GRIFFIN TUCKER VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 2
MOUNT DISCOVERY, PROVINCE OF ARAGONIA
As Griffin experimented with his new graft, he became more and more convinced that it was way better than any boring attack graft he could’ve gotten. He wasn’t looking forward to using any kind of attack graft against anything, even the disgusting plasma cybercentipedes. He’d just like to sneak past them and let them live their horrible lives out in peace.
At least with the Sensor Suite, I’ll be able to have a chance of doing just that, he thought. Only a couple more things to test and then I’m gonna get the hell out of here. There’s no reason for there not to be a million of those little monsters crawling all over the place here, not when there’s a tensa beacon like that obsidian thing. Maybe there’s something else that’s keeping the monsters out? He glanced over at the eggs and remembered how there hadn’t been any plasma cybercentipedes around the Mother when he’d first run into it.
“Griffin,” Kismet said, “I know you’re getting used to your new graft, but we need to get out of here soon. There’s no telling when another Mother or more plasma cybercentipedes, or even another monster might wander in here.” She’d finished her inspection of the obsidian device and had settled on one of the nearby desks, watching Griffin as he experimented.
“I know, I know,” he said. “I just need to try a couple more things then we’ll get moving.”
Griffin needed to know if he could turn all of his new senses on at once or if he was limited to just one at a time. One by one, he activated his new senses and found that there were no limitations on how many he could have active at once. He layered on each of the different sensor types and his HUD became more and more colorful and crowded as each of the sensors added their unique kind of data to the mix.
The HUD gave him more than just a convenient, information-rich display, it also allowed him to process the information from his newly-acquired senses much more rapidly because they were at somewhat of a remove. The new senses didn’t overwhelm him because he could filter the strangeness of suddenly having four new senses through the HUD. It made his senses feel more like a video game and therefore easier for him to process since it was a level of artifice he was familiar with.
His Speed Attribute suddenly jumping to 10 was still quite an adjustment. He felt his tensa surging through him faster than ever. It was like having ten cups of espresso, a few energy drinks, and a bag full of cocaine but instead of his heart exploding, it was all contained within him, ready to explode at his command. As the feeling suffused him, it was almost enough to let him forget the disgusting stench coming from the hole in his suit’s glove.
He decided he’d need to get away from the mess of slime and crushed eggs before he could test it out. The hazmat suit was now more a liability than anything and he’d need to go through the whole laborious process of taking it off. Griffin swiped at his faceplate, trying to clear more of the mess off when his new HUD interface lit up with a message:
Visual impairment detected…Attempting environmental reconstruction using Sensor Suite sensors [tensa, SONAR, infrared, precision telescopic vision].
A progress bar appeared below the message, rapidly filling and then, without him doing anything else, his view cleared until it was like he was looking through a just-cleaned window. If he moved his head rapidly, he found that there were little visual artifacts in his view, but they resolved in fractions of a second.
“This has got to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” Griffin said. “I know that probably makes me a real nerd, but come on magical senses? This is just so fucken rad!” He exclaimed. “There’s just one more thing to try,” he remembered. “The recording and recall thing!”
He found he was able to record whatever his senses perceived—including his normal senses—with just a thought. It was extremely disconcerting, then, when he played the recording back and found that he didn’t just record the visual and audio data. The recording included all his senses, including those he didn’t even think of as senses: proprioception, his minor aches and pains, his kinesthetic sense, everything. He didn’t just watch the recording, he re-experienced that moment in time as if he were reliving it.
Whatever software or enchantment or spell was allowing him to experience the recording also let him pause, scrub forward and backward, and control the playback speed.
“This is so freaky,” he said, playing back the recording for the fifteenth time. “Even though I know I’m sitting down in this ancient office chair, I’m also standing just over there, smelling the same dead, rotten fart smell I’m smelling now. Except my left calf is itchy, I have to clear my throat, and I blink like four times in a second.”
It was just a few seconds of him standing there in the lab or workroom or whatever the place was, but it was endlessly fascinating to him. Before he could get too lost in playing with this new aspect of his graft, Kismet reminded him that they really should get out of there. Reluctantly, he tore his attention away from his new power and back to the present.
At least he’d gone nose blind to the terrible stench. Mostly. He activated his tensa and SONAR senses, feeling like they provided him with the most relevant information right now. He started walking slowly, trying to get used to the feeling of moving while using his new senses. It was disorienting at first, but after a few steps, he got used to the two new magical senses working in tandem with all his mundane ones and he was able to move much more naturally.
As he navigated through the room, he took a circuitous route through the desks so he could see if anything was interesting. He practiced using his SONAR to see what was in each desk’s drawer, getting fuzzy images of pens, tools, and other things that Griffin couldn’t identify. He’d nearly made it around the room when his tensa sense picked up something a little odd.
“Hey Kismet, look at this!” He brushed the dust off one of the desks in the last row, revealing a rectangle of dense metal about the size of a pocket dictionary. “Look at the way the tensa is layered in this thing.” The strangely heavy object had strangely dull opalescent threads of tensa woven in patterns that looked like Celtic knotwork. “Why is it so…un-shiny?” He asked, looking for a control or button or anything that might indicate what the object was.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Kismet flew over to Griffin, looking closely at the object. “Ah, that’s an interesting find! It’s a Sysalisys—terrible brand name, I know, but there’s no accounting for corporate taste. They were in circulation about two hundred ninety to three hundred years ago.”
“So it’s like an old computer?” Griffin asked, his interest piqued even more. He’d had an extensive collection of servers and yellowing desktop computers from the 80s and 90s that he’d boot up and mess around with, enjoying the novelty of working on the different operating systems on the original hardware. “I can’t believe that this place has had computers for longer than the United States had existed.”
