"You're fully committing to the Vuxarinan disguise, correct?"

"That's the plan. I have Win's medicine to make me look like them - and you've been reminding me on an hourly basis that I need to stay under the radar, so yeah. I think that's a good way to make myself look like I'm not from Earth."

"A good way - but not great. Winnie's pills are a big help, but you won't fully pass for Vuxarinan if you don't make some adjustments. We can pretty easily spin a story on your lack of knowledge - like that you were abducted as a baby and never grew up on-planet. That happens more than you'd think. But - you'll have to be as physically close to one of them as possible for the rest to work. This will be good body modification practice for you and it should be quick, so we're going to do it before you get into the true work. Nothing else I show you is going to matter if you just get yourself caught because you're recognizable. Plus, I can show you what you've been doing wrong."

A bit of hope flared in Reid, focused on easier and less taxing self-improvement. "What have I done wrong? Are self-modifications not supposed to be painful?"

"You've done a whole lot wrong - but pain is normal. Pain accompanies all self-modification. You don't get to play around with your internals and not have any side effects. Now, I want you to focus inward, but still concentrate on my voice..."

Nyx took Reid through interacting with his own body in ways that were similar to what he'd done before - only in more specific sequences. He had to work on small clusters of muscle or blood or skin or tissue, then move down the line, and back again. There were little things she had him change about the angle and force he used to apply energy to parts of himself, and further instruction on the duration and speed at which he allowed energy to move through him while he worked. He wasn't opposed to tedious and repetitive work, but he was interested in understanding the reason behind it.

"Why do we keep going back over the same areas? Why not just finish the work in one then move onto another?"

Nyx let out something between a grunt and a sigh. "You remember how you felt when you were making Requiem and Queen's Edge? How you needed to hold onto a bunch of different things at once, then activate them all at the same time?" Reid nodded. "Well, the reason you did that is because if you didn't, it would've caused cascading failures throughout the weapons. Similarly, you're doing as much in the right sequence as possible here so things don't revert or fail. The same concept applies to skill use and growth - you could, technically, manually build a skill within you - like the one you saw for the Smith's Recall. At the end of the day, most things boil down to a specific structure or style, timing, and sequence of energy use. How its applied and where the energy is directed works to make things happen that you want to happen. Right now, we're using the same kind of theory, only applied to your body. We're making you leaner and taller, changing a bit of your skeletal structure, and your muscles. But if I had you do, let's say, all of the muscle work before the bone work was done, you'd first off feel quite a bit more pain than you do right now. You'd also end up with screwed up musculature that would deteriorate, not work, or that your body would consider inefficient and that it would naturally try to heal. We're doing it like this so that when we're finished, it's going to be as solid and reliable as a well-built skill."

Curiosity sated, Reid dove back into himself, and the work. Nyx's advice was sound - there was still pain, but the burning and agonizing sensations were definitely lessened now that he jumped from one task to another. It also helped that he'd started getting used to torturing himself - as bad as that sounded. Bit by bit, Reid's body was slowly and surely morphed and changed. None of his skills or stats were affected, but when Reid finished fourteen hours later, he looked like an entirely different person. He used a bit of non-rusted armor like a mirror.

His eyes were mostly the same, but the rest of his face was different. His eyebrows were hairless, heavily protruding things, and his cheekbones were as visible and prominent as a model's might be. His mouth was slightly wider, and his nose just a bit flat. Seven deep lines, indented all the way down to his skull, ran from the top of his nose to his hairline. From there, five went straight back and down the rear of his skull, while the other two curled back to stop at his ears. The ears were slightly smaller, and sat further down his face - close to a now-wider and sharper jaw.

He was at least a foot taller than he'd been before, and his muscles and everything else were packed into a narrower frame. The change was prominent enough that it left Win and Lycra worrying the miners would think he was someone different entirely. The simple planned explanation was 'a growth spurt' that occurred because Win's medicine cured his disease. Hopefully, it would be enough to make things believable. Even if it didn't convince, there wasn't much trouble any of the other miners could cause about the change.

Win had been surprisingly nonchalant about Reid doing the self-manipulation to change his appearance - but not because she considered it normal. She'd taken a new philosophy with Reid that boiled down to "no part of you is normal, so I just shouldn't be surprised." Lycra was thoroughly impressed - and happy that Reid's disguise would be even more effective. Reid stopped listening to his ramblings when the topic of wigs came up again. He wasn't wearing a wig.

One downside to the change, unfortunately, was his prison jumpsuit now fit worse than before. It clung in the wrong places, and was too short in the arms and the legs. He could continue wearing the F grade robes in the den, but once they went back to the processors and canteen, they'd be back in uniform. He was forced to rest for another half a day before Nyx would give him any further instruction.

#

The roll he sat on was thin enough that he could feel the rocks and uneven surface of the cavern floor. Water dripped slowly, somewhere out in the cavern, and he could just barely hear the scratch of Lycra's tools against his latest creation. Nyx's tone was professorial as she started the lessons Reid had really been waiting for.

"Let's talk about self-affixation. What you're doing is unusual, in a universal sense, and there's history as to why. I'll keep things general so I don't get restricted, but you need to understand this to know what kind of forces are truly at play. Awakening contracts like the ones your friends have may be 'longstanding tradition' now, but that wasn't always the case. The new ones are massively different from how contracts actually started. Those original contracts were more about access to the system itself, which was a way to help with personal growth."

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"And it was personal and individual- self-affixation, where you have to improve yourself to raise your power or dexterity or intelligence, was the natural way of things. Today's contracts are much more rigid. They allow for predestined levels of improvements based on earned energy - and the contract sponsor takes a portion of someone's earned energy in exchange for letting them use the 'template' of growth they created."

