"Got another volunteer," she says distractedly to Casey, "don't want to try the same experiment twice until I know more, this stuff's pretty dangerous but I'm starting to get a handle on it. Sorry for blanking out on you, I'm used to only being one person at a time, this hivemind stuff is throwing me for a loop. It's like every second I'm just coming out of ninety different daydreams but they're all things that actually happened."

Okay.

It would be stupid if this power did nothing but clone stuff.

All these weird chimeras look, at least partially, like combinations of real creatures in insane ways that she's not sure would actually work in real life, except that here they are, in real life, working.

The goo is not physically fast enough to clear out the horrorcancer before it explodes, and those structures—if she sort of shifts her perspective around a bit, she can peer ?up? into the interweaving of dead parasite with ?living?... soul? Those are almost certainly souls.

(With another part of her splintered attention, she decides that the constantly falling hive is irritating her, and has its goo clump together and intertwine and grow outward to catch the lakeshore on its way past. The way it's moving is weird enough that she takes extra care not to make too much goo in case space is being warped here in some sort of way that would turn out to instantly drown them all in massive quantities of goo if it stopped.)

Right. So.

What if.

She makes goo... and uses the implicit ability to combine different creatures' properties in ways that don't strictly make any sort of biological sense... to change that goo into a form that extends ?outward? in the same directions as the horrorcells?

This turns out to be a thing she can do.

It's really fucking weird, especially since goo doesn't seem to have any native senses of its own besides an extremely rudimentary form of touch/proprioception but it does serve as a relay for her lifesense and her lifesense is a fundamentally three-dimensional phenomenon. The overlapping perspectives threaten to give her a headache.

Four-dimensional goo appears in three dimensions as a darker, denser, slower-moving but much faster-eating version of its natively 3d cousin. And the two kinds turn out to be able to pass mass back and forth, as long as they're in contact. She interleaves them, having the 4d version spread through the 3d until they're marbled like her red-black lifeforce. This will be a good solution to any future goo-drowning issues. Also, it lets her get at considerably more horrorcancer surface area at once.

She eats the dead egg with it, and a handful of horrorspawn corpses, as proof of concept. Kind of a pity she can't do the live-fire test on one of herself, but unfortunately her power doesn't seem to be able to reanimate the dead... yet? Why does "yet" feel like the right word there...? Whatever. One problem at a time.

"Okay," she says to Casey, "further results look promising, do you want to be my test subject for attempt number two? I'm reasonably confident it won't explode this time."

The goo can slide uncomplicatedly over itself in the fourth axis, but it's heavy in a very different way, moving in that direction... but the parts that don't intersect normal space don't seem to have inertia on the first three axes in the normal way either. There is a a pressure, constant, flattening the goo into three-space where it is allowed to do so, but a little leverage can hold against it.

Sylvia gets the last of Samantha's guts off her skin, looks down at her pristine naked body, and adopts a thoughtful expression. A moment later, she is dressed in designer leather hip-huggers and a ruffled red silk blouse.

"So it was the Horror's light. Our Styles work now, since it's gone."

Sylvia folds her arms. "Thank you for freeing us, and thank you for trying, with Samantha here, but I believe I am obligated to ask: Who are you? And what, have you become?"

"What," Casey asks, "is the deal with that? Are you still... you? Because there is a very short list of things that could do half of what I've seen you do and an even shorter list of things that start as something else and none of those things make sense, except for possibly that you were killed and replaced by several gods."

Casey pauses, to wince in pain, because she is still unable to even sit up and her horribly distended belly hurts.

"Is this gonna kill me? Because that's actually tempting right now, but I think we're all gonna need what I've got in Storage to get out of here," she says, staring at the pillar of goo and debris in the middle of the lair. "That is probably a bad sign for getting out being simple. Have your... creatures... tunneled out in any other directions?"

"Hollow Witch Scintilla," she says to Sylvia, "and I have no idea, actually, it just kind of happened. I'm, uh, I actually had only been a magical girl for a week before I got captured and I have forgotten a lot of what my patron told me and none of it covered any of this bullshit," she waves vaguely at herself and the cavern and everything in it, "so I am kinda just super lost right now on like every conceivable level."

