The debriefing took the rest of the day, extending late into the night. We were interrupted several times for emergencies, including an hour-long recess when a freshly-spawned Titan appeared in an area called “Old Town.” The massive monster was dispatched quickly enough, but it did significant damage to a local landmark church and started fires. Since the area was in the middle of the Albuquerque metro, I could totally understand why everything else was dropped until leadership was 100% certain that the fires had been controlled.
Kirtland Air Force Base command had adapted well to the loss of technology. Large paper maps covered three out of the four walls in the colonel’s conference room, with the last wall left blank to allow an Information Assistant to project images and diagrams. There were three such alien AI attached to members of Kirtland Air Force Base’s leadership. Though none were as memorable as Walsenburg’s Captain Beember, Kirtland’s assistants were effective, picking up on little details from what we remembered to tease out our exact route and label all the hazards we’d faced and cleared along the way.
Some of the colonel’s subordinates started arguing whether the best plan was to head for the stable areas, like Walsenburg and Glorieta, since they would likely be able to find cooperative allies there, or if they should prioritize reaching the areas currently suffering. The colonel cut off the discussion before it got too far: “We’ll strategize later, after we have all the information.”
One of the colonel’s aides was able to inform us that there was evidence that Davi’s biological augment would eventually replace her limb. Unfortunately, the aide couldn’t give us more details, only that people with high levels of synergy in Rapid Regeneration had seen measurable regrowth after losing body parts. We were scheduled to meet with the ability analysis team the following morning to share the data we’d gathered and ask questions of our own.
When they finally finished grilling us, we were offered bunks in a nearby barracks for the night. In addition to the analysis group, we’d be meeting with their automotive group in the morning, then heading off to place our Shop. After that, our itinerary wasn’t clear.
“We’ll put a driver at your disposal. You may be able to begin harvesting material, but it will likely take a few more days for construction to begin.”
“Why’s that?” Kurt asked. His voice was calm and pleasant, but I could see his fists clench.
It was Heather who answered. “Scale. You’re talking about a huge vehicle. It won’t just be long, it’ll also be really tall. I assume you don’t want to be outside fending off monster attacks while you work?”
“No…” Kurt admitted. “Ideally we’d build it indoors first. Even if we had to partially disassemble it to fit out the doors, it would still be best. Monsters would make construction difficult, but wind would as well.”
Heather shrugged. “Then there’s really only one place in town that’s close to big enough: The Pit.”
I exchanged a look with my friends. “What’s that?” Kurt asked. “Some kind of stadium?”
“Basketball arena. Even in The Pit, I don’t think the roof’s going to be high enough, but we’ll at least be able to build large pieces of the framework. Trouble is, it’s being used as a shelter and food distribution center. It’ll take a while to get all those people re-situated.”
The delay chafed, but her explanation made sense.
Our meeting with the team working on getting cars and trucks running the following morning was more extensive than I’d expected. I’d been thinking of it as a formality, confident that even John couldn’t out-car the local experts. He couldn’t, but I hadn’t considered that getting the cars running was the easy part. Albuquerque had a decently-sized fleet of vehicles, but they largely operated on the same few major thoroughfares through the city, and thousands of people were working together to keep those roads clear. The trucks, cars, and buses mostly didn’t have to deal with monsters, and when they did, it was only for a brief period, and never more than two at a time.
Getting down the highway between cities was a different beast, and the team was happy to pick our brains, asking detailed questions about the efficacy of the snowplow and fencing we’d added to Frank’s exterior, techniques for breaking up and killing a Monstrosity, and how we had dealt with wostrich packs.
Our answers seemed to trouble them.
“It’s possible, but not easy. I mean, we had to abandon the semi to make it here, and we’re planning on building a different kind of vehicle entirely now,” I said.
“We’ve got to get something working,” one of them growled. “It’s one thing to have flyers take a person out to surrounding towns to pop down a Shop or two, but we don’t have enough for every settlement! We need to get some kind of bulk transport going so we can make regular food and water deliveries.”
