New Objective! ⛝

■ Remove the Trukaron Underground virus

"How am I supposed to do that?!" Terra asked out loud.

It was a sign of how far gone Cassie was that she didn't even ask what Terra was talking about.

[I have made a contract with the world-system. It will keep our secrets if we drain and destroy its virus. And it will not interfere with anything we have to do in the attempt.] Sly explained.

'Fine.' Terra gathered her wits together by a force of will and found somewhere safe to gently lower Cassie into a sitting position. "Put your head between your knees. It's going to be okay."

She was relieved when Cassie did as she was told. She hadn't been sure her friend would even hear her. Then again, if whatever this was had been that drastic and obvious, it surely would have been noticed and shut down by the world-system before, wouldn't it?

'Sly, the world-system didn't leave this access point on purpose, did it?' Terra asked, wondering with a spark of suspicion if there was some way the parent system could have still been gaining potential from its subsystem by leaving it a tiny window of access to people from which it could feed on.

[I do not know.] Sly answered her impatiently. [We'll probably figure that out as you work. Remember how we explored Cassie's channels?]

That had been Sly's most recent lesson for Terra on how her reality sense and Hacking skill worked.

He had made a copy of Cassie's channeling tree when he screened her, instead of just reading it. He had then projected the tree into Terra's mind to explain to her what it was.

Every living creature contained and generated potential. That core feature of life made up the trunk of a mortal being's channeling tree. Simple, daily functions and energy needs expended miniscule amounts of potential but in a heavy myriad of ways. Those many small and twisting paths made up the root system of the channeling tree. The roots were able to divide potential out into an even spread, but could otherwise be easily overwhelmed with too much energy running through them. A build up of potential beyond what they roots could handle would either burn out the tree, or create an alternative escape in the form of a talent, which created a branch off of the trunk.

Sly had explained to her as they looked together over his projected copy of Cassie's tree how these channels were like the bed of a river. They could be changed with enough pressure while new, but would deepen over time and with use. A deeper channel was much harder to change, but would also become easier to use. A channel with enough depth could be given additional outlets in the form of enhancements.

Terra had asked Sly why he didn't show her her own tree to teach her all of this sooner, but he had said that was something she had to discover and explore for herself.

'I remember. What about it?' Terra asked him now, still kneeling beside her friend and barely keeping her patience.

[You know what her tree should look like, so you'll know what has changed. I want you to look- don't touch- for that change. That will be what is linking her to the virus. When you find it, you're going to have to grab it with the will to drain it all.]

'Won't that just corrupt me too?' Terra asked him, thinking this sounded incredibly dangerous. 'I don't really fancy becoming a living virus.'

[I don't know.] Sly answered her calmly. [You could always leave Cassie there. We can drop the contract.]

'Absolutely not!' Terra rebelled, furious that he could even make such a suggestion while sounding so relaxed and reasonable. She wished he had been nearby so she could read his body language. He gave much more away in his physical form than in his synthesized mental voice.

[Then we don't have much choice but to try, do we?] Sly asked, this time sounding resigned.

'Damn it.' Terra thought, realizing what was going on. Sly knew he couldn't stop her from trying to save her friend, so he was giving her the only plan that might work. 'You don't think this will really work, do you? You just know I'm going to do something stupid either way?'

[She can be taught.] The rueful thought was almost warm in her mind.

'Okay. Can the world-system separate you from my mind? With that firewall or whatever?'

[Not without breaking our bond and forcing me into being a subsystem. I'd rather be corrupted.]

'Here goes nothing then.'

Terra sat down beside Cassie and closed her eyes. Apparently some day she should be able to see the channels of others without doing this- the same way she felt their influence without having to numb the rest of her body- but for now, she had to calm her mind and block out as many of her senses as possible to actually visualize what she could more vaguely feel.

When she brought Cassie's channeling tree into focus within her mind, she saw right away what had changed with her artistically trained eye. A tendril like a parasitic ivy had wrapped tightly around the trunk. In Terra's mind, it took on a red, evil hue, ugly against Cassie's pastel purples and pinks. She knew in reality channels had no colors. That was merely the way her mind filled in her impressions of them.

Taking extreme care to not reach out to the red tendril, she followed it with her mind's eye. As she did, she realized there was a sort of... coating around the red channel. Something it could not reach through, but which she had a feeling she could. Like a one-way mirror but for influence. That must have been the anti-virus measure the world-system had put in place. As she thought about that, the sheer coating took on the blueish tone the world-system's windows had used.

