So far, the discussion had been brief from his end, though Jonah was talking enough for three. Tule was tired and more than that, he was severely wounded. Medjel was so good because it worked with Nano. Without enough Nano, it was marginally better than hyper-glue.
He had burned Allocation to protect Korl, Telane, and Cura on the Run. He burnt his first few points of Allocated Nano to reach Korl’s arm in time. There was no other choice, anything but the Toothpick would have seen Korl dead.
He had burned his entire Free Nano to heal himself and even then he had been forced to burn more on the Run, because any serious wounds meant instant death. If Jack went down with the shield then it would have meant instant death.
Inside the Core, he didn’t have any Free Nano left and couldn’t risk dropping below a BenchMark. Then he’d used Bound-Nano. He’d do it all again if he had the choice. He wondered how Korl would take it.
His Nano was naturally regenerating but it was too slow, his wounds would kill him or he would lose control of his foundations and that, that would kill him.
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“Why did you say it was ‘theoretical’? So it is possible.”
“It would kill you, almost assuredly. It’s better than death but it takes incredible resolve and control of your Nano to rip apart your body at a fundamental level. As well, the odds of you dying immediately are substantial. So, functionally impossible.”
“Not. Impossible.” That came from Tule.
“Not impossible?” Jonah’s curious eyes gleamed as his mind whirled. “Wait, you burnt Bound-Nano?” Something new.
Jack interrupted, “Wait, is that what’s wrong with you?”
Tule answered both questions with a nod.
“If you can control Nano then can we heal you?” Jack took out a few Magno-Tubes. Tule paused then grabbed one of them.
“It…” He paused for a long moment, his mind somewhere else, far. It looked like had made some sort of decision, “it should help.”
“Do you need more?”
Maybe Jonah should have checked with Jack, before offering his Magno-Tubes freely.
“Unless you have more, all mine are empty.” Jack looked into one of his bags.
It was weird that every one of his Magno-Tubes was empty, all empty. How? He remembered now, he forgot to reopen them after using them on Yuma’s Pod.
“It’s not a question of more.-”
Jack took out and opened Magno-Tube after Magno-Tube and the containers started to fill, streams of silver coming from the holes the Toothpick had punched into the giant crab’s back.
Jack shoveled over the pile of quickly filling Magno-Tubes.
Jonah looked torn, “Crab aspected-Nano? Directly replacing Bound-Nano? That’s one experiment I wouldn’t do.”
Tule wasn’t paying attention, he already had some idea of the risk. He swirled freshly gathered crab Nano into his hands.
“I will need some time.”
Jonah turned to Jack, “If you didn’t know how to burn Nano then how were you healing yourself?”
“I don’t think it burns Nano when I heal.” He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t feel weaker when he was running current through himself. Jack sighed, he missed his Zappa already. His electrical generation was slow and whenever it managed to build up to a reasonable amount it would find new, minor wounds and drain to heal him. He had taken more damage than he thought.
Leanne was studying Jack, he didn’t notice.
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Jonah had said it had been two cycles, apparently those didn’t have a fixed length, even in the Labs, so Jack still didn’t know how long that was supposed to be. All Jack knew is that he slept, woke, and had repeated that twice.
As the niggling and minor wounds across his body closed up and his Affinity came back online he found his electrical regeneration had drastically slowed down after reaching half-capacity. It would take much longer than he would like to recharge to full at this rate.
Up to half or a third was quick enough but realistically, if he wanted a full charge, he would have to find an external power source. He thought of Yuma’s zapps then he wondered if it was possible to upgrade the Zappa.
Tule was busy cycling crab-aspected Nano into his foundation. Jonah, after learning from Lea that they were floating on water, was busy analyzing a sample of the liquid and doing math on his portable. Jack tried to make sense of it but quickly abandoned the effort after an extended explanation from Jonah that ended with, “and that covers ‘x’, now to calculate ‘x’ we would use…”
Jack, not knowing a tactful way to disengage from the conversation, simply walked away. He’d take another lap around the rim.
He ran into Lea sitting on the edge, looking out.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“See something?”
She started then relaxed, “Oh, it’s you."
Jack sat down next to her, she scooted a small bit away and in response to his Yuma-tier eyebrow, told him, “you stink.”
Jack thought for a second then planted the Toothpick into the chitin, unlooped his belt, reattached the bags to it, and set it on the ground. He debated over his clothing for a moment and realized it wasn’t its original color anymore. Well, as far as he could tell in the dim light. He settled on slipping the AI disk into one of his bags and dove over the edge into the water far below.
The water was further below than he had thought. He started to feel the worm of panic but then, he hit.
The water felt nice, it reminded him of the only time he had seen more water than a bag could hold, it was with Yuma. She’d probably enjoy this. He thought of her heart and her Electro-Constitution. Maybe not. He swallowed a mouthful of it. It was kind of flat and had a tang to it. He thought about how to describe the tang. Dead, but alive? No. Dead and sterile. Closer. Not having a deep experience with drinking water he dismissed it.
He roughly rubbed himself all over and he felt the ichor and blood start to come off. He appreciated the feeling of being clean even as he felt his shirt disintegrate. He probably should have taken it off.
Finally feeling clean, he took a deep breath and looked around, where was the crab?
