I hastily stop providing the steam nail crusher with heat, closing my palms. And wait for the machine to slow down. I fidget in place, waiting nervously for the results, and when the machine finally finishes, I lunge forward.
I do a large frog swim to the steam engine attached to my humble abode and wince when I touch the still-hot metal.
Before shaking my head and grabbing handfuls of the dust that I just made. The dust is somewhat grainy and is a dull gray. It sticks together a bit, like clay.
And it is marvelous. The main blockage to my building has mostly been the arduous process of hand grinding the iron nails into usable iron dust. From here on out, I can expand!
I quickly shoveled the dust into the bag. giggling uncontrollably at the manifestation of my pain and effort.
Remodeling
Log 1
"Ugh. *sounds of panting* I had to move the base. Huh, Huh So that the ball of iron was above it. It wasn’t growing fast enough when I could only give it nails at my workstation [sounds of wiping]. It was hard to keep moving like that, but since the base has no weight, I could actually move it around before I remodeled it. Although it was still hard, the base has mass after all; that’s a constant. So I could only push it a little bit. But very little force doesn’t mean any force, especially with no air resistance to slow me down. Either way, Tara's Out.”
Log 2
“*Sounds off a woop and pumping fists in the background* ALRIGHT. I managed to make some steel, and I’ve replaced the IBA nails with steel! Okay, let’s get back to the start. When I melted the wood instead of burning it, I was at first sad, but I noticed after doing it again that when I melted it, some black stuff was made. And since I knew that you made steel from charcoal and that charcoal was black, maybe I could make some steel even without oxygen. And you know what? I was right! I looked up the recommended ratio for steel, stuck in an extra bit of carbon, and made a steel bar! From there, I shaved that steel bar into a steel nail with Stevens corpse, then used the IBA method on it and generated enough steel for me to use only steel nails. Now I pretty much exclusively use steel. But although it is stronger than iron, that’s not why I care. I care because steel is a lot more magnetic than iron. Steel holds a magnetic charge for far longer than iron; it’s what most magnets are made of. So I can use magnets in a lot more places, and more specifically for collecting nails and dust. Both in the ball and for construction purposes I have the old iron nails in a storage box in the work center. But I mostly use magnetically charged steel. Either way, Tara is now going to optimize the fuck out of this bitch!”
Log 3 Day 7
“I’ve optimized the process of the production a little bit, made some copper bars from wire, and placed them throughout the station so that I can constantly heat up the water. And when I'm not doing that, it just means that I'm tossing up steel nails. Although, hmm, I wonder what the composition of the ball is now that I’ve switched to steel. Anyway, I’ve also made some steam generators that have their own bars. I tore up all the hand-crank generators to make just one steam generator, but frankly, it’s so much better than the hand-cranks. No need to constantly reset it; I only reset it once they run out of water. And that only happens around every hour of operation. Oh, right, the other thing. Is it that I can now actually tell the goddamn time? I just decided that one full tank of water running out means that an hour has passed, which equals, oh, around 8000 bottles of water. Although I don’t use those nowadays to hold water. I replaced it with big barrels of iron so that I only needed to duplicate two to get enough to refill the water. Although goddamn is it annoying to refill them, you have to push the water out like it’s toothpaste! Eventually, I had to buckle down and just make specialty tanks that look like stupid syringes and then just replicate those for my water, but in the beginning, it was annoying. I also added a separate tank for nails with a magnet on the crusher to attract those at the top. Now every hour I refill the nails, collect the dust, and duplicate some water so I can make some more. And by now, well, I’ve stockpiled enough for what comes next.
Log 4.1, Day 34
“I’ve knocked down all the walls in between each other and made it into a central room, which I’ve dubbed the planning room, so that I wouldn’t have those annoying edges at the start of rooms. Then I cut holes in the outer walls to make doors to my new, expanded rooms. The only exception is the meditation corner. It is just the astral, in all its beauty and glory. When I finish certain meditation sessions, I like to open my eyes and bathe in my new home's quiet beauty. Sounds of a mournful sigh: * I can’t say this isn’t my home now, despite how tragic that is. I’ve certainly molded it enough for it to be my home; the film that surrounds my base made that clear enough. Sounds of rustling fabrics idicating a head shaking and a sigh."
