We learned a lot that evening. Most of it didn’t help directly, but it still helped.
Every ability we were able to test was stronger at high synergy: Davi’s Force Shield was about half a centimeter wider than the default one, for example.
The biggest thing we learned actually wasn’t from our official tests. When we went out that evening to kill monsters and drop the battery back into the cab of the semi truck, we stayed out until near-dark, ranging far into the open fields beyond the ValuCo. Four of us were trying to earn enough points for a new ability: John needed his second while Kurtis, JoeyT, and Twinkles were working toward their third. I’m sure Byron and Davi could have earned extra abilities, but - like me - they were holding back. We needed to let Kurt and JoeyT to get the truck running. John needed a second ability so he could actually earn more points going forward. Bolero could use a third ability for the same reason, but at least his little scouting critters gave him points if we killed the monsters that jumped them.
Twinkles was a bit of a special case. He was in decent shape as a combatant, and his planned ability, Freeze, wouldn’t help us get the truck running, but we still needed it before we left ValuCo. We were all worried about Zephyr. Right now, the only thing keeping the violet-scaled woman from dying of heatstroke if she went out during the daytime was ValuCo’s freezer, and we couldn’t take that with us. Avalanche had raised the idea of traveling at night… but even her close friends hadn’t liked the sound of fighting monsters we couldn’t see.
Getting a third ability for Zephyr would have been a more obvious choice, particularly since we already knew about a Temperature Tolerance biological augment, but she hadn’t been able to stay outside long enough to earn a fraction of the points needed. The idea of farming points after dark had been suggested, but we all wanted to see if there was a way around that. The little monsters had already ambushed us in the day… darkness would only make that easier for them.
With two ice-themed abilities already, Twinkles was happy to take a third.
“Got my points!” he called. “Watch my back for a second while I snag my ability.”
“You can’t wait until we’re indoors?” grumbled Kurt. “Zephyr’s not even with us.”
“I could, but it should have a good percentage with Ice Bolt! I want to see how much more effective it gets.”
We let Twinkles get a hit on the next monster, even though he didn’t need the points. I could tell the ball of ice was a little bigger, and the monster actually halted for a moment and started limping after it crashed into its foreleg.
“Holy shit!” Twinkles shouted, staring at his hands with excitement as JoeyT and Kurtis finished off the spacedog.
“What’s up?” I called, loudly drowning out John’s muttered criticism of the blasphemy. “That looked stronger, but not that much stronger.”
“I can curve my shots now! On my Ice Bolt! I couldn’t do that a minute ago.”
“What’s your synergy percentage?” Byron asked.
“225% for Ice Bolt! It’s… different for my other abilities. They’re not all the same percentage anymore! Blinding Blizzard is 241.6% and Freeze is 216.6%.”
“Fascinating,” Byron muttered. “What was your percentage before? It may be that each new ability synergizes independently with all previous abilities. We should take careful notes at each level, to determine the synergy between each pair of abilities. I wonder if order matters? Does taking an ability as your third choice provide more synergy than taking it as your second? New functionality, too. At a 100% threshold? Hm. I suppose that makes sense. 100% represents the totality of a single whole, no matter how you subdivide it into percentages, so-”
“Nerds!” Davi yelled. “I’m interested too, but this isn’t the place.”
Sheepishly, I realized that all of us had turned around to listen to Byron’s excited deluge of speculation, gamers and engineers alike. I’d at least kept part of my focus on my surroundings… but only part. Everyone else seemed wholly transfixed by the new possibilities the information presented. It was probably a good thing Davi had gotten our attention.
“Was Twinkles the last person? John, you’re good, right? JoeyT? Kurt?” I asked.
“I actually still need a few more points,” Kurt said. “After I get Cleanse, we still need to test it on the truck, too.”
“The synergy with Missile should be okay. Not sure about Animate Machine,” Davi said. “I hope it’s strong. Using Cleanse has been tiring people out almost as badly as Healing Touch. Worse, in some ways, since you can’t always do it a little bit at a time.”
I sighed and turned back toward the ValuCo. “Alright. Let’s head over. Hopefully we’ll find some monsters on the way.”
