PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Three (Patreon)

A fascinating insight from our recent history is to look at the way essence awakening and average essence levels in people have changed. Three centuries ago, it was far more common to awaken one’s essence and begin cultivating as a magian or tamer. And yet, despite the number of cultivators decreasing, the average level has risen dramatically. We think there are multiple reasons for this, but there’s one big one: as our policies have become further entrenched, people have been able to rely on the power of the collective to survive, rather than personal power. As such, the people who chose to awaken their essence do so out of passion, rather than base survival needs, and that allows them to make great mages and tamers. 

-

Excerpt from Political Science and History, a book by an anonymous author, circa 402

-

The battle between Gawain and Councillor Cruz didn’t last horribly long. Maybe that was because I was watching from the outside, rather than being the one calling the shots with my Primals, but I could have sworn my battle had taken an hour, while Gawain’s battle wrapped up comparably quickly. He’d focused fire on the combat and fire Primal early, letting Gryphon tie it up while Gabis focused on the Tapirinic. It was a good choice for Gawain, and ugh, the fact that everything was named with a G annoyed me. It was probably good for building a unique identity and standing out among the morass of people that was low-level taming as a sport, but it was a pain to keep Gawain, Gryphon, and Gabis all straight. It was only going to get worse when or if he had more Primals. 

I shook off my thoughts and re-focused on the battle. While Gabis had played what was, essentially, magical ping-pong with the teleporting Tapirinic, Gyphon had been able to use lightning spells to wear down his opponent. The combat one had managed to get a couple of solid hits on Gabis, despite being occupied, and that had nearly sent things over the edge. The body-boosting powers of the combat element were nothing to scoff at, and with both ice and earth pneuma more easily pierced by the combat attacks, it had been like a hot knife through butter, and had almost instantly destroyed Gabis’ pneuma shell. 

But almost instantly wasn’t instantly, and the counterattack that Gabis had launched had been a potent sphere of mud that had nearly snuffed out the wounded bull-like Primal’s flames, allowing Gryphon to swoop in and clean up with another lightning bolt. From there, it had been a two on one, and even the quick teleportation and rapid-fire sleeping spells of the Tapirinic hadn’t been enough to win – the Tapirinic had knocked out Gabis, and with his pneuma shell already on the fritz, a weak bolt of arcane element psychic energy had finished him an instant later.

That left Gryphon and the Tapirinic, which had been the longest part of the fight by far. Both of them were great at evading the attacks of the other, either through teleportation or on the wing, and had deep enough anima reserves that it turned into more of a mind game than anything, as both tried to avoid needlessly using their spells. In the end, the wing-based flight of Grypon was enough to win, as Gryphon only needed to use spells to attack, while the Tapirinic needed to use spells to teleport out of the way, as well as to attack. 

When Gryphon eventually wore through the Tapirinic’s anima reserves, the battle was effectively over, and Councillor Cruz called it in his victory, rather than just sit and watch as Gryphon blast the Tapirinic’s pneuma shell with fire until it broke.

After the round of congratulations, handshakes, and photoshoots wrapped up, Gawain recalled his little drone and shut it off, nodded to me, waved to Scales and Hex, and then just walked out through the doors and left. I stared at him, not even entirely sure what to do in response to that. It felt vaguely insulting, if I was being honest. We’d worked together to get here, and he’d shared the drone footage with me, but then he'd left without saying a single word.

No, it was worse than that. He’d actively waved at Scales and Hex, but had only nodded to me. I apparently ranked below my Primals in his mental pecking order – which, okay, to be fair, Scales and Hex were both very cute. But it still felt insulting to me! 

“Aye, Aiden, we need the area cleared out soon for another challenger group,” Councillor Cruz. “Sorry, I don’t mean to rush ya, but… time and such. Did you need a hand down the stairs?” 

“No, I’m fine, just irritated,” I said, sighing as I got up and headed to the exit. My annoyance faded fairly quickly as the elation of having defeated my first Councillor returned, and I was practically skipping as I walked down the street, stopping for a moment to grab an apple from a tree. It was bruised on one side, but I used a knife and cut that chunk off, and ate the rest while tossing the bruised part down near one of the compost piles. 

I stopped at the same cafe that I’d met with Rane at and while sipping on my latte, and started setting up my augpad. I navigated through the city net to the Tamer’s Consortium Website, and pulled up my public profile, then set to work. 

The first thing I did was delist the full recordings from Gawain’s drone, as well as from the cameras that the Consortium had set up. Any of the recordings that focused on the challenges getting to Councillor Cruz wouldn’t go live for public viewing for a while, since they contained spoilers – just because leaking was easy it didn’t mean that the Consortium didn’t try at all. But the final battle, at least, would be entirely open to watch for anyone.

