Mana & Casting
"A resource gauge has been added to your interface. The Network is confident it was always there."
On Floor 1 there was no mana bar, because on Floor 1 the Network's paperwork held: whatever happened to your planter was horticultural variance. On Floor 2 the paperwork visibly does not hold, and the interface stops pretending. The bar appears at arrival, with a notice, and every runner gets one regardless of build.
The pool
Every runner carries a Mana pool of 100. It is spent by casting, restored by consumables, and enlarged by exactly one discipline (below). The Network does not currently document where it comes from. Runners who ask are referred to the notice.
Casting
Floor 2 is where a trained discipline starts to cast. The milestones at Levels 20–30 turn each one from something you have into something you do — a Blade runner opens wounds at a word, a Mend runner closes their own, a Mobility runner is briefly somewhere else. All of it comes out of the same Mana bar. One pool, one price list, no separate accounting per skill.
Casts cost between 15 and 30 Mana, and the pattern is the same in every discipline:
- 15 — the everyday ones: openers, self-heals, dashes, quick reads.
- 20–25 — stronger effects, and anything you keep running.
- 30 — the finishers. One per discipline, priced so you feel it.
A full pool is therefore roughly three to six casts. Casting is a seasoning on Floor 2, not a diet — the runner who plans a fight around seven consecutive casts has planned a different fight than the one they will have.
Signal — the amplifier
One discipline exists to make all the others cheaper and deeper. Signal — one of the twenty disciplines you can train — sits underneath every kind of magic, and what it opens on this floor pays out straight away:
| Milestone | Level | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Flux Sensitivity | 20 | Every cast costs less — 10% off, and more than that on the expensive ones. It applies to all of them, whatever discipline they came from. |
| Reservoir | 25 | Mana pool +25 (to 125). |
| Reservoir (peak) | 85 | Mana pool +50 more (to 175). A deep-floor promise, printed here for the ambitious. |
Arcane is optional — the floor's required spine is survive and reach a Seam — but a caster who skips the amplifier is paying retail on every cast for the rest of the descent.
Refilling the pool
- The Flicker Cell — the first thing most runners refill from. A maintenance power cell holding a faint, restless charge; on the Greenbelt it twitches harder than it should. Consuming one restores +35 Mana. They loot from the floor's machines and events, and the irrigation offer pays out in them. Uncommon, stackable, worth pocketing every time.
- The garden and the potion bench feed the same supply — plenty grows on this floor, and some of it holds a charge. Ask Odette. Or don't ask, and read the gathering entry instead.
Practical notes
- Some casts work in and out of combat — a self-heal or a service-tunnel dash spends the same Mana either way. The pool doesn't care whether you're being watched. (You are being watched.)
- A few things cost more than any ordinary cast. Reviving a downed companion out in the field, which takes deep Survival training, runs 40 Mana. Budget for it.
- The bar is per-runner. There is no party pool, no borrowing, and no appeals process. The Network checked.
Next → Fauna Field Guide — what's out there, and which parts of it can be befriended.