that now, but she has learnt also to camouflage better, making the others less able to detect her.
Now they can hide their work behind layers of static matter and more controlled processes of threading, sewing an invisible filter around themselves that soften the waves.
They can feel or understand how the other is structured when they bump into each other raw. And since the ocean is imprinted over reality, which means that overall they are at the same place in both world, they take advantage of having perception in reality to protect their otherworldly roots as well.
Thus when they feel waves in the distance, below, they can relate to a place above.
A burst of energy use somewhere sends waves below that some lifeforms will be able to interpret for what they are and analyse them, thus detecting the user's nature and position in reality, above also.
This is what she fears most.
Bursting magic at each other in reality doesn't do them much. Below, they can't really hurt each other because they are more like plants than animals at this level.
The ocean is really thin like air, so they can't really do much to each other there, they are too thin and lightweight as their energy is too.
When the body dies, they go on evolving and eventually will retry.
Their true life is below reality, mostly unaffected by what may happen in reality. Mostly because they learn and evolve as they live and try to.
They can also die below over time, by accident, or when something truly far more powerful is able to break their structure.
Blume broke the structure between Ogre and her body.
Thus, she defeated her by cutting her supply route of energy into reality almost.
That was a new trick from Blume, and she wouldn't have been able to defeat Ogre otherwise.
The enemy simply had far more energy to spare.
However this means that if Ogre was killed, her otherworldly roots remain somewhere, and once upon another time, she's likely to become alive again...
Now Blume has evolved in anxious bulimia since then, trying to grow as much as she could in available power below, our body being self-sufficient here.
Blume is trying instinctively to surpass the power of Ogre, because she's terrified of her...
She's gotten herself sick actually, trying to grow too fast and too big. She created an unstable structured growth in the ocean that will not last when processing too large amounts of energy too rapidly.
Her livers hurt her and she's sore, but only for what she is in the ocean! Because she transformed herself rashly, motivated by fear.
She showed me great strength... And hurt herself in the process, and revealing the true extent of her fear.
Now that we're talking about it, she realises it.
Where her mental inertia had led her, and how far she already went down that slope.
R - You don't need that much power. Don't go hurt yourself being a glutton under a feeling of urgency over fear. You managed to defeat a stronger opponent using wits and tactic, not raw power, remember that.
B - You're right. But... I'll need some time to correct the way I've been growing over the last few months... And I'm still scared.
R - Blume. I will take care of you here, alright? Go and take care of your true self in the ocean. I'd rather have you safe than powerful and fragile. It seems you have both your structure and your mind to correct from the path that fear made them take.
She agrees shyly. She feels like a child who has done wrong.
We're both still young to this world.
~