Apparently what was next was getting his ass beat. Having discovered some of the weapons that he could use, Martin decided that he needed to spend the day learning exactly how ineffective he was with them. He’d tried pointing out that he was expected to be helping Ruth, but Martin countered by explaining that he was only expected with Ruth if he himself was not around to supervise Adam. When Adam escalated to begging, the old man just laughed at him. By the end of the day Adam was praying to anyone who’d listen for a skill that made him fight better. Sadly, he got no response.
Once more, he gained quite a bit of knowledge about how to fight using his kitchen knives, as well as about how Martin fought, but he continually struggled to apply it. In desperation he headed back into his mindspace in the hopes of finding a solution. While he didn’t find what he was looking for, he did make an interesting discovery.
While flipping through his skill category tabs he noticed a difference. If he was being honest with himself, he would have to admit that it was unlikely he would have noticed it if he wasn’t specifically looking for new skills. One of the previously locked skills in the Discipline section had been made available to him. It was one of the skills at one end of a linked chain, and not the same chain as Disappointment.
Shhhhhhhh: Children are noisy, but every Mother knows there are times they need to be silent. When they haven’t yet learned to be quiet on their own, a reminder is needed. Sometimes it needs to be gentle enough to soothe a crying baby to sleep. Other times it needs to pierce through an argument. Shhhhhhhh silences whomever a Mother needs it to, be it one for a long time, or many for a shorter period. Even mana behaves in the presence of a Mother.
It certainly wasn’t a skill that would help him fight Martin, nor help with his Chores, so he didn’t buy it. He still made a note to remember it for when he next spoke to his torturer about his skills. Try as he might, he had no idea when or how he unlocked it.
None of his other class skills had unlocked yet that he could see, so he searched through his trade skills as well. Once more he found nothing that looked like an immediate fix, although there were some improvements. Cooking had the most useful sounding skill, knife work. It wasn’t something fancy and powerful, simply a tool using passive, but it would help if he could figure out how to apply it. Obviously it wouldn’t help with the actual fighting parts, but maybe it would help him with the stabbing and cutting portions.
Groaning, he fell backwards to float in the void of his mind. He was grasping at straws, and he knew it. He had skill points to spend, but had no idea what to spend them on as of yet. Martin was kicking his ass, and he had zero improvement to show for it. To top it all off, the old bastard had told him the duke was expecting them in his study the next day with some new instructions. Martin refused to speculate on what it could be about, but Adam’s mind was racing with the possibilities. He had told himself he was looking for a solution to constantly losing to Martin in their spars, but in reality he just needed the peace of his mindspace to help calm him down before going to sleep.
Opening his eyes, he screamed and dropped to what passed for a floor. Apparently you could still be startled while inside your own mind, sudden emotional bursts being one of the few things that could get around the emotion deadening effect of the mindscape. Picking himself up, Adam was impressed with how quickly it brought him back to calm. He still managed to force some annoyance through though.
“What in the names of the gods are you doing here Szellem?” he growled.
The long hair, scraggly, nasty beard, and strange leather vest hadn’t changed since the last time Adam had seen him. Annoyingly, the smirk hadn’t changed either. Worse yet, the chuckling was still sinister, a traditionally bad sign from the ancient weirdo.
“I can still hear your thoughts, kiddo, and I’m not ancient.” Szellem didn’t sound upset in the slightest.
In a surprisingly self-aware moment of clarity Adam responded, “I’m thirteen, everyone is ancient compared to me.” He ruined it with, “And you are ancient to all of them. So, yes, you are ancient.”
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“Fine, but I’m only as old as I feel, and I feel groovy.”
Adam just stared at the strange man in his mind. Having never heard the word before, with due consideration, he decided groovy must mean dirty, or possibly disgusting. Maybe it could mean badly dressed. Breezy? The vest with no shirt looked chilly. Supremely ancient was still a strong contender.
“Hey! Enough of that shit! You know I can hear your thoughts in here right?” When Adam just reflected Szellem’s smirk back at him, he said, “Oh, very funny.” Suddenly he turned around and threw his hands up, crying, “Gods! This is what I’m talking about! I’m arguing with a teenager!”
It being the first time he had heard Szellem sound upset, Adam was naturally quite curious. Cautious, yes. But curious. “What’s got your beard in a twist you old weirdo?”
Hearing the geezer’s sigh was almost comforting, for once. It was a return to normalcy, or the closest approximate concept, that indicated that whatever was bothering him wasn’t a permanent problem. Rubbing his face and eyes, Szellem groaned, then said, “Being stuck inside your mind for this long was supposed to be a nice vacation for me, but your mind can affect me to some degree.” He rose up, an irritated look on his face. “I’m not sure if you are aware, but teenages have a lot of hormones.”
Adam simply stared blankly at the man. Hormones was another word he had never heard before. “What are hormones?”
Another groan. “Gods, your education was terrible. Please, when you are older, burn that orphanage to the ground with the teachers still in it. Normally I wouldn’t condone that sort of thing, but I think they deserve it.” He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. The effects weren’t too strong, but he needed to be constantly vigilant or the changes could sneak up on him. “Hormones are the shit that is making you crazy, driving your emotions back and forth, up and down.” He opened his mouth to continue, but Adam beat him to it.
“WHAT?!?!?! Get them out! How do I get them out!?!!?”
It was too much for Szellem. He’d spent two weeks locked in the kid’s head, constantly battered by his emotional instability, and this was the final straw. He tried to hold it, but after only a second of staring at Adam’s fear filled face he burst out laughing. Deep belly laughs he couldn’t hold back rolled out of him. He couldn’t breathe, not that he needed to, but the physiological responses had become psychological ones over his lifetime, so he was doubled over trying to stop. Watching the youth’s face turn from fear to anger just pushed him further. He could hear the kid’s furious wrath at being tricked and laughed at, but he couldn’t stop laughing to explain.
When he heard his intent to leave, he struggled, finally managing to gasp out, “Stop. Wait.” It was all he could force out for the moment, but trying to do so helped him to gain control. The boy was still furious, but he was waiting.
When he finally gained some semblance of control he managed to adjust his mental and physical states into something more calm. There weren’t many perks to being dead, but full control over your consciousness and its avatar was one of them. Provided you were in the headspace to make it work.
“Wasn’t laughing at you, kiddo, I was laughing at the question. I wasn’t tricking you, you just caught me by surprise is all. Hormones are chemicals in your brain, natural things that everyone has. They aren’t something that you can just remove, and you wouldn’t really want to. Hormones are what tells your body how and when to grow. Super useful stuff, but they have a few side effects. Mainly emotional instability.”
Adam thought while Szellem paused. Now that he’d calmed down again, he could try to puzzle out what he meant. He knew that his life couldn’t exactly be called stable. Nor did he have a lot of support, or education. What he did have was a new handy skill that liked to explain stuff to him. It even worked from inside his own mind. Sadly, just because Mother Knows Best could dump knowledge into his head, didn’t mean it made sense. Adam had no idea what a chemical formula was, nor peptides and glycoproteins, and he didn’t really want to. Luckily, it also gave him the same basic breakdown that Szellem did.
He was going to be growing because his hormones said so. Hormones made him grow, but they also made him crazy. There was no cure for crazy. The only way out of the mess he was in, was through it.
As if the next few years of his life weren’t going to suck enough already. His only hope was that the hormones would make him crazy enough to miss the worst parts. He didn’t kill the messenger, but he said some very bad words at him.