Hint: As your abilities increase, so will the amount of kilocalories you need to survive.
Be sure to get plenty of food!
“Well that’s not a direct answer to my question.” I said.
“What? Lemme see.” I opened my display to show Madeline, and then instinctively tried to hand it across to her like I would if it were a smartphone. Except I couldn’t because the damn thing was attached to my hand.
Instead, I awkwardly angled my wrist to the side so she could read it better.
“No, but at least it answers yesterday’s primary query.” She observed. “If I try it on my display do you think I’ll get the same answer?”
“I thought you were saving your hints.”
“Right, but like, hypothetically.”
“I don’t know. Try it. We’re not planning to do anything dangerous today.” I said blithely.
“We haven’t previously planned to do anything dangerous, I thought.”
“We definitely planned our last stunt.” I pointed out.
“Sure, but neither of us woke up that day thinking it was a great morning for mortal peril.” she snapped back.
“Yeah yeah yeah. Bickering aside, are you gonna use a hint or not?”
“Nah. I’m still saving it for when I need it.”
“Kay.”
The conversation petered out after that, and we went back to our separate business. Namely, Madeline continued working out, and I got to work on lunch. Today’s entrée was going to be hot sandwiches. I had a variety of not quite expired lunch meats to cram in between slices of bread with a couple choices of cheeses and either brown-mustard or thousand island sauce.
Madeline had one of those electric countertop grill press things, so I cleaned the thick layer of dust off of it and put it to work. I went for a faux-reuben, not having the sauerkraut or rye to make a real one. Miss Madeline got ham and swiss with brown mustard. After we both demolished a sandwich each, I ended up making another for myself and another two for Madeline.
We chatted for a bit after the meal, and I set up another barrier. There was still a bit of time before the last one expired but I didn’t want to risk being without one for even a second, even if I wasn’t entirely sure of their overall effectiveness.
I then laid down on the couch again and settled down to read a book. Instead of one of my lightnovels on my phone, I had in my grasp a large hardback tome. It was a supposedly well regarded piece of science fiction that I’d just never managed to get myself to read fully through. The pacing was a little slow and the story was a little high-concept for my taste, but I figured now was as good a time as any to give it another shot. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do, after all.
***
I woke up at around 3:30 in the afternoon, having apparently nodded off. I noticed Four-Arms had conked out again, meaning my ATP was refreshed. I bought another healing item, along with another barrier. I Spent my three remaining points on bringing back Four-Arms and Repairing another two models. I chose those particular ones because of their shields. I was checking to see if shields could be Scaled and Animated like weapons, having been more than a little troubled by our lack of defensive options.
One of the shields could be, but the other couldn’t. Comparing the difference, I was unsurprised to find that the shield I could Scale was the one that came mounted with weaponry.
In this case a ridiculous piledriver thing.
The shield that was just a shield was unlisted under the dropdowns of the two abilities I’d been hoping to use it with. So If I wanted shields I was going to need gimmick shields. Which were not going to be cheap to Animate or Scale.
Finding this out made me feel like I needed to reassess my strategies for combat. Neither me nor Madeline could really soak up any hits when it mattered. Healing items could revive us from just about anything, but using them in the middle of a fight was a questionable practice at best. The amount of pain they put you through was downright paralyzing, and they couldn’t be used if your right arm got chopped off, as we’d unfortunately discovered. Not to mention that they weren’t free, either.
Really, not getting hit at all was the ideal.
I just had no Idea how to achieve that.
Although. . . thinking back to that stairwell based siege, Tommy had proven to be the real MVP there. Resupplying him only cost a point, and If I’d just spent all my points on him while he blasted away we very well could have just vaporized everything before it even got close. I hadn’t done that at the time because of a lack of ATP. Instead I’d spent two points animating Fry and Mick-chicken only to find that they were pretty much entirely ineffective.
It kind of seemed like my best bet was to stop distributing my points on multiple mechs and just focus on one mecha or weapon at a time.
I brought the Idea up to Madeline, and she basically agreed, though she did mention that we needed to find a way to prevent blinding ourselves due to laser fire.
“Some welding goggles would probably do it, but I don’t have any.” I said.
“Oh, I do, actually.” Madeline switched back from her recliner to her chair and headed towards her hall closet.
Well, I called it a closet, but I think it was technically intended to be a pantry. She used it to store her junk instead of shelf stable foods though, so it was a moot point.