Log 4.2, Day 34
"Either way, I’ve made some improvements to basically every room. The entertainment section is stocked with lots of paper for drawing. I made some needles from a steel nail, some crochet hooks, and knitting needles, and now I can make some new clothes. It got so tiresome having to just look at the same old clothes in the metal reflections every day that I took the plunge and tore apart some better-looking clothes. Specifically, the ones I could remake, but I now have access to tons of good-looking fabric. It was a bit hard to make the clothes; [a sound of annoyed sigh] replicators are so much better. You just have to make a model, and boom, raw materials become fully made items damn near instantly. But with my experience, I could make the clothes by hand easily enough. I also can drag around Stevens for music if I need to chill. Oh, right, Stevens I returned him to form by making him into a blocky laptop by encasing the wires in a steel box with the charger, Stevens screen, and keyboard sticking out. Although the music is a bit muffled by the steel, it's still fine enough. It might look like someone embedded an old smartwatch into a briefcase and then put on top of it a broken laptop, but in the end, it works."
Log 4.3, Day 34
"Right next to the Recreation slice to the left is the Sleep room. At the center of a dancing rainbow cocoon of cloth floats my faithful suitcase that I've stuffed with satin. The long cloth strips drift constantly from the small shifts in the base that touch them, then touch the other strips, leading to a self-perpetuating shifting sea of fabric only possible in zero-G. Although it might not be zero-G with how the ball is growing. When I look up, it gets bigger by the day; any steel not used for construction is thrown into its depths."
Log 4.4, Day 34
"The chillax room to the left of the sleep room is a little bit lacking, however, compared to the last in look. It just holds a couch made out of stolen and then replicated fabric with lots of straps so I can mindlessly consume Stevens’ audiobooks. I might not be able to read anymore. I can slowly use my voice as a shaky mouse to pull up old audio files from old databases. It is strange to think that old databases couldn’t hold all human knowledge. If you wanted to learn about old stuff, you would probably have had to find whatever tiny server held that specific information. What a nightmare! I usually just blast out my brain here when I can’t deal with any of this thinking for a bit. It’s also essentially my junk drawer, where I store random things that I don’t need anymore. Like the old iron nails, extra tanks of water, and my assortment of random artifacts I don’t know the use of."
Log 4.5, Day 34
"The workstation is a bit of a mess really—a mess of molten nails, random magnets, and wires EVERYWHERE. It’s this way because it’s where I prototype most of the optimizations, and I can’t be bothered to clean any of them up. It's not like cleanliness matters that much when you can just slap it away. But other than its untidiness, it is also one of the only two rooms with a roof, so important things don’t float away. This place is where I think of magic I should explore and where I keep that useless book. Although hopefully, it won’t be useless soon. But when the work gets beyond prototyping and ideas, I use the next room."
Log 4.6, Day 34
"The last room is the experimentation room. It has much taller and thicker walls than any of the other rooms, and it also doesn’t have an exterior hull, in case of an explosion or any other reason that I want to have the ability to rapidly leave. It would be as dirty as the workstation if I didn’t constantly blow the junk into the ball. which, thankfully, is much easier with one wall missing. Its walls are dirty and blackened from all the weird things I do in here. While the workstation is where I think of magic, here is where I actually use and test it."
4.7 Day 35
Last but not least, there is the planning room. The center of the whole operation is plastered with drawings and the best indications of plans I can make without my full grasp of the English language. In the exact center of my entire base sits my throne, a sleek steel chair polished to perfection, on which I sit right now. Tightly strapped to it by an intricate web of ties. I do not float; I elegantly sit, thinking of the future. But that is interrupted by another thought:
.
What the hell am I, a dominatrix? Why does the world fuck me over in such a way that the best chairs I can make are ones that would normally be found in torture equipment and sex dungeons?
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
I laugh at my own joke as I pull together my future plans. Now that I’ve upgraded my base, I should get to work on pushing my advancement forward.
What I need to get done is first relearn English and then attempt to learn the language behind the runes. So many things in this world are cruelly locked behind literacy, and I need something to reference if I'm going to learn magical runes.
While doing that, I should log down all the baseline magic so I have a better idea of where to start. Plus, it will give me a litany of small techniques to use.
I pull myself over to the workstation on the ubiquitous handles, avoiding the extremely hot copper bars nearly everywhere. I toss steel nails constantly, only stopping when I reach my destination.
After all, it has a ceiling.
I grab the blocky laptop I forged from various scraps and one empty, incredibly advanced AI. And pull it open and click into the vocal databases, which are luckily easy to find due to the image of a speaker.
“Vocal Database, colon, lesson, colon, beginner, colon, English,” I say as clearly as possible to Stevens’ screen strapped to the front of the box: any errors can take me to ridiculously wrong places.
Once I ended up accidentally pulling up lessons on how to cook pasta along with the entire life story of the writer. Ugh either way I then click on the square, knowing it is packaged into lessons and listed by best rating. And listen to some strange lessons on English scavenged from Stevens database. Augh learning without mind injection is so slow; I wish Stevens had it enabled. But allowing random people to give themselves skills without an expert at hand is kind of stupid. So it makes sense that they didn't enable that, but well I still need to finish these lessons.