My mind was bubbling with possibilities. If the abilities got new functionality when they were powered up enough, it was almost like getting extra abilities. What kind of added functionality would my abilities receive? I loved the speed Sprinter gave me. What new functionality could be added to that? Maybe I wouldn’t get tired anymore. Maybe it would make me stronger? I’d been interested in making it stronger even when the only thing on the table was increased speed. I was definitely taking more biological augments.
It didn’t take us long to reach the truck, and Kurt got enough points to grab Cleanse before we got there. “Hey, nice! The synergy with Missile was pretty bad, but my Animate Machine is up to 225% now!”
“Did it change?” I asked.
“Let me check.” Kurt frowned, and the door on the cab briefly glowed blue as he pulled the door open. It looked the same as it had the last time he’d opened a door, except that this time, Kurt smiled. “Oh, that’s nice!”
“Don’t be a tease, Kurt!” Davi heckled. “What’s nice?”
Kurt shook his head. “It’s hard to explain. Uh, I guess before I just kind of… thought about what item I wanted my ability to target and what result I wanted it to have? And either it worked or it didn’t. Now, I kind of get a vague idea of what my ability is affecting and how it’s working. Like, I can tell you there’s a bar running here,” his hand traced a line along the outside of the truck door, “which I assume connects the handle to the latch. I can probably target just the latch in the future.”
“Which will make it easier to use?” Davi asked.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Kurt shrugged. “I hope so. A door latch is easier than making a whole cart move, so I expect being more efficient costs less.”
“Probably.” I cleared my throat. “And speaking of efficiency… And effectiveness...”
Kurt laughed. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll start testing.”
We opened the hood and Kurt stared at the engine. A moment later, a cloud of particulate puffed out one side and Kurt sagged, leaning against the dirt-covered body of the semi for support.
“It looked like something came out,” I said. “Did you get the whole engine?”
“Not… even… close…” Kurt said, his eyes fluttering as he struggled to keep them open. “I did… maybe… a tenth of it? Need sleep.”
“It worked, though?”
“Think so…”
“Let’s get him inside,” said JoeyT, moving to shrug Kurt’s arm over his shoulder. “I can test my metal-shaping indoors. There’s tons of shit with wires there.”
We practically dragged Kurt back indoors. Even with him incapacitated and JoeyT and Byron occupied holding him up, getting back inside wasn’t a problem. With safety in sight, no one was holding back on ability use, and even without precise analysis, it was obvious that Twinkles’ Ice Bolts were much stronger than they’d been earlier in the evening. If he used several bolts on the same target, he could take it out by himself with no interference from melee.
Once inside, we helped Kurt over to the sea of clothing and stuffed animals near the grills. He fell asleep instantly.
We found Zephyr and Avalanche to share what we’d learned.
“So… It’s gonna take Kurt a while just to clean out the engine block. At least all of tomorrow, maybe two or three days, depending on how long he needs to nap,” Byron said. “I think we’re gonna want to work on getting fuel out of the tank ourselves and through some kind of jank filter. If cleaning a small portion of the engine punched him this hard, we should find another way to address the fuel tank. It looked… huge. Over 100 gallons. It’d take him weeks to clean that with the ability.”
“We should get the fuel lines too,” John put in. “They won’t be half bad to clean, not compared to the engine proper. Just need to find the right tools to unscrew the hoses.”
“You don’t think he can just use it in lil’ sections?” Zephyr said. Her voice was still muddy, but it was getting easier for me to understand the more I heard it, and as she got better at avoiding problematic letters. “Do less at… at once, like healing? To not get ti-... uh… slee-... uh… ”
Zephyr stumbled as she failed to find a pronounceable synonym for sleepiness, but we all understood.
“‘Fraid not, sweetheart,” John said. “If he doesn’t do whole chambers at a time, it’s going to be easy to miss grit.”
“Plus, he’s gotta actually get that grit out of the engine,” I said. “There’s not much point in moving it from one part of the engine to another.”
“Oh,” Zephyr said, looking at Twinkles. “Did you get your new thing?”