He heard a repeated clanging sound. To his right, not close, but not far either. He followed it, and as he drew close he recognized the sound as metal on chitin. Suspicious, he latched onto the soft and water-logged crab tendon. As he rose higher he realized that climbing back up was going to be a problem. Near the water-line the tendon between the shells was soft, but higher up it was much harder than it had been when the crab was alive.
He punched his gauntleted fist into the wall. Dammit, if he only had a blade, he punched again. He felt something punch out of the knuckle of his gauntleted fist. He jerked it out and it slid easy, he caught and re-stabilized himself. Slowly retracting into the Gauntlet from his knuckle-line was a sharp triangular point. He punched again, nothing this time.
Recalling his experience with the Shield and GreatShield he worked backward with his thoughts and patterns.
Someone was calling him from above but he didn’t hear it.
It was easier this time, he remembered seeing the punch-blade attachment at the first Terminal. He worked his way, he thought ‘blade’ and it punched out. Very nice. A new line of text showed up on the inside of the Gauntlet.
MORAB CORAB NFELZI: 23%
Was that for the punch-blade? Interesting, maybe he could figure this out on his own.
He kept trying out the punch-blade, eventually it stopped coming out. Was it an energy requirement thing? He felt the pull from his stored electricity but this felt different than the Shield attachment. A lance of pain shot up his arm as the Gauntlet drained his stored electricity down to a scrap. He dove deeper in his Affinity trying to scrap together enough control to keep a tether between his brain giving the command and his left hand holding on desperately to the crab flesh. The Gauntlet fought to drain him completely.
He held, the patterns and channels he was forced to build and reinforce by the electric snakes kept scraps of electricity under his control.
The only thing in his body that had any electricity left was his hand and his head and the faint slithering cable between the two.
He wasn’t sure how long he was hanging there but his fingers had reached their limits. His pinky had given up a while ago. The electricity wouldn’t propagate in drained cells so it was spreading in its naturally slow pace from his brain. His eyes, being directly connected to the brain, came online first. He saw his feet hanging down. They’d be good to get some current into, why did his feet have to be so far away.
He slipped and a hand caught him. That was convenient. Now not having to constantly feed electricity to his hand he managed to look up. Lea was there, her blade punched into the tendon.
“Thanks Lea.”
Her eyebrow twitched, “Sure. Are you going to grab the wall yourself? You aren’t light.”
“Can’t, I’m almost completely drained. It might take a while to spread.”
“Drained of what? Electricity? You should still be able to move.”
Jack tried to shrug but it failed as the signal from his brain died along the way to his shoulders. He settled on shaking his head.
She was staring at him, they both looked at her hand wrapped around his wrist. Damn, it was looking like he may have to answer. They looked back at each other, her eyebrow inexpertly raised.
“No, if my cells are drained completely I have to wait for other cells to send the first bits of electricity, to get the cells started.”
They hung in silence as his cellular electricity slowly propagated.
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“Tule, I’ve run some calculations. It’s far from ideal, you’ll be pa-”
“Quiet. They return.”
Leanne broke in first with a question, “Jonah, do you know where we are? How are we staying afloat with the four giant ports in the side of the shell?”
Everyone paused as they thought, except for Tule, who slowed down his Nano cultivation fractionally.
Jack watched Tule work. It was complex stuff and Tule would periodically jam a knife through a bone to deposit Nano inside. Jack watched him do it to individual ribs on the edges of the mass of Medjel.
Jonah started to calculate on his portable with Leanne looming over his shoulder providing input.
“Tule.”
He paused a beat then continued his work.
“How are you doing that with Nano?”
“It’s called aspecting Nano. Ideally you would have a Terminal do it but we can as well. Just much less efficiently. And safely."
“Are you replacing Bound-Nano?”
Tule looked at him, “Yes.” Then back to his rotating orb of crab-nano and another rib.
“How are you going to deal with the Medjel hole?” It was the middle of his torso that was almost pure Medjel at this point.
“Medjel is receptive to Nano, replace the Nano surrounding it and it will diffuse into the Medjel. It will recreate the missing Nano-Trace.”
Nano-Trace? Jack had heard that word, there was a lot of new terminology to learn. Before he could ask, Tule glanced at him again then started to speak.
“You don’t know what Nano-Trace is. It’s the term for the imprint that your Nano has on your body. The patterns it moves and affects a body. The Nano that floats around you. It’s all together called a Nano-Trace. Like a fingerprint. Unique to everyone.”
“Can you show me how?”
“It isn’t easy to learn but it’s not hard either, at least once you can sense individual Nano. Once you can hold awareness of individual Nano then it becomes easier.”
“Ok done. What next?”
Tule stopped completely as a near completely aspected ball of Nano collapsed in his hands. Tule stopped himself halfway through cursing and smoothed his expression from his uncharacteristic remark and started rebuilding the cloud of Nano.
“How can you already sense them?”
Jack debated telling Tule more about his Skills. If there was one person more trustworthy than Yuma it was probably the guy that had half-killed himself assaulting the Cryo-Core’s SI right next to him. It was also, perhaps, one of "who-knew-how many times" he would be able to get a complete answer from someone who seemed to know a lot about Nano.
“Well,” Jack paused, he had lost the ‘feel’ of it. He walked himself back through the process as he explained it out-loud to Tule.