I don’t know what Mel and I are right now, but the soft kiss wake up and the boot to the ass out of the rack was just the motivation I needed. I invite her to the mess for breakfast, but she picks my snack pockets and bails on the offer. Irascible gremlin.
I feel that your development would benefit from making track decisions before your onerous extra duties commence. You have a hull cutting supervisor duty today that should allow for those decisions.
Who would have thought that I, an avowed nerd, would feel a system acquisition as a burden. When I start on the track of making a magic-based wave drive for my bad ass moon visiting shuttle, then, then I will find my excitement again.
/Mercer, DE EA, my construction man team recommends stacking pieces while we build more recyclers for the mass of fabricators we are about to build./
/Roger that sir, do you want me to focus on collection? Or do you want me to spare a team for re-calibrating the collider?/
/Mercer. The collider is on my radar. Your own timeline has us at 18 months to rebuild and calibrate the Propulsion systems. The collider can wait a few months/
/Aye aye sir/
I jump in my air pack and a long hose to connect to ship’s air and work my supervisory ass toward propulsion to see my new, larger team cut enormous holes in the ship.
Alright, Tessa, hit me baby, one more time.
You have two advancement options to select.
Chose (2) from the available modules
Tessie, baby, check my greed here, Insight and Engraving seems to be the magic duo. Do the remaining choices stay for my next level up?
Those two may be the fastest way for your badass moon touching shuttle to become real. It depends on leveling. This early in the leveling process, odds are good that these options remain. Early options disappear as level distance from initial appearance increases. Should I make those selections for you?
Please and thank you. My HUD scrolls with a mess of data, some of it pearlescent, and all of it super bright in my memory. Gadzooks, direct download is a trip. A long, thin box drops into my hand? And it tingles like warp energy.
“Did I just get a fucking system drop?” Tessa chirps me affirmative.
I mean, I’m not some inconsiderate schmuck that denies providence. I open the box and it looks like a combination arc-welder and tattoo gun?! Okay, that’s badass. I don’t know if the Andromeda Matrix tailors these tools and concepts to the races using them, but an Aether-welding pen seems just my speed.
Okay, I was being a pain earlier, but now I’m jazzed again Tessa. If we’re in a place where my mutations come into play again, manual dexterity or Aether processing/conduits/storage/pooling are priority. Aether subsistence, bio conversion, increased height, and enhanced audio separation/control are low on the list. For avoidance, avoid cognitive detrimental effects at all costs. For all I know, the next warp will fuck me up.
Real talk Tessie baby, will the swarm help mitigate Aether sickness for my team?
Inoculating them early is best. And yes, I can create the channels necessary to reduce adverse effects, and eventually long-term fortification. Using the Primus strain in that bottle will enhance the effects.
And that’s how I spend my day. The little bottle hooks into a newly formed port on my wrist that can coalesce Aether. Tessa tells me this is a Tech-Symbiote Amalgam perk. Aka, Penny makes decent choices some times. I observe my environment and scab a mag rune and by some miracle an effing GRAV RUNE. They’re weak and rudimentary, but with some refinement, they could at least lead to a better night’s sleep.
My watch is over, my inspections done, and my AAR written. Time to report to the XO.
“MM1 Mercer, reporting as ordered Ma’am.”
She proceeded to have me stand another supervisory watch, but this time for engineering forward’s breaches. At least it’s something I know how to do.
The next weeks are more of the same. Melissa starts joining me for breakfast in grav and the Chiefs ignore that she’s becoming a regular. Ivanka is as overworked as I am but pulls double duty taking care of Petra, who ended up sacrificing parts of herself to plug holes in the compartment she was in. I’ve committed to myself that I will help Petra whether the CO wants me to or not, but finding a time when she’s alone is tough with all of my extra commitments. She seems happy to see me when I visit though and she’s always been a member of the superhero butt-watching club.
I don’t get any chats from Katie or the Botanist, and I probably won’t until they want something from me. I try to keep busy and keep my mind off of such depressing things.
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The end of the month sees my extra duties mandated by the XO come to an end, so I spend the time in the fab lab working on my engraving and studying the two runes that I have. The gravity rune seems to be a linked design with a container, or directing embellishments? Hmm, for both of the runeshapes I know, they’re kind of a rune face toward effect kind of magic, so the directing thing doesn’t really make sense.
I fumble around with a rendering of each runeshape in my HUD so I can study them, and then I watch with more intent on how the shape activates than just finishing the shape. When the last bit of liquid Aether firms and cools, the form lights up in three stages, the container type shapes first, the target identifier and the effect.
Tessa, would I have learned theory and rune form structuring in the Basic Rune Forms module? She chirps the affirmative. Damnit Penny, always trying to walk before we run. Wait, why isn’t there a pull rune in the magnet runeshape?
If you bothered reading the tool tips, you would have realized that Aetheric Insight helps you to discover shapes that mimic the technology effect you are observing. While the simplest forms to create the same effect would be “metal” and “pull” that is not what your boots are doing.