But if I wanted to give off the air of a professional tamer, I’d need to do more than just post the vods. Those were fine, but pretty much the only people who cared to watch through a full, unedited, uncommentated on, battle from multiple people at once were other tamers, not people who just wanted something to throw on while they did the dishes, cleaned, or whatever else they happened to be on. 

The first thing I did was start breaking up my battle against Councillor Cruz in the editing software that the tamer’s consortium provided. I knew there were some good open source editors out there, and a handful of one-time purchase software packages that had unique tools or other specialized applications, but I was still a far way from wanting or needing one of those. The consortium’s software was fine for me, at least for now. 

I sorted through the various scenes, and was begrudgingly impressed with the quality of Gawain’s drone. The cameras on the consortium were good, but the side-aerial view from the drone of Scales grabbing the Axekit and tumbling into the Tubifoop was much cleaner and cooler looking from the drone, at least to me. 

I worked through the videos until I was confident I’d identified the highlights of the fight, and then checked each of the camera feeds until I found the one that I thought was best, before splicing all of them together to create a short video, only about a minute long, which I then published to my page. I sent the video to my mom, Rane, and a few people in the village who had expressed some interest in seeing my fights when I finally became a tamer, then set to work on the next video.

Putting together a ten minute highlight reel of the entire challenge was harder and took a lot longer, but fortunately a lot of the footage was just Gawain and I resting against the tree. I did include a brief moment of that, just to show us recovering, since the last thing I wanted was to be indirectly responsible for someone thinking it was a good idea to jump from fight to fight without resting. It, much like the vods, couldn’t go live yet, but would drop as soon as the restrictions did.

By the time I was done, it was getting close to lunch time, and I ordered a sandwich, before starting on the commentary breakdown. These were the longest, and by far the most difficult, but also the most popular. Sometimes, if one got popular enough, a professional analyst for the game would start breaking it down and giving their own analysis, which could create a fun back and forth that could even result in the Tamer going on the shows to argue strategy. They were also the ones that I most often watched, since it helped me get into the mind of more experienced Tamers, and were the most enjoyable for casual people to watch, as it helped to explain the exact what, the why behind certain actions, and the why not behind others. 

I wasn’t going to record my commentary in a cafe, of course. That was horribly rude to anyone who might be trying to focus, even if I managed to edit out all of the other sounds in the . While I might not be able to record, I could start to pull together footage for the longer form video, make sure I wasn’t looping too much of the same footage, and at least start to compile a few public domain resources that I’d need to put up onscreen in order to help explain some things while I talked – images of Sharmond and Felimalio analytics, displays for their gifts, natural move sets, all things that I planned to discuss. I set them out in a rough order, and then spent a while working on a script. 

I knew from my time in school that reading off a script directly tended to make me sound flat and inflectionless, as I focused my brainpower on not accidentally flipping my ‘d’ and ‘b’ or ‘p’ and ‘q’, while also remembering the position of the letters within the word and not letting any of them trade places, all while putting it together into a coherent sound that also made sense with the rest of the words in the sentence. 

I didn’t want to have to do that with commentary. Admittedly, there were some tamers who could pull off the flat, low-energy voice quite well, but it didn’t match my personal high-energy vibe. And if I became a competent enough Trainer, I wouldn’t need to do my own breakdowns, as other people would start doing it and posting it elsewhere on the Consortium’s site. 

Even so, I wanted to do the breakdowns, and I wanted to make them actually match who I was, which meant no strict script for me. Instead, I tied bullet points to specific images, so that when I recorded my audio over the fight, I’d only have to reference three or four words, and could then adlib it. I’d done the same thing in school for my public speaking class – there was no point in having a speech written if I got good enough at flying by the seat of my pants. 

I checked my messages then, and saw that I’d missed a call from my mom without even noticing it. Oops. I called her back, and we spent a while talking about the fight, about Gawian, and about what my next plans were. I also caught up on everything that she’d been up to, a bit more of the village gossip, and her life as a whole.

When we finally ended the call, Rane had texted me, offering to go out with her and one of her boyfriends for a friendly dinner and maybe some shopping or dancing afterwards. I hesitated for a moment – I wasn’t a dancer, and the idea of being stuffed in a grimy, dirty box, filled with people who had been drinking sent shivers down my spine. Maybe if I was invited to an outdoor rave, that might be better. 

I sighed and agreed to at the very least going out to dinner, then got up as she shared her location, and started biking out to meet her.