Cameron is silent for a long moment as she absorbs the Doc's words.

"There's nothing spontaneous about it," Cameron says absently to Tegan. "The artificial god-brains were invented by those planet-machines my partner killed, a long time ago. Eelesia suspects that when they arrived on our planet, they hunted and captured gods to experiment on and study them, because we have stories about a lot of gods that don't exist anymore. I bet at least some of those dead gods were killed by that first generation of magical girls, personally. The religions during that time period were more than horrific enough to justify it, and it would only really take one dissenter with the right specialization. Of course, then the Veil went up and confounded everything, so we don't really know."

Cameron continues to try to fit the Doc's framework into the ontological framework she's familiar with. And fails. That as good as confirms it. This whole place is doing something to these people, and the problem with that is the scale. It's too big to be anything (super)natural. This whole place... is someone or something's... experiment.

A cold prickle crawls down her spine as she looks up at the Doc.

Simon shudders. "Killing gods – it's an ugly business. That's the kind of thing that breaks civilizations."

Cameron shrugs at that. "It happened."

She straightens up and offers Simon a smile. "Sorry. We should get on with things. There's something I need to do outside before I head back to Sunny's inn."

"Of course," says Simon. "It's been an honor to have you."

Tegan and Doc stand up as well. "Thank you," Tegan says to Simon. "It's been a privilege."

And they file out.

"I think that went well," she remarks.

"Mmmhm," Cameron agrees.

"Okay," Cameron says, sobering. "I want a better lay of the land, so to speak... I'm going to try the obvious thing."

She looks around, and heads away from the nearby houses towards the closest clear, open ground that looks unused.

"You can watch me set up the sorcery," she adds, mostly to the Doc.

Some sort of general-purpose divination, presumably? She honestly doesn't even know what to call obvious anymore.

        "I believe I would be interested in seeing that," he says.

Cameron pulls out her tablet, and brings up her sorcery notes. It's a locally hosted wiki that's mostly Eelesia's work, consolidating a hierarchy of basics, the 'simple machines' of the 5d energy world. Diagrams and equations with neatly organized descriptions.

Then she pulls an etched glass disc out of her Pocket as well. It's an inch thick, and it has a triangular notch in it. She pulls out a tet next, fits the glowing die into the notch, then flings the disc out like a fat heavy frisbee.

At the top of its arc, Cameron snaps out, "Oum!"

The disc freezes in place, lights up with rainbow radiance, and shatters into dust as light plays down and scorches a pattern into the ground. Cameron steps forward, stopping at certain points in the design, and placing down a glowing aurora cube at each.

Flashy.

"A complex effect, for such a simple invocation. I assume the materials were pre-prepared in some way?"

"Oh yeah. Very very simple, just projects whatever is etched into the glass into whatever's below the disc. For when you need to set up an array in a hurry. Or when you're impatient and lazy and have spares," Cameron adds wryly, setting down the last cube.

She straightens up and steps carefully outside the bounds of the array. "Now I test it."

"Iao." The power core marked with 'iao' runes lights up briefly. "Vai. Khz. Lom." The areas around each of the other cubes lights up in turn.

Each 'word' corresponds to a specific 'rune' in the array. When she speaks the sound, rainbow light flows from the adjacent cube into the specified rune.

Curious. The outlines of the procedure make sense – a complex ritual involving a series of individual invocations – but if she needs that kind of complexity, why are the individual incantations so short?

(He doesn't interrupt, as long as she appears to be actively working.)

—oh, of course. She's testing. A series of diagnostics, but she's diagnosing the magic itself. He doesn't have any firsthand knowledge of the techniques used to survey the magical environment in an unfamiliar location, but he would not be astonished if it looked more or less like this.

But she seemed to think magic couldn't use natural power; if wherever she fell from was empty of natural magic, then why would she already have such a thing prepared? – no, it wasn't empty, it was that nonhuman magic was toxic. So this must be designed to check for the presence of contamination.

But she doesn't seem to be reacting as though these results were unusual, and the rainbow light seems indistinguishable from the inside of her duplicate from earlier, which weakly suggests that there isn't any detectable contamination in it. Is the local ambient magic simply too weak, or too nontoxic, to register?

Cameron catches the look on the Doc's face and pauses to raises an inquisitive eyebrow at him.

"It looks like your spell isn't detecting anything, and I was wondering why. My best guess is that our ambient natural magic is much weaker than the toxic natural magic you're accustomed to, and so is too subtle to register."

