Ed closed the door behind him as he set foot in the apartment again. It took him a while, but he explained everything to Belle honestly. He didn’t leave out any information as long as it was something Buddie allowed him to say.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much. He couldn’t tell her anything about the company at large, or about what the world was like beyond Earth. All he could tell her was that she would not be hired if she failed to complete her work too many times.

And that the consequences were not something that she would be able to deal with.

After making sure that she at least understood the consequences of her actions, only then did he feel good enough to return home.

Zara was on the couch waiting for him, playing games on her phone, which she had bought recently. Hearing the door behind her, she switched off her phone, and turned around. “What do you want to eat?”

“Not sure. But let’s just have Buddie send food over. No need to worry about cooking today,” Ed said.

“Mm,” she hummed while stretching. “It’s still a little early then. What do you want to do in the mean time?”

“I want to get some practice in,” he said as a violin appeared in his hand. He moved some of the furniture away so that he could have a wide open space, as he didn’t want to break anything.

“Just keep doing what you were doing. No need to let me bother you. I’m just going to be fiddling around,” he said with some embarrassment, remembering how he constantly tripped and fell last time. He didn’t want her to watch that. At least, not again anyways.

Zara listened to him and turned her phone back on, however, she was still looking up at him from time to time when he was looking elsewhere.

Ed nestled the violin in place and began playing. With no enemy around to target, and not wanting to disturb Zara, he could only target the violins effects at himself.

He began by making himself take a step, then another. His left foot shot forward with the sound of the violin, then the same foot awkwardly took another step, making him almost do the splits.

Umm. Better than falling over, I guess? What do I need to do here?

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He remembered that he could only have one action correspond to a note. And as it turned out, taking a step with his left foot, and taking a step with his right foot where considered as entirely different actions here.

Figuring that out, he set the actions to two different notes and played them in an alternating fashion until he bumped into the chair in front of him.

A little clunky. And very awkward. But, I can definitely make use of it to throw people off and confuse them.

There were so many individual actions that a body would have to take in order to move around and do anything that it was incredibly impractical to try and use the violin to move his body around. It was much easier if he just moved around normally.

However, although it was useless when used on himself, it would be absolutely terrifying when in a battle. If he was being chased down by someone and was about to die, all he would have to do is play a single note and they would trip all over themselves, giving him the chance to flee.

Let’s see what else this can do. After fiddling around with the violin a bit more, he pulled a chair over and sat down. Getting himself comfortable, he held the violin out in front of him, and watched as it transformed into a piano.

Even though he knew this could happen, and had seen it happen in his soul, it was still a crazy thing to see. To watch something change so drastically at his orders sent a shiver down his spine.

The violin expanded and twisted like it was being pulled on. Shaped by the hands of an invisible entity. It didn’t take long for it to twist and change into a piano, and land on the ground in front of him.

I never really got around to trying out the others. What do I do here? After a short moment of thinking, he decided there was no better option than to just jump right into it.

Treating it just like the violin, he thought of an action and pressed down on one of the keys. However, instead of his head tilting to the side like he had planned, it instead did nothing.

Huh? He played more keys randomly with similar thoughts, but they did nothing. So the piano does something different? That’s just great. I’m right back to square one.

He continued to play the piano, that is, if pressing random keys could be considered as playing. He even ran his hand across all the keys from one end to the other, but no matter what he pressed, it seemed like it was just an ordinary piano.

There has to be some kind of a connection between the two. He began thinking of the violin, and suddenly both of his feet took a step forward. Given that he was sitting down, his feet knocked into the piano instead.

What? Pressing that key again, his feet once again bumped into the piano.

Excited, he cleared his mind and began experimenting with renewed vigour. After a few minutes, he had figured out a few things.

The first was that the piano worked similarly to the violin. In that once he assigned something to a key, it would be saved, and he wouldn’t have to think about what he wanted to do while playing. Even when he cleared his mind of any thoughts, his legs would still kick forward when he pressed that key.

It’s good to see that I don’t have to start completely from scratch. I don’t even want to think about how much effort I would have to put in to figure this out if that was the case.