To Casey, "Honestly I have no idea what I am at this point but I have close continuity of experience with the person I was before all this and I seem to have basically the same personality adjusting for circumstances so I'm comfortable assuming that if I'm several gods now I'm several gods' worth of me. Yeah if you've got critical supplies in your Storage you probably should not volunteer. I tried reinfecting one of my copies so I could experiment on someone thoroughly expendable but I couldn't get the seed to germinate without the light to nourish it. I had all my tunnelers working on the hive but I can try pointing a bunch outward and see what happens." She does that.

Probably she should put her Style on but actually she kind of hates the whole concept of Style and also if she thinks too hard about how there are ninety-six of her and every single one of them is naked and covered in slime she might have a breakdown and that seems like a suboptimal use of resources.

Sylvia softens outwardly, but she's kind of concerned about the lack of experience in the girl with these bizarre new powers.

"I'm sorry to hear that, Scintilla. I am Sylvia the Gravitic Eclipse." She introduces herself in the classical style, of combining real name and half-title, out of habit.

"I would be glad to answer your questions, about this life. But first, I believe you should explain what you're trying to do, before you make an easily preventable mistake."

Casey lets out a pained chuckle. "That's not how... that's not what 'god' meannevermind. Not important right now. I guess we've got no choice but to trust your self-assessment. What exactly can you do?"

Tunneling into the wall reveals flesh, rock, more rock, flesh, and then... the lair. The tunnelers emerge into the cavern they leave, going the same direction, from the opposite wall.

Also, some of the rescued men are waking up and freaking out, out where Scintilla stashed them.

"So," she says to Sylvia. "I have this goo that eats things. The thing that went wrong with Samantha is that I was expecting the eldritch stuff to come out localized because that's what happened when I got rid of mine, and instead it sort of... fell... into... the rest of her body? Which I'm pretty sure is because it fell apart along the way, and the goo couldn't eat it fast enough to keep up and also couldn't touch it before it got here and it was getting here in bad places. So now I have made four-dimensional goo. Piloting that stuff is kind of a trip. It seems like it's taking care of all the tentacle-faced corpses just about as well as I was hoping, though."

And to Casey: "A... lot... of things? I seem to have acquired, uh... the best way I can describe it is a really fucked up bioengineering power suite from a paradigm totally unrelated to any kind of magic I've ever heard of." She pauses, integrating the sense-data from all her tunnelers. "Oh, uh, all roads appear to lead to Rome. By which I mean that all the tunnelers I sent out have ended up coming back into the cavern from the other side."

Sylvia's eyebrows shoot up at 'four-dimensional goo', but she considers for a moment before speaking.

"I'd be very careful on your next attempt. Imagine we are flat beings, like drawings on a piece of paper. A ring of matter would be an enclosed container. Now imagine you fill in that ring, and then add more and more paint or ink until it starts to form a lump, sticking up off the paper. Now imagine its still liquid, so it runs off, flowing over the ring. Now imagine that the... ring is made of a contiguous series of dots, and a drawing implement exists separately for each dot, a very fragile crystal needle no thicker than the dot, is still pressed to the paper, forming an extrusion of the ring. Now imagine that the extrusion is water-tight, and you can fill the resulting cylinder of needles with ink. Now imagine that ink is left to dry. What happens when you try to remove the dried ink from the wall of needles?"

"Damn," Casey exhales. "I've heard of this. It's a closed space loop." She frowns, trying to remember things she picked up over the years. "There're different kinds? I think we need to figure out what kind of hypergeometry we're dealing with, before we'll even know what we have to do to escape. Is there... gah, this hurts, is there, uh, 'odd kinetic behavior'. Inexplicable forces. That kind of thing?"

(The waking men are kind of freaking out a lot. A few of the other girls from the battle are talking to a few of them, but there're still like a hundred naked dudes figuratively flailing around, angry and confused and scared.)

