I was with Glassmetal, Swordjuice, LED and Victor in the UnderBarn’s lab, just outside the marble room. Recently it had been destroyed in a training exercise that got too intense between me and Swordjuice, but Glassmetal had fixed it already.
This was the room we used to test new weapons and to train our powers and so Victor had just finished using it to test his new powers with LED’s help, with everyone else giving ideas and watching the show. Now we were moving to me analysing his Matrix to see what I could get from his powers.
Powers that I had helped him awaken just yesterday. It was a weird situation; basically farming powers to grow my own. That I even could do that was alarming. I shrugged the concern off at seeing the exhausted look on Victor’s face. That’s right, he had been playing with his new powers the whole night. I got to it, finding his matrix quickly and forming a tether to it.
Something immediately struck me just by looking at it. Instead of what I saw in every matrix, a circle of fractals around a luminous core, there was a swimming mass of the fractals that made up the matrix, disconnected from the center, undulating around the much smaller central matrix.
I still could see the luminous core inside, and everything else looked the same. The only difference was the matrix detached and drifting around his tiny power matrix. It almost looked like a living thing, smoothly undulating in unclear patterns, like a snake made of solid light, assembled into geometric patterns.
The only other situation where I have seen disconnected bits of matrix acting on their own was with LED’s buff, but then they had a set purpose and a time limit.
I approached, trying to not just speculate and instead investigate, although I didn’t think this was something else besides Victors powers, it’s much more likely that this is a system of organization of matrixes I had never encountered before, which means there might be many more types.
I got closer to the giant snake made of reality-editing fractals, analysing the meaning written in its conceptual lines. And what I found was to be expected.
It was the matrix of the metal that Victor could control. And by what I see here, control and feel through. Which matches what I remember Victor saying about how the Metal felt like an extension of himself.
Matrixes described what a power was and how it changed our reality, the mechanisms it used and every little detail about them. This type of matrix is the first of its kind that I’m analyzing. Instead of telling how the energy affects or transforms the real world, it describes the materials existence in our world, the composition of each piece from atomic going to a molecular and then to a macro scale.
It was a unique substance completely created by itself as it was essentially the matrix, it also had a power of its own, It could analyze other substances of weapons and then reproduce them, it categorized itself as a weapon and it had an active connection with Victor’s mind, a connection exactly like the ones that matrixes normally had which let people feel and control their powers, but that was here in the matrix-snake outside instead of close to the core, peculiar.
Maybe that was how it got energy without being connected directly to the energy source and with no ‘battery’ like in LED’s constructs?
This thing would be interesting to analyse and try to copy. It brings some interesting possibilities to the table. I went past it to see what was going on in Victor’s matrix around the core that expelled the energy all powers used.
It had no active part in it for using that energy; it mostly had the blueprint to create the other part of its powers, creating the matrix of the metal that created the metal in the real world at the same time.
It’s all very interesting. Could I combine this with LED’s power to create matrixes projections, creating a piece of matrix that I can freely control? With LED’s power, I’m already able to manifest matrix constructs directly into the real world, but with Victor’s power, I can manifest into the real world basically any material as long as my matrix has its blueprint.
I have the space available in my matrix after I made all the alterations recently, so I decide to copy this ability to test further later, and go back to the actual metal. Analyzing it deeper, I find that all the other active abilities, mainly the modifications, also happen here, probably because the connection with Victor’s mind is here.
The way his metal uses the properties it copies from weapons is interesting. It doesn’t directly transform into the materials sadly, but it’s rather that the metal has the power to assume those characteristics. It’s a subtle difference, but for me it means I can’t copy it to help me control transformations actively or to transform into metal.
The property mimicry though is something I can easily implement in my power and I do so, copying over how to analyse other weapons to create latices of matrix that record how to then recreate that property from the metal, in my case I’m not a metal and completely copying it as its is wouldn’t work really well
It could become a power that tries to give every cell I have the rigidity of the material, something that doesn’t really works for me if I want to keep the ability to move, instead I implement it as just one more way for my power to create new transformations, then when I transform automatically my power will create a transformation imbuing hardness and every other property of actual metal to just my skin or scales or whatever it might be.
It acts like a buffing power. its transformation part is in essence just another version of its modification buff, which is the second part that I can try to implement in myself.
Once again though I need to integrate it so it can change on my automatic transformations after they happened and not as an actual transformation option, which is more intuitive with things like enhance and invert or even delay, I wouldn’t want to do those things with my body, but it might be useful together with the things I gain during my transformations, like other powers I use.
It will be fun to test if I can invert for example, Araphel’s shadow electricity form. Absolutely crazy! Just thinking about the possibilities makes me excited.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
But letting that go for now, I go look at the way victor’s powers catalogues and stores the characteristics of the weapons it encounters.
It had a way of transforming the properties of the material in the real world into the same ‘language’ that composed it here. Using the metal existing only in normal reality and transcribing it as a lattice of power. Very interesting.
I can copy that, certainly. Adding it into the tentacles together with all the other interaction and sensing powers I had; I can then do the same that the metal does, copying properties of weapons as viable enhancements to my forms.
Very great so far, giving a power to Victor might have benefited me more than him, I thought, smiling at the idea
“Look at that,” I heard Victor say. "There must be good things in there, guys looking like a kid in a candy shop.”
“Thats right, quite the interesting harvest,” I chuckle.
“Shit man, didn’t think you were hearing,” Victor curses and I hear some laughter as I focus again on his power.
Together with enhancing and the interpreting that I had converted already, the interpreting being how I decided to call it taking on the properties of other types of physical matter; it had three other modes: invert, combine and lastly delay.
Invert would take a property and make it the complete inverse, so something hard becomes soft. It could choose any property on an object and invert it. It could be powerful if it could also change things like conductivity, were inertia or weight properties? Tests needed to be done.
The other one was Combine. It made the user able to choose another property to go along with the first, so a chosen property of, say, iron with a chosen property of, I don’t know, lead? Something like that.
And lastly delaying, maybe the weirdest one of all of them. The way to use it was to pick a property that his power had saved up in the metal’s matrix. With this one, you could choose to set a timer where the effect would then take place. Could be effective for a projectile that then did something? Weird.
But yeah, that’s it. I took off the tether connecting my Matrix with Victor’s, bringing my attention back to the real world.
“Done then?” Victor asked tiredly
“Yeah, your power is very interesting, but I think you want to sleep, so we can discuss that another time.”
“Yeah man, I wouldn’t be able to now,” Victor says, furrowing his brows between his long blinks.
We all take the elevator up, Victor going straight to his room while the rest of us go to grab something to eat.
“Today we’ll be going outside again?” I ask LED.
“Yeah, I forgot to ask Victor to come with us before he left, but going by how sleepy he was, I think he would have denied, anyway.”
Glassmetal chckles, “Definitely.”
“Are we training in the same spot today?” Swordjuice asks to which LED nods, his mouth full.
“Sounds good to me,” I nod.
This success with Victor makes e eager to try it on other people as well, to confirm if everyone really can get a power and also to empower and grow our faction, going with what I’ve seen so far it seems rather sparse. To take on the whole military power of the regime, we would need much more people. Maybe that’s why use guerrilla tactics.
Someone close who doesn’t have powers yet. Hmm, I turn to LED, getting his attention. I ask, “Do you think old Dan would be interested in getting powers?”
LED’s eyebrows raise. “He might. Yeah, it’s crazy that we have this possibility now.”
“Yeah, just figured we might as well use it.”
“True. Dan isn’t the most combat ready, but he’s trustworthy. It might be good to give him the choice.”
LED thinks it over breakfast and tells me we would offer on the way to the training location. He also told us all to gather back up in the cafeteria at 3 pm to go to the training.
Everyone agrees and we part ways to each do their thing until the meetup time, some to just relax and unwind or to take a nap. I go up to my room and spend my time solidifying my knowledge and familiarising myself with victor’s power, also using the time to train a bit my matrix manipulation.
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Going out, we passed by Dan’s house again. This time he wasn’t on the porch and so LED yelled out to him as he entered.
Dan came out of the kitchen walking at that slow pace old people often have, as if he was in no rush. Dan was called old Dan for a reason, and I guessed he was already approaching his eighties.
“What’s up with you all? Need something else?”
“Actually, we came to make an offer. Matrix here has figured out something quite revolutionary.”
Old Dan only nodded, urging LED to get on with it.
“We can make people awaken, or at least we think we can.” Old Dan frowned at that, going still.
“We tried it with Victor already,” I said, “and it was a succes. He has a power now, a cool one even.”
“God, boy. This is.. jeez.” He exhaled, going to take a seat. A frown on his face as he slowly sat on the somewhat beaten armchair.
He stared at me incredulously for a second before sighing, shaking his head. “Now, little Brian will really want to keep an eye on you.”
“Who’s that?” LED asked.
“Doesn’t matter.” Dan said, waving his hand. “You say you can give this old man a power.”
“Yeah, we think so. It worked with Victor and he’s pretty old,” I say, shrugging.
Dan laughed, shaking his head. “If I ain’t got nothing to lose, I’ll take it. It might make my last years a little more interesting.”
I looked towards LED, he shrugged, giving me a nod to proceed.
“Just don’t go expecting me to fight anywhere.” Dan added.
“That’s fine,” Spotlight said from behind. “It’s mostly so Matrix can satiate his endless hunger for new powers.”
“Hey that’s not it.”
“You went and reaped a big reward from Victor’s power.”
“It’s mutual gain. We’re all part of the same group.”
“Right, right.”
“So when you all going to do it?” Dan asked.
LED thought on it, “it could be now, but we wanted to train and it might get late if we don’t go soon.”
“Yeah, and it’s very energy intensive as well, so I’d exhaust myself before the training.”
“It’s better to do it at night then. After we rest after the training.”
“Is that fine with you, Dan?” LED asked.
“Of course. What’s a couple more hours to wait?”
“Wait, we should first confirm that he can get powers, at least.” I said, “so that we don’t raise any false hopes.”
“That’s reasonable,” LED said, sending a simple buff towards old Dan who perked up, feeling its effects.
“Oh, feels like a cup of coffee.”
I went forward, extending my senses on the matrices’ side of things, looking for Dan’s matrix; it was hard to find, but after a while I found the beacon that LED’s power created leading me to Dan’s.
I approached, finding LED’s matrix construct from his buff, but instead of it being latched on the side of a grand orb of darkness, it was instead hugging it completely, the little orb completely encased in LED’s buff.
I stared at it in shock. Why was it so small? This raised so many questions! Could he still have a power? Would it just be much weaker because of the lack of energy? Did people have different sizes of matrix from birth or did they grow or perhaps they grew smaller if unused after a certain age?
No way of knowing any of that, but interesting nonetheless. There was still so much about powers that I didn’t know.
“Well, it’s weird. I think we can give you a power still, but it would be really weak.”
“Why is that?”
“He has, like, very little energy generation capacity”
“Is something like life-force, maybe?” Swordjuice asked, interested.
“Well, that could be it. I don’t know what it is exactly, only that there’s some energy coming from somewhere that powers the matrices; I can’t go in there though, not even inside my own.”
“Well,” old Dan interjected, unconcerned. “I wasn’t hoping for a big flashy power, anyway.”
“That’s fine,” LED said. "We’ll be going then.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He waved us off. "Have fun hitting each other, you all.”