A yawn bubbled from her throat as she made her way into the high afternoon sun, her shadow almost entirely beneath her well made boots, the golden traceries lighting her shadow with dancing waves of light with each step. Her pale uniform skirt swished and swayed, it's silken folds hiding her long pale legs from both the sun high above and the gaze of her classmates.
Not that it any would look, not because she was ugly or was overly cruel, no it was simply a poor idea to leer at the heir apparent of an imperial house. Her tutor's had warned her, her combat instructors had warned her, her political advisors had warned her, even the matronly guard captain had offered a roundabout warning. But she had ignored them, sure of herself, after all she wasn't a kid anymore. She would go to a normal school, and take classes like a normal girl and maybe even make some friends.
But as these things go youthful ignorance is trumped by aged wisdom. She had made no friends, beyond those who wished to either curry favour, or otherwise exploit her future position. And so she had thrown herself into her studies, too ashamed, too proud to admit that she had been wrong, no she would not give up just yet. But maybe, maybe next year she would not return, maybe some complaint about being held back by the rest of her class.
Her back unconsciously straightened as her resolved firmed. Yes, that would do. Something tumbled towards her as she reached the teleport booster and reflexes drilled into her since she could cast her first spell kicked in, a fully enclosed angular barrier snapped into place just as the booster shattered into the waves of rainbow nothingness and everythingness of the dimensional sea.
Back at the school pandemonium broke out as Annette the Rose vanished into a nullspace hole.
~~~
Forever and nothing passed outside the shell of magic Annette had constructed herself, fear and panic rose and fell as the reality of her situation dawned on her, she was falling through the dimensional sea, buffeted by fluxes of pure mana and gaping voids that were the bane of even the largest dimensional cruisers. Without her shield she wouldn't have survived more than a minute, without the mana redirection element she would have been burned from the inside out as her linker core exploded, or imploded or or, something. She wasn't an expert at biological interactions with raw dimensional space, she hadn't even finished school yet!
Suddenly the chaotic wirling smoothed out, the swells of mana the the lows of nulls flattened out into something almost completely stable. Lacking in the ambient mana levels she was used to but no longer actively breaking attempts to pull a spell together. A thought refreshed the slightly stale air in her bubble of stability and the dimensional sea around her rolled slightly with the action. In other circumstances such a discovery would be a major proof to the current leading theory on spellcraft, but to Annette it was more an inconvenience.
A dimensional transfer takes a lot of energy and focus to properly and safely craft, without a teleport booster that meant time. Time spent pulling in the energy and forcing it into the correct pathways for the spell to complete, time where disruptions or distractions could be disastrous. That light pull to refresh her air had churned the sea up enough that she knew she'd never get a controlled teleport off, she just wouldn't have the time to properly focus the mana the right way before she would either be distracted by the wild motion around her, or disrupted by the null voids themselves.
But... An
uncontrolled teleport, that might just work, and despite it's name it's uncontrolled and unpredictable nature was more due to randomly diving into the dimensional sea before being spat back out in roughly the direction you wanted to go. If she had been a little further along in her studies she might even have been able to shave off almost half of the spells functions, she was after all already in the dimensional sea. But... it wasn't like she really had a choice, do or die and the air around her was already going stale again.
She pulled on her magic,
hard and fast, crashing through the calculations needed between one heartbeat and the next. Her linker core burned and darkness swallowed her vision as her spell completed.
~~~
Voices spun around her as something beeped rapidly beside her head, a tightness gripped one of her fingers before she shook it off, to which the beeping thing beside her squealed in complaint.
Bodies, human in pyjama like clothes rushed in, serious faces giving way to relief at the sight of her sitting up. Garbled sentences tumbled out of the mouth of one of the pyjama clad people as another replaced the clip on her finger.
It sounded sort of like that documentary on backwater colony's that had lost contact, some of the words almost sounded right, but none of it really made sense.
"Wo, wo ich bin?"
