You make your way towards Babbage outside of Oasis as Jonesy had directed. In essence, you follow the thin river leading into the large lake from the northwest, but on the northern bank. You do your best to stick close to the plateau’s cliffside as you move towards your destination.
The river itself seems to branch outward as it spreads out between the plateaus. Or perhaps much more accurately, they come and meet into one before emptying out into the lake behind you. Perhaps the confluence where they all meet was once grand in its day, but now they all join into little more than a whelp of a river.
Thankfully the water it provides is still enough to keep Oasis alive.
You turn northwards as the plateau itself curves in that direction, at which point you see the makeshift encampment along the cliffside ahead of you. Babbage’s trailer is butted up right against the cliff, with all manner of piles of scrap around it. It seems to you like any old junkyard you’ve ever seen in your life.
The whole encampment is ringed by large rubber tires stacked up on each other roughly five high, but with a gated entryway facing your direction. Every tire pillar appears to be filled with rocks and dirt, and are topped with scrawny shrubs - though at least they’re flowering.
The dirt path leading straight to it - the one you’re walking on now - is marked with all kinds of tire and hoof tracks. Which perhaps shows that plenty of traders and merchants visit him regularly.
Just like the homes and shops at Oasis, this place is also covered by a large canvas sheet on long poles. This time, you note that the very top of the poles have electronics wrapped around them. Looks like a variety of different solar panels lashed together, acting as a kind of pole-topper.
The makeshift metal gate in front you slides open easily as its wheels travel down rails laid down on the ground, but it still makes a kind of squeaking noise at some part of its mechanism. You can’t tell exactly from where, though, and that strikes you as a little bit odd. Almost like the squeak itself is purposeful.
And now that you’re inside, you can see that the various piles of scrap aren’t just randomly made or haphazard in their construction. All of them are filled with the same or similar parts, and they’re sorted in large bins relatively neatly. Most of them are simply filed to the brim and are bulging up and out of their containers.
One of the larger piles is an assortment of random steel scrap - bent ladders and warped shelves and old pans and stripped car doors and rusted poles are among the residents in there. It’s such a massive variety of scrap metal that you imagine yourself making a full suit of metal armor with them. Or maybe even an entire shelter.
Another nearby pile isn’t so much a pile. Rather, it’s all made with neatly stacked buckets filled with all kinds of cut wiring. Most of the wires are made of thick strands of copper, with a handful of buckets filled with oddly shaped chunks of some silvery metal. You presume it’s actually silver, considering those two metals are the most electrically conductive.
A pile of circuit boards catches your attention as well. It seems like a great variety of boards, from big to small and complex to simple. You even recognize a few PC motherboards in the pile, though they’ve long since been stripped of chipsets and modules. Most of the other boards in the pile are the same - stripped clean of anything that could be attached to them, besides whatever’s actually soldered into them anyway.
You come up to the trailer to find a rather robust work area situated right in front of it. There’s a massive workbench up front with bins of various projects off to each side. There’s a shelf filled with tools and small parts behind the workbench, butted up against the trailer itself.
On top of the workbench appears to be a half dozen or so objects - old electronics devices and refrigerator compressors and what looks to be a kind of engine, though it’s fist-sized. All of them don’t really look as though they’re part of a cohesive whole, and are rather different devices that are being worked on at the same time.
Oddly enough, Babbage himself isn’t out here - you sense his psyche inside the trailer itself. Oddly though it feels a bit scattered. Although the core of his thoughts are coming from within the trailer, there are traces of him all around the yard itself.
Hello Traveler, he greets you Telepathically. You have full permission to perform equitable transactions within this collective space.
“Uh, thanks,” you reply. “Glad to be here.”
Do you not wish to communicate via Telepathy?
“Just trying to give my mind a bit of a break right now, no offense or anything.”
No offense taken. It is merely our preferred method of communication.
“Our? Is it more than just you here?”
You’re piqued by Babbage’s use of a multiple to identify himself. You have only sensed his consciousness and no-one else’s thus far. Certainly nothing obvious like the Chimera, at least in contrast.
Apologies. Singularities are still a concept we are re-adjusting to, he replies. But yes, we are the only ones here.
“I think I get it,” you say. You have your own struggles with your own inner voices at times - it’s likely that Babbage is going through something similar. Perhaps all people with psionic powers have their own unique insanities they’re going through.
“In any case, I’m just here to see if you want a couple things from me,” you continue after a second. “A solar charger and a portable radio. They can hook into each other, and they’re in pretty good shape. As far as I can tell, anyway.”
Please place them on the workbench for appraisal.
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You pull the two devices from your hiking pack and place them on the workbench as Babbage has requested. There’s a nice empty spot with just enough space for the both of them, so you set them down right next to each other.
Though you fully expect him to come out of his trailer, you instead sense a great amount of Telekinetic energy rise up in the air around you. Then, multiple tools rise up from the shelves behind the workbench and hover over to the two devices.
All of them work in conjunction to cooperatively dismantle and disassemble the both of them with relative ease. You’re amazed by how well Babbage is controlling all of those things at the same time, with such precision and grace and expert timing.
Not only that, but he’s also capturing the various parts Telekinetically, and causing them to hover in the air as he works. It makes it look as though the devices are exploding in absolute slow motion, one part at a time.
