Interlude: Nykka
The girl. Why is everything about the girl?
Nykka’s thoughts kept returning to Lilijoy, even as she stalked through yet another stinking hemp field on a completely unconnected mission. She allowed herself the distraction, as the dangers of the Outside, while more consequential, tended to be far more predictable. Deep in safe territory on a wild goose chase, she took the opportunity to think without distraction or interruption. According to Attaboy, Lilijoy was the only one who could help her, could give her a system that might, just might, be able to replace her own. Attaboy insisted that he was unable to do this, that he was at the wrong stage, whatever that meant.
That stupid, smart girl.
She had learned more about Quimea’s way of thinking from listening to his conversation with Lilijoy than all the previous years she had served him. And unlike Lilijoy, she had a context for what he was doing. She had done her best to help the girl, to keep her from getting drawn further into the Doctor’s web, though she had been quite hampered by the need to assume she was being watched. She never felt entirely safe on the Inside, where her senses were not under her control. She understood all too well the dangers that could pose. After all, on the Outside, she was the one doing most of the controlling.
Just a few minutes ago she had passed by two serfs working the fields. To them, she was… whatever she wanted to be. A god. She could shape their reality as she saw fit, could flood their brain with ecstasy or agony, her only accountability to the Doctor, or whoever he designated as her superior. If she wanted, she could kill them with a thought. She found no joy in her powers though, due to the profound sense of isolation she had felt ever since she was a small child. No caretaker lasted long with little Nykka. Before she learned control the only people who could spend any length of time with her without undergoing some form of psychosis were the Doctor and other members of the upper echelons of Sinaloa who had systems built without any easily accessible back doors.
Eventually, the Doctor had brought in a nanny with no system at all, which solved the psychosis issue for a time, until she began interacting with other children anyway. Gradually, she had gained a bit of control, and later, understanding, of what she was doing when she influenced those around her. That led to a very happy time when she was surrounded by friends her own age who loved her and would do absolutely anything she asked. Unfortunately, the Doctor moved around a lot and her friends had experienced severe withdrawal symptoms when she was removed from them. She was never told exactly what had happened to them, but she never saw them again.
Slowly, Nykka had realized that she was to blame, that she poisoned those around her and must keep herself apart, if not physically then emotionally. Everyone else seemed to see it the same way; she was aware that there was an informal network of communications within the clan devoted to tracking and avoiding any unnecessary interactions with her.
Somewhat ironically, she had a more difficult time controlling her own brain with any precision. According to the Doctor, this was due to the fact that her brain had been integrated directly with her system since before birth. She had conscious access to direct commands and controls, but her unconscious mind had ways of undermining and changing her neurochemistry back when she attempted to alter it away from its preferred homeostasis.
She hated her system, but it was as much a part of her as her own body. It was her. It made her a pariah-god, it chained her to the Doctor. She knew that her attempts to replace it were doomed to failure, but she persevered anyway.
What was that ancient civilization that said ‘liberty or death’?
It sounded vaguely Roman to her, but she couldn’t be bothered to look it up.
With a sigh, she forced her thoughts to her surroundings, feeling obligated to at least pretend to a cursory search. The last sighting of the green man, as the serfs were calling him, had been somewhere in this agricultural complex. Pausing her movement for a moment, she filtered out the ambient noise of wind and rustling leaves. There was a sound, something out of place…
Is that laughter? Definitely out of place.
She moved cautiously, tracking the sound, until she reached the edge of the crops, or rather an island within the field where stones had been piled and even an opportunistic tree had grown. A girl was talking, whispering really, with a man. A green man. He was nodding as he chewed.
She could sense the girl's system, knew her identity as Maria Mendez, as Recolectora2166, and at this range could already tap into her senses. From the green man, she could sense nothing at all.
“You tell the funniest stories,” Maria was saying, as she watched the man eat. He was hairless, and his skin, in addition to being green, was loose on his emaciated figure, as if he had once been much larger.
“Shit, that’s nothing,” he replied between bites.
The girl drew a breath at the curse word and then giggled. Nykka rolled her eyes.