The instance near Sylvia frowns thoughtfully. "It sort of depends how you're approaching the problem, doesn't it? You shouldn't try to scrape it off but, say, filling the cylinder with water and rinsing it out shouldn't be much of a problem... I really wish I could get this stuff to grow on its own, then I could just keep experimenting on myself until I got it right."

"...The hive was falling weirdly slowly?" she says to Casey. "Not sure if that counts. Where would I be looking for inexplicable forces and what kind of inexplicable behaviours would they have?"

The freaking-out men are kinda spread out, so one or two of them just so happens to wake up to the sight of this particularly fuckable girlbottom, sticking up with a hand between her thighs, moaning into the floor as she fingers her drooling cunt.

She's bound in goo-rock, stuck that way, not able to get away at all if someone decides to take advantage of her...

(The man who happens to wake up behind Scyelen takes in this sight and merely adds it to the MASSIVE TALLY of WEIRD SHIT he totally DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH. He stumbles away towards where there's more light, in search of EXPLANATIONS.)

"I apologize for the overly simplified analogy," Sylvia says. "It rather falls apart in the face of questions like that. The truth is that only the Puchuu really know how souls work. But I would intuitively expect that thinking of this as anything less that extremely delicate surgery will lead to ruin. It may in fact be easier to cart us all to a sufficiently powerful healer, and I anticipate that being nearly as inconvenient as... simply washing our hands of it and spending a year disembodied."

"No, that counts," Casey says. "That's good. That counts. That means... what," wince, "that there's... okay, um... check... top speed? If the same slowdown applies on all axes."

"...If trying to get the stuff out could cause worse damage than just killing us then it makes sense to—wait—I think I can see them?" she says to Sylvia. "The, uh, metaphorical crystal needles? Would there be one for each cell, disconnecting as the cells die...?"

"Okay, I can do that," she says to Casey. She considers and discards a few possible strategies before deciding on 'goo accelerator' as the most straightforward plan. A tunnel of goo-rock assembles itself, extending arrow-straight across the cavern, perfectly level; then a large blob of goo (all three-dimensional, for simplicity's sake) crawls inside and starts glorping itself along. Goo is not very fast on its own, but in an enclosed structure it can do clever tricks with pressure that she for some reason has instincts for. She sets up similar tunnels in a sort of three-dimensional asterisk, vertical and perpendicularly-horizontal, carving through the hive-pillar where necessary.

(Multiple confused guys accost various Scintillae, asking if she knows what the fuck is happening.)

In the life-sense, it is obvious that the 'crystal needle' analogy was a good try but kind of like trying to explain orbital mechanics with a car doing donuts in a parking lot.

Sylvia blinks, impressed. "Yes. You should not be able to see that. That is alarmingly impressive."

Below a certain speed, there is no weirdness. Above that speed, there is no weirdness... at first. But each traveling object seems to collect an increasing amount of inexplicable friction, even as it continues at the same speed. The fastest objects seem to collect resistance at a steeper curve, while the drag on objects in a middle range seems to level out.

"A lot of impressive things have happened to me today. Most if not all of them have also been alarming. Anyway, I think I can see them clearly enough that trying to clear out the stuff around them wouldn't be a completely crazy idea—I really wish I could've known this stuff before I tried what I did with Samantha but actually I think seeing it collapse was what let me figure out how to see it at all... but what happens if the links break, is it anything worse than just disconnecting your soul from your body the same way that happens anyway when you die?"

"Top speed behaves weirdly," she reports to Casey. "But it looks like the same weird is happening in whatever direction I try? It's, uh, up to a certain speed everything's normal and if I push stuff faster than that it collects drag and if I push it even faster than that it collects more drag faster."

(Various Scintillae shrug helplessly and say, "We were all kidnapped by eldritch four-dimensional squid-men? And then a bunch of even crazier bullshit happened?")

(But those aren't things. The world is supposed to make sense. Where even are they? Who is she? Why are there so many of her?!?! How did they get here? This is crazy. This kind of stuff doesn't happen in real life. All those monsters aren't going to eat us, right? Kill the monsters! They're alien too!)