"Rigid contracts allowed many people reach high levels and get to higher grades, so their popularity grew. Given the choice between difficult, self-guided improvement - or tried and true paths to power that aren't likely to fail? They chose rigid contracts in droves. People ate it up. It was a guarantee of 'better' lives for your children, or your family, or a ruler's subjects. All too quickly, understanding of Self-Affixation methods ended up limited to only those cultures that were still practicing the harder ways to grow - or to historians and researchers."

"The old standard became a fringe method, and then it was labeled as dangerous by those in power, who also happened to be new contract sponsors. Tomes on the subject were locked away and knowledge was further restricted until only select societies even practiced the methods anymore. In the eyes of a normal person, self-affixation is more boogeyman than reality. So the concept itself has become something of a lost art, and many hold a misguided contempt for the mere idea of someone building themselves up without a contract to guide them."

"That is the innate bias you are going to encounter whenever someone learns you self-affix, and why even knowing that much is an issue for most. It's one of the primary reasons you need to keep your ability to grow a secret as much as you can."

Reid shifted, and picked a pebble out from under his leg. "How does my control stat come into play there? I'm the only self-affixer I know, and I'm also the only one with a control stat - so does control always come with self-affixation?" There was a long pause.

"That question is off limits until we get stronger - don't tell anyone you have the control stat, and definitely don't tell them you can increase it with stat points. Your current understanding of it as a limit to your growth is directionally correct, so just stick with that."

"Now, you need to know that without a rigid contract - which I'm just going to call a contract because that's how you view it - most people would never make it into F grade. So F grade self affixers were somewhat rare. Those that got into F, though, often ran into later issues because they focused their efforts on only the areas they knew well. Doing that was a hinderance for them later down the line. What you do in G grade is a foundation for future growth, and the investments you make determine how easy it is to build yourself up later. Some real monsters in the cosmos can overcome a lack of foundation later down the line - but doing that takes a hell of a lot of work, time, and skill. It's not something you want to worry about."

"So, a contract forces you down a set path that's easier to climb, even though it takes away some of your potential power to do it - but would a contract also stop you from making an unbalanced foundation?"

"Yes - but only partially yes. Let's say you spend your first 18 levels putting every point into two stats, and there's a huge discrepancy between them. Your contract would then force your next gains to be chosen from the other three stats so they catch up with the two you overinvested in - keeping you upright like training wheels. Yes it would stop you from falling over, but those training wheels are fucking expensive. It's much better to just do things yourself and not pay for the help, as long as you have some idea of what to do. If your stats were, say, 30, 12, 8, 11, 30? That distribution might get through a contract's safety measures because they're close enough to each other to be permissible. But that doesn't take away the later issue of foundations... hm. There has to be a better way to describe this. Something I can get through to you without the restriction triggering."

Reid sat in silence for a few minutes while Nyx contemplated. She often had long pauses in her speech, and Reid figured that her being 'alone' for so long had warped her sense of time - and conversational flow. Reid picked dirt out of his fingernails.

"Got it. Changing tires. You know how to change a tire. Break the nuts loose while the car is on the ground because it's easier, but don't actually loosen everything fully and pull the tire off till its in the air. Then you put the wheel back on, tighten down the lug nuts in a star pattern, put the car back on the ground, double check everything and you're good to go."

"Your stats are like putting the wheel back on. If you only put one lug nut on and tighten it all the way down, then try to drive the car, the wheel shakes or comes loose and you crash. But even if you tighten all the lug nuts, but you haven't done it in the star pattern, you can still have a loose wheel that causes problems, or a crash, or you can get the wheel jammed at an angle and you have to use a pneumatic driver to tighten it the rest of the way down. Star pattern is best because you're doing some tightening to the bottom, then the top right, then lower left, and so on going back and forth until things are properly secure."

"The contracts people sign aren't forcing them to do a good job or put the tire back on the right way. They're just passing the requirement that the wheel doesn't immediately fall off when someone tries to drive the car. Now that might hold up if you're just going to the grocery store, but not if you're going racing. And leviathan knows you need that speed. Getting into F grade is kind of like when you put the car back on the ground, so its even tougher to tighten things down properly or fix the issue after that point. Whew. Alright, no restriction, so I'm ending that analogy there - does it make sense now?"

"More than before, yeah. So that's why you had Lycra focus on an almost-equal distribution of stat points."

"Right - yes. So our goals, now that you've finished your disguise and I've given you a bit of background on the history of self affixation, are to impart to you the tools that will let you balance yourself and your stats out before you run off and kill some other ancient powerful thing that sends you straight into F grade. And I mean it when I say impart the tools. You will not be capable of doing all of the work right away, and expecting anything like that is going to leave you disappointed. It's an intensive process, and we are just going to get you reasonably balanced."

For all she'd warned him and his friends of her limitations and things she couldn't share, Nyx was an incredibly talented instructor - his immediate progress in body modification and her way of framing complex topics for him were proof. Now she was offering him the keys to the future.

Reid felt an eager fire burning in his gut. He'd faced down monsters and death. Turned himself to stone for his family's sake, and committed to a path of painful improvement. Nyx's knowledge wasn't just a next step - it was the game changer he needed. How could he possibly be intimidated by the difficulty of his tasks and time it took to complete them? Reid's will was iron, and it would not be bent by such simple obstacles.

He committed himself to a simple truth.

Reid would wield the tools Nyx was going to give him until they made him raw.

He would earn and fight for every iota of progress one offered, and then throw himself just as hard at the next.

Sprinting, walking, or crawling, he would reach his goals.

The idea took root deep within him, and hardened. He clenched his jaw.

Reid was going to succeed. There was no alternative.

"I'm ready. Let's start."