You find the process both hypnotic and beautiful, and a part of you wishes to emulate it as best you can. In fact, you resolve to try practicing it when you return to rest for the day.
Once all of the parts have been individually separated from the whole, they spin in the air for a moment almost as though Babbage is observing them in greater detail. Then after a few seconds, he reverses his work and the two devices are put back together piece by piece.
It’s almost as though it is happening in reverse - that same precision that he had used to separate them is exactly the same as when putting them back together. It’s so scarily accurate that you wonder just how powerful his Telekinesis is.
Certainly more powerful than yours, that’s for sure.
After our inspection, we can easily mark these two devices to be in very good condition, Babbage Telepathically tells you once everything is back in place. We can offer you anything that you may need that is within the courtyard in exchange for these two devices.
“I, well, honestly, I don’t need much of anything from out there,” you reply. “I mean, a lot of it looks really useful one way or another, but not just while traveling.”
Understandable, Babbage says. In which case, we can instead offer data in exchange. We are both psions curious about our future and our potential, yes? Perhaps we can enlighten you further, no?
“Why not just exchange notes? I mean, it would seem like we’d both be better off if we did that. Exchanged psionic experiences and all that..”
We certainly can, however the debt for these devices would remain unsettled.
“Alright then, how about you teach me two things and I teach you one?”
This is acceptable. Is there something specific that you wish to know about?
“Truthfully, I do. I’ve got this energy weaving that I picked up recently, but don’t know exactly what it does, or how to use it. Could you maybe help me make sense of it?”
We shall do our best to impart our knowledge. Please demonstrate this psionic power if you are able.
You nod, then do your best to weave the energies as you remember them. You recall back to your fight with the Ifrit and shape a certain amount of Control energy in the air around you. Although you’re certain that you’re mimicking its actions, you don’t seem to be actually doing anything else.
As you do this, you sense a great amount of Scan energy emanating from Babbage. It appears that he is studying this power with great intent. Not only that, but his Scan seems much more rigid and controlled than yours.
It dawns on you that he isn’t performing one massive Scan, but rather a multitude of small Scans layered into each other. And in doing so he is observing the nature of the power from multiple levels at the same time.
The method is extremely clever, and you decide to try to practice a similar technique in the future.
You wonder just how much more knowledgeable Babbage is from you, and if two lessons will be enough to sate your curiosity. You find the wonders of these psionic powers to be bottomless, and your curiosity for how far you can go grows steadily as the days go by.
The underlying architecture of this weaving is familiar, Babbage proclaims after a few moments. However the outer framework is far from structured. It is rather chaotic, almost organic. Where did you acquire such knowledge?
“Ah I sensed an Ifrit do this,” you reply. “It wove it while it was attempting to burn me alive.”
This computes. Those Ifrit are chaotic minds and their work can be difficult to parse. Please allow us a few moments to deconstruct its energies.
You nod a couple of times, then realize that Babbage is using terminology that you’re not entirely familiar with.
“Architecture?” you ask. “Framework? Deconstruction? What?”
Apologies, he replies. These are terms that the psionic community has adopted as a whole. We use them to further analyze and break down our own powers, mostly for our greater understanding.
“Ah, I see. So you chat with a bunch of other psions, then. Like, the ones in Oasis?”
No. We psions are all linked subconsciously through Telepathic channels that encompass our existence. Ideas and conventions echo all throughout these channels, feeding us with information gathered from the whole.
Imagine the terms Telepathy or Telekinesis, Babbage continues, or any of the combination powers that exist. Chakra. Fortify. Orchestra. It is similar for the rankings, from D to S, or Novice to Scion. These are all terms that we have all subconsciously determined and shared through Telepathic channels enshrouding the planet.
You’re stunned at this revelation, and it takes you a few long moments to fully process what Babbage is saying. But what you eventually make out is that all you psions have a kind of hidden Internet connecting all of you, and you’re all subconsciously sharing information with each other, somehow.
“Seriously?” you sigh. “I really thought I came up with all those names. Thought I was being super fuckin’ clever, too.”
Perhaps you did create some of the terminology, perhaps you inherited others. It is all the same in the end. We all use them uniformly. How else could we possibly grade each other with better certainty?
You ruminate deeply on Babbage’s words, slowly coming to accept the reality of psionic knowledge. It certainly makes a great deal of sense - it’s your collective knowledge that’s forming the hierarchies and structures of the powers.
As someone who is still learning the very basics for some of the powers, how could you possibly claim to know the existence of something greater than what you already know? The very idea of it had to have come from somewhere else, first.
Considering how much you are ruminating on this knowledge, it is clear that you have technically learned your first lesson, Babbage says after a few moments. However, we will consider that one as complementary.
Now, let us focus on the power you wish to know about - it is called Merge. Many psions use the technique to create or destroy various objects in reality. Your Ifrit, for example, utilized this power to create methane gas by Merging hydrogen and oxygen with the right amounts. We hypothesize it is how they create and manage and heighten their flames, thus a key factor in how they maintain their dominance over their lands.
“Wait,” you stammer out. “You’re saying that the Ifrit was making flammable gas out of thin air? That’s wild.”
Yes. And now, so do you.