So with the various forms of pushing that could be considered “thrust”, our chem thrusters would be discovered as something akin to “flame cone” or “fire push”? Tessa chirps her concurrence. Well damn, I wanted to get enchanting next, but it seems I’ll need to get that teaching module on basic forms so I can possibly deconstruct and simplify my discoveries. Funny thing is, though it makes sense now to have chosen different, it would have taken knowledge I didn’t have or an insight into tooltip explanations that I didn’t make time for to have made that decision.
I take a hammer and the tip of a screwdriver to make the rune inert and throw the piece of scrap back in the pile for the reclamators. Man, those construction men need to finish that second reclamator, the single one we have just cannot keep up. They’re behind schedule because apparently, fabrication is the easy part as long as you have the components. Reclaiming the base components of a broken item is apparently difficult and time consuming. I watch as one of my team members feeds a chunk of thrust cone into the reclamator, and 20 minutes later it spits out various sorted nuggets and powders. That’s so friggin’ cool.
Then a debilitatingly massive download punched me in the brain. I can hear noises in the distance one of them is a guttural cry and what seems like hours later my body goes limp and I start panting like I ran to the front of the ship and back.
Your throat is injured, you’ve pulled several muscles, and there’s a bleed in your left eye. You should avoid intently studying a process and triggering another rune for a few days.
“Guys, Mercer’s not responding. Help me decouple her boots and I’ll take her to medical.” I think that’s MM1 Carpenter from engineering forward?
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know man, I started hearing something like a sub-vocal scream and then I looked over to see her seizing. Lasted a couple of minutes.” He manages to disengage the mag on my boots while another sailor gets a strap to tie my arms down and then Carpenter tows me up a few decks to medical.
I don’t think I could form words if I tried right now. My head and my eyes and my neck all feel like I’m being stabbed and blown up. I can still see my HUD with my eyes closed, so that’s entertaining. I get what the shapes and colors on my body mockup are telling me, but the descriptions are displayed in words and I really can’t even right now. Seems like my ears can still process language though.
It was mostly your visual cortex that suffered the trauma. Your reasoning centers are compromised and you’ll have some short-term memory loss, but I can help you recover those. Additionally, I have identified that a RAM-style buffer installation would mitigate most of the trauma you experienced with your last uplink.
Yes, do that. I find it hard to believe that this will be the only time I “discover” something too advanced for my current baby self.
Modification confirmed, tech imbalance of 2 consumed. I will be modifying the sinus structures in your cheeks and brow to contain the proposed hardware.
Tessa, I really am interested, but can we table this until thinking doesn’t hurt as much? And could you turn pain suppression up?
After a brief pause, she responds by forcing me to sleep.
***
My HUD tells me I’ve been out overnight, around twelve hours. Too bad I don’t feel rested. My eyes open as ordered and my fingers wiggle appropriately—all good signs. I am strapped down to a table, though, and not in my uniform. Huh. That’s inconvenient, typing is hard when you’re strapped to a table and your typing gloves are missing.
Penny, those circuits have been disconnected since I removed your need for a contact lens for your display. I’ve been reading your hand movements and typing for you since then.
That’s pretty cool Tessa, thanks.
/Hey Mel, wanted to let you know that I’m okay. An overlarge data download set me seizing, but my swarm says she’s working on a fix for the future./
/Oh thank god. You had us pretty scared Pen pen. Can I come see you?/
/I’m strapped to a table in medical, so probably/ I chuckle at that. It comes out as a raspy wheeze. Oof. That is so wrong. I gotta say, I’m surprise none of the medical staff has come by yet.
Melissa comes in with a Nurse a few minutes later. He unstraps me and does a couple of cognitive tests and manual dexterity checks, takes my vitals again and leaves to fetch a doctor. Melissa is in my arms immediately.
“I can’t believe your swarm hurt you.”
/Not her fault. I chose a skill that I thought sounded cool, but I should have learned the basics first/
“That sounds like you. No voice?” she asks, pushing away but keeping her hands on my hips.
I shake my head and also point at my eye.
“I saw. Your irises are still really pretty though.” I lean forward for a quick peck and we both smile at each other, knowing that we’ll trade a longer kiss later.
“Someone looks like they’re feeling better.” A smooth baritone says before a clean-cut Officer walks in.
I nod at him and mouth “can I go?” while pointing at the door.
“I want to ask you about what happened first.”
/Lt. Boone, I was in engineering watching the reclamators when my vision went white, my whole body clenched for several minutes and then I went limp, couldn’t speak and had a hard time thinking straight/
“It sounds like either an aneurysm caused a seizure, or cancer did. There were some unusual structures on your x-rays and we don’t have an MRI onboard, but the structures shouldn’t be large enough to trigger the episode you described.
“Best I can do for you right now, is to send you with some migraine meds and a 3-day light duty chit. If you get another eye bleed or you notice any irregularities in your fine motor control, come back immediately. Also, you should be observed for the next three days, just in case, so don’t go off on your own until then.” He looks over to Melissa still holding my arm, “Not that you’ll have any trouble with that.” He chuckles. “Supply will have your over-the-counter meds.