Demon Princess Magical Chaos

The silver plate flies off my control halfway across the room and hits Korenga in the head. It bounces off harmlessly without the towering woman noticing the hit, but she still stops her meal to look around in surprise at the sound of impact. Luckily, there wasn't anything on the plate, or it would have scattered across several people.

"What are you trying to do?" Aurelia glares at me disapprovingly. For a moment, I think she's talking about my lack of table manners and about hitting Korenga. Then I realize that my choice of object to train with has a deeper meaning than I would have ever considered.

Is she worried that I'm encroaching on her territory of telepathic object manipulation but with silver instead of gold? Or is that her way of making a joke?

"Gravity." I reply with a shrug and flick a finger at the plate that landed on the table behind Korenga, causing it to fall upward. Then, with another flick, it moves toward me and accelerates. Catching it in my hand, I look at the small dent left behind by the hit to the Black God's temple.

Senka taught me a bit more about the physics of gravity. For one, it moves at the speed of light, which is also the reason a black hole's gravity can stop even light from escaping. But she also explained the concept of inertia, which works even in the vacuum of space. That's what causes an object with mass to start slowly and accelerate over time, instead of having the same instantaneous burst that light has.

To be honest, she said that there's no way to teach me everything about gravity in a matter of days or even months. In my time, it took physicists years to learn everything humanity knew at the time, and there were still many things unknown to science.

For now, I can only practice what I already know. Before heading to Armeria to find Asoko and my children, I'll visit the Khurut desert and experiment with gravity on a massive scale there. It will be practice for when I try to slow down the moon and have it get caught by Earth's gravity again.

We discussed through the night how Chaos-Juzual might have caused the moon to fall at the speed that it did. According to Senka, even at a full stop of its angular momentum, the moon should take about five days to drop onto Earth. But to achieve it in thirteen hours would have needed some means of acceleration.

Maybe the Witch of the End had a deep understanding of gravity. It would explain how she was able to make Aurelia and me zoom through space when I first met her, and then again when she sent us back to Earth. With our tiny mass and no air resistance, we accelerated so quickly that it felt instantaneous.

"This is what will bring the moon back under control." I drop the plate in my hand, but before it reaches the ground, I reverse the gravity acting on it. For a split second, it floats in midair as if weightless, but then quickly accelerates toward the ceiling. I catch it out of the air and get the strange feeling of the weight tugging upward rather than downward before I undo the gravity on it.

Unlike the telepathy-like control that Aurelia has over gold, gravity requires much more effort to make it move as intended. For all intents and purposes, all it can achieve is momentum in a single direction at a time. Complex movements would need an insane amount of fine-tuning of vectors that I'm simply not capable of. I think no living being could achieve that with the limited calculating capabilities of their brains.

"Gravity, huh?" Exla comments while leaning back on her floating cloud chair. Her huge fluffy hair is a reflection of the morning sun's orange glow illuminating a band of clouds from below. Even though we're in a room without windows, her hair is like a screen that shows only the most beautiful of skies. "The Juzual I know didn't have much of an imagination. All she was ever able to do was seemingly erase things from existence. Nobody understood how she did it, but that's why she fit the concept of the Witch of the End."

"Erase?" I place the plate on the table in front of me and ask with an interested gaze.

"Maybe her imagination wasn't as weak as you thought it was." Senka suddenly chimes in and speaks with her arms crossed. She glances at me, then returns her gaze to Exla. "The Imagination Engine uses the thoughts of its users to converts the sun's energy into phenomena on Earth. As we all know, E=mc²-"

"You lost me there." I raise my hand, only to be shut up by a glare from the doll girl. I've heard that formula before, but I have no idea what that means.

"Energy can be converted to mass and vice versa." Exla takes over the explanation, deliberately putting it into simpler terms for me to understand. I appreciate the sentiment, but I also feel somewhat belittled by a girl that looks a lot younger than I do - even if she's much older. "But nobody has ever achieved that through imagination alone-"

Suddenly, the cloud girl stops and turns to Tokomaha, who is eating without following our conversation. She notices the eyes on her and looks up with a blank expression before it turns to confusion when she sees Senka and me staring at her as well.

"What?" She swallows her food and asks, unaware that we only now realized just how incredible her feat of stopping the moon truly was. She used the Imagination Engine to turn energy from the sun into mass. And when she was done, she turned it back into energy. After all, there isn't a massive pile of new dirt where she grew to titanic proportions.

It's the same principle her clones are made by; the little earth she always uses could never make up for creating physically complete bodies of her size. They seem to be more of a mental catalyst for her than the actual ingredients.

I inadvertently break out into a smile when I find myself appreciating just how incredible the little goddess is. Not only can she make plants sprout, create clones of herself, and grow to the size of the moon, but she may have given us the key to the creation of matter itself.

"Are you making fun of me for something?" Growing irritated from confusion, Tokomaha frowns at me. I only shake my head and keep my smile on, causing her bushy eyebrows to furrow even more.

"So you're saying that Juzual was able to erase matter by turning it into pure energy?" Exla doesn't sound too convinced. She always prided herself as the one with the most potent imagination among the Old Humans - or at least the most flexible. To realize that she considered Juzual to lack imagination even though she achieved what nobody else could at the time must be shocking.

"And vice versa." Senka adds. "Maybe that's how she stopped the moon's orbital velocity and used that energy to push it toward Earth."

"That means one should be able to do the same in reverse. Stopping its momentum away from Earth and using that to propel it back along its regular orbit." The cloud girl scratches her chin and theorizes with a thoughtful expression.

This talk is already beyond me. All I can tell is that they're on their way to finding a solution to this celestial problem. But does that mean I don't even need to use gravity for that? If Exla can figure out how to do that energy to mass transfer, she should be able to not only recapture the moon but also stop the solar winds.

"So, you got the solution?" I ask the cloud girl innocently. But she only spins her head to me with an annoyed expression.

"If you can help me sift through a million scientific papers to find the right ones that explain the mass-energy formula in a way that I can understand, I'll do it." It's the first time she's talking in a tone about as sarcastic as Senka's. "This isn't something you study in a few days."

"I learned gravity in a few hours." Demonstratively launching the silver plate on the table before me into the air with a gesture of my hand, I state with a shrug.

"Then you should stick to that plan." Senka mocks me with a cynical shrug. "I'll help Exla with that other problem then. Call on us in a few decades to see if we've figured something out."

"Alright, alright." The sarcasm pelts me like hail, and I duck under it apologetically. "I get it already. This isn't something that will be ready for the solar winds or the moon's escape."

I look across the gathered girls, who watch our exchange in confusion. Korenga doesn't seem to care and continues to eat her meal, but the others have stopped and seem to be trying to understand what we're talking about. Especially Tokomaha is still peeved about my earlier behavior and furrows her brow again.

Then my eyes fall on Kamii and Hestia. From here on out, things are getting way out of their league. This isn't even a matter of the power of their imagination anymore. Even Exla and Mataku, who had millennia to experiment with the Imagination Engine, are incapable of overcoming problems on this scale.

Only Chaos-Juzual, who specialized in mass-energy conversion, could pull off the moonfall. And Areteniha, a scientist working on a station near the sun and with direct access to the root system of the Imagination Engine, is most likely using a manual approach for the solar winds.

All I can do is hope that my imagination for gravity will prove strong enough.