Language
Log 1 Day 41
“Start Log. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, I have been learning English quickly. I’ve been blazing through the videos and all their requirements. I can estimate that while it would take most others two years of dedicated study to gain a basic grasp of a language, it should take me around three months at the rate of learning I have. I can only assume that through my consumption of language and the subsequent intrinsic understanding of the rules behind language, all language is majorly helping me out. Although it is still very annoying and difficult, most self-teaching programs already assume you know at least one language. At first, I tried to go down the path of incredibly specific searches, but I was frustrated by how clunky the search function is without text. I had to eventually make do with *sigh* books for parents teaching their children how to read; I had Stevens read them to me. I know enough now to recognize the word English" and things like the" and apple. But my god, is it embarrassing to have to look up baby books?
Log Day 44
“Woopdidoo, a double-digit identical number; gosh, do I love those. Sadly, my other news is much more depressing: the magic books are evil. Because, frankly, when I ate the cloud, I had stuffed into my brain essentially a perfect understanding of language as an idea. And this book seems specially designed to screw over translation. Which, yes, is fair for those who don’t want their ideas stolen, but it is oh so incredibly frustrating for me. Because each and every single one of these runes is unique. And the main way of deciphering languages is to find where they intersect with others, which is NONE! Or 2: finding similarities in the composition of words or phrases. But since each and every single character in the book is unique, there are no similarities, and I can’t figure out the vowels if there are none. So now I basically just have to guess what things are based on the arcane squiggles that don’t look like anything. Right now I’m trying to essentially find any individual characters that look similar and group them up together. Plus, I can’t even write any of these down without fear of blowing up the paper. So I instead have to write down the page numbers in some strange index. But there is one exception that could save me from the very last page, which has an incredibly complicated rune inscribed on it, one that makes me wonder if their eyes were even good enough to see all the details. It kind of looks like a shield divided into two sections, with swirls, dots, and lines falling inside the divisions. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find repeat patterns among the mess that will allow me to decode the rest. But first I’m taking a goddamn break. *sounds of a book bumping into a wall as it’s tossed away*”
---
I wake up and go off to my break to experiment with new magic. Work might not be much of a break, but anything is better than mashing my head against the brick wall of that book.
So I’m going to investigate it, Baseline Magic. Or what magic does when you just let ‘er rip!
When I invoke an emotion, I essentially choose the emotion of the magic I’m going to do, then execute the technique.
Executing the technique invokes the emotion of the magic. So if I create an anger technique, whenever I use it, I get really angry, and if I use it too much, I eventually get into a catatonic state. That is where you are so overwhelmed by the emotion that you just can’t do anything.
The baseline technique that I’m using right now is essentially throwing away the second step. In order to see what that emotion does without guidance, give me a hint about what to use.
Hmm, I think I’ll split the magics along their color type so that I can generalize my findings, and I’ll categorize the main ones only. I can find out about the weirder ones later, like the specific brand of joy only found at carnivals or the fear of feet.
—
Blue:
“Start Log. Overall, Blue seems to include slowing and cold magic in its rapporteur. Most other blue emotions are variations of sadness and calm. With the small subsection of high-energy blues that are more diverse in emotion. Including the strange one out, Hope, that increases physical durability. But in general, Blue Magic seems to make things lose energy. Things slow down, darken, and freeze with the use of Blue Magic. In the future, I could use this category if I wanted to take something away.
