(19a) Addendum to (19)

The Crusader Campaign (080-1123 to 084-1123)

Kalida's Third Klatrin Experience

    Kalida's second klatrin experience starts out much like the first, with the shrinking and expanding and floating.
    Again she has come in with a definite purpose, directing her experience as much as she can.  At the end of the last experience, she had found something in particular that was pulling her, and she was trying to follow it.  At the very end she had a flash of recognition of one of the shadows, but couldn't identify it.  She's looking for it again.
    Things look different now.  There's a pattern emerging among the threads.  Several levels and clusters, and everything folding through what has to be Tussinian.  What it does before there has some fuzziness.  She's seeing the threads not just as a single line, but as possibilities existing in fuzzy states as they interact with other threads.
    At this point, she's pulling more threads than are pulling her.  There's one thing in particular pulling her and all sorts of other things, fairly strong threads but getting fuzzier at the end of the pull.  She picks one of the stronger ones, trying to follow it back, and finds that it's directly driving her -- it's pulling her with her consent.
    She backs off that, and tries to follow the threads that she herself is pulling.  She quickly finds that leads her to the fuzzy mass the other side of Tussinian.  It's suddenly clear that a lot of that pulling is not voluntary, and the effects are not predictable -- except that her involuntary pulling is strengthening its direction, like she's influencing it in the direction it already wants to go.
    Everything focusses through Tussinian, but it's not clear that she can follow much from that onwards.  It's not so much fuzzy as confusing, as if she hasn't made sense out of it yet.  There's other threads coming off before that, that are heading out in strange directions that make no sense to her.
    She tries to focus in on that, and realizes that everything she does, whether she wants it to or not, is influencing things -- and at the moment the direction of that influence is not in the way she wants things to go.  A wave of paranoia washes over her.  It's really hard to decide what to do when it feels like if she gets it a little wrong, or perhaps even more so if she makes the right choice, that it's making it worse for her.  It's odd, and the feeling that the unintended consequences are looking bigger than the intended ones will stay with her for some time.
    She feels that something is happening as a direct result of something she's done, and while she can't be sure, it's looks like there's more threads than there used to be.  She feels she hasn't been paranoid enough, as there are threads she is sure represent something she's never considered, and she can't figure out what yet.  There is some possibility, something going on, that has far-reaching fuzzy effects, an explosion of thread possibilities.
    She pulls back to Tussinian again, because everything is going through there.  She picks a thread at random going beyond it.  This one doesn't look good, threads are exploding and collapsing, multiplying in small areas and vanishing around, as if the Imperium itself were breaking up.  And it's all influenced by those unintended consequences.  It's almost as if one day she decides to have, or not have, coffee, that the state of the Imperium relies on that one decision.
    Now it looks like whatever she does, and whatever she follows, things just get worse.  Maybe she'll just sit there and try to figure out how those other threads are pulling her.  The other ways just look dangerous.
    The threads that are pulling her are pulling through her, being influenced by her choices as they pass through.  She can't escape the consequences of small actions that way.  Generally the threads pulling her do feel more comfortable, though, there's less danger lying along those until the fuzziness sets in and dominates.
    She realizes that Norris is a major factor pulling her, and of course he's pulling other threads not related to her that don't seem to make any sense.
    There are some things going on that do not depend on Tussinian that do not look comfortable.  Things that she just hasn't considered.  Something is now going to happen as the result of an unintended consequence, a quite solid thread that she can't identify, but she knows that there are friends that are caught up in it.
    She has noticed that everyone has their own threads among the crew, hers are separate.  They are, of course, very closely linked right now, and a lot of threads they are pulling together -- particularly the unintended ones.  She starts to try to pick out a thread that connects only to her, not to the others.
    Suddenly an instinct turns her to a thread elsewhere.  She knows for certain that something bad is going to happen to the Duke of Adabicci, and it's going to happen because of something she has done.  He is in trouble.  It's something she hadn't even considered, and she can't trace it no matter how hard she tries.  It's something everyone has been missing, and that's where it is.  Adabicci.  It's coming soon, too, but probably at least a month later than the 110-1123 date she had anticipated.
    That was her very first concern and she messed it up anyway.  And it's with that realization, in shock and paranoia, that she drops out of the trance.