“There was this one time...” the man continued. Nykka tuned him out and began to circle around behind him, removing herself from the girl's senses as she did. She stayed just behind the last rows of plants, using the girl to watch for any signs that the man had detected her movements.
“...and he was picking glass out of his ass for days!” the man finished. He looked at Maria expectantly, but she didn’t respond. Nykka watched as he waved a hand in front of Maria’s eyes.
“Well, that’s a new one,” he muttered. Then he froze as he felt Nykka’s blade at the back of his neck.
“Shit. That’s a sword, isn’t it?” he said.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Don’t be hasty,” he said, raising his arms. “I’m no threat.”
Nykka could see his hands shaking. No, she thought. You really aren’t.
“Who are you and why are you here?” she demanded.
“Well, that’s kind of a long story…” he began.
Chapter 11: Tokimeku
The week passed quickly, once Lilijoy allowed herself to slow down. She had a minor epiphany about the path of joyful anticipation after her time in the field, the realization that the only thing she needed to do was to find and follow her own nature. If that took her farther along the path, as it certainly seemed to, then she was doing well, and if it took her in a different direction, then that was fine too, as there might be a path closer to her true nature to find. It was far more important to cultivate and develop her sense of self than to figure out and follow any set of arbitrary rules she might develop.
That this way of thinking was probably part of the path itself, and thus she was following the path by not following the path was not lost on her; it carried the scent of paradox that indicated truth. The path was full of such minor contradictions, cosmetic paradoxes she had started calling them. To do or experience what she was anticipating made the anticipation go away; should she then never do anything? Or should she always focus on the next thing, even when she was finally doing something she had been looking forward to for a long time?
Of course, the answer to both of those questions was no, but it was by asking them that she came to a better understanding. It was fascinating to her how narrow the path was when she tried to follow it, but how often it was underfoot when she didn’t. And yet, it was simple enough to leave the path, as her experiences of trauma and corruption indicated.
The solution to the first ‘cosmetic paradox’ was presented with the renewed sense of anticipation she felt when she sat down to craft. Each session spawned a burning desire to learn more, more about Hand Weaving, more about Leather Working, more about Paper Making and Glass Working and… well the list went on. Every completed project, every lesson learned, left her anticipating the next day’s experiences all the more. Like curiosity, it was a hunger that grew as you fed it.
It didn’t stop there either, for as she learned more individual crafts, she began to understand more about the depth of crafting on the Inside as a whole. As far as she could tell, the skills involved in ‘natural’ crafting were exactly the same as on the Outside. Certainly, she was able to draw on her internet memory to quickly boost herself to Initiate level as soon as she got her hands on the tools and materials, and if the new crafts were anything like Hand Weaving, she doubted it would take long at all to reach Apprentice. Where crafting on the Inside diverged, however was exactly in the tools and materials, past the very basic beginnings. This was because the Magi portion of the skill was more nuanced and complex than Lilijoy had ever dared to think. She had imagined that applying magical effects to a crafted item might be as simple as choosing from a list of possibilities, but it was in fact closer to a negotiation among three parties; the materials, the techniques and the crafter themselves.
No, she corrected herself, not three parties. Three assemblies. Me and all my mana types, affinities, desires and predilections, the materials, their qualities, shapes and variances, and a thousand different techniques for manipulating, preparing and applying mana. And they’re all interacting and creating feedback loops throughout the process.
The art of crafting magical items then, was one where the crafter’s understanding of all the details and potential interactions was merely a starting point. Currently she was experimenting with weaving various plants into bracelets. In theory she had six value points to add, given her current level of Upgraded Apprentice, but in practice, she was far from achieving an effect that matched her, already quite small, potential.
Plants in general seemed to like prana energy, which was no surprise, so if she focused on adding this while she wove with grass, she could make a bracelet that would add one point to her Vitality. Unfortunately, the mana would slowly drain from any imperfections in the weave, so at best the effect lasted a few hours. If she used a more complicated braid, the effect seemed to last longer, unless she made more mistakes. Iris leaves seemed to prefer generic mana, and she had been able to create a bracelet that added two points to her mana well, after a string of failures that she still didn’t understand. As with the grass bracelets, the effect diminished as the mana drained out of imperfections in her weave.
