Chapter 4

----------------------------------------

I don’t think I drove that well since my drivers test. I went exactly the speed limit the whole way home. Full stop at stop signs. All the turn signals. No yellow lights.

If I am honest with myself that probably made me seem more suspicious.

But it worked! Made it home.

To suburbia.

With a thousand prying eyes in every window. And probably a camera or two

Normally I park in the driveway to save space in the garage for extra activities, but tonight feels like a night the car should be indoors before unloading. What with the body in the back seat and all that.

Before I drag Buddy inside I take a second to close all the blinds I can. No need to have anyone peaking in.

“Home sweet home Buddy, Me cassa es sue cassa” I grunt out as I drag him into the living room. Characteristically of someone in a coma, he doesn’t respond. I prop him up against the couch taking a breath.

The armor is coming off before we go up the stairs. He’s too heavy and I’m too weak.

"Core, Please eat the armor without hurting Buddy"

Nothing. It makes no move to take it. The core sits very contentedly in the pouch, not ignoring, but definitely not following my command.

Ok, either the armor is enchanted or there is something else stopping it. Lets put that in the later column

I guess I will be getting it off myself.

It is at this time I realize there is a lot left to learn about knots. But not being a scholar I instead chose to imitate Alexander the great and just cut the darn things off with a knife. Much easier. I hope the ties weren’t important. If they are, maybe I can have the core take care of it. If it can do anything with the armor at all.

Now I am wishing I hadn't cut the knots.

Buddy was still a sack of dead weight up the stairs, but a more manageable one. We made it into the spare room. The half finished one weekend project from 4 months ago was not clean. Drywall dust and plastic paint coverings all over the place. The mattress was leaned up against the wall, wrapped for protection. I put Buddy down and did a quick sweep and kick of the room before placing down the mattress.

It wasn’t much of a hospital, and I wasn’t much of a doctor, but I liked his chances.

With the core providing magical healing stuff and me… being there…. I’m sure he can make a full recovery.

I just need to make sure I can get more potions….

…and find a way to feed and water him….

… and clean up after him…

…and make sure no one finds him…

…and prepare for whatever shot him coming after this core…

I clearly did not think this plan through, did I.

I got the first aid kit from under the sink and started wrapping and cleaning what I could. The wounds looked better. Ugly scabs everywhere, but the bleeding had stopped, even on the hip and leg. I removed the tourniquet and was thankfully not greeted with a waterfall of life blood, only a small trickle from the deepest part of the cut. I wrapped it tightly. Maybe if I can get him some more potions I can speed this along.

I patted the bag hiding the core under my clothes. It was comforting there. The bond, the thought of what it could do, or some combination of the two brought me some comfort in the face of the unknowns.

“If we are gonna do this, we’re doing this right. And we’re doing this now.”

I sat down at the foot of the bed so I wouldn’t fall over and hurt myself.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

“Core! Open Merge!” I said tensing myself for the out of body experience again.

I was greeted by… nothing. I was still sitting in the spare room on the floor with a ridiculous look on my face.

Nothing from the crystal.

“core” I said with noticeably less confidence “open teaching screen. Please”

Nothing

I tried a few more permutations of commands to get the learning options back up again, but I think I knew after the first two it wasn’t going to happen. In my rush on the mountain I had skipped the tutorial. I was flying blind on iron man difficulty.

“Not even a day into it and I have already kneecapped myself” I got up off the floor. I wouldn’t be going back to the astral projection zone today, maybe ever. But the core still responded to commands. And I had a brief and incomplete list of abilities.

Not great, not terrible.

Time to do what I had done every time I had bumbled past the tutorial, brute force this system into submission through trial and error.

----------------------------------------

I emptied every trashcan in the home with the crystal. Free matter for testing. Next, I pulled the large cans into the garage and emptied those too. It was too bad that garbage day was only 2 days ago, I could have had more to play with if this had happened earlier. I wish I had kept all that garbage.

Well there's something I have never thought before. It is strange how fast normal can re adjust in your head.

It seems the core had an easier time on the mountain making mundane items than magical ones, so that is what I am going to try and test first. Transmutation, efficiency, complexity and several other five dollar words I am sure I will think of later.

And I had just the plan.

