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Noctoseismology
Book 4 Chapter 8

Book 4 Chapter 8

"Okay," Akane said, reviewing her own notes. "Teaching mad science to others is reliant on a few things. Requirement the first: the student should have good foundations in the fundamentals of mad science, allowing the student to create predictive models to explain the desired effect. Requirement the second: the student should be made to understand the desired effect and the qualities, both abstract and concrete, which render it desirable and must be achieved. Requirement the third: the student should have a desire to learn the particular skill being taught, and why it in particular would be useful in their pursuits."

"That all sounds solid to me," I said. It was Thursday, and after I'd gotten bored with the hologram projector yesterday, Akane helped me figure out how to turn lab mice into aluminum. I was a little surprised we still had lab mice, but apparently, the loan from the superscience department was for two months at a time, and we still had a few days before we could give them back.

"I'm not sure I'm comfortable with how many requirements it makes of the student," Akane admitted. "The student basically needs to self-teach with guidance from the teacher."

"Well, setting aside the fact that mad science is ultimately a very personal and unscientific pursuit," I said, "you do need to consider that... well, pedagogy is communication, and it takes two to tango. If the Socratic Method can teach us anything- and it can, it's been tested for two thousand years- then it's a perfectly valid pedagogical style to simply guide the student as they search for the truth."

Akane blinked, as though I'd given her the final puzzle piece.

"...I think I've got it," she said, as the reified energy of ideas and creativity swirled around her, invisible to onlookers without eyes that could spot mad science at fifty paces. "Yes... Yes, I get it now! I get it!"

"Congratulations on your third completed thesis, Doctor Sakurai," I said, applauding her. "You're on the same footing I was when I came here, which was six years into my career; at this rate, you'll reach parity with me by Christmas, and achieve full demiurgic enlightenment before your next birthday. Whenever that is."

"Valentine's Day, actually," Akane said. "Mom planned it that way because she thought it'd be good for my love life."

"Aw, that's sweet."

"Except that Valentine's Day is always really near Super Bowl Sunday, and so my birthday parties always happened alongside Super Bowl watch parties. Which, personally, I really liked because I got to eat birthday cake and watch the big game, but you and Lisa don't want to watch sports with me, so..."

"Who said you can't have two birthday parties?" I asked, shrugging and mentally googling the 2023 Super Bowl- February 12th, two days before Valentine's Day. "Eat cake while watching the Super Bowl, then eat some more cake two days later on a romantic evening that you share with three hot bitches?"

"I can live with that," Akane said, nodding. "Ooooh, I bet I could squeeze another thesis out of that. 'With the assistance of mad science, how many dicks can one girl take at the same time?'"

"We'll make sure your mothers are out of the house before we conduct that research," I said, patting her head. "Anyway, are you all set? Need anything else from me? Because if not, I'm about to go down into the dojo and teach Nicky some martial arts."

"I think I've got everything I need to make the second to last word in mad science transformation gadgets," Akane said, nodding. "I'll probably need your help figuring out how to use it effectively, because while you might be a professional fighter who knows the human and inhuman body inside and out, and also is really good at automatons, I'm... still not, because that kind of proficiency is totally mundane and takes a really long time to develop, and I haven't really started. But! I'll be done with the gadget sometime this afternoon, so hopefully you'll be done with your instruction by then?"

"Why is my specialty in automatons relevant here?" I asked.

"It turns out that at this penultimate stage of transformation, I can transform people into pretty much any form that it'd be possible for a demiurge to build an automaton in. A dragon, a velociraptor, a gorilla, a giant, a fighter jet... And while Doctor Wales said I don't strictly need to know how to build automatons myself to transform people like this, some help from someone who does would be nice."

"That's... a pretty big fucking deal. Automatons can do and be a lot of things. What the hell does mastery look like, if that isn't it?"

"The absolute pinnacle of mad transformation includes a lot of things, but the biggest one is transforming into impossible forms," Akane said. "Right now, on the wrong side of the cusp, I can turn you into a cyborg, but a cyborg can still naturally do all the stuff you do. But with this final advancement, I could turn into a living stone statue, or a mobile cloud of smoke, or a slimegirl!"

"I'm sorry, what?" I asked. "Are you telling me that slimegirls are the product of peak, legendary transformation, when done by mad science?"

"Yep!" Akane said, nodding. "Why, did you know one?"

"I got my dick sucked by one at a convention," I said. "She was, like. Translucent red. Kept her phone inside her body, I could see the screen turn on when she got text messages. I said some, uh... well, you know how I dirty talk. You're telling me I called a legendary master of transformation a dumb slut?"

"Or someone who'd been transformed by them, probably permanently- which takes resources you'd only use on yourself or close friends," Akane said. "But, yes, you apparently did do that."

"...Considering the meme that exists for a reason of the trans woman with a master's degree whose fetish is being treated like a dumb slut or otherwise some form of sexual object that is expected to not think very hard, I have the sneaking suspicion that this slimegirl, the equivalent of a fucking Nobel Prize winner, was a trans woman."

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"Possibly! So, if I can finish the gadget sometime this afternoon, will you have time to help me?"

"Probably, yeah," I said. "It may take a while. See, generally, when you're learning a new martial art, about an hour of training in a day is the upper limit before you hit sharply diminishing returns 'cause of overtraining. But, because everyone involved has some mad science implants installed to keep us fresh and at our peaks, I reckon I can squeeze about six or so hours of training into Nicky and Lisa every day, if I do it smart, with frequent breaks. Something like the Pomodoro technique. Which... y'know, may stretch it out a bit."

"We only have until Wednesday, and I doubt you'll want to do any training then, what with the raid," Akane said.

"I'm almost a master of mind control," I said, grinning. "I can very much put some useful muscle memory in Nicky in just a week."

