GRIFFIN TUCKER VASILIAS, GREAT HOUSE SCION, REBORN LVL 4

MOUNT DISCOVERY, PROVINCE OF ARAGONIA

Over the next several days, Griffin recovered from his ordeal in the vent, practiced and trained with his grafts, and planned on how to get the last ethershard he needed to unlock Dominion, his final Attribute. By now, his Sensor Suite graft had become almost second nature. He was relying on his extra senses now just as much as he was on the senses he had been born with but with the bonus of near-superhuman reflexes, speed, and precision. With the added senses and his unlocked Attributes, he felt like a burgeoning superhero. Kismet’s admonitions about the feelings of invincibility leading to death suddenly made a lot more sense and he resolved not to overestimate his abilities just because he felt powerful now.

Griffin also practiced using the Reality Twine graft. The twine looked like fishing line to Griffin, though in his hands it never slipped and he found it easy to manipulate. It took knots extremely well and it really did seem to be unbreakable. He hadn’t been able to cut it with any scissors he could conjure, nor had he been able to burn it, pull it apart, or figure out any way to harm it at all, though, at Kismet’s suggestion, he tried using his anima like scissors to cut the Reality Twine. To his surprise, it worked and he pocketed the meter-long length of Twine he had cut as he continued his experiments.

Even though it was practically invisible to the naked eye—and to pretty much every other sense Griffin possessed except his tensa sense, he was nevertheless aware of exactly where every bit of Reality Twine was through some preternatural sense of the stuff. He could even will it to shimmer a bit and he figured that would make it visible to anyone he wanted to be able to see it. The stuff looked very strange with his tensa senses.

Griffin had thought the Reality Twine would appear to be more solid, more real through his tensa senses but it was in fact the exact opposite. Instead of showing bright strings of tensa energy along the structure of the graft, Griffin saw that it was a complete absence of tensa that marked Reality Twine in his senses. They seemed like little slices out of the world into a deep and endless void, even if those slices were hair-thin.

Griffin’s test of the anchors proved that the anchors were themselves made out of whatever substance was used to make the Reality Twine and he had to place them by hand. Once he positioned the anchor, he had to focus his intent and then spend a hundred sparks of tensa in a quick little burst. No matter where he positioned the anchor, whether it was on an object or just at a point in midair, the anchor would set. From then on, the Reality Twine was anchored to that point and no matter how much he pulled, it wouldn’t come free.

Curious as to the strength of the anchors and the Reality Twine, Griffin conjured a large steel plate with his Adaptive Conjuration. He attached four strands of Reality Twine to the plate with different anchor points and then suspended the plate from midair using another set of anchor points. He stared at the resulting platform hanging suspended from nothing, reflecting that this kind of surreal sight was going to be a lot more common and he’d better get used to it.

After refilling his tensa pool, Griffin conjured ten-kilogram weights that he put, one after the other, on the platform he’d created. He ran out of room to stack weights and there was no evidence that the Reality Twine was under any strain at all.

I wonder just how ‘unbreakable’ this stuff is, he thought as he calculated the total weight on his platform—he’d managed to fit five hundred kilograms of weights onto it before he’d run out of room. This Reality Twine shit has some amazing properties. I don’t know if the powers that be here know exactly what they’re doing giving a DM unbreakable string—I mean, if I had an Immovable Rod, I could do some damage but I guess Unbreakable String can cause enough trouble. I can think of a few ways it might be insanely useful.

He didn’t have the room or a safe way to test his more extreme ideas, but Griffin started sketching them out in his notebook just in case. Kismet was pressing him to speed up his plans because she doubted the remaining power in the facility would be sufficient to keep the monsters out of his room for much longer. Once Griffin took a look at the enchantments layered in the wall by the door with his tensa senses, he felt his anxiety spike. The enchantments had never been all that strong to begin with but now…Now they were barely there at all. The silvery strands of tensa that wove around each other to form the enchantments were thin and ephemeral like a single curl of cigarette smoke.

“Okay, so I guess the timetable has moved up regardless of the state of my prep,” Griffin said as he moved away from the door and sat down at the low table on the floor. He began laying out everything he’d made with Adaptive Conjuration and stored it in his Inventory. “D’you think the suit of full plate armor is a bit much?” He asked as the steel helmet rolled off the table and crashed to the floor.

“Considering that the zombies’ jaws will slice through unenchanted steel like it isn’t there and that they could physically rip you limb from limb, yes, the armor is a ‘bit much’,” Kismet replied. “Class 1 monsters can pretty much ignore mundane protections. A meter of steel would delay them only a little longer than that armor.”