Cattail reeds were also happy to accept prana, but they seemed to prefer the mana energy she associated with the Charm: People trait. Her best effort so far had created a bracelet that had a mild calming effect on herself and those in a small radius around her. It was so subtle, she hadn’t been sure it was doing anything at all until she brought it to a training session with Rosemallow, who had demanded she remove it immediately.
“Get that peace-weave away from me,” her trainer had said, an expression of distaste on her face.
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Lilijoy had apologized, but inwardly she was jubilant that someone had recognized something she had made, and it even had a name. “So my bracelet is called a peace-weave? Who else makes them?”
Rosemallow had looked down, and if Lilijoy didn’t know better, she might have thought her trainer even looked a little guilty. “River villagers in my home territory. They used them to protect themselves from… monsters. That one you’ve got there barely deserves the name though. Imagine a whole town festooned with the things.” She shuddered.
Lilijoy could read between the lines on that easily enough. “Master Rosemallow, what kind of crafting do you do?” she asked to move the subject along.
Rosemallow had frowned. “Wood.”
Obviously she doesn’t want to talk about it, Lilijoy thought. Too bad for her.
“What do you make?” she asked.
“Piles of goo out of nosy students,” Rosemallow replied.
Given that Rosemallow dispensed bark and bite in roughly equal measure, Lilijoy had decided to let the subject drop for the moment. Ever since Averdale, Rosemallow had been more gruff than usual, and a bit more prone to training methods that led to respawn. Nonetheless, Lilijoy persisted, thinking particularly of what Professor Anaskafius had said about both his and Rosemallow’s teaching techniques and time, how he characterized it as time-bounded suffering. A big part of harsh training was the knowledge that someday it would all be worth it, a trade of temporary pain for long-term gain. Lilijoy felt that her path was very much about her relationship with her future self and she had begun to find joy in the midst of the horrific training inflicted by Rosemallow.
In this way she began to see the connection between her path and Rosemallow’s, which led her to suspect that there might be more to Rosemallow’s path than struggle with a dash of sadism. She still had been unable to pry the ‘three words’ out of her magic mentor, the words that Eskallia had used to change the monstrous oni from foe to… eventually friend, but she suspected they must have something to do with Rosemallow’s path.
I wonder if Eskallia left that memory in the library too? That would be cheating... but how cool would it be to see the whole crew when they were young?
She realized then that the odds of that particular memory being in the library were slim, as it involved Shadow. She had only visited the library once during the week, and then only to explore what her hundred credits might be good for, but she hadn’t been able to resist asking about memories from or including Shadow while she was there. In reply, the library first offered her a list of over ten thousand entries, which narrowed to a few thousand when she specified Insiders, and then narrowed a bit further when she specified pookas. Pookas were, evidently, very fond of the name ‘Shadow’.
She nearly gave up at that point, as the discovery undermined the already tenuous case she had built for her theory. If there were many pookas named Shadow out there, it was no longer an unlikely coincidence to have run across a couple, especially since she didn't truly know if the Shadow who had grouped with Eskallia and Professor Anaskafius even was a pooka.
She was further hindered by not being able to cross-reference her search by other people associated with memories. Just for fun she sampled a few of the memories recorded by pookas named Shadow, and found they were the most mundane activities possible. One of them was literally watching paint dry, while another was a view of a pot of water in the process of heating up. As far as she could tell, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of such memories.
Either pookas are the most boring people ever, or they were messing with the library system on purpose, she had realized. She knew for a fact that the first wasn’t the case, as pookas were well known to be mischievous, enigmatic and reclusive. The memories of people who weren’t pookas were even more problematic, as the creatures were always obscured in some way, or even completely invisible. When they spoke, it was whispered, and it was always the same.
