(14a) Addendum to (14)

The Crusader Campaign (068-1123 to 071-1123)

Kalida's Second Klatrin Experience

    Kalida's second klatrin experience starts out much like the first, with the shrinking and expanding and floating.  This time, however, she's come in with a purpose, to get a handle on the threads that are connecting everything.
    And she achieves that, very suddenly and quite unexpectedly finding herself connected to everything and tangled up in it.  She can move, but she's caught in it, and when she does it pulls everything else.  She can only move very slowly, and all sorts of effects ripple through everything.  Whatever scale she shifts up or down, she has effects on those scales.  Shrinking everything down, and suddenly stars wink out when she wiggles her finger, and new ones appear over there when she twitches her nose.  When she drifts down in scale, particles start dancing with each other because of the threads connecting everywhere.
    She tries to remain still.  The act of remaining still tweaks the threads.  They are always in motion anyway.  Just the act of looking to see what happens tweaks the threads.  So she experiments with tweaking things to see what happens.
    Kalida remains stuck for what seems like a long time, and the threads start pulling her too.  She's losing control, way too much caught up in anything.  Moving one way causing her to be pulled in other ways, and ends up with her moving not quite where she wanted to go.
    Kalida then tries not remaining still but not purposefully moving, just letting the threads pull her.  This seems to work.  She's being pulled around, and it's a lot calmer feeling except for the suspicion that someone is pulling her around deliberately.  She's feeling watched, and it seems like someone over there is pulling these threads a lot more effectively than she can.  She contines to relax and let herself be pulled, but paying attention to what is moving her.
    She's now convinced something is pulling her around.  She can't see it, but she can infer its existence by the way it's pulling the threads.  The scale of the interactions, however, is still too large for her to grasp.  Nevertheless, she gets the feeling that the shadow that's doing the pulling is itself being pulled and not realizing it.  Her action of moving with the pull, in turn pulls the shadow.
    After a while, she can start to direct how it pulls her by how she's being pulled.  She focusses on that.  She still doesn't have full freedom of movement, but through the interaction with this shadow that's manipulating her and being manipulated back, she's starting to resolve the picture of the threads, cutting out some of the ones that she's less interested in.  Even though everything affects everything else, she can classify the more global effect and push it out of the way to look at others in a bit more isolation.  This is what she has been wanting to do, and although it's still very difficult, she works hard on it.
    Her next thing it to try to see how the shadow is interacting with his connections.  When she starts to do that, however, she starts to lose all sense of locality of connections.  He's connected to other things, and so's she, and Kalida is quickly getting lost in the scale again.  She draws back.
    That's much better, much calmer.
    She resumes trying to manipulate him indirectly, and see what effects it has.  She has some success with this, following different thread networks.  That's when she notices that the reason she's manipulating this shadow that way, is because that's what that one is doing to her.  Nevertheless, she continues.
    Finally she gets a sense of being able to move within the connections, but while being affected, affect back and direct.  She's getting some grasp of control.
    Suddenly she gets a flash of recognition.  She knows she recognizes one of the shadows, but it's just a recognition on the meta-level.  She doesn't know which one it was, even, and doesn't know what it might be.  She continues carefully with what she's been doing, hoping for another flash, but it doesn't come.