What the channel led back to was not a tree at all. The virus was instead something more like a cloud of vines. A tangled root system with no trunk and no branches.

Terra almost reached back out to Sly with her mind, to ask if this was what all system channels looked like, but she stopped herself. She didn't want to draw the thing's attention towards her system. She could look closer at Sly on her own later.

The cloud of evil vines had an odd feeling to it though. A sense of influence that was potent but directionless.

Terra decided that feeling must be all the half-formed influence that was the corrupted, self-hoarding potential. She was not positive she could grab it like she had grabbed fully shaped influence back on her homeworld... but she thought she could.

Despite thinking that it felt possible, she hesitated to do so. Did she really have more will power than a system? Even a minor and corrupted subsystem was still a being beyond mortal comprehension in many ways.

After a moment of contemplation, Terra drew back from the virus and decided she needed to look somewhere else first. She needed to know exactly what tools she was working with, which meant looking inside herself.

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Sly had implied that she would be able to see her own tree, so she willed herself to do so.

At first, she could find nothing. It was like trying to cross her eyes to make them see each other and her head began to ache in a similar manner from the strain. She tried to force it by sheer stubbornness, but that only made her head begin to ache worse.

Gasping in pain, she lost her inner sight altogether and came back to her physical senses in a rush. Cassie had leaned into her shoulder and was trembling in what the people now standing around them asking if they were okay obviously thought was some kind of terror or shock.

"We'll be alright." Terra said to the concerned strangers. When they seemed like the would linger, she made a face mouthed "cramps" to the women in the group.

They nodded in sisterly understanding and got their guy friends to leave the young women alone.

Once they were alone again, Terra took a deep breath and focused herself on meditating back down. This time, when she tried to look at herself she didn't so much attempt to look inward as she let herself relax and tried to feel her channels from within, rather than seeing them from without. She felt out the bounds of herself, and let the image begin to form up around her.

When the walls of her channels started to fall into place around her, dark black and inky, with an opalescent sheen, Terra understood why Sly had told her this was something she would have to discover and explore for herself. He could not have shown her from without what she would only see from within. Despite being an internal view, she could still see the whole of her own channels at once. She did not bother to explore the tangle of her roots, but paid close attention to her trunk and branches.

The trunk of her channel tree was scarred on the inside, rippled with shiny patches like burn scar tissue. At one point, there was an offshoot that was not her own, yet joined to hers. Its electric green color came not as a clue to who it belonged to, but from her understanding already that this was her bond to Sly. Without a moment's hesitation, she willed her scarred trunk to seal shut across the opening, not dislodging it, but sealing it off. She hoped that would keep Sly safe, even if something happened to her when she made this attempt.

An outflowing of influence on the other side of the seal she had just put in place told Terra that Sly was aware of what she had done and he wasn't happy about it. She waited for a moment, but the wall of her trunk held against his attempt to batter his way back in, so she moved on.

The first of her two branches was deep and steady. She knew instantly this was her shifting ability. It felt familiar and comfortable. She knew what it could do and how much she could push it without breaking herself.

The second branch was older, ripped out of the heart of the worst of the scarring and with a similar scarring inside itself. Despite the age, it was thinner and the second branching off of it was like a budding twig, something she would have to grow into. That being her Elusive enhancement, she pressed into it, feeling over the delicate new walls and what their purpose was. It felt immature, as if some day it would grow into something far greater than it was now, but for now, it offered her independence. More specifically, it protected her from the influence of others. It made her reality sense resistant to the touch of other reality senses.

'Resistant to corruption too?' She asked it hopefully, pushing more potential into the branch to strengthen it in anticipation of an answer.

The answer was not something audible or even sensed. It was just something she knew of herself.

Yes. She would be able to resist corruption better than others could have as well.

It occurred to Terra that she was something odd. Her channeling tree was still much more like Cassie's than the twisted mass of the virus's channels, the capabilities of this talent made her function much more like a system internally. She wasn't sure she liked that thought.

With a newfound sense of confidence, Terra let her senses rise back up out of herself to see Cassie and the virus again. She found that place where the viral tendril was wrapped around her friend and was about to grab it to do as Sly had instructed her when something odd about it struck her. The tendril was connected to Cassie in the same way Sly was connected to Terra.

In a moment of inspiration, Terra changed her plan. She did not reach out right away. Instead, she began to lay out a series of intentions in her mind, much as she had learned to do to manipulate the outcomes of a screening. She knew for certain if this idea was going to work, she would have to Hack these changes all at once when she seized the corrupted potential.