Griffin grimaced and shook his head in disbelief. “Well fuck,” he said. “You could’ve mentioned something. I spent a long time on this damn suit of armor.”

He picked up one of the greaves, turning it over in his hands and hefting it contemplatively. It had taken him three and a half hours to get the fit just right. He tossed it back over his shoulder and it clattered with a truly amazing amount of noise as it hit the stone floor.

“You make so many items with your Adaptive Conjuration that I did not remark on your metal suit of armor because it seemed to be just another of your more…artistic creations,” Kismet said. “But you’ve been making more than useless armor.”

Griffin nodded. “Yeah, okay fair enough. The armor wasn’t fitting right anyway—it was chafing in my left armpit. Do you think I made enough brains?”

“You conjured one thousand, four hundred and ninety-two kilograms of brains Griffin. If that’s not enough for you then I don’t want to know what your purpose is. You spent over fifty kilosparks of tensa on brains alone. Frankly, I’m glad you left them in your Inventory.” Kismet flew over to the table and looked at the array of supplies. “I don’t know why you need to play cards. Or five kilograms of glitter. I note that you did not include any of your dynamite in your supplies.”

Griffin nodded and fidgeted. “Yeah, that was a damn close call last time. That shit is no joke. I don’t want to make the kind of mistake that will bury me in millions of tons of rock.” He paused, then said, “The cards were a joke.”

Kismet looked sharply at him. “The cards were a joke?”

“The glitter was too,” he admitted with a grin. “I just wanted to see your face when I took it out.” He couldn’t help but laugh as Kismet stuck her tongue out at him. “Worth it!” He laughed again, then felt his smile fall away as his mind returned to his plan, such as it was. “Are you sure the maps are accurate?”

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“Yes Griffin, the maps are accurate.”

They spent the next few minutes going over his plan and the supplies he’d created before Kismet said that the power drain on the enchantments would leave them vulnerable soon. He didn’t like it, but that didn’t prevent Griffin from accepting the truth. He tried to remember if he was forgetting anything but that was an exercise in futility. Plus he already knew the answer: of course, he was forgetting something. He always forgot something.

He shook his head, taking a deep breath as he tried to settle his jangling nerves. “Okay, then I guess we’d better fuckin’ go, huh? It’s not like it’s a complicated plan so at this point, I’m just dragging it out.” He stood up and started putting the things back into his Inventory. “The hike to get there is going to take forever and I don’t wanna get jumped by a bunch of laser bugs on the way.”

Once he put everything away, he pulled out his oil lantern—he still hadn’t worked out how to make a functional flashlight—lit it, and hooked it to his belt. He walked up to the door and paused, waiting for his SONAR to fill in the details of the hallway outside of his door. It was a mark of how much the enchantments had faded when almost immediately, Griffin had a high-resolution picture of the hallway for dozens of meters. He gulped at what awaited him.

Every other time he’d gone out exploring, Griffin had waited until the plasma cybercentipedes had left the hallway before venturing out of his room. He didn’t have that luxury this time. He had expected there to be a few—there always did seem to be five or six hanging out on the walls trying to get to the tensa that flowed through the enchantments or just resting—but this time, the hallway fairly teemed with the monsters. They coated the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, crawling over one another and releasing occasional beams of plasma into the roiling mass, slicing apart whatever it passed through.

Griffin’s skin crawled as he considered the hallway. He had come up with a plan to deal with the monsters, but he had no idea if it would work. Clenching his jaw, he pulled a bucket and metal scoop from his Inventory. The bucket was filled with an extremely fine white powder that Griffin had learned about when his mom had first tried to plant a garden. He set the bucket down and pulled a red bandana from his Inventory as well, tying it around his nose and mouth.

Right as they were about to harvest some truly delicious-looking tomatoes, they’d come out and found a swarm of slugs all over the fruits, ruining most of them. His mom had gone to the garden store and spoken with one of the people who worked there who pointed her to a bag of diatomaceous earth. It was a natural desiccant made of the fossilized remains of primeval diatoms and it worked like magic on the pests trying to devour their garden. Griffin remembered reading the bag and seeing that it was useful in controlling all kinds of pests, not just slugs.

Once again, he had no idea if the stuff he’d conjured was diatomaceous earth, but it looked and felt right to him, so he had to trust his graft. Given that there was no way to test it, he hoped he’d managed to create the stuff successfully. He’d created five more buckets of the stuff, but the SONAR image of the hallway full of plasma cybercentipedes had him worried he hadn’t made enough. Griffin shrugged. Time enough to worry about it later.