Shadow I be, maybe you see,
a pact you must seek for even a peek,
for favors, an oath, binding us both
That was when she had given up on finding Shadow in the Mystic Library. It seemed that one wouldn’t get past this first rhyming offer without making a binding promise of some kind, one which no doubt precluded sharing memories and information about what happened next. It disturbed her to find more evidence that oaths were a very real facet of the Inside, but more bothersome was the irrational feeling that she somehow knew even less than before she started the inquiry.
That feeling was soon dispelled when she turned her attention to her library credits. As she had suspected, they could be used to purchase memories of skill use; insights and breakthroughs. It turned out to be a somewhat tricky system to navigate, as the memories were organized only by skill, level and cost.
She had quickly realized the potential trap. If she spent credits on an expert-level memory, she might not have any context for its contents, and even with her perfect memory it might take some time, years even, to receive the full value. If she aimed for a lower level she might purchase a memory of something she already understood and waste the credits entirely. It didn’t help that the ‘pricing’ seemed entirely arbitrary, or nearly so, for it was clear that some skills were valued more than others. When she asked, the library explained to her that the cost was determined by demand, value and the skill level and completeness involved, as well as ‘arbitrary factors’.
“What does arbitrary factors mean in this context?” she had asked.
Whatever
I
want.
Thus...
arbitrary.
Well that’s just great. Talk about institutional friction.
“Do you have any memories about skills in general, how to analyze, reduce and combine them?”
No purely
or primarily
internal memories.
Nice try
“So that rules out most of the magic related subjects?”
Effects are
documented.
Causes are
not.
“I could see someone cast a new spell, but not have the memory of how they figured it out.”
Precisely
That put a damper on many of her plans for how to use her credits, but also relieved the nagging anticipatory guilt she had been feeling about taking shortcuts. It seemed the library could enable her to move forward in her understanding of concrete knowledge and skills, but that understanding principles and concepts would still be her responsibility.
Her first experiment was with a skill memory she could purchase for a single credit, Swimming. While she had no problem kicking around in the pond during her Flash training, the skill had yet to show up on her character sheet. Lilijoy had noted that there seemed to be some minimum threshold for that to occur, so she was curious to find just where that limit was. She turned on her notifications, so that she could see just when the skill became official, and then entered the Initiate level memory, recorded by an Academy student many years before.
Thankfully, the library made sure there was a certain level of species compatibility, so she wasn’t learning how to swim as a quadruped or something. Soon, she was in the water, experiencing a lesson of how to coordinate her arms, legs and breathing in a variety of strokes, though no skill notification was forthcoming. Unlike her memories of the sacking of Averdale, or Eskallia’s encounter with Echelon, this memory was efficient and impersonal.
She was Lim Zhi Hao, an Outsider, and she was summarizing everything she had learned about swimming in order to see if she could trade it with the library for a credit. As she swam, she thought about what she was doing and why, the names of the strokes, the timing of the movements, the techniques for breathing. She herself was already a Journeyman swimmer so her thoughts on the subject were clear and organized.
From that experience Lilijoy understood the skill memories much better. In some ways, they were simply an upgraded form of the instructional videos from the internet archive. Indeed, Lilijoy could easily retrieve all the information she had learned from her internet memory, though some of the precise terms varied. ‘Breast stroke’, for example, in Lim Zhi Hao’s mind was ‘frog swim’, which made much more sense.
A far more valuable discovery was that she could interact with the memory at her maximum internal speed. Why she hadn’t realized this before, she couldn’t say; perhaps it was the more immersive and personal qualities of the historically important memories, or perhaps she was simply becoming more fluent with handling the input from the library with experience.
Rather than stay in the library and pile on more memories, Lilijoy had made her way to the pond and run through the lesson, this time in her own body. In less than a minute she received the notification she was a Natural Novice, and after about thirty minutes, she raised that to the Initiate level. She stopped there, but it was clear she could raise her level further with minimal effort, if she wanted. Needless to say, she was thrilled with the notion that she could easily learn any skill she desired with a minimal time investment, but she suspected that the true value would be found in the most expensive Journeyman and Expert level skill memories. Those started at twenty credits and went far higher, well past what she could afford. The lowest Expert level skill she found was Sailing, for sixty credits, which she thought must be a reflection of demand. The Garden was a single continent, and as the Academy was emphatically landlocked, there probably weren’t many people knocking down the library’s doors for that particular skill.