She had to do some more digging, but instead of tossing stuff randomly she just stuffed everything into her inventory until she had excavated enough to find what she was looking for.
Triumphantly, Madeline returned with a welding mask and a pair of goggles.
“Man, why do you have so much miscellaneous bullshit?” I asked.
“My grandmother has more money than she knows what to do with, so she gives me a 500 dollar amazon gift card every christmas, plus another on my birthday.”
“And you use that money on welding goggles and helmets?”
“Like I said, I have an unfortunate late night shopping habit. And given how useful that behavior has turned out to be, I don’t think you have a right to complain. Which do you want?” She asked, throwing them both on the kitchen counter.
“That depends. Why does the helmet look funny?” It had a large, purple tinted view port unlike the thin slit visors I was used to seeing on a typical welding helmet.
“It’s auto darkening. It uses some fancy electronic stuff to keep you from going blind instead of a tinted piece of glass.”
“Neat. Can I try it on?”
“Go ahead.”
I shoved the welding helmet upon my cranium. It fit okay, but it was only after putting it on that I realized I could only see out of the tinted viewport in front. My field of view was significantly smaller. Given that I was going to be trying to use the thing in the middle of combat, that was less than Ideal. I grunted, pulling it off my noggin.
“Can I try the goggles too?”
“Be my guest.”
I had to fiddle with the adjustable strap to get it to fit right on my face. Once I did I noticed that I still had a field of view problem.
Still, I think I liked the goggles better. I told Madeline as much and shoved the helmet into her inventory, claiming it for her own.
The rest of the evening was uneventful, I made beef taco bowls for dinner just because it was easy and produced plenty of leftovers.
Or at least it usually did. We ate more than I anticipated. Still, we had enough left over for another meal or two each.
We then played video games, chatted, and generally tried our best to distract ourselves from our current circumstances.
***
That night my dreams were mostly about struggling alone and digging a pit. A malevolent force that may or may not have been my aunt was hunting me from the sky and I had to dig deeper and deeper to escape it. Even when I was miles below the force kept pursuing me, and I could feel it burning on my back as I fled.
Until it finally caught me, a long nailed hand squeezing my shoulder.
“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!!!”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
My eyes darted around the room, and my heart beat at a million miles an hour. I felt my stomach churn with acid. I ran past a concerned looking Madeline and locked myself in the bathroom and then heaved awful tasting bile into the toilet.
I was having a panic attack.
***
I was no stranger to them, severe anxiety having been a part of my life for years at that point, but usually I managed them a little better than this.
Unfortunately, it seemed current circumstances weren’t proving great for my mental health. Which shouldn’t surprise me, honestly, but there I was anyway, puking what little remained of last night’s dinner into the bowl of my best friend’s toilet. I was thankful, at least that I’d cleaned it the other day.
Madeline called my name through the door, but it took me a while to respond. I still felt like I was suffocating, and the sour, bitter acid on my tongue was constantly causing me to gag. Choking out words in between all that was a tall order that understandably took me a while to manage.
“I’m fine.” I croaked, unconvincingly, after I drank some tap water straight out of the bathroom sink.
“Leo, man, I mean this in the nicest way possible, but bullshit you are.” She responded, her voice coming through slightly muffled due to still being on the other side of a locked door.
I drank some more water, splashing eyes that had gone puffy with tears as I did so. Even exhausted as I was by the episode I just had, I felt mortified that Madeline had seen me like this for even a second.
Worse, I’m pretty sure I’d screamed at her. If I was right, then the hand I’d felt in my dreams may well have been Madeline attempting to shake me up from the nightmare I’d been having.
Fuck me, this was a rough start to the day.
I tried to think of something that I could say that would magically make all this embarrassment and shame just go away so that we could both pretend this never happened.
Unsurprisingly, I came up empty.
I settled instead for telling Madeline that I was fine again, and insisted that I just needed to take a shower.
She probably wasn’t super pleased with me stone-walling her like that, but she relented.
That she didn’t press the issue somehow just ended up making me feel worse. If I was a better person I’d just explain that this was a thing that happened to me occasionally, but instead I was hiding from it and her in the restroom.
A bit of a step back from the progress I’d been making with my therapist, unfortunately, but honestly I was just so tired. I’d been sleeping like shit for a while now, all while doing my best to convince myself I was fine in the midst of something horrible happening.
I stripped down, squeezing my eyes shut to avoid accidentally catching any glimpses of my naked form, only opening my eyes just long enough to locate the shower head, place myself under it, and turn on the water.