"...what? I haven't cast anything yet. I'm just testing that the array is getting power and responding as it should. I don't want to lose extra mana dice if a line came down wrong."

"Ah, I see. My apologies."

"It's fine?" Why is he apologizing.

Alright, array checks out. Cameron consults her tablet again. If she builds this thing in the wrong order her trip is going to be short and embarrassing.

She peers discreetly at the tablet – that's supposed to be nonmagical? She wouldn't even know where to begin. You'd need a light source, since it seems to be glowing... and then maybe some kind of stained-glass in front of it? You could get very basic shifting images with multiple independently rotating layers of glass; that can't be what this is doing, but maybe a more advanced extension of the same principles? But it's supposed to be based on some kind of mathematics – maybe the right starting point is more like an astrolabe? She really has no idea.

Cameron starts chanting. It's the same small set of syllables, repeated in various combinations. Like this, it's much more obvious that each syllable is activating its associated symbol within the array, as the aurora light is directed to flow, this way, that way, connect here, brace there, lock together.

A rainbow mandala forms on top of the lines already there, more like a diffuse smear of color than the sharp lines of the array.

Cameron walks around the circumference of the mandala, physically reaching in and pulling arcs of light up from the flat design to make it three-dimensional. Then she calls out one more syllable, and those arcs rotate into the fourth dimension, accelerating as though pulled until they hit some invisible point of resistance and lock in place.

A gentle breeze starts flowing inwards, towards the array from all directions.

Cameron steps back. "Alright. I think I did that correctly."

Fascinating. It looks like she's working with a different design philosophy for her spellwork: more explicit, separated into clearly separated minimalistic parts, refined essences like oil and water and salt rather than mint and coriander and thyme.

"What is it meant to do?"

She's never seen a ritual that involved such large detail work – actually, it looks like the aspects of a ritual relating to refined, rather than raw, components, except that the whole thing is like that – and why does it need to be glowing like that? Unless the lines are informative somehow – and it looks like they're just describing the structure of the ritual environment – that would only happen if she's working with an incredible amount of power, in which case maybe the refined components are so that she can have more control, more precision? Or maybe this ritual was designed as a teaching demonstration – Cameron does seem like the sort of person who would go haring off after learning one spell in discipline – but she also claimed to be an artificial god, and that her partner had killed gods. It's probably the power one.

"Um. How would you check if you got it right, and what would happen if you didn't?" And does she want to be standing near it, if so.

"It's a gravity shade," Cameron says. "If I didn't get it right, then when I trigger it, it'll consume the rest of those mana dice, get very bright, and then do nothing much. But... feel that? That breeze means it's doing something."

She toes a small rock and uses her foot to toss it over the array. The rock, as it crosses the boundary, suddenly bounces upwards off thin air, then arcs back to the ground on the other side of the array. Cameron frowns. That... might be wrong? But she doesn't remember for sure.

"I think it's working. Anything between the arrays is sheltered from down."

"I wasn't aware that – falling down – came from a place. It... separates things from their weight? Or, no, that's probably like saying a regular shade separates things from their color... I really don't understand enough of the theory, sorry."

"Separating things from their weight is a reasonable description, yes," Cameron says with a nod.

Cameron pauses to take a breath.

And then she chants her transformation aria. "Unafraid of rape, nor beholden to love, I will not be diverted from this, the one true cause. Every enemy of lust shall beware, Erocentric Avenger Rousing Salve."

The words are more than sound, more than their meaning, they are tangible. And in their wake comes ripples of aurora leading pieces of shining black and emerald green, kaleidoscoping out of nothing to fit itself onto Cameron's body.

Cameron's raiment leaves the parts that matter exposed, and is seemingly made of pristine, alien materials, but in addition to that its presence, its existence, is vivid and stark, standing out.

Oh.

For some reason that's what makes it fall into place, the – she can't call it an incantation – the words that are realer than real, and the raiment likewise – she's looking at a goddess's avatar.

Shipwrecked, fallen, built herself a body from nothing, possessed of powers beyond the ordinary yet not a prophet... she really should have figured it out before Cameron explained. And even after Cameron said she was a goddess, somehow it still didn't really click. But this, this unearthly woman cut of a fabric not like the fabric of this world, and with her declaration of such a narrow purpose— it's vividly, unmistakably clear that she really isn't human.

"If you're interested in gathering local worshippers," she says, "I think you've landed in a good place for it."