"Sure." Maybe she should send something to Sean. Not millions of dollars, just a quick email. Despite everything, she has this latent instinct that if the Phoenix sendoff was secretly a disintegration chamber or a chute into somebody's supervillain lair, Sean would find out somehow and wreak fiery vengeance for her. Honestly he probably would, if he somehow found out, but it's the finding out that's the real trick, isn't it?

Anyway, back to her hotel room to play more Candy Crush.

Nothing interrupts her luxurious, indolent hotel stay.

The paperwork comes up in a manila folder. Six pages of contract. Minimal legalese. This one says that they can send her off, and outlines all the terms. This one says they will handle her estate including the 8.2 million as described. This one says she understands there's really, definitely no way back.

In the end she does not email Sean. She signs the paperwork and shows up for her sendoff.

Some people opt for a party. They're definitely competent enough to do the opposite of that here. Bland SUV to a bland warehouse building. They get her up to a medical style exam table in a room full of weird equipment pointing at her. Businesslike nurses and doctors, setting things up. Unobtrusive reminders that she can back out at any time.

She only slightly has the visceral urge to start biting people. She's going through with it.

Well. The needle goes in, and she loses consciousness.

The magic circle embedded into the surgically clean floor shines with actinic blue light. The surgeons cut away at her body. Efficiently. Brutally. Ritually. The robotic arms lower brands, hot iron searing her skin. Two people are chanting. A wave of pressure - something not of this Earth, something unnatural and wrong - rises up and up and up.

She stops breathing. A terminal blinks green.

"Soul transit confirmed, pattern deviation nominal. Zero point zero zero one four percent. Great work, everyone. Let's get this cleaned up."

April slowly awakens, as if from a fitful nap, in a mostly comfortable armchair looking out a window on a hazy orange hellscape. Cracked ground, wavering heat-mirages, ruined trees.

She also has a brand-new shiny sensory modality! Energy, going by the briefing. She vaguely feels a deep pool of it behind her, and nothing from in front.

The presence of ruined trees is honestly pretty interesting. Implies there were trees to ruin.

All right, let's get cracking. Time to find out what she needs to be doing and then do it.

I cannot thank you enough for responding to my call, young one...

A voice in her head says.

Though the labor to restore my domain from its tragic end will be long and difficult, it will not be thankless. The souls of my people are safe, they only await a new world to be built for them. Your natural aptitude for magic will serve you well in the duty you have accepted. The calamity that wracked Thander was the result of viral spells, magic running out of control until all was consumed. The world must be rebuilt with braids of magic at its heart. We will do great work together, I am sure.

Huh. A more hands-on boss than she was expecting, but sure, she can roll with it.

"Where do I start?"

By learning the laws of magic, which differ from those I was able to express across the Void, and learning to cast basic spells. Once you are ready, you will use the Wellspring from which you emerged to push back the Miasma, restoring ground. I will give you plants and animals then, who will take the negative flows of magic expending themselves to keep the Miasma away, and produce more magic, a self-sustaining cycle that does not require constant maintenance. The true challenge will be the long walk, as more and more must be reclaimed, and the shifting balance as new areas tug upon old. It could all unravel again, if done carelessly. Alas, I will not be able to give you close guidance forever.

"Sure, okay. I can be careful, I've got time. Tell me all about the laws of magic."

The presumable-goddess does so! She expresses things with wordless intuitions that just suddenly appear, fully formed, in her mind. This is the sensation of pulling on the Wellspring. Here is how to focus your magical senses. It's gentle and chaotic, scintillating and sinuous, lightning quick and slow as molasses at times. This is the sensation of separating out kinds of magic. There's a hideously complex dynamic to the flows even at the macro scale; The true underlying nature of magic is not something she needs to worry about right now. 

The big thing to avoid is creating more Miasma. Lots of magic interactions create Miasma by default, and it's also just a sort of cosmic background radiation. This would be the 'zod' in the previous sims.

You can cast a basic light spell by enlutrating (poking, but like, in a specific symmetrical way) a spheroid of altax with a thin needle of soma, but be careful to kline (wobble?) the lissa that comes with altax, soma/lissa is an annihilation reaction. (All of this makes perfect sense if you stare at it long enough and have a goddess throwing qualia at you.)

It is, if anything, even more fun than the CAD program. She casts a light spell and giggles delightedly.

It's tricky, mind you. Like gymnastics in the mind - pay too much attention to one thing, and another thing will go out of control and screw it all up. Everything's flowing constantly- The sphere of altax is stable once formed, it pops into shape like a floating soap bubble, but if you don't do the two other things at just the right speed it'll fail. 

Her happiness tugs on the glowy sphere and rips it apart, creating a small burst of miasma!