Kismet brought up a video screen and an advertisement started playing, showing a sleek new Sysalisys rotating in dramatic lighting. Griffin watched with interest as various runes started lighting up all over the device as low, pulsing, electronica-adjacent music started playing. A voiceover started up, promising the Sysalisys would be the solution she required for whatever financial or research sector use she needed to be addressed.
Kismet dismissed the video and continued, “They were an old Systablo variant that gained popularity in research centers and the financial sector two hundred and ninety-seven years ago. The conditions here aren’t ideal for preservation, but if you provide a bit of a tensa charge you might recover at least some of the data. Your tensa pool will be small until you unlock your Growth Attribute, but you should be able to power it for a little while at least.”
Griffin grinned, “I know this might sound kind of lame or boring, but data recovery is a bit of a specialty of mine. I worked at ByteSafe for six and a half years and all I did all day every day was help companies recover lost data…Well, either that or tell them why it was borked this time. I really wanna see the servers that’d stay working after almost three hundred years.” He chuckled, then clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “So how do we do this?”
“Use your anima to pull out a strand of tensa…and don’t forget about your DEMI Port! It will make the connection much stronger. Remember how you first felt when you connected to the Systablo?” she asked.
Griffin nodded. He’d felt like there was a firehose of information being fired directly into his brain. Disorienting to say the least.
Do I even care about this? It probably won’t help with getting out of here or finding Sarah. Griffin asked himself. Then he chuckled. Of course I care. This is exactly the kind of thing I always dreamed of and wrote about in my D&D adventures. Discovering hidden secrets from a long-dead magic computer? Yes please, I’ll take two! Besides, it’ll only cost time. He glanced up at the heavily enchanted obsidian device. That thing looks ominous as fuck. Maybe there’s a project file or convenient wiki that explains what it is.
He tentatively reached out with his anima, just using a small tendril of it to poke nervously at the device. When his anima touched the chassis, an invisible rune appeared which had a very slight pull on his anima. He allowed his anima to be pulled and as soon as it touched the rune, he got a message on his HUD which read:
A new infused item, Sysalisys Model 531 v. 8.0.0.8, is requesting a 100 spark per min connection. With your current tensa pool and recovery rate you will have 7 minutes 42 seconds before your tensa pool reaches a 20% threshold. Allow connection? Y/N
Griffin read it quickly and considered it. Seven and a half minutes wasn’t a ton of time and it was likely that he wouldn’t find anything useful, given the state of the whole facility and this room in particular. Besides, it’s not like he’d use the tensa for anything other than conjuring something to deal with the smell. With that decision made, he mentally selected the “Y” and a little timer appeared in the upper right-hand corner of his HUD.
Griffin was able to see the lines of enchantments begin to glow softly to his tensa perception but nothing else happened. The timer counted down a full thirty seconds before a whining drone came from the Sysalisys device and suddenly, an illusion or hologram appeared in the air above the blocky device.
Griffin had braced himself for the sudden bursts of data that his first connection to his Systablo had made him expect, but it didn’t happen with this device. The connection was tenuous at best and what was there was ephemeral and vague.
The device’s menus were fragmented and corrupted, but Griffin carefully started picking through everything he could as quickly as he could. Most of what he found was completely useless: too corrupted to be read or just flat-out missing. But even with all that missing information, Griffin was able to find a few files that were able to be repaired enough to at least be able to be opened.
“Can I copy these to my Systablo?” Griffin asked as he worked. “I’d rather not have this be the only place I can access these files.”
Kismet’s chibi portrait appeared on the left side of his HUD and nodded. She said, “Your Systablo should be able to handle anything on this old junk. You’ve already worked out most of the Systablo’s interface, the copy operation is easy enough.”
It only took another minute as Griffin pulled out his Systablo from his Inventory, connected to it, and then copied the files he had managed to recover onto his Systablo. He still had two and a half minutes left, so he started trying to poke around into any hidden files.
“I wish I was more familiar with this UI,” he muttered as he scanned through long directory lists that he couldn’t be sure weren’t corrupted or just a very obscure naming convention. He moved as much as he could onto his Systablo, not caring what it was. “I’ll sort through it when my time’s up,” he said aloud.
He was disconnected a few seconds later as the ancient device shut down again, his tensa no longer fueling it. Griffin was about to start searching through what he’d gotten, but a look from Kismet made him roll his eyes and reconfigure his anima into the Ten Star Vortex. He concentrated on pulling tensa in and, a just a little while later, his tensa pool had been refilled.
Griffin considered continuing his investigation here, but the darkness was beginning to creep him out. Plus, he had an idea for a record player that he wanted to try out with his Adaptive Conjuration once he got back to his room. The obsidian, rune-covered artifact in the middle of the room also gave him the willies. The longer he stayed here, the more uncomfortable it made him.
He looked around, making sure there were no plasma cybercentipedes nearby—at least, none in the hallway outside the door. His SONAR was able to give him a good idea of what lay outside the walls and his tensa sense didn’t show anything but he had no idea if the sense was inhibited by walls or not. Griffin carefully opened the door to the hallway and peeked out.
The hall was empty, so Griffin started on his long, circuitous route back to his room. It had taken him four and a half hours of hiking, following a route he and Kismet had planned out and the hike back didn’t go any quicker. As he and Kismet made their way back, Griffin noticed that there were fewer of the tensa-powered lights on in the halls. Not only that, but there were more filthy patches on the thick grey carpets, and more halls where mold had taken over. The disrepair was worrying, but Griffin had no idea what he could do about it.
When they finally got back to the room, Griffin was tired and filthy. He was eager to see what was on the Systablo, but not before a relaxing and above all, long, hot shower.
“I don’t plan on coming out of that shower until I forget the smell of dead, broken monster eggs!” Griffin vowed to himself and walked through.