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Kali, also known as Arnis (coming from arnes, the old Spanish word for armor, from the same root as the equivalent English harness) or Eskrima (coming from esgrima, the Spanish word for fencing), was something of an umbrella term for the traditional martial arts of the Philippines, which were quite popular among martial artists. The arts were known for a smooth blend of open-handed and weapon techniques, in a manner that was generally regarded as more accessible and more effective than many other martial arts that had weapon techniques, the chief point of comparison being some forms of kung fu.

Most of these facts weren't terribly important to Nicky, but martial arts training isn't supposed to just be about hurting people more effectively, and history was a pretty standard inclusion in these curricula, so I included some of that in her breaks, when she put down the training sticks- in this case, both were weighted identically to her stun hammer.

With as much mind-control mojo as I had, the periods of training were a bit unusual, with very little demonstration being done by me, the instructor... at least, with my own body. Instead, Nicky invited me into her brain, where I could see through her eyes, feel with her nerves, and move with her limbs. After a brief calibration period, I got into a rhythm, where I would perform the correct form a few times, release control, and tell her to repeat what her body had just performed, and we'd practice with some back-and-forth corrections until she got it right ten times in a row, then we'd move on to the next form. This was a fair bit quicker and more effective than the traditional method, thankfully.

Kali had, formally-speaking, twelve recognized angles of attack. However, it was common to start beginners off with just five of them: downward chop to the neck from both sides, sideways chop at the lower ribs and kidneys from both sides, and stab- or palm strike. Even though I was training Nicky to fight with what was essentially a warhammer, and not even the sort that had a spike on end of the shaft to make for an ersatz spear, I was still not omitting the palm strike or the stab from the rotation of angles, because one, she'd still have a hand free for palm striking people while fighting with her one-handed weapon, and two, I wouldn't send a student into battle with that glaring of an omission in her foundation, and I sure as hell wouldn't be doing that to my girlfriend either.

Once I was pretty sure the absolute basics were in her muscle memory enough to do the drills properly- itself taking a full 25 minute Pomodoro (Hey, it works, and I ain't fuckin' with it) session- I set her to doing drills for another 20 minute Pomodoro, monitoring her closely the entire time, making occasional corrections to her form, which, thankfully, I didn't have to do very often. While she took ten minutes to stretch, put down the sticks, get some water, and take a breather- one of the side benefits of her implants was that, now, she was kept in perfect thermal equilibrium by her armor, and so would pretty much never get sweaty ever again. This had been discussed, and while Lisa had argued in favor of the possibility of Nicky muscling flexingly around in sweat-soaked workout clothes, Nicky had argued that boob sweat was the bane of her existence and the worst thing for about living somewhere that got above 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and so had won that particular argument.

A wise decision. I didn't have it as bad as her, admittedly, but as a trans woman who would never get bottom surgery, I've dealt with boob sweat and ball sweat, and they both sucked.

After an hour of the very basics and drills, enhanced by very potent mad science, Nicky was ready for the start of her sparring with Lisa. After all, Lisa needed practice too, and Nicky needed the chance to really hammer home these lessons, and make sure she could rely on this muscle memory and respond instantly in a real fight.

Now, granted, I'm pretty sure Nicky didn't quite enjoy the fact that she couldn't take off the training vest that took away her superpowers for these initial spars, whereas Lisa was fighting her in War Form- because that was how Lisa always fought- but training was supposed to be harder than the real thing.

She flipped me off every time I told her as much after getting her shit rocked by three hundred pounds of fang and fur.

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"Okay, everyone," I said. "Akane has made her breakthrough, and with my help, we've developed some transformations that should make us even safer."

"Roxy assures me that these transformations are wholly metaphysical," Akane added. "We'll all still look and feel exactly the same afterwards, we'll just be a lot harder to hurt, let alone kill."

It was Monday morning, and Akane and I had been working on the transformation design ever since she finished her first version. It was big, about the size of an old-school desktop tower, and it was not terribly portable. One day, she'd refine it into something she could install in her own Virtual Machine, and then be an inherent shapeshifter to surpass myself and Lisa. For now, though, transformations of this caliber could only be done at home.

"I attempted to devise a transformation that would make us nearly impossible to kill," I added. "Via the creation of a sort of brain backup mechanism, which would allow us to survive death by transferring our consciousnesses into vat-grown clone bodies. Unfortunately, I do not as of yet have the mastery required to build things that move consciousnesses around between bodies, nor do I even have the level of skill to produce human cloning vats, even though that's a subset of one of my specialties."

"Oh, what, you can only make us even more invincible, and can't even swing some basic cortical stacks and sleeve vats from Eclipse Phase?" Nicky sarcastically complained. "Pft. Did you even try?"

"So lazy," Lisa added.

"Yes, yes, you're all very funny and fuckable," I said. "Now, Akane's gone under this particular knife already, with me and an automated control unit at the helm. As you can see... she's fine."

"I'd offer to demonstrate by jabbing myself with a knife, but we've confirmed it with multiple different scanners," Akane said.

"I'm offering to go under it next, but if anyone is particularly antsy to go first..."

"I don't want to be last," Lisa said.

"Nor do I," Nicky said.

"Alright, well, I guess I'm going last, then," I said with a shrug. "Anyhow. This transformation shouldn't have a recovery period, so after we're all transformed, we're going to go back to our training. The transformation shouldn't make our bodies feel any different, either, but just in case, we should work out the kinks and get used to them now, instead of on Wednesday, when it's go-time. Any questions?"

I glanced between Nicky and Lisa, neither of whom seemed to have any questions.

"Nope," Lisa confirmed.

"Nada," Nicky said.

"Right, well, in that case..." I clapped once and rubbed my hands together. "Let's get started."