(13a) Addendum to (13)

The Crusader Campaign (066-1123)

Kalida' Klatrin Experience

    The 40cc of oily fish-smelling liquor tastes just as it smells.  Even so, it doesn't seem so obnoxious after a little while.  Kalida could see that maybe some people might like it.  It doesn't take long before Kalida's others perceptions change...
    She feels as though she's floating in the universe among the stars and galaxies.  She can reach out her hand and wave it around in them.  Soon she discovers she can move around.  The scale keeps shifting, everything gets smaller to the point where she can just hold the universe in her hand.  A quick turn of mind and it's reversing, she's shrinking -- or the universe is growing -- to the other extreme, where she can see atoms and particles moving about.  Everything is drifting in and out, and she can move around and direct the motion somewhat.
    She doesn't really have control as such, because things are so different.  Everything is affecting her in a different way.  She can drift through oceans -- or swim if she wants, her body is under her control even if where she goes isn't completely.
    As things shift, she is finally seeing more dimensions that she's seen before.  Everything was just a three-dimensional projection of what is really there.  It's nice not to be seeing just a subset of colors anymore, to see more of them that weren't perceivable before.  The colors taste different now, too, and have a different sound as well.
    She can feel the burning desert she walks across.  It kind of hurts, but it doesn't, because what's "hurt" once you step beyond the three-dimensional projection?
    The experience is kind of overwhelming, but not totally.  The sense of time, however, is totally gone.  She has no idea whether it's years or milliseconds -- time just doesn't work that way now.  She just wanders around the universe experiencing it, watching creatures dissolve and reform in nebulae, all sorts of strange things.  It's just a totally different existence, and her view had been so restricted up until now, locked into this tiny three-dimensional box.
    Sense of place is different too.  She is "here," whatever that is.  When you can hold the universe in your hand, what does "here" mean?
    After a while, she starts to see some little threads drifting through.  Even with her new perception, she has to look sideways out of the corner of her eye to see them.  The threads are connecting everything, and nothing moves without connecting with something else.
    She picks one thread and tries to trace it.  The more she follows it, it's more that it connects than connects to, and she starts to lose herself in the web that's starting to build as she focusses in.  Then she finds that the very act of following the thread is changing where it's going, and when she looks back it doesn't connect where it used to, but if she doesn't try to follow, they don't move.
    She pulls back and looks for the shape of the structure rather than a piece in particular.  It is everywhere.  There is a structure to it, but it doesn't really have a structure.  She can't grasp it -- every time she looks to see where the structure is, it doesn't make enough sense anymore.
    She tries to see if she can affect it in any way.  She's not sure how she's doing it or what the effect is, but she senses that she can affect it.  The more she tries to concentrate, the more she experiments with it, the more she feels like she's getting meshing in.  She starts to feel slightly constricted.  She pulls back quickly.
    As she pulls back and stops looking, the web fades into the background.  She knows the threads are there, but they're not in the way anymore.  There's just a feeling of connection of everything.
    As she makes herself smaller in relation to the universe, the web persists.  In fact, the more she goes down, the more she sees that it's there in every level.  What on a larger scale looked like a simple connection is actually just the projection of many, many small connections into what was her perception level.  As her perception level changes, she sees all the small connections and the larger structure has gone.  She can see the trees or the forest, and knows there's a connection, but can't see both -- and if she starts looking at branches, she can't see the trees anymore.
    She starts to float among the dimensional relationships, and observe the projections within projects and dimensions expand into more.
    And there it is: a three-dimensional projection of Sick Bay on board Nightshade.  There is nobody there.