Earth, 2565 A.D.
Archos Institute, Seattle, U.S.A.
The first break wouldn't be long - just twenty minutes. But it was enough to sit in one of the "refreshment" rooms Archos had designed for optimum rejuvenation and employee morale, this one modeled after the tropical butterfly house at the Pacific Science Center. Here, Alessia could lounge on a bench sipping vitamin nectar while hundreds of butterflies swarmed the bushes surrounding her. If it weren't for the bright orange of her jumpsuit and a few other interns and employees walking the grounds, the butterfly garden wouldn't be out of place at a menagerie or conservatory. The others in her group had opted to see what snacks were available in the cafeteria, but she preferred the solitude and natural beauty here.
A slight tickle in her wrist alerted her of a text message. It was Kai, just a few words - "They're taking us skiing! On another planet!"
Alessia smiled and texted back, calling up the forearm overlay to tap out the letters. "Have fun. I'm learning how to simulate killing people with small objects. Can't say much else because of the NDA."
She waited a few minutes, in which time a blue and black butterfly settled down on her shoulder. He didn't text back. So she carefully stretched, cueing her butterfly friend to seek a new perch, and spent the rest of the break on a leisurely walk, using her contacts to snap a few photos as she went.
On her way back, Alessia saw the receptionist from the day before standing awkwardly with her mouth gaping, several monarchs and various tropical butterflies crawling on her clothes and hair. She held a sketchbook in her hand, covered in scribbles. Maybe the lady wasn't an aibot after all, if she was using a break room meant for humans and couldn't draw. She'd certainly sounded like one, though, with her odd timing and the unprompted speech about New Idaho's flooding, which hadn't been a problem since last spring. Alessia shrugged and walked through the net just before the door, where a scanner beeped to clear her of any stowaway guests. Butterfly free, she was about to exit when she caught movement from the corner of her eye. Was the receptionist eating a butterfly?
No, she must have imagined it. But was she? There were only six butterflies on the lady now, and an odd dribble of drool and insect legs coming from the woman's mouth.
"So gross!" Alessia fought puking. She'd heard of eating butterflies as a delicacy - but certainly not monarchs which were both toxic and endangered. Hopefully security would catch it - it wasn't her problem. If not, maybe the woman would get a nasty stomachache to remind her not to pick on butterflies.
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Alessia slid into her seat and pulled up her computer, diving back into work for the day. The brief break had given her time to think of a hundred more things to test, but the creepy image of the woman devouring a monarch stuck with her, and each time the thought crossed it was as if she loomed larger, her mouth opening wider and wider in an endless black cavern. White spires and spikes would rise from the floor and descend from the ceiling, only to collapse and bury her in a pile of suffocating skulls. It was hard to focus.
Alessia wiped away a bead of sweat, deciding to take a new approach to the testing. Instead of focusing mainly on kinetic dart and kinetic bonding, what if she took on a role and tried to achieve a goal using all the spells at her disposal?
"Hmmm," Alessia mumbled to herself while setting up a new avatar. This one was of a portly man, a sort of merchant-tourist with a seedy secret. His goal on Aanbree - well and by far Archos' most popular tourist world - would be to illegally obtain food, gems, artifacts, and other sundry not nailed down to bring back to Earth in various 'legal' forms and become rich. "I'll dub you Set," she thought, typing in the name of her new playtesting character.
A beautiful tropical resort was shown on screen, a series of massive tree houses set into lush trees, a dozen tropical birds of paradise circling the tree-compound. Alessia turned on the sensory cone, their detailed cries now audible and the fragrance of fresh leaves and exotic flowers tickling her nose. The camera zoomed in to where her avatar was waking up in his room. It was time to see what Set could do. Perhaps something almost ordinary, like crafting perfume - but from scratch?
There were several varieties of lush, tropical flowers outside the window. Some grew in planter boxes, others trailed on vines down the side of the treehouse, and still others grew from the massive tree itself. They weren't native to Earth, but did seem to pull from the general structure of some Earth flowers. The computer labeled them as genetically engineered plants, with a note they were not to be carried through any portal back to Earth.
The invisible sensory cone about Alessia that blocked out sound from her teammates also functioned to transmit and trap micro-smells released from select nano-particles in the table. It was still nothing like being there in person, but it was enough - the waft of scent was bit like gardenia, ylang ylang, and the citrisy-jasmine notes of coffee flowers.
Set began to 'pick' flowers with kinetic dart. While there was minor resistance, the stems were so weak that the spell-tug worked to severe them as well. It was hard to guide them perfectly by hand gestures alone, but when Set was given a voice command to order each type into a different colored basket, it worked fine.
Alessia then shifted the scene, taking Set and the baskets to a circle of stones by a stream on the ground, out of the mostly-wooden hotel and about a kilometer from it. She had Set take a regular stone pot and put it on a stone - it would have been too large to carry via kinetic dart. That was a downside: if this was reality, Set probably would have been spotted carrying three baskets of flowers and asked about them. But realism wasn't the issue so much as proof of concept was.
