For the rest of the day, I had fun showing my parents around SEYA- although there weren't a lot of things that I could legally show them and I didn’t want to get them involved in my trouble. When it came to showing off my magic, there also wasn’t a whole lot I could do without putting them in danger. Maybe I should have been more conscious of the health risks my chemicals posed to other MGs, but they also had a higher baseline resiliency and recovery.
As my parents were still a little jet-lagged from traveling across the world and had organized some meetings the next day, we had an early dinner at a restaurant that got recommended by Emily before I showed them to the guest-house.
After walking out of sight, I doubled back to make absolutely sure my extra protections had kept the demons away during the day- and if my understanding of how they worked was correct, just being in the area would keep them away. For extra security, I had infiltrated my parents phones and associated devices to keep an eye on them.
The tree I had climbed up nearby wasn’t the most comfortable and I had forgotten to grab a blanket or heavier coat for the night, so I wasn’t expecting tonight to be pleasant. Sure, the artificial tropicality of the island would stop me from freezing to death and if I got a little cold from the sea breeze, I could warm myself with careful energy conversion, but if I stayed sitting like I was for the night I was going to feel it the next day.
Leaning back after making sure my tail was securely wrapped around the branch, I quietly asked Cleo, “did I get any experience from the demon dissection?”
{Yes, do you have something in mind or is this just idle curiosity?}
“I was thinking about getting a perk that lets my body function with either no or very little sleep- or I guess even less than even an MG typically needs. My mind already kinda does this with the expectation of my brain and it's a little annoying to be stuck only thinking for six hours a day.”
After a moment of freezing, they offered, {as always, there’s a few options- although only two would probably be the best fit for what you’re thinking. If you only want to spend experience, there is [Cat Nap] for 29 after tax. It allows you to enter a meditative-like state where ULE can assist your body in speeding up the natural sleep processes- cutting down your requirements to about an hour a day. The tradeoff is that it likely wouldn’t work that well with your computer network, so you’d need to disconnect from those temporarily.
{The other option is an augment called [Low Activity Recovery] for the same amount of experience plus two tokens. The difference is that this would make your body enter a recovery period like what happens when you sleep as long as you’re not doing anything more intense than a calm walk. It is important to note that those who take this perk have reported feeling a bit more lethargic or slower to get going than before.}
“So… instead of having near limitless energy at all waking hours, the augment would limit me to a normal human’s?”
{That’s not exactly accurate as you’re not actually limited in any way. It would more likely be expressed in longer reaction times at low activity and a few minutes of ‘waking up’ before being ready to run around or use a lot of magic.}
Humming to myself as I considered the options, I asked, “would it be possible to manually turn it on and off or is it all automatic?”
Cleo took another brief freeze before answering, {by default no, however I could fit that in for another token.}
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A quick check told me that my parents were still awake, although definitely getting ready to sleep, so I felt comfortable taking a short break from my vigil. Climbing down to the ground and sitting against the tree, I decided, “let’s do the augment. Wait, will I need to change my habits too much to be in low-power mode for enough time each day?”
{It was chosen due to your typically… relaxed schedule giving enough time for recovery each day.}
A little indignant, I protested, “I maintain a good level of productivity every day!” After a blank look from my companion, I sighed, “whatever, just let me shut down my systems then do it if that’s the case.”
After a thought to turn off my servers, I blacked out. After what felt like the next instant, but was actually a few minutes, I woke up and immediately felt what Cleo meant. It wasn’t as bad as I had expected, probably because I was a relatively new MG and hadn’t yet fully adjusted to getting everything I could out of my improved body.
My innate awareness of everything my body did let me figure out that resting mode slowed the action of my muscles and synapses in order to cut down on the two largest consumers of my body’s energy.
Climbing back up to my previous perch gave me a good idea of the actual difference in speed and strength. More importantly, I quickly figured out I could get around the limitations using some of my other tools. The slower thinking only applied to my brain and could easily be made up for by my networked computers- something which happened almost automatically when I reconnected to them.
Realistically, the limitation to my body was completely acceptable for everything that didn’t lend itself to fully waking up, however, I wanted to find a way to make up for it anyway. The easy answer was to convert a little ULE into kinetic alongside the normal output of my muscles. The issue was that doing this for every action at all times would have required dedicating a noticeable chunk of my processing to only that- so I begrudgingly accepted that it was currently infeasible.
The next thing to check out was how fast I could shift back to my pre-augment energy levels. Cleo had left the activation method of the manual switch to me, so I inelegantly jerry-rigged it to work like how you can manually take over your breathing or blinking. Actually flicking the imaginary switch started shifting a few things around in my body’s automatic limiting of its output to give me more to work with. Like advertised, the process took a few minutes before the last vestiges of pseudo-sleep washed away.
After reclaiming my perch, I switched back- prompting the process to play in reverse. With only a passive watch to maintain for the night, I gave my demon-detection a higher priority before sinking into my mind to mess around with my developing tools.
A whole, relatively shenanigan free day had given my clusters plenty of time to work on the tasks I had given them. The hacking team had made an unprecedented amount of progress, reaching almost 100% recovery of [Can of Worms], [Secure Connection], [Magical Antivirus], [Oxidation Membrane], [VPM], and [Perk Macros]. Admittedly, this was only possible due to each of those being only lightly damaged by my morph so progress on the more integral- and thus destroyed- perks was still slow. In spite of that, I was hopeful that by fixing these, I had gotten the necessary knowledge and practice to speed up the recovery of the rest.
Additionally, with the restoration of [Can of Worms], I was able to push out an update to most of the afflicted devices which contained a vastly improved version of the energy recovery spell. If someone was paying attention it was still obvious that their device was running colder and quieter than it should, but with the energy absorbed from that waste, the RAT was able to very slowly net ULE and- in theory- duplicate itself to another connected device given enough time.
Lastly and most annoyingly, the cluster dedicated to finding the tail controls had not found a nice, self-contained package like expected. No, instead it had been slowly untangling a truly nefarious level of interconnection with most of the very important delicate bodily systems. Aspects of the decision parameters were tucked into or reused from ones that helped control my heart, diaphragm, kidneys, liver, and just about every other organ that was needed to keep me alive. I was torn between cursing Cleo’s very existence and congratulating them for what must have been a serious effort to make changing anything as impossible as possible.
The very slight silver lining was that I now had a reason to dedicate some resources to mapping out and actually learning the pseudo-code that controlled my body in the background since my morph. A task the tail-chasing cluster was immediately sent upon.