She was most interested in the Healing skills, but the situation there was disappointing. There were many, many different areas of study, but all of them were focused on specific technical knowledge. She was sure that learning the functional anatomy of desert nagas at a Journeyman level would be absolutely fascinating, but she wasn’t prepared to spend five credits on it. It was relatively inexpensive since it was categorized as incomplete; an element of the larger skill Medical: Healing: Anatomy.
Didn’t humans spend a year on the Outside studying their own anatomy when they trained to become medical doctors? she had thought at the time. How is it even possible to collect enough species to be considered an Expert?
If she was going to reach her goal of achieving Expert in Medical: Healing it seemed that the ability of the library to help was limited. She shrugged that off as a minor setback. What was more important was to follow Arpentra’s direction to understand her skills better. She had spent a fair amount of time over the week meditating on the subject, pulling up her character sheet and trying to see deeper within it, trying to perceive some kind of underlying metadata. She feared that the sheet itself was blocking her, but she hadn’t yet come up with a way around the nicely packaged data the Inside supplied for her.
Still, Lilijoy thought as she considered the past days, it had been a great week. She had become much faster and more efficient with using Nandi’s boon, had spent hours exploring the Trial space. She had retraced the steps of her Trial, had learned that if she had taken the upward leading branch of the cave it would have eventually delivered her to a snowy plateau overlooking a field of bubbling blue pools and geysers, which she recognized as the home to the giant geyser squids that had tormented Anda on his Trial. She had explored the giant cavern, now short one Nasty Hanging Tentacle Monster, and found an exit at the far end that led up and up, until it reached an abandoned complex of trap-filled chambers, culminating in the room Magpie had described to her, the one with the statue of the four animals holding source gems.
She had even found Runk, and followed him around for a while as he aimlessly wandered, looking for someone to help him find his rock. All this viewing did slowly drain her available soul energy, but not nearly so much as moving things in and out of the Trial space. She was cautious in her experimentation as far as that went, once she realized that using her soul energy impacted her own mood. It was a mild effect, one she could easily override with her system, but larger expenditures left her less… alive, somehow. Since she was cultivating a virtuous cycle of positive energy, she wanted to make sure she understood fully before she spent it carelessly, and she was equally cautious when it came to using her system to adjust her mood.
When she examined her soul vortex while using her system to make arbitrary changes to her emotions, it was quite clear that the induced feelings were qualitatively different. If they showed up at all, they were gauzy, ephemeral. The curiosity she was feeling as she made the changes created a far stronger impression within her soul vortex. It was clear to her that the context of an emotion had more relevance, to her system anyway, than the chemistry. That said, she could kickstart an emotion and then it would impact her behaviors and subsequent feelings, so it was a complicated subject; thus her caution in simply using her system to patch over the feelings created as she drained her reserves.
On the Outside, her life was simple, though equally full of playful experiments. Now, in addition to her midges, she had a small fleet of houseflies. Their larger form factor was vastly easier to work with, plus she had received the unique experience of tasting with her feet. Adapting her work with the midges to their much bigger cousins was simple, and now she had the ability to deliver larger amounts of her system anywhere within range. The two species worked well together, as the midges were very good at hovering, and the houseflies were fast and nimble. She had also been able to make them at least semi-autonomous, capable of following complicated instructions and decision chains. Wind was still a factor, but no longer a deal-breaker.
She felt very good about her ability to handle a small group of enemies, to the extent that she was a little scared of what she could do, scared, but also full of anticipation. She and Anda were, once again, in the hovercar traversing the Amazon wastes, now on a mission to pick up Attaboy. Unless they were ambushed, or attacked from vehicles, she thought that the outcome would be inevitable. Once she got a foothold in Sinaloa Territory, there would be no need to retreat, no need to consolidate and plan how to avoid Sinaloa while making their way to Taos. She was going to spread across their lands, liberating as she went.
Sinaloa isn’t going to know what hit them.
Now there was something to look forward to.