---Richard---
Richard stared at his missing arm, watching as it slowly healed back into place.
Fucking A that was an experience all right. Richard felt enlightened – he had confirmed something all right but for the life of him he couldn’t say what that something might be.
What could he do with this information? Nothing right? Rip in pieces.
To understand just what Richard was going through, you had go back a week. Step one after ‘activating’ his mantle and nomming down on his sandwitch nest, was to explore his new capabilities.
His existing skill to spread his defense into the surroundings was bolstered by the upgrade to his mantle – to be more accurate it was subverted at its core with only its shell and trim remaining the same.
Like before, Richards defense spread through an area, although now the process was quite a bit faster. It was like he was spreading tiny invisible threads in all direction with the space between them filling with goop – like wire bones surrounded by a thick invisible and intangible gel. Richard could deploy this field across a room in roughly three minutes using the majority of his aether. Ongoing costs then dropped to a fraction of a percentage once it was deployed.
Unlike before, the goop itself did not resonate with his stat field. Instead the edge of his skill created a thin membrane protecting the inner part. Richard could tell the entire ‘weight’ of his defensive stats were mirrored across the entire surface area of this ‘volume’. ‘Something’ then happened with the inner part that hooked in with his mantle and let him change things.
Instead of full access to whatever underlying tools there were – or a completely obscured black box – what he now had was something like a mixture of the two.
The default state was nothing. By using his AI as an interface he could ‘request’ something from the system. After that request and a confirmation detailing any complications, he would be given a new panel with several manipulatable variables upon it.
Asking for X would give him back a panel with controls for a, b, c and d.
Asking for Y would give him back a panel with controls for c, f and g.
It was as if Richard was emailing off requests and getting programs back in the attachments – as soon as he read the terms of service and signed off the liability form of course. Quite a few had overlapping controls while others had nothing he could modify. Some allowed him to apply multiple at once while most were a 'one at a time' sort of deal.
The majority of new states were built off the old instead of a replacement for them. That meant instead of completely changing how everything worked, each request modified the default by adding or removing stuff from it. Sometimes the bits that were added and removed barely mattered. Sometimes they were seemingly unrelated and sometimes the ‘side effects’ were completely obvious results of the new abilities but mitigating them was a nightmare like pulling off a bad patch on a wall then realizing the entire wall was rotten.
One of the very first tests was related to Richard asking for a visible field. Easy enough.
First Richard applied it, then selected a nitrogen reaction and wavelength output in the visible light spectrum before adjusting its sensitivity and confirming its main side effects as acceptable. This combination gave every single aether active – and most aether passive – devices an aura of sorts. Minute bits of aether reacted and lit up the air around nearly everything – It was like a heat map with stronger sources giving colours higher on the spectrum.
Modifying this test a bit even gave an incredibly useful classification of what 'rank' various materials were – with the exact colour of light directly relating to its rank instead of just its quantity. Quite alot of Richard's 'devices' were a hodgepodge of different colours showing him what the weakest link was comparatively. It felt like using a blacklight on a cheap hotel room – was there really such large holes in everything?
The main side effect of this 'law' was a miniscule drain on all aether devices as bits of their energy was radiated into light. It was such a small drain it was negligible for anything Richard was powering…but it was significant enough that the drain damaged previously ‘stable’ materials and items with esoteric aether heavy elements inside of them. If Richard left an unpowered AI in this field, all of its phase crystals would shatter within the hour as their unique structures weakened and unraveled catastrophically.
Considering unpowered AI should last for years without breaking, that change was pretty significant. it also gave a hint as to a single way chaotic aether - or 'mana' - might break technology by changing a single small rule.
The main reason Richard had asked for this ‘rule change’ was that it lit up the edge of Richards zone letting him confirm its shape and extents much more accurately than whatever feedback the skill had given him. If he was standing in the middle of an empty field the ‘zone’ would create a blobby shell about him like some giant invisible slime or melted gumdrop. If he chose an enclosed area – like a simple stone box a meter thick – the field preferred filling the container like a liquid. It only leaked out if he actively pushed against it, despite being able to pass through physical materials as it expanded.
Shape of the zone aside, Richard next tried fixing the ‘side effect’ of this aura revealing rule to no longer break unpowered devices using the tools provided to him. By shrinking the reaction range, completely enclosed devices were no longer drained – an AI inside an insulating casing was safe…but the useful bit of the law failed as quite a few aether heavy devices no longer glowed.
A full request to try and ‘fix’ this side effect resulted in a completely different law – this one containing dozens of side effects each much more annoying to deal with than the first one Richard had tried.
