Inviting Jade to his Desktop was so perfunctory at this point that he’d pulled the friends, testing, and abilities menus over to the same table, only glancing at the former to make sure that he’d be clicking his sister’s name instead of someone random’s. It didn’t look like it had been necessary, his muscle memory correctly placing his finger over her name, but it was still a good habit to check one’s targets.

And it might become more important, actually.

She phased into existence just outside the seating area, walking by the time she fully loaded in, and he nodded to her, pulling up the testing grounds and abilities list in a single motion.

Around them, his desktop seemed to compete for existence with a much more blank white, tiled surface with various thicknesses of walls and several different clusters of targets, as well as a moving range on one side.

The tiling was new, but it made sense. Most people, seeing a pure white field stretching out with perfect flatness, had reported a number of really strange effects. For him, personally, it had made things seem to curve up at the corners of his vision, like it was actually an enormous ring instead of pure flatness, but Jade had seen it curving the opposite direction.

He was mostly interested in the abilities list, though.

“I’m thinking the psychic creation subset is basically where I’m going to be pulling from.”

Jade gave him a look. “Couldn’t you go for the autonomous creation subset? I would have thought that’s what you meant– like a turret carry or something.”

“We’ve got the stats for it, but nah. That would be scaling power off of calculation, where I think we can actually put together a pure concentration carry.”

She seemed to think about it for a moment, then shook her head. “What makes you say that?”

He weighed the pros and cons of telling her, but he didn’t really feel like hiding it anyways. “Got matched with a random, about our age. She had a bit of calculation scaling, but her build was almost entirely a long-range, defensive agility slash strength carry. It worked so much better with my support build that it triggered this whole thing.”

“Huh… Give me a minute. Wait. Can you bring up her build?”

He had memorized it, so it was just a matter of directing the screen to show it more than one of finding it. She’d get that minute, of course. While he was better than she was at predicting the individual members of the enemy in the moment, she’d always been better than he was about picking apart the strengths and weaknesses of a build within the complicated tapestry of items and purposes.

“So… Let me see if I’m reading this right. Defensive aggression with you on the initiation-assassination role while she follows up with utility turning into long-kiting and unkillability in the late game, with moderate damage and utility and an enormous burst trick?”

Nathaniel laughed incredulously. “I need ten minutes for that, you get it in one.”

“You were showing it to me for a reason…”

“That’s not enough for that to make any sense and you know it,” he said, injecting as much finality into his voice as he could manage. “And I didn’t even see the burst trick until she did it.”

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Jade chewed on her cheek for a moment, staring at the abilities. “Dangerous to use though. I could see you or me managing it without falling over, but just barely.”

“She did. Could still move a bit, but it basically took her out to use.”

“Can I talk to her?”

That made him pause for a second, then checked his friends list. “She’s out right now.”

“Damn. I’m gonna make her an offer.”

“What? You haven’t even met her.”

“You think she’s worth it.”

“Ugh.”

And Jade was right, too. But that reference had gotten him back on track.

“What do you think for passives? I was thinking either the creations explode on destruction or damage zones.”

Jade shook her head intensely at that. “No. We’ve got those two, sure, but they aren’t going to carry-scale. Remember that you need item scaling to be a carry. You could probably manage a double duplicate in a few weeks for the DoT if you were willing to just dump your real body on the ground, but that’s not where we want to go at all.”

“What makes sense, then? I was just thinking of PC: Throwing Weapon with explosions would be enough.”

“For a midlaner that’d be great. Lots of early game power, moderate scaling, and it frees up a lot of abilities. But you’re trying to be a carry…” she pulled up another menu, this one items, while he followed along only somewhat, narrowing down the list of abilities to take out the ones that wouldn’t be useful. Psychic Creation: Ranged Weapon, for example, would be great– if it didn’t essentially invalidate the purpose of being a carry, with a carry’s credits.

“I… think I have something. It’s a little dumb…”

“I can wait the three months,” Nathaniel said, rolling his eyes. It wasn’t like an ability set was permanent, even if removing it did lock the slot for three months. Given that each person had three to begin with and he’d only used one, that wasn’t particularly threatening.

“Item Copy and Creation Control.”

That took him a moment to figure out. “Control doubles the Concentration reservation though..?”

“One point five. But you can take it… you only need sixty to fight if you need quick reactions, so you only need forty–”

Nathaniel snorted at that. It was fair, at least. If he was reacting to something he wasn’t expecting, he was already basically screwed.

“Which brings it up to eighteen, so you could manage seven copies pretty handily,” Her smile turned predatory. “And that means you have two free skills”

“Creation Charge, PC: Plane, and a movement.”

“PC: Plane?” Jade said, then realized what he’d been getting at. “Oh! Double movement, plus defense! Got it.”

Psychic Creation: Plane was basically an unused ability, but they’d looked at it for his original support ability set in the place Void Wall now held. It was a five concentration per square meter physical-but-translucent plane that could take quite a bit of force, though physically piercing things could fairly easily get through it. The real draw was the fairly small concentration reservation and nearly nonexistent cooldown, which hadn’t been all that important as a support compared to the pure effectiveness that Void Wall provided.

Those were actual considerations here, though, and he was already getting entertained by this carry build. He’d basically be riding a flying carpet, using floating weapons that he’d use to attack from moderate-close range.

Hesitantly, Jade went on. “I’m thinking that for movement, Psychic Inhabitation.”

Nathaniel raised an eyebrow. That skill would allow him to teleport to any one of his psychic creations, but it would also destroy it in the process. It was fairly low cooldown and cost on its own, but he’d need to recast whatever he destroyed.

“I trust you on that, but are you sure?”

“I can’t think of anything better. Especially with the cast times we’re dealing with here, you should be able to essentially use the copies as teleport charges. So twenty seconds between weapon copies, one second between replacements, effective range thirty meters…” she paused, staring at the list they’d been compiling. “Off to the AI then?”

“Yep.”

Nathaniel clicked confirm on the ability set, sending it to Granduon’s balancing AI.

They’d get to see what it thought of their ability selection. The stronger it thought the base combination, the weaker the penultimate and ultimate it would tag him with.

Almost five minutes passed without a response, which worried him a little bit. Nothing else had lasted more than thirty seconds…

The menu dinged, and he read the abilities.

Then read them again.

“What the fuck?” he asked the world, more than anything.

“I… well. Okay. It makes… a degree of sense. But wow. Those are… weak. At least they’re synergistic? We need to test this on some dummies because I was not expecting that.”