One guy is rather delirious, calls her, "Lisa," and grabs her, clumsily trying to get his dick into her while mumbling about blueballs.

Sylvia hesitates. "I don't know of a reason why it would be different. Souls are pretty resilient. But I don't know exactly what you're seeing or what you think you can try." She glances around. "We ought to gather everyone up, so everyone knows what the options are, and may contribute their own ideas. Once they've... recovered... enough to participate. We're going to need everyone on the same page, regardless."

"Okay," Casey says. "That's promising. Erk! Um, okay, so explanations. Where is the missing kinetic energy going? Probably, its going into a direction we can't perceive. Which is good. Good sign. Is the... is the distance across the cavern, is it the same for the fastest test-objects, or are they covering more distance than should be there?"

"Yeah, that makes sense," she says to Sylvia. "And it'll be less of a headache for me than trying to have multiple conversations at once. Trying to have multiple conversations at once turns out to be kind of hard."

Scintillae around the cavern alert all the magical girls that they're being gathered together for a conference. The goo provides transport for those who can't or don't want to move on their own, or are too unresponsive for whatever reason; people who actually don't want to go, she hesitantly leaves alone. (This also seems like the time to free Scyelen from her rocky encumbrance.)

"That... is a very good question that it might take me a minute to answer," she says to Casey. "In the meantime, we're gathering everybody for a conference over there," she waves Sylviaward. "I can bring you, you don't have to get up."

The men get shrugs. Lots and lots of shrugs. And one or two instances of, "oh, yeah, I have like two hundred pet dinosaurs for unrelated reasons. You can ignore them."

...and one instance of "fuck... off???", whereupon she raises walls of goo to exclude all of the bewildered men from the conference because she just does not want to have to deal with a range of possible responses that includes That while she's attempting public speaking in a crowd of people all of whom know more than her about everything except her insane bullshit magic powers.

There aren't actually any magical girls who flat out refuse to go where Scintilla wants them.

A few of the non-pregnant girls notice Sylvia, and clad themselves in their own simulated outfits, but they're still the minority.

Of more concern is the sudden and egregious exclusion of all but a handful of the men. Before Scintilla can even open (one of) her mouth(s), a bunch of the girls speak up in indignant protest at being separated. Some of them were getting along fine, some of us were in the middle of calming them down, see? What about all the other ones who're even more confused because we didn't get to them yet?! And also there're like three time as many guys as magical girls! This can hardly be called "everyone" can it.

Scyelen herself makes an abortive attempt to stop fucking herself, but notices that she is not actually the last girl still doing that, as they're gathered up, and settles for doing so less enthusiastically and in a more attentive pose.

She isn't one of the girls who speaks up, but she agrees with them.

"We can have a second conference once we've figured out the magic stuff a little better but I am dealing with a lot of things right now and I don't want explaining everything to a bunch of people even more confused and ignorant than I am to be one of those things until after we've looked into whether I can fix the eldritch pregnancy thing and what the fuck is up with the wraparound."

Ugh ugh ugh she hates everything about this situation she should just leave them all alone to argue it out and then kill themselves no she should not do that that would be terrible.

(She doesn't... entirely notice... that when she speaks she does it in near-perfect unison with the dozen or so of her bodies scattered throughout the enclosure.)

The pervasive chorus of her voice is startling enough that her words get listened to. There is grumbling.

"C-can you fix the pregnancy thing?" asks one girl. "It's, it's starting to hurt..."

This gets a small clamor of agreement.

Sylvia steps into the crowd, carrying Samantha's remains. "This was the first attempt. It is an option, but we may have more pressing priorities."

Casey takes advantage of the ensuing silence to gasp out a pained summary of what they've already figured out about the space loop.

"Hey! I know that!" another girl chimes in. "I recognize that behavior. I studied this in topology. I think we're at the bottom of a five dimensional hyperbolic funnel. When we move, we're circling around the funnel's axis, but the faster we go, the higher up the funnel our momentum raises us. That would mean, to break out, we just have to go fast enough to climb the gradient until we reach normal space!"

