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You lay your hand on the solid glass wall, knowing what you must do. You consider all you know about æthereal construction. The wall isn’t a wall. It’s a pattern, a concept, the idea of a wall, so strong that your mind believes it is here. It operates on principles that mimic surface principles of optics. Your own avatar is no different, it’s just a solid pattern of æther. Two solid objects could never pass through each other, not without altering the laws of physics themselves, and that’s AdminTech years beyond you. So it’s you who will have to change.

You need to not be solid is all. Be like light. You’re no optics autistic. You understand waves better as music. Same thing, right? It’s all just sine waves. What technopath doesn’t love a good sine wave? You feel the pattern, the structure of the prism, how æther resonates through it. You need to resonate like that.

You think of ÆON, ÆR avatar seemingly made of light and darkness. You can do it too. You let go of the ideas of physical laws binding you to your solid shape. You let go of matter entirely as a concept, all except one elementary particle, the photon. Your body is glowing white like distant starlight. You step forward and slip through an unseen linear passageway into the wall.

Once inside, the outside is a strange, distorted, untouchable place. The laws that bind it seem so false, impossible to you. Here in this matrix of impossibly thin linear hallways, you feel no limits.

You move to chase down the beast. You arrive at destinations faster than you can begin to comprehend. The entire massive labyrinth is a trivial shape now. You can navigate it a million times, going nowhere, but being everywhere. Your target shines like a bright red star in the sky, in a place ten thousand angular junctions away. And next to it are three other stars, one with a green frequency, one smaller and blue, and one that resonates in an alien way, like a negative translation of the others--a black star on a bright sky.

The red star closes in on them. You move to reach 7 before it can, but you couldn’t possibly, since you move at the exact same speed. You reach it nearly instantly.

You and 7 are flanking the target, it seems. She’s found her way into the prism before you. But you can only feel the distant echo of her presence. All you can see directly in this 2-dimensional space is the beast of white and red light, and not your exam partner or her familiar. But in this state, the intent of the creature is visible. Its focus is entirely locked on the blue aura.