Nothing was truly free in the end. Every state had pros and cons and Richard slowly began to appreciate just how well the default they were given was put together.
After a few more tests including ones proving Richard could make a zone mimicking the effects of space and the moon Richard moved on.
His current request had started by Richard requesting the ‘default’ form of aether.
Every single law he took for granted seemed to be something built into it. An artificial addition – a product of intelligent design.
Every rule change he made was built on the current base and a lot of the side effects were made through interactions with the existing rules.
So, simple enough question. What was the original base? What was aether like…before the system? What base rules might be hidden as future rules tried to mitigate them? What rules were the hardest to break as they were far away from this theoretical base nature of aether?
A simple enough goal but one the chatbot in charge of granting all of his requests seem to want to keep away from him at all costs. Stingy fucker. It being locked up made Richard want it even more – but the chatbot kept drowning him in nested ‘are you sure’ messages warning of instant death and directive subversion.
Finally the messages changed. The response was no longer formatted in obviously automated way. This was personal.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Just saw this,
Giving you a one time specialized allowance to create a nested field for study. Don’t tell anyone, it’s mostly legal with your admin status and sub-system creator title, but I don’t want to have to justify the opportunity against fairness laws considering your status should ‘not’ be activated yet.
Confirm 'special sandbox' then confirm 'oldest checkpoint mimicry'.
Notes: Don’t stick your head in if you are attached to it. Oldest checkpoint predates most of the universe and requires active isolation from most natural laws just to mimic properly. You won’t be able to abuse this for a challenge or request this allowance again. Special allowance will break as soon as you leave the sandbox. Special allowance costs quite a bit to maintain so I’m directing the system to dump all monster costs near you in the name of fairness. Longer you spend there the more you’ll have to deal with. Minimal aether controls are available in the sandbox so gather any tools you want first and don’t rely on too high of a tech branch. Finally because your sandbox will be isolated and this is itself an opportunity shaped like a reward, theres a good chance you won't get any achievements for the experience. Not impossible, but its like gaining stats for gaining stats - the system doesn't approve unless something else is at play.
PS: Request again for base 1-3 if you want less lethal and more useful ‘defaults’. Good luck
~R
Richard had latched onto his special snowflake privilege. He prepared then notified his friends both to what he was doing and the potential monster swarm afterwards. Then he activated the request as directed, and finally found himself staring at what he could only describe as a miniature black hole.
In the center of his laboratory a sphere roughly a meter in diameter floated. It warped the light that passed through it, lensing the sides in strange-looking ways – sometimes twisting it, sometimes not. Sometimes the image fliped or mirroed itself for a moment. Sometimes the colour suddenly inverted or tinted into a monochrome shade. Sometimes the edges of the sphere seemed to freeze and show a delayed view of the room behind it. Sometimes it seemed to stutter and show a view from minutes before or twist and show what looked like the grass of the outside world or a glimpse of monsters. Richard saw what looked like a goopy net of cracked balls that slimed around each other before devouring a massive black and white barrier. He then saw James performing some kung fu against a bear – as if the event horizon of this sphere was a camera showing what James was doing kilometers away. Breifly there was what looked like another lab with three white coated researchers staring back at him - and then it flipped back to showing the room behind but green.
The light warping grew worse the closer to the middle it grew – completely shredding into blackness near the center.
But this wasn't a passive view Richard could study for as long as he wanted.
Immediately upon activating this allowance, the room began to fill with radiation, as light that passed through the edges without being destroyed it was shifted down into gamma rays and x-rays.
Air near the sphere was a bit better contained – whatever the sandbox did prevented the entire room from being sucked into this sphere but it didn’t prevent a thin layer from getting warped just due to proximity.
Within a few seconds the air around this sphere had ignited – the warping in space now appearing to be on fire as molecules were ripped apart in a steadily intensifying fission reaction. Chunks of dry ice dropped to the floor and a white goop dripped steadily downwards and then sideways in some unrecognizable reaction. Clouds of poisonous smoke dropped to the floor or flowed up along the ceiling – what looked like a human hand shot out the side of the sphere before bursting into flames and falling into a pile of fleshy charred carbon seconds later.
Nothing about this was controllable. This wasn’t some secret trump card Richard could create beside a massive monster before shoving it in. This was a chaotic mess of anything and everything he could barely appreciate as his lab rapidly deteriorated.
Richard stuck in a metal pole then watched as it rotated around and up the side. Suddenly the pole shot out with enough force to blow a red-hot hole in the side of his box. Richard tried directing a few waves towards the sphere – measuring what came out the other side to try and tease out what might be happening but every measurement was different. Richard then gave up and pushed each and every sensor he could find into it in the hopes of capturing ‘something’ from the sphere.