“Oh. Yeah, an airship won’t be great for that.” Weight was a serious concern, and water was heavy as hell. “You have a lot of Animate Machinery people. Can you not get planes working? Even if it took four or five people trading off to make it fifty miles… that’s not really feasible for us, but I feel like it would be for you.”
The man shook his head. “No. Brass tried, with a few different kinds of planes. Didn’t seem to work.”
I frowned. “I can see why jet engines wouldn’t work, but I would have thought propeller planes would. The rules of physics are the same, as far as we can tell.”
He laughed. “Yeah, seem to be, even if abilities break them. Um, I’m not sure exactly why the planes didn’t work…”
One of his compatriots cut in. “Humans are bad, basically. We got a pilot going with Animate Machinery, and it looked to everyone like they were doing everything right. Had to get someone else out with Analyze at high synergy levels to realize they weren’t even turning the prop half as fast as they needed to. I think the ability eggheads are trying to find a workaround for that, but… eh, not my wheelhouse. Anyway, as far as bulk transport goes, we might have to get the flyboys to send a team west, snag some tanks from Sierra. Even if cargo space is low, the news that the monsters left their semi trailer alone when no one was inside… it opens up some options. Driver in the main tank towing fuel and supplies behind them?”
“It’s a possibility,” the first man responded.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
When we met with the ability analysis team, they were able to get Davi an estimate on the recovery time for her arm.
“Rate of recovery is slow, but linked to the synergy percentage of the relevant ability,” a researcher told us. Her crisp lab coat was the whitest clothing I’d seen anyone wear in weeks. “If the subject receives other injuries, healing speed also seems to be inhibited. Our data on regeneration is limited, but we have seen clear progress.”
“So… how long until I get my arm back?”
“With under 200% in the ability? I can’t say with great precision yet, but I would estimate between one and two years.”
Davi looked offended, but her emotional reaction didn’t ruffle the woman, who simply reiterated a request to see the ability records notebook we’d kept.
Davi handed it over with poor grace, muttering under her breath, “Rapid regeneration, my ass.”
It didn’t take the researcher long to go through it. One of her co-workers had their own Informational Assistant, Bob, an amorphous blob with a single large eye. The eye was clearly a giant plastic googly eye, but Bob could control it as though it was real. It was… weird. The researcher flipped through the notebook in front of Bob, the blob asked us a few questions about points where our data seemed to conflict with theirs… and that was all they wanted. Byron was way more excited about them than they were about us, which made sense in retrospect. They had a whole city full of data to pull from, and we just had the thousand-odd people we’d met along the way.
The rest of the meeting was essentially a courtesy to us and handled entirely between us and Bob the Informational Assistant. It answered all our questions as best it could and even offered build suggestions, referencing its databanks for abilities it knew or suspected would synergize for us.
Bob had an absolutely massive list of Biological Augments that I tore myself from only reluctantly after he said that duplicates of the ability list had been posted in all area Shops. Most of the augments on the list weren’t very tempting, like all the ones that enabled people to survive by eating different food or less food, or to adapt themselves to particular extreme environments. There were also a ton of abilities that seemed uh, of limited utility. Yes, you could make yourself create silk like a spider. No, you couldn’t project it yards from your body and enable yourself to swing from buildings.
Even so, I found a few interesting options I wouldn’t have considered, like a backup oxygen reservoir to allow me to forego breathing for extended periods. That would help me survive gaseous attacks like the one Carlton had used and enable me to operate underwater comfortably. That hadn’t been necessary thus far, but I didn’t want to be purely reactive with my choices. Options were good.
I tapped the page. “This wouldn’t be the next ability I’d take, but it seems like a great choice eventually.”
“Hm. Didn’t you say you only had four more ability choices?” Bob asked.
“Uh… what?”