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Set used minor manipulation to move water from the stream into the pot. He then used minor manipulation to make the molecules in the water move faster, mimicking heating. Soon a bit of bubbling started with a whiff of steam - only to quickly cool off as the spell wore off. But there was always a plan B! Alessia had Set stand back and use 'roasting' upon the stone upon its highest setting, 350°C, which seemed like the temperature a nice campfire might hit. It worked much better - the pot heating from the heat of the stone, and that in turn boiling the water. It was a little noisy with the popping sounds from the sandstone, but the sensory cone should prevent anyone else at the table from having to hear it.
Once the water started boiling in a few minutes, she tried using minor manipulation to have Set siphon off the steam into another pot. She needed to distill the water. Unfortunately, that ended the roasting spell. That wasn't too much of a problem, since the heat remained - it would take a while for the rock to cool. But she also wanted rapid boiling. Having Set recast the roasting spell ended the minor manipulation, and the steam once again spilled into the open air. Would it take multiple iterations? She tried that - roasting for five minutes, followed by manipulation to collect the steam until the boiling stopped. Then another five minutes -
Make that two. In what Peter dubbed the most, "interestingly visual test of the day," the sandstone rock she was roasting exploded into chunks. If the bludgeoning wasn't enough to keep him down and bloodied, the boiling water that followed certainly would.
"Classic." Peter laughed as Alessia held her head in her hands. "This is definitely one we will put on the big screen for everyone to dissect and take notes on." Which he did, to her further embarrassment.
Apparently, the mistakes were many: using wet rocks or rocks near a water source, as water in the cracks and pores of the rock were what led to steam pressure building in the rock itself; using too large of a rock, when many smaller rocks would be more efficient; heating the rock to the maximum allowed temperature instantly, vs. drying the rock with a lower temperature first; not being cognizant of the type of rock used; and so forth.
"Wow," Enz whistled when he saw it. "So your guy took critical bludgeoning *and* critical heat damage. You should join me on the destruction side."
The playful mockery continued well past lunchtime.
Alessia wasn't one to give up that easily, however. Once the laughter and analysis died down, she spent the rest of the workday on the problem, figuring out just what rocks to use and where, and in what spell rotation, to distill the water. Then placing the flower petals in that water and using minor manipulation to work out their oils into the water rapidly, until she had a fragrant perfume bath and Set came through the ordeal uninjured. Briefly, she considered having Set use kinetic dart to harvest spider webs and minor animation to weave them, but she decided to save those tests for tomorrow. Set had been given a high-quality woven silk jacket as part of his generated clothing, so she decided to use that. With the silk over the bowl of flower-water, she had Set use minor manipulation to pull just the oils from the flowers themselves through the cloth and into awaiting bottles.
It wasn't ready-to-use perfume, as she had no idea what scents to combine there. But there were three bottles of seemingly pure oil essences. Was it convoluted when there was plenty of modern tech to extract essential oils? Certainly. But if you were on a planet and couldn't carry back certain plants in large quantities, or legally bring them back at all, it would work. Peter seemed somewhat happy with the tests, so there was that.
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Twenty minutes before the workday ended, while Alessia was brainstorming how she might have her sleazy merchant might smuggle out an expensive relic using magery, an alarm klaxon sounded in the room. Immediately all the computers descended back into their tables, while a locked symbol appeared on the top of each. The workers stood up, lining up by the door and whispering over the noise.
"Quickly," Peter said to the four interns, "we'll evacuate to the nearest safe area, it will be highlighted on the map on your pads."
"Is this a drill for the new interns?" Farash asked, falling in step behind Peter as they joined the line out.
"If it was, could I tell you?" Peter arched a brow. He seemed to be forcing himself to stay relaxed for their sakes - or perhaps it was just a learned discipline. Either way, Alessia wasn't quite sold that he was as calm as he was acting. It could be a drill - but what if it wasn't?
The group filed into long room which was fairly featureless. Surely there had to be more exits, right? But once they were all in, things shifted - sort of the sensation of an elevator, but different as well. Alessia had no way of knowing whether they had gone up or down, how many floors - or even if it was a physical movement vs. a change in space as the portals functioned. Once they 'arrived' - wherever they were, walls opened up into a large auditorium with several rooms off of it. Other groups were filing in, scientists and even some workers in the intelligence department, all arraying themselves in a perfect grid as if waiting. There was a strange hum in the air, some sort of energy of otherness she couldn't describe.
Alessia stayed with her team, as there were easily a thousand people in the room now. The alarm was still sounding, but distorted now, and no one was acting panicked. But she could see confusion on some faces, and nervous trepidation on others. Things were too quiet. They were no longer marked on the map of Archos on her pad. What had happened? And where in Archos, if even still at Archos, were they?