The night air was refreshing after an intense deliberation session with myself regarding the fate of this world. Even if it wasn't a truly complex debate, I still needed to reaffirm my convictions because of all the bullshit I would have to pull off so this world wouldn't go completely off the rails. But I also had to consider how much I could interfere without creating an extreme dependency on me from the others. That was the whole crux of the matter: not whether I should interfere, but how much.
That meant I had to prepare several things and mobilize part of my assets. As for the mechanical angels, I would have to start introducing them to the general public gently, through a few barely believable appearances, just to set a precedent. I also needed to use the reality bubble to create a couple of things I couldn't manufacture directly due to the lack of a developed industry on the planet, review the Gem technology scattered across Earth to see what I could try to integrate beyond the extremely durable glass alloys over time, and finish the first volume of human magic, or at least the preliminary version, to see how this "magic" would fare.
To be honest, that last part would easily be among the most complicated. Even with parts of a rough draft in a book I had been creating since before I even took much of this world seriously, it was still a pain in the ass due to the energy efficiency required to affect reality. But I won't delve deeper into this for now. I need to focus more on how to solve minor issues, like starting to build a more noticeable public image, as well as fixing several problems with my government identity that I hadn't needed to touch since I arrived in this universe.
"What a nuisance," I said to myself, looking at the stars with a contradictory mix of emotions. It ranged from a touch of amusement over how I might be perceived by others when the time came, to a far more serious conviction than usual about what my own actions would ultimately create. Perhaps it was a mere reflection of myself trying not to lose my way in power, and the fact that I care about that means I haven't turned into a full-blown mad god yet, a megalomaniac who always believes he's right, or a true horror from beyond the veil.
...
I observed the mechanical angels outside the tower from a simple marble throne featuring metallic veins and a design covered in a black blanket made of raven feathers. Nothing truly ostentatious in its details, just something simple that looked oddly good inside my reality bubble. I need to come up with a better name for this place than just "reality bubble." Anyway, I got distracted by my thoughts while watching the angels enter and exit this reality every now and then. It was a bit strange because time didn't function as such in this place; that's why it gave the illusion of being static yet dynamic. That's how I saw so many angels fulfilling their duty, though there weren't actually that many doing anything in the material world beyond acting as guardian angels for certain people, appearing in dreams, and guiding parts of recent human history. I didn't want to mess with paradoxes by altering history, as I had enough of that with the time-travel experience.
Damn, I went off on a tangent. This has been happening to me way too much lately. Maybe it's because I was always like this, and that trait of mine simply grew when it ceased to be a problem once I could exist differently. As I was saying, everything has been normal recently, apart from a distant green speck in the sky. It's still quite far off, but at the current pace, how much time did I really have before they arrived? Almost three weeks. That was actually plenty of time for me to prepare, but very little time for the rest to get ready.
Against all odds, the Crystal Gems had been genuinely optimistic. Running into what Peridot said served as a reality check for them, and they've begun doubling down on their efforts to prepare for the inevitable. I mean, they started looking for various artifacts from ancient crashed ships and other pre-rebellion Gem technology. Pearl could be seen working on a macro-cannon using several lasers from damaged ships, along with searching for the rest of Rose Quartz's cannons, though I didn't expect to actually need to use it. You know, they didn't really expect a dangerous enough retaliation, but I made sure to slip that suggestion into their common sense. Amethyst and Garnet could be seen training or going on missions more than ever, both to clear the area of unexpected dangers in light of what might happen and to keep their minds busy, especially Garnet, since everyone knows what happens when someone has the ability to see the future; it's always a worry when objectively bad things are bound to happen.
On the other hand, there was Nora. The girl was genuinely conflicted; she didn't really know what was coming, but she knew it wasn't anything good by any stretch. Even so, I was there for her most of the time. Even if I wasn't entirely fine myself, neither of us was, but that's what we had each other for, right? Yeah. Too many problems. At least I could make real progress once this whole phase blew over. After this, everything would be easier. Yeah, I wish it were.
Meanwhile, I was finishing the first actual compilation of magic. It really was a massive pain to create an accessible method so that esoteric streams of thought could be manipulated after passing certain tests. That was only part of the problem; the other was having to minimize the energy requirements so it would affect the materium in a coherent way rather than just being a mental phenomenon. I didn't have a warp to use as an energy source, nor did I plan on creating one. Likewise, I was unwilling to use myself as a battery to power magic. The most I did with it was give conceptual weight and limitations to the method; basically, it acted like a contract with the practitioner themselves. No matter how one learned magic, as long as they followed the "contract" of its rules, they could use it. The most important rule is having a soul that acts as a lightning rod for the energy produced by the conscious thought of the entity, which is then used to pull physical energies from reality and harness them for the spell. That was the solution I had to face, because if magic were cast directly using a person's own power, nothing on a real scale would happen.
I was tired, so tired of all this esoteric complexity. Yeah, I felt a lot of satisfaction in basically creating magic as a power system using mostly physical components and just a few embers of esotericism, but damn, I needed to cuddle with Nora soon, or I would lose my mind from all the truly incomprehensible knowledge I had to dig through reality lately just to make magic work. Having to create a new axiom accepted by reality, even on a local level for whoever practiced magic, was a completely mind-boggling task.