“Well, you have seven thus far, yes? So only four more until your Speciality is chosen for you, and then you’ll be left to enhance the ones you have.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Byron. “Back up. We haven’t heard anything about any of that.”
“Specialty?” Kurt asked. “We were attacked by someone with an insane ability. The people around him were talking about a speciality, but…”
Bob pulled back into himself, letting a large bubble stretch his amorphous body before it burst out through his “skin” at the top. Bob showed no apparent signs of discomfort. “Ah. You would not know, as you were not present when we made the Announcements a few days ago. Indeed. Specialties are twelfth abilities chosen for contestants by the system itself. They tend to be quite powerful, but are generally accompanied by limitations. Many can only be used once an hour, once a day, or even once a twelveday. Some can only be used when certain prerequisite conditions are met. A few are passive abilities.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I wanted to pick my abilities, not have them chosen for me. It did explain something that had bothered me: why Carlton hadn’t led with his strongest ability. If he’d thought he’d need to fight another person after me, and he couldn’t use it frequently, he had probably been trying to hold it back.
Bob was still talking, and I dragged my attention back to the desk-ornament-turned-researcher. “Following the acquisition of a speciality, future thresholds will allow contestants to empower their own abilities, adding approximately 108% synergy to an existing ability of their choice and spillover synergy to abilities that resonate with it. Well, I say future thresholds, but we have only tested up to the fourteenth. Different rules may apply after that.”
We were all staring at the little ooze. He made a head for himself and craned his neck to look from one of us to the other.
“We can only pick eleven abilities?” I asked. “Total?”
“That appears to be the case.”
The news unsettled all of us.
“Thought we had this figured out,” said Byron.
“Yeah…” I said. “I don’t really like the rules changing, because other rules might change too. I think, though, that this change is actually a positive for us, at least since we know about it enough in advance.”
“How do you figure?” Byron asked.
“Well… I could keep getting decent synergy with most of my choices if I kept taking Biological Augments, but the rest of you probably couldn’t.”
Byron frowned thoughtfully. Several of his abilities had even higher synergy than my augments, things like Heat and Freeze. But he’d already picked off all the low-hanging fruit we were aware of, and his latest ability choice, Ice Bolt, had been weaker. “You might have a point,” he said. “Might need to re-think our coming choices… Forego a little synergy in the short term for greater tactical flexibility later. If I can just empower Heat over and over in the future, I’d rather take something different that gets a little boost each time I do that than another redundant flame skill.”
“Ah!” said Bob. “In that case, tell me what abilities you plan to empower in the future and I can offer suggestions.”
The discussion with the little blob left us with plenty of food for thought.
We made one last stop before we left the ability analysis complex, a small gym where the equipment had been added to and modified to help assess superhuman levels of strength. Bob had been able to give us information about how strength increased as we took abilities, but he hadn’t been exactly certain how much I’d be able to lift.
“With seven abilities, the expectation would be approximately 450 pounds on top of your pre-Maffiyir capability in a clean lift, but… hm… you have two muscle-augmenting abilities and a skeletal improvement. Fascinating. You are difficult to model. I enjoy examining heavily-augmented individuals.”
“A clean? Not a deadlift?”
“The clean lift is more indicative of your capability in day-to-day activities, so we have focused on that metric.”
The ooze coached me through the proper form as weight after weight was added. The pole was thick enough to make my grip slightly difficult, but it still bent under the weight.
Time after time, I hefted the pole up to shoulder height, until finally Bob stopped my friends as they went to add more weights. “That’s quite enough to accurately model Vincenzo’s strength. He can clean lift over 1,200 pounds - just under 550 kilograms - slightly more than someone with 13 abilities. Your lifting form was unpracticed, so I would expect that you could deadlift a little under twice that.”
Heather had continued to accompany us. She looked impressed at Bob’s announcement. “Huh. And you only have seven abilities so far? You’re more optimized than I realized. I didn’t think muscle-powered propulsion would be able to get you much speed. Maybe I was wrong.”