I shivered as the water came out cold at first, but as it warmed I managed to finally untense a little. I couldn’t hang out in there forever, Madeline was going to need her chance to use the restroom, but I let myself have the moment alone.
***
I managed to relax for all of about five minutes before the shame came back and I started wondering how to explain to Madeline what was wrong with me. But that brought me to the one thing I really wanted to avoid thinking about.
My fucking childhood.
The abuses I suffered as a kid are not the sort of thing I’d want to discuss in detail with anyone, honestly, so forgive me for presenting you the abridged version.
Basically, my mom left my dad when I was young because he’d proven not to be the sort of person you could trust around a child, and while I don’t remember him that well, what little I do remember of him leads me to believe that was for the best.
Besides, that isn’t where the majority of my pain lies.
You see, my mother, like any single parent, had trouble supporting a young child all on her own. So she reached out for help. And while that was probably the best thing she could have done given the circumstances, the problem lies with who she reached out to.
Her sister, or as I came to know her, my Evil Aunt.
***
I’d love to say she was just a nasty, bitter person with a blackened lump of coal for a heart, but of course it was more complicated than that. After all, if she’d just been awful, then I wouldn’t have had to deal with her shit for over a decade.
But no, my aunt did a great job of supporting my mother. In fact, they still go along famously.
Issues only ever arose whenever my aunt and I were alone together. As soon as my mom was removed from the equation she’d just turn into a different person. One hellbent on hurting me in just about every way possible.
I’m still not sure why she was so intent on torturing me, but she certainly didn’t ever seem to get enough of it.
Control was definitely a pretty big part of it. They absolutely needed to prove that they could get me to do anything that they wanted to. And frankly, much like with Jacob, fighting back never seemed to get me anywhere. Especially because my mother could never hear that anything was wrong.
Anytime I tried to tell her about what was going on she’d shut me right down. So I got used to not having any real personal agency. I went with everything I was told, for the most part.
The only real exceptions were when I got so pissed that I’d snap. Because of course I had anger issues.
And my aunt had a real knack for sensing when I was on the cusp of a blowout. She’d always set things up so that when I blew my top my mother would be the only one in the line of fire. She’d then seemingly rush to my mother’s defense, making me the villain. Promptly, she’d then guilt me into feeling like the whole thing was my fault, and use that guilt to gain greater purchase upon my soul.
And so the cycle went: Do something needlessly cruel to me, let me seethe about it for a while, then poke me again at the worst possible time so that I’d make an ass out of myself. And then I’d be told that I was the problem. Everyone else was fine.
How dare I?
And that was the basic gist of it until I hit my teens. Then things got worse.
I. . . can’t talk about what happened there. I just can’t.
What it left me with though, I can.
I loathe my body. I can barely look at myself in the mirror. I can’t handle when people touch me. If someone gets too close to me without my noticing I freak out. I’ve never dated anyone and probably never will.
And because Madeline touched me when I wasn’t ready for It, right on the heels of a nightmare, during a time when I was already more than a little stressed, I flipped the fuck out.
I cut the hot water, then stood there with my eyes still closed, letting myself drip dry both because we were nearly out of clean bath towels and so that I could put off leaving the bathroom for a little while longer.
***
When I finally managed to work up the courage to leave my hiding space, I found Madeline playing a game on her console in her favorite chair. She looked over to me, raising one eyebrow with a concerned twist of her lips.
I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t seem to open my throat enough to say anything.
I felt my face flush.
I wondered then if maybe leaving the apartment and running for the hills might be the better option.
I looked up from where I’d been staring fixedly at a wine stain on the carpet, to see Madeline offering a reassuring smile.
“You don’t have to say anything, man,” she said, “it’s ok. It’s all gonna be ok.”
I fucking cried.
***
The rest of our morning was uneventful. I made a batch of fresh rice and we finished off the refried beans and taco meat from yesterday over the course of breakfast and lunch.
I decided that day would be as good as any to finish that model kit I’d been building. Sure I’d wanted to save it, but not finishing it because I put it off so long that I died would just be silly.
Plus, finishing it would give me another mech to Animate for basically free.
I managed to finish building the base model in its entirety and was working on its weapons and accessories when Four-Arms fell over mid step, rigidly collapsing on the countertop next to me. Which meant that my ATP had refreshed. I was already thinking about how to allocate my points for the day as I put down my hobby knife in order to look at my display.
What I saw instead