I save my change. I keep it around instead of depositing it. Not sure why. I don’t have the patience for proper coin collecting. Occasionally I find a fully copper penny or a silver quarter, but even those I just hang onto. Maybe it was always for this. Probably not, but that would be an interesting bit of fate. Now, they are material. Test subjects. A violation of US code 331. And a means to understanding this thing in front of me.

I mean, how many other things are there in a modern home worth less than a buck?

I started with a fully copper penny.

"Core, please absorb this penny, the round copper thing here" and it did, unsurprisingly after a day of eating much larger objects. Now for the first test.

"Core, using only the penny you just absorbed as fuel, make as much copper as you can" A tiny square of shiny copper was deposited on the table in front of me. I searched around the kitchen for a scale. The scale only went out to two digits, so I wouldn't be setting any records for accuracy, but it would be enough for these first tests. The copper lump and a fully copper penny were the same weight.

Ok, so the same material has a minimal cost, even if its in a completely different form.

Now lets test accuracy.

“I want you to absorb this penny” I pointed to the coin, flipping it over to show both sides, “without absorbing anything else.”

I then sandwiched the coin between two other pennies, newer combination penny coins, and set it down in front of the crystal.

The crystal, Bob, performed perfectly. The top most penny was lifted ever so slightly and the middle penny shot forward and disappeared. This was my first time closely watching the process of ‘eating’. The penny didn’t last long, but as it moved into the crystal it seemed to stretch and warp before vanishing completely. Very interesting. Not sure what to do with that information, but it was sure cool to look at.

No, Bob doesn’t seem right. Not regal enough for something this powerful. And I think Dresden called dibs.

I told the crystal I wanted the materials it had just absorbed back. But this time, I wanted it to be divided into 100 identical copper balls. The crystal obliged. And 100 teeny tiny copper balls were deposited onto the kitchen table in front of me. Carefully to ensure none were lost I scooped the loose copper into a cup and weighed it on a kitchen scale. The weight was exactly the same. At least to the level of precision a kitchen baking scale can account for. So splitting an object apart doesn't seem to absorb too much either. That's good too.

A few more tests with other pennies proved that this was a consistent effect using the core. Modern or original style, as long as you asked for the same materials as were present in the original coin, you got the same weight back

The problem started to arise when using the modern pennies. They aren’t fully copper. In fact they are mostly zinc by weight. If I mistakenly asked for the weight of the modern penny in copper, using only the material it had just absorbed, the core would give me copper, but much less of it. The 100 copper balls were smaller, and the total weight was lower by more than 30%. Similar things happened when asking for the pennies back in lead, silver, gold, water and grass (the kind in your lawn, get your mind out of the gutter). The biggest weight loss came from the grass and the water. I assumed it had to do with the elemental complexity of the items being transmuted. I wanted to see if I could get more complex.

To test this I attempted to find the most complex chemical that was stable at room temperature. In scientific American I found an article that had a string of elemental characters that may have technically been in English, but that I couldn’t understand. I showed the phone to the crystal and got…nothing.

Ok, maybe its audio only. I pulled up a picture of gold and indicated for the recent penny in that instead. Task completed successfully. So it isn’t audio holding it back. Its probably me. I have to understand what I am asking for.

That’s good to know, I will have to write that down.

But wait, it made a health potion?! I have no idea how that works.

How it works....

I don’t know how grass ‘works’ either. Something about the mitochondria I’m sure, but that isn’t exactly the same as knowing how a living thing operates over millions of cells.

How did I get the potion? I was in the shared space and the crystal, Reginald, suggested it to me. The crystal knew about the potion. Then it shared that with me. I asked for it and Reginald made it.

Yeah I hate that name too.

I need something complex that I can give the.. I’ve got it!

I gave the core a handful of pennies. “Please make me a painkiller liquid gel pill” No movement, task failed.

Excellent

I ran back up the stairs to the bathroom and grabbed the bottle. Back in the kitchen I gave the core one Tylenol pill. “Eat this, and learn about it” The act took less than a second, but I was on the edge of my seat.

“Once you are done, make two pills using the pill I gave you and the 10 pennies, and give me back the pennies you don’t use”

The core deposited 3 and a half pennies on the table, right next to 2 identical pills

I don’t have to understand shit! I just have to feed it things that are complex and it can make them, with a significant amount of material loss. But still, this is huge. I fist pumped into the air. It was all starting to make sense.