First, she laid out her will that the potential come to her. Then she planned a new structure she wanted to use that potential to reshape the tangled vines of the virus into. Next, she formed the will to break off the virus's connection to the world-system, which would merely be completing something the world-system had started itself, but never completely finished as she had suspected. Lastly, as she held those first three steps in consideration with a tiny thread of will running through them, she formed a promise of future power on the condition of purification and partnership.

When her vision was a cohesive whole upon the palette of her will, she did not hesitate to reach out, grasp and enforce it upon the tendril she grabbed with her talent.

The potential that came coursing in through the channels she had only just explored was nothing compared to what brushing against the Interim had felt like, and yet this sensation was not outside of herself, but within herself. It burned like acid running through her veins. She sucked in breaths of surprise, but did not let her determination falter. She could feel the desire of the corrupted potential eagerly chasing the promise of more power she had baited this trap with. She also felt when it realized the cost and started to rebel.

It tried to turn back. Tried to pool itself within her instead of moving on where she intended it to go.

'No... you.. don't.' She snarled at it mentally, pushing hard for it to keep moving forward. 'You're meant... to... be used.'

At the same time as the potential began to resist leaving her again, the virus began trying to connect to her. Its tendrils wrapped around her channels, trying to force an opening that would let it take back what she was pulling from it.

Rather than resist letting it join to her, Terra made an opening. The moment the virus clamped on, she forced its confiscated potential back into itself fully infused with her will.

She heard the virus shriek with the same searing sensation she'd been going through a few moments before. Now it was the one being reshaped by the will of another and it didn't seem to like it much. It tried to withdraw from her, but she clamped the wall of her trunk down around its invading tendril, forcing it to remain open to her influence.

The more of the corrupted potential she managed to purify through the prism of her willpower, the more easily the rest followed suit until the second half of her newformed influence was rushing out of her like a torrent of disinfectant through the virus. The vine-like subsystem was writhing with more than pain. It was shifting and changing.

Terra's influence finally began to peter out when there was nothing left to take from the corrupted subsystem. However, the last step was yet to come. For that, Terra first snapped the tiny tether still connecting the virus to the firewall of its parent system, then let her hold on the virus go as well.

The moment she released it, it snapped away, recoiling like a rubber band towards the only connection it had left. One which Terra's influence drew it towards. Rather than cutting off that connection as well, her influence strengthened it, forming it into a permanent bond once the last traces of corruption were gone from within the subsystem.

With a deep gasp of air, Terra came back to herself again and turned to watch Cassie anxiously, to see if her attempt had worked.

Cassie was no longer shaky or disoriented. Instead, she looked as if she were staring off into space. As she started to come back to herself, a shape shimmered into existence on her lap.

The basketball sized creature in Cassie's lap was like a living thorn bush with glowing red spots for eyes and two roses for ears, one pink and one purple. It had nubby little limbs made out of twisted clusters of more vines. And it looked completely confused.

Terra slowly re-opened her bond to Sly, who immediately snapped into her thoughts: [What have you done?!]

'It's alright. I purified it. And, hey, now Cassie has a system seed like she wanted.'

[You... what?]

Terra felt a sizzling sensation in the air and the now familiar feeling of Sly expending his potential to reshape himself. He dropped out of the thin air into her lap to stare with intensity at the thing in Cassie's lap.

By that point, Cassie was putting a hand to her head and saying: "What... happened?"

"You got your system seed, remember? From that tap in the secret lab." Terra said, not wanting to fill her friend in on all the details if she didn't remember them for herself.

The vine creature turned and looked at Terra with two marbles of glowing red light. Despite having a face made entirely out of vines, it managed to look both confused and nervous.

Cassie was too busy looking at it in awe to realize her seed seemed to be afraid of her friend. "I did? Yeah I... I guess I did!"

Terra got back to her feet and offered a hand to her friend. "Come on, the captain is going to be looking for us sooner or later. She can't wait around expecting us to cause chaos forever. Let's go share your good news."

"Oh, yes, let's!" Cassie agreed, eagerly accepting the help up with one hand while she scooped the vine-creature up in the crook of her other arm. "I can't wait everyone to meet you, Rosy!"

Sly pounced to his place on Terra's shoulders and watched "Rosy" with narrowed eyes.

Rosy curled in on itself as much as it could, wrapping its little nubs around Cassie's wrist.

[We are talking about this when we get back to the ship.] Sly thought sternly to Terra.

'Yeah, yeah.'