Good work, she hears anyway. You're picking this up quickly, as expected for a summoned one.

Hmm, so if she wanted it to be more stable against minor perturbances, could she—or what if—

Taking the Energy Intuition system was definitely the right move, but she still really wishes she had a CAD program to test out her designs with. It wouldn't work as well, though, because these designs aren't static, you need to actively juggle them. She tries a smaller light spell so it'll make less miasma when it blows up, and sees if she can get it safely put together and then taken apart again.

With a few trials and errors, she can figure out how to take apart the light ball!

There's a sense of vague fondness, and of going-away-for-now, and of a braid of three strands of magic (altax-lissa-varo) she should practice.

"See you later!" she says cheerfully to the goddess, and settles in to twiddle with magic. She's pretty conscientious about not making unnecessary miasma, but doesn't get too discouraged when things fall apart on her.

Braiding magic is really tricky! The three-way braid is mostly stable-ish, but rotates and undulates, twisting. Pull hard to keep it straight and the strands touch, miasma. Let it wobble too much and the strands touch, miasma. But all the miasma gets eaten by the bright shining glow of her Wellspring, deeper in the little facility, no problem.

After a while of this there's a blueprint for the most basic kind of land restoration: Flood the place with bios, which will spread out like water and push away the miasma. You just need to form a tube for it to be drawn through, and wait.

Braiding practice is a delight and she could do it all day. But when the blueprint shows up, she switches to working on that.

Making a tube is hard!!! The approach that eventually works is making a hollow sphere, slooowly making it longer, like a big worm of magic, and then placing a ring of the braid she's been practicing, tied to itself, around the 'mouth' of the tube to hold it open at either end. It'll collapse at any moment without her being sharp, on the ball, maintaining it the whole way. (Has she noticed yet that magic structures built inside something solid are much more stable? Also sluggish, and behaving differently in a bunch of ways, but they'll sit still much more readily.)

Also, surely she'll get hungry eventually.

She figures out by accident about magic structures built inside something solid, and this leads her to perceive parts of her environment that are not shiny magic, which leads her to realize that she has a body she's been neglecting. With considerable reluctance, she leaves off the magic practice and investigates her surroundings in search of something to eat.

She has a smartphone in her pocket. The place she's in seems to be a large circular stone structure, almost like a somewhat short and squat tower. But a nice one, like a fancy vacation home that's designed to actually have modern amenities while still having that old-timey look. It's a comfortable temperature. She's currently in a sort of sitting room or living room. On the first floor is this room, a kitchen, a large pantry stocked to the brim with bland cans and sealed plastic bags and cleaning products, a small restroom indistinguishable from a modern one, and a large empty space by what looks like a heavy reinforced door to the outside. There are odd racks on the walls here and a few empty crates here and there. There's a staircase in one corner, up and down. The appliances have thin, elegant twists of magic inside them.

The first basement level looks to be a large storage and workshop area. Lots of shelves and boxes. A writing desk with a small note saying If you need crafts, write orders here and I will see what I can do. Small things only. There are some gardening basins that are fairly similar to her old hydroponics setup, and a few cages and pens, currently empty. There's a long ramp terminating in a big garage-style door. The second basement level is taken up almost entirely by the Wellspring. The source of the magic she's been playing with. It glows softly, light pooling and flowing, casting dappled light all over. It's insanely intricate, beautiful to her magical sense, and shot through with a flavor that can only be called divinity.

If she manages to tear herself away from that and investigate the upstairs, the first upper level has a large master bedroom and bath, with more magic fittings. The second upper level has a luxurious study with a PC tower set up and a large room with worktables and something weird and magical running throughout the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture. The third upper level contains a stone structure in the middle, with trails of magic radiating outward. Like the wiring hub for her new house? The rest of the upper level is mostly bare, one large room with plenty of windows to look over the orange hellscape with. The brown fog prevents her from seeing far. There's a wrap-around balcony, but it would be understandable if she did not go outside yet.

She will not poke the magical wiring setup. She will not poke the magical wiring setup. She will not poke the magical wiring setup even though it's shiny and interesting and she wants to find out how it got stable enough to run a house like this, is it really that much better building inside solid objects? Maybe you can get it better if you refine the object? She's gonna learn how to do that and it's gonna be so cool and she should NOT start by taking apart her appliances because if she did she would not yet be able to put them back together and then she would have no appliances and it would suck.

Ahem.

Yeah she'll eat food now. She doesn't expect anything much from it; sure, better food would've been nice, but she's looking forward to gardening again and getting to grow her own food, and in the meantime she doesn't mind if it's bland. She should look into those familiar-looking basins, maybe dig around for a manual or ask her new boss if she can't find one. Hopefully there's manuals.