It was night in the world outside the microscopic reality that Vita and the other Vita's existed in. The little teenage girl was fast asleep, using a dozen or so vines as pillow. Of course, no thorns or any other potentially harmful material were present in them. Across a large stretch of land and underneath it, the boy is half asleep and talking to Vita about his life before it all fell apart. While Vita doesn't quite care about whatever he did or was before they met, it was only a fair trade to monitor and regulate any signals going through his brain so that he doesn't break quite yet.

Was it cruel of Vita? Vita doesn't care, and wouldn't want to deal with a kid bawling their eyes out at how their life turned out. But it did tickle Vita's microscopic side that he was part of the reason Benjamin's grandfather had died. Not like Vita would ever tell him. Because Benjamin was the perfect age where experiments with volatile organs didn't result in explosions. Experiments with the draconic cells that were stolen from that Rubert-Ree guy would always react negatively when created outside of Benjamin, but pulling them back under the skin caused them to mellow out. And if too many of them were present in a single area, Benjamin would express discomfort in various ways, like sweating and having difficulty breathing. But since it was all in the name of figuring out how to use it for Vita's own purposes, Benjamin would just have to deal with it.

And hey, if Vita could use these cells, then of course Benjamin would reap some of the rewards too.

Diana mumbled something in her sleep before flipping over in bed, pulling the vines with her. Vines which were much too durable for her to tear apart, so Vita silently shifted around to loosen the tension in them. Speaking of Diana, she was still more or less useless in battle. And despite her friends always trying to help her in their ways, there was simply no way for her to fight at the same level as either Wendigo-Vita or Heracles. This didn't make much sense to either Earl or Beatrice, and they would argue again and again that trying to match a person who has been training in combat their entire life and a wendigo was silly.

But that didn't mean she didn't stop training with a spear, at the very least she could learn how to defend herself in case Vita wasn't around. With a spear, she could also fight from Vitas back as well. And since this way of fighting isn't exactly rare, she was quick to learn how to fight in sync with Vita. She would always find openings when fighting from the safety of Vitas back, and in duels it made the already fatal duo slightly more lethal. If only her self-esteem would understand that.

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Vita had, at first, thought about messing around with Diana's DNA to see if anything fun could be done to her. But with all the people around and how much attention their group already got, Vita had to be satisfied with changes that weren't visually present. Simply things, really, like modifying her bones to be more durable and her muscles to be stronger without getting too big. She still looks normal, and unless someone takes a closer look at her, and nobody would know what had happened.

With two living test subjects to do some smaller experiments on, and some lethal ones on those who would whisper shit about Vita, there weren't that many experiments Vita could actually do without someone catching on. So to not bring too much troublesome attention to Vita, and the group too to a lesser extent, some experiments had to be done on the current form Vita had built.

Sure, every time Vita did try, it was met with catastrophic failure to almost the same degree as the draconic cells did. But it was fairly easy to use the somehow, infinity growing bone-like cancer to crush the result to a more easily torn apart material. The bone-cancer probably drained magic or produced magic on its own, but it wasn't as important as what Vita was actually focused on.

It was that book Vita had found, the one about a cave deep in the World's Teeth where the explorers were turned into crystals and somehow still alive in that state. If this was true, there were plenty of questions that needed to be answered for how that is being done. With what little Vita had bothered remembering from the different classes Diana went to, was it using magic to transmute one biological creature to a material that could store souls in it? Did it simply kill the host and then mimic what the host would've reacted with to being in such a state?

A highly unpopular option that was mentioned in the daily Vita meetings that Vita had with itself, was to send out another group of Vita's into the wild and experiment there. But this was quickly shot down, and the Vita's were sent to clean up duty on Diana's skin to make sure she didn't get any diseases on her. To experiment outside the Wendigo body would mean sending out the living-to-crystal book, a risk too big in an area where people highly in tune with the surrounding magic could find it. Especially that Professor Camille, she already used crystals for her magic and would no doubt be the first one to not only find the book, but be able to use it for her own gains.

Vita had to move somewhere with plenty of opportunities for experimentation, where no one would bat an eye if Vita were to brutalize some poor thing. Picking up Diana's hand that had the communications ring, Vita used the eye in the middle of its forehead to properly view the magical screen that appeared, and quickly found where the Questing Board was located. A nifty way for students to travel around the Kingdom to put their theory to the practical test. Perfect for Vita had in mind.

And as luck would have it, there was a request from someone both Diana and Vita knew quite well.