He shaped his anima into the sphere configuration, boosting his senses even more—he didn’t want to get caught unaware by one of the Mothers—then opened the door quickly. Several meter-and-a-half-long plasma cybercentipedes fell into the room from the door frame, hissing and raising to brandish their mandibles. Grimacing, Griffin grabbed the scoop in the bucket and flung the powdery substance at the monsters, covering them and causing a thick cloud of white dust in the air.

The reaction from the monsters was immediate. They writhed as the powder coated them, hissing and screeching with high-pitched, gargling voices. Griffin didn’t let up, scooping and tossing the powder at the monsters and then out of the doorway and into the hall as fast as he could. He was glad he’d remembered to tie the bandana around his face, even though it wasn’t perfect protection against the fine dust. The plasma cybercentipedes in the hall all started screeching and screaming, writhing around, trying to remove the abrasive desiccant from their carapaces.

Griffin had to scoop and run as quickly as he could, frantically throwing the diatomaceous earth ahead of him with desperate speed. The monstrous centipedes were just as anxious to avoid the stuff as their Terran counterparts and they ran out of his way with scurrying speed. He had to keep moving because there were so many that the sudden chaos of his exit from his room had caused the creatures to crawl all over each other. They were driven mad with pain and the ones on the ceiling started dropping down. Beams of plasma from the panicked monsters shot everywhere forcing Griffin to dodge both deadly plasma and falling monsters while keeping up the pace of his scooping.

It took a distressingly short amount of time for his metal scoop to scrape against the bottom of the bucket and Griffin grabbed the next one from his Inventory, still throwing scoops of the substance ahead of him. The monsters thinned out about twenty meters down the hall from his room until there were only one or two clustered on the walls every dozen or so meters. He carefully avoided them and the smaller monsters seemed content to chew at the walls. The plasma cybercentipedes didn’t seem all that dangerous to him at all, save for the plasma beams they shot randomly. And their mandibles. Their numbers were pretty intimidating too. Okay, maybe they were dangerous.

Griffin grinned to himself, looking back down the hall toward his room. Most of the remaining plasma cybercentipedes had retreated, leaving only a few on the ground. The hallway looked like a white powder bomb had gone off: diatomaceous earth was everywhere, its dust hanging chokingly thick in the air. He’d have to wait for a while for the dust to settle down before he came back this way or he’d need a special power to replace his lungs from breathing in the stuff. Still, his plan had worked!

Admittedly, it was a plan without much depth or recourse. If the diatomaceous earth hadn’t worked, his only other option was to shut the door to his room and hope they’d go away. Griffin didn’t allow himself to think of that—or the fact that he’d left the door open and that five or six of the monsters had fallen into his room when he’d first dashed out. He’d take care of it when he got back. After all, he still had some more diatomaceous earth in the bottom of his bucket with four more in his Inventory—plenty to deal with a few annoying insect monsters.

Griffin kept moving. He’d planned his route carefully, just the same as he’d taken the last couple of times he had been down into the sub-basements. He kept passing doors that led to rooms he had never explored and likely never would now. Hopefully, this would be the last time he had to make any kind of trek deep into the old weapons research facility.

The one thing that kept his anxiety on a slow simmer was the fact that this place was a Vasilias-run facility. Every time he opened his Reborn Profile in the System, he saw the same name. What kind of a reputation did this noble family have? They had created a secret weapons facility that had turned out at least one truly horrifying weapon: the Light of Liss. They had designed the weapon so that it was supposed to turn living people into undead and then make them controllable.

Griffin had steadfastly refused to watch the hundreds of hours of weapons testing videos that Kismet had recovered from the closed system that had managed the zombie storage area. He had no desire to see how the Light turned people into undead—he’d seen the results of it first-hand and that was enough. The testing reports were gruesome enough even though they were written in dry, technical language devoid of other context. One failed test had caused all the subjects' flesh to fall from their bones and their skeletons to fuse into something called a Bone Horror monster. The reports didn’t mention what was done with the Bone Horror.

As much as the Light of Liss scared him, the hope of finally leaving this abandoned facility was what kept him going. Griffin glanced back over his shoulder to see if any of the plasma cybercentipedes were coming after him, but he already knew there weren’t thanks to his SONAR. It just reassured him to see that no monsters were crawling down the hallway. He kept a pace that was a quick jog that was just shy of a run. It was a pace that he’d found he could sustain for as long as he wanted without ever feeling tired: yet another perk of unlocking his Attributes.

He just hoped that, once he got there, he’d be able to sneak past the zombies, grab the shard, and get out without a bunch of needless danger or drama.