—
Red:
“Start Log. Red’s effects were quite obvious given my previous knowledge; they heat thingthings up. I've been using red magic for ages now, but you should always rcord and replicate your knowledge. The various emotions found within Red changed things, but only slightly. It was all variations of heat. The usesred red are obviously melting mtand,and, if I ever find anything self-defense related,s3500 °C. up. I’ve been using red magic for ages now, but you should always record, and replicate your knowledge. The various emotions found within Red changed things, but only slightly. It was all variations of heat. The uses of Red are obviously melting metal, and if I ever find anything self-defense. I doubt most creatures would enjoy being hit with a heat beam that reaches above 3500C. End Log
—
Yellow:
“Start Log. Yellow clouds are all variations of happiness, while yellow does have the same breadth of cloud types as all the others. They are all just hyper-specific variations of joy, happiness, and excitement. As such, it is quite obvious, if still a shame, that all yellow magics only have one effect. That is increased energy; the baseline technique feels like chugging five 5-hour energy drink bottles and then doing speed. It feels incredible, but the catatonic state for this feels so bad. Even worse than hunger! And that felt like being constantly stabbed while having my guts ripped out like they were a drawstring! The catatonic state of yellow feels like claustrophobia in my head, like my thoughts were expanding and pressing against the side of my skull, bruising themselves. And the speed of thought granted by joy turns into thinking about all your problems incredibly quickly, but you can’t feel any sadness while under its effects. So you feel dizzy and robbed, and incredibly sick, like the grumbles of roller coaster riding if that roller coaster is on the sun! With all the pain and discomfort that comes with becoming catatonic with Joy, I have stopped using the procedure for using a particular magic until I run out. Pain is there for a reason; it tells you something is wrong, and I have no idea what damage is being done when invoking yellow magic. Either way, using Yellow Magic in moderation might be useful if I need to make something incredibly quickly. End Log”
—
Orange:
“Start Log. Orange Magics' nature seems to be that of exploration, helping me move through the astral and helping me find interesting things. Since the two effects I could find were movement-related and most curiously highlighted interesting or unique things. Wanderlust gives me the ability to fly, and all the others highlight various objects. Overall, it can be seen that Orange Magic could be quite useful on my next expedition. End Log
—
Pink
"OH, FOR GOD'S SAKE HOW IS MAGIC THIS USELESS? Ugh, pink magic doesn’t do fucking anything at all; it just pulls in more and more of the emotion until you go catatonic in like 5 seconds! I’ve been getting better at judging how close I am to being full of all the other emotions. It feels like a cup about to overflow, but with pink magic, it 1) doesn’t do anything, and 2) since I blow through everything so fast, I instantly end up in a catatonic state thinking about how I want to strangle my more successful cousins. Or, like, I need to have a baby right now. I deal with that sh*t from my body often enough that I don’t need to deal with it while being a wizard! Though this does make me think about how horrifically inefficient most of these magics must be. I don’t have any numbers on it, but I’m able to do other magics like the IBA and the spoon-devouring technique for far longer than these. And for those, only when I devoured the spoon did I go catatonic. All the other ones, I couldn’t even detect the emotion being expressed. And I don’t have to spend my thoughts pulling in the emotion from wherever this price comes from. So I can do other things while utilizing other techniques. So yeah, I fucking give up on Pink Magic.
—
Green:
“Start Log. I have already experienced many green magics from the growth and healing emotions, but it turns out that the majority of green magics aren’t even that. They mostly seem to be mildly altering magics; some increase the quality of thoughts while sacrificing speed, while others do the opposite. Tradition is a good example of making me unable to accept new information but more cognizant of good old ones. And another: Innovation quickly makes dozens of shitty thoughts, culls the bad ones, and makes more slightly less shitty thoughts, increasing in quality over time. These magics might be useful for research, but I am hesitant to alter my thought patterns for utility. End Log.
—
Purple:
“Start Log. Like Pink, I have noticed no effect, but with a bit more time and less frustration from the terrible catatonic states that Pink provides, I believe that it’s doing something. My hypothesis is just that I don’t have the necessary conditions to do the magic, so I just absorb emotion for no reason at all. Since the most obvious thing missing from my environment is people, and the emotions found within pink and purple are a bit more social than most, I hypothesize that it does something to people. I have no idea what, but since I don’t have the conditions required, I have laid both of these magics to rest until I meet others. End Log.
---
I pluck nails in the specific pattern I made long days ago, working with precision and speed that a mere machine would envy. Tossing those nails up into the growing ball Sitting perky on my throne, the straps dug just a little bit into my shoulder.
I smile a gentle yet devious smile, and I don’t have to toss those nails nearly as hard as I used to. It does the work for me now.
Continuing to smile, I slowly unstrap myself, pulling off long pieces of cloth and untying small notes, until I drift free of them.
But I don’t drift for long before I fall up!
With my hands holding onto my dreams of wanderlust, I hold myself in this strange fluid and slowly rotate myself with my mind until I let go and gently land on a ball of metal nails. The surface melted smoothly on the uppermost layer. A strange mishmash of black and gleaming grey stretching on for quite literal miles.
Over these long days, I have slowly made an enormous sphere of iron, and steel larger than an entire neighborhood, at the truly ridiculous, size of a 3.5-mile radius!
After all, that is what historical scientists determined the minimal size of an object needed to provide enough gravity to keep a human attached.
I jump and reach my arm out to the glorious sky above and fall, looking at the boundless seeds of thought flowing in and out of massive clouds of emotion. The low gravity allows for strange feats.
So with a smile of triumph on my face, I pull my notebook out of my own handmade suit and write with utter perfection.
Entry 17 Pg.444
I done it, I has generated weight in this empty location!