Twinkles was quiet. “Yeah… but I’ve actually been trying to use it on you since I got here, and it’s pretty… hard. It seems like I can’t directly change your body temperature. I can make the air right next to your skin cold, though. I guess that will help, but it’ll be a lot less efficient.”
“Oh,” Zephyr said. “I thought I ‘as staying cold longer.”
“No, that was me,” Twinkles said. He laughed bitterly. “For whatever it’s worth.”
“Can you… kee’ doing that?”
“No. Just stopped, actually. I kept it going for about a minute, and I’m feeling pretty tired now. I could do it for longer if I did it in shorter blasts, but… not indefinitely.”
Zephyr’s face wasn’t as flexible as it had been a few days ago, but her worry at the news was plain enough to be clear regardless. Her brow ridges raised, making her eyes look large and anxious. “I… I don’t know if that’s going to be enou’ to let me earn another choice on my own.”
“Batteries are working,” said Davi. “Maybe we can find a way to build you heatsinks, like a computer CPU!”
“Would that… work on a person?” JoeyT asked?
“I have no idea!” Davi said. “Maybe? It’s worth a try, right?”
Zephyr’s defeated expression didn’t show much hope at the suggestion.
Avalanche grabbed Zephyr’s hand. “Don’t worry, Lily. If you have to stay, I’ll stay with you. That’s why I wasn’t the one to take the wire-making ability.”
“The ice ‘on’t last.”
“We’ll fix things before it melts. I’ll buy the little lights and we’ll try going out tonight. I’m not going to leave you.”
The pair locked eyes, Avalanche fierce and Zephyr scared.
I coughed, their intensity a little awkward to witness. “If you buy some lights, I’ll go back out with you guys. We can even go tonight. I just want to take my third ability first.”
Twinkles nodded. “We’ll all help as much as we can, Zeph. We’re a team.”
Davi threw me a reproachful look. “Vince! You promised you’d wait to take your third ability.”
I scoffed. “You’re gonna hold me to that? That was before we found out about ability upgrades!”
The tiny Asian woman glared. “You promised.”
“It’ll be more dangerous at night. You want me to go out there at less than full strength? Come on, you’ve gotta have something that’s not too dangerous.”
Davi scowled, but relented. “Temperature Tolerance, then. I haven’t seen any problems with that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on. That’s great for Zephyr, but useless for me. How about something that makes me stronger? I’d take a size increase. More reach would be really nice.”
“Meghan’s not going to recognize you,” Davi said.
The suggestion brought a faint flutter of worry, but I quashed it ruthlessly. “I would love to get to the point where that’s a problem. She’s more than a thousand miles away. I’m not going to get back to her by being timid.”
“Resilient Skin?” Davi tried.
This time it was me who made a face. “Come on. Nothing for the muscles? The skeleton?”
“People with muscle augments seem to be dislocating their shoulders a lot and breaking their own bones. The people with skeleton augments are complaining about random aches and pains if they don’t get healing after physical activity.”
“How about their flexibility? Anyone mention any changes there?”
“Umm…” Davi thought for a second. “With Sturdy Skeleton and Solid Skeleton, yes. Reinforced Skeleton, no, other than movement causing them pain if they didn’t get healing. But there are only two people we talked to that had that augment, so they might not have noticed…”
I thought about this. I could deal with random aches and pains. That didn’t sound so bad. Plus, we had healers! If I reinforced my skeleton now, I doubted I’d break any bones if I improved my muscles later. Oh, and maybe I could actually punch things without breaking my own hand! I mean, hypothetically, I could do that anyway if I landed the punch correctly, but Sensei Hank had always been very clear on what a crapshoot punching someone was, which is why we practiced so many open-hand strikes. I’d still rather use a weapon to attack, of course, but the only weapon that I could be sure I’d always have handy was my own body. Improving my attack options was extremely attractive.
“I didn’t talk you into taking the skin thing, did I?” Davi muttered. “You’re an idiot, Moretti. I’m sorry, Meghan. I tried to stop him. I tried.”
I just grinned.