"I... might be able to accelerate somebody that fast but I'm not sure I can do it survivably for the pregnant ones—it didn't take much damage to the part of the seed that's in our space before the whole thing collapsed, and when they collapse they do, uh, that." The one of her who is speaking gestures at Samantha. "I think I have a way to fix them that won't do that but the dead stuff is kinda tangled up in the connections between your soul and body and letting it move around too much will jostle them and might break a bunch and apparently we're not sure that's safe? Or, like, we're pretty sure it kills you but not sure if it might do anything worse? It didn't do anything worse than kill Samantha when hers collapsed, as far as I can tell, but it was kinda killing her pretty hard already."

"It might be safer for us, to just die and wait to come back," another girl points out, "but what about all the guys? They're just human. If they die, they'll be, y'know actually dead forever."

"I think," says one girl, hispanic and curvy, and on the same level of gravid as Casey, "I think I'll risk it."

Topology girl suddenly bolts upright. "Wait wait wait!!! Disembodied souls have non-euclidean motive force! It's..." she stops herself. "The point is, anyone who dies down here is stuck. You can't climb the gradient as a soul. You can only move in three-space because you basically have no intersecting mass! In higher dimensions it'd be like trying to move a mountain!"

This starts a clamor over whether or not topology girl is actually right about that, or if there's ways to carry souls up with them. Binding to a power artifact? Nobody down here's a spirit mage and they can't use their spells anyway!

"Um!"

Oh crap did she seriously. Why. Now people are looking at her. (Her hand freezes between her legs.)

"Um, I'm an oddball. A mimic. If anyone's got one spell that can solve all our problems. I can. Copy it. And use it. Even with the psychic block."

Oh boy is that ever a relatable expression of social fear on that girl's face.

"........there's... an off chance I might be able to experimentally reembody people but that seems like probably a much worse idea than just leaving one of me here to wait the year and then break out the stragglers," she says. "Anybody got useful spells for the mimic? —Oh, and I figured out how to reconstruct my aria early on but I could never get around the block to say it properly, we might be able to crack that and then—I actually have no idea if transforming with this gunk inside you is any safer than trying to take it out my way, damn. But those of us who aren't currently pregnant could transform if we figured out how and that seems like it expands our options a lot."

What's useful depends on what they're trying to do. What are they trying to do, exactly?

And the general sentiment is that the boredom of being stuck down here for a year without a body would be torture, but if none of them have a way to carry Samantha's soul with them, that ship has already sailed. If they're not going to abandon this place at the first opportunity anyway...

"The transformation is thoroughly unlikely to be inhibited physically. It's designed to chew through anything in its way," Sylvia puts in. "The mind block is not an active spell, of that much I'm certain. Whatever it changed, isn't wearing off naturally, and that is much more concerning, I believe."

All of the girls who fought in the battle and a few more volunteer to try Scintilla's trick anyway. Shanie, the lanky Lightning Mage, is among them. She gives Sylvia a thumbs up.

"It's sort of hard to explain but, um—you can guess-and-check to match words against the ones in your soul and then figure out how to fit them all together. Mine is—" It's been a while but she practiced enough that it comes back to her near-instantly. Her voice drops out of habit, though not quite all the way to the secretive murmur of her early days. "Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough; I am Hollow Witch Scintilla! ...or at least I think so. But I can't get it to work right."

The one's who're trying, try. It's a slow process, and the various sentences they try don't work when they try them.

Meanwhile, topology girl suggests that their best shot at climbing the gradient is probably to use the big hole where the lake and hive used to be, and start out by falling. She does some math, based on the speeds of Scintilla's test objects, and comes to the conclusion that the width of the gradient is going to be more of a problem than the speed. The space around them will seem to stretch out by several orders of magnitude, leaving them in near vacuum by the time they're near the top of the hyperbolic funnel.

One of the few included men is pretty sure the stuff under the fleshscape is lunar rock, which means that even if they survive the gradient, they'll either slam into solid rock or be flung into even more vacuum. At that point, body-death would probably be better than not for the majority of the magical girls, but they need to think of some way to keep the men alive. Is this red goo and goo-rock... air-tight?