Dimly some faint part of Richard appreciated the chaos just for the sheer strength of it. Like a laugh he was trying to hold in, crawling up from his suppressed chaos affinity.
And yet, not even that was enough to convince Richard to stick his head into it.
Instead he stuck his hand in – bracing himself with both a steel cable and frontload of knockback defense.
For some reason Richard had some vague misconception that this sphere was a source of damage. That his defensive stats might be able to ‘defend against it’ – but no, stats came from aether. Removing the rules that governed how stats worked bypassed that ‘fact’ entirely. Richard had less than a second of exposure towards the field inside of the sphere before his arm was gone – stats inside it and all, the unravelling travelling up from his hand and ending over a foot away from the sphere just past his elbow.
Something inside the sphere began to look ‘off’ in a dangerous way. Instead of simply being a hard to understand and chaotic jumble of different ‘things’, the sphere felt alive. Instead of just being confusing to look at, the sphere began to mentally hurt to observe – It was more than just the radiation flying off it. Something about the churning shapes had elevated beyond randomness. It was as If there was something contagious about the sphere – as if some pervasive wrongness was jumping across to Richard through the very act of noticing it. And now – even with his eyes closed the act of acknowledging ‘it’ was feeding the ☐̸̲͑☐̷̼͋☐̸̝̒
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Richard's memory juttered in an alarming manner as suddenly he was sitting on the floor. His arm was mostly healed but he was distinctly aware of missing stats. He'd just lost over 40 and there wasn't an indication they were coming back.
Richard opened his eyes and stared at up the sphere in dominance. He had one final test – and despite every foreboding sense telling him to do the exact opposite, Richard reached across with a connection arm.
His connection arm did not exist in the same physical dimension as the sphere. It passed by the spheres overlapping location in the skill layer without appearing to interact at all.
Next following a memory of his current actions, Richard pushed a trickle of aether down the connection – not really sure what was leading him towards this point. Suddenly a component of his aether that rested in the physical layer had passed through the barrier pricing into the sphere.
Inside the sphere a single curved line burst into prominence. A curve of his aether flowed through the space where the rules of aether were gone.
A dense dense rush of sensation filled Richard as every bit of aether in his body began to resonate with his aether inside the sphere – connected to him by a cord of power.
And this was the moment Richard suddenly re-reviewed the last minute or so of his life. What the fuck was he doing? What led him to thinking poking the clearly sus ball as much as he had.
Richard reviewed his memory trying to search for signs of interference – even as he tried tugging the connection arm back with firmer and firmer motions. He slammed anti-mind manipulation protocols on his AI and started following a procedure he had made back while studying the hive nest.
Suddenly the sphere in front of him blinked.
A giant eye opened and stared at him in curiosity. Richard-
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Fuck that, fuck that! Fuck that! Big old fuck off pile of nope!
As soon as Richard noticed he was standing there mindlessly, he slammed the connection to chaos closed and watched as the hole slowly ever so slowly faded the eye closing once again. The vise-grip that held onto his aether and through that his connection arm slowly faded.
His makeshift lab was a mess. Fire burned everywhere – the smoke thick enough he could barely see – when had that happened? How long had he been standing here? Why hadn’t he realized there was this much smoke sooner?
What kind of half assed sandbox was this! Richard stumbled over to a wall covered in holes dragging a suction ring he’d been using as a fume hood. Activating the ring he directed it to blow out a cluster of holes then began to vent into an empty secondary chamber.
He’d try and scrub the area later to prevent as much pollution – for now Richard cleared out the majority of the more dangerous gasses and sealed the wall off for future him to deal with.
A massive thud rang out as what sounded like the footsteps of a giant grew closer and closer.
“Give me a second to calm down for fucks sake” Richard yelled then tore a door open revealing a hoard of monsters.
“I call the big un!” James yelled back pointing towards a red giant waving about a tree for a mace.
Richard stared out in shock at the sheer number and watched for 30 seconds as James flew towards the hoard with a whoop.
Finally he shook his head slightly relaxing at the visible threat and got to work cleaning up his mess.
Behind him lying forgotten on the floor of his lab lay his charred hand. A hand that had appeared minutes before he'd stuck it into the field of origin aether.
As the battle outside waged the hand slowly cooled – bits of charred flesh falling away and crumbled as if still burning with an invisible fire. Slowly at the center of the ash a small glassy diamond was revealed and soon that diamond and a pile of ash was all that remained.