“It’s ready.” A professional looking person wearing a lab coat over shorts said to Paige’s Art History tutor, around the corner near where an intern is holding open the fire exit on the side of the science building, leading her tutor quickly into the building. Paige with nothing else to do for the next two hours was curious, knowing that those fire doors can only be opened from the inside, she went through the front door of the building.
Going down half a floor, finding a hallway that led to several student laboratories, hearing her tutor and those other people walking down the hallway around the corner. Following them, Paige walked on through, missing the RESTRICTED ACCESS sign on the open double doors.
Getting closer to a lab at the end of the hall, Paige started hearing what sounded like someone outlining an experiment. Hopefully they won’t mind a spectator, probably not this is a university after all and it doesn’t sound like a class, and most importantly, it sounds interesting. “…-eleport skill in a clone, as a skill that allows faster than light travel, rapid applications may allow time travel into the past.”
Feeling her phone buzz, Paige stopped outside the lab to check her messages. Looking at the large number of notifications she’s somehow missed she starts going through them.
“How do you plan to provide it the mana necessary to do this, doesn’t providing mana greater than 2% of their maximum pool per second cause debilitating pain in the subject? And 10% per second would start damaging them? How big is the subject’s mana pool that they can perform rapid teleports, which is one of the most mana-intensive skills currently recorded.” Someone who Paige suspected was her Art History System course tutor asked, trying to poke holes.
“The cloned subject for this experiment was engineered specifically for this purpose, it is not alive technically speaking, we’re controlling it through mentalist derived mana-injections and implanted electrodes to trigger its one and only skill, teleport.” Paige glanced up at that, to only have one skill how did they manage that on a cloned subject? If they cloned it from a person with the teleport skill they must’ve at minimum have had the mana manipulation skill as well, right? Paige supposes it’s possible that they combined skills in a precise and lucky combination to get the theoretical tier 7 skill Teleport, but she’s never heard of that combination before and to not have any other skills, that sounds restrictive and cruel, there’s skills for nearly everything after all.
Scowling now, Paige knows if that’s true that means that these people must be keeping skill combination information private, there was an international policy of open information regarding skills combination and knowledge to gain them. If these people are caught keeping skill info secret, Paige is going to have to move to another university, maybe another state if this matter gets escalated. Teleport specifically is a heavily pursued skill as well, and as far as the world at large and previously Paige knew, there were no humans with the skill.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
They continued inside the room “An average subjects entire mana-pool would allow maybe 80 teleports, this subject was cloned from a sample that was suspected to have an extremely high teleport skill level as well so it can teleport between extremely far distances without the mana cost increasing, approximately allowing to teleport two and a half million metres away. We are going to be connecting it to the mana node beneath the mana stream beneath the university providing approximately 185% of its maximum pool of many per second, the subject won’t last long under these conditions, but they are necessary for the experiment.”
Paying full attention to his words, Paige recognises the value of this experiment, if it succeeds or fails, it will still provide the answers to multiple questions physicists have about possible theories of causality and gravity. If the lab coat and shorts wearing guy conducting the experiment’s approximations are correct it would allow the subject to teleport approximately 90 x 185% = 148 times a second allowing for a total distance travelled per second to be 148 x 2,500,000 = 370,000,000m/s, which is faster than the speed of light, potentially allowing for backwards time travel.
Time. Travel… Maybe.
Having finished reading the texts from her family curious when she’s returning home and some emails, Paige decides a response can wait and walks into the room finally seeing how they managed to get a cloned subject to only have the teleport skill. It seems Paige might not have to worry about changing Uni after all, what she thinks is the subject of this experiment in the middle of the room wasn’t a human or human analogue creature after all, it looked more like a plant than anything else. How it has the teleport skill and nothing else is still interesting, but as the method probably doesn’t include skill combination or acquisition information for people, it probably won’t violate the information sharing policy.
Looking up and seeing everyone facing the shorts wearing scientist with him focused on his monitor Paige started walking up to them, waving “H- “.
“This is just a test to see if its possible, we’ll conduct further tests depending on the results of this one, after we check if it can be repeated. Without further ado, lets begin.” The shorts and scientist coat wearing person who seems to be the one conducting the experiment interrupted, nobody hearing Paige’s aborted attempt to gain their attention. He typed something in quickly and pressed a button, and everyone turned to face the about-to-be teleporting plant, finally noticing their extra guess.
“Uh, Hi, I hope yo-“ Paige was interrupted when her tutor rushed up to her poking her backwards.
“What do you think you’re doing here; this is a restricted area!” Paige’s tutor, that she’s really regretting not looking up the name of in the course information, but hey, it’s not Paige’s fault that the tutor didn’t introduce herself in her tutorial before.
Continuing to be poked back, Paige tripped backwards after a stronger poke, this lady must have significantly higher strength stats than her, causing Paige to trip backwards into the about to be teleporting mass of brambles.
“Sorry, I didn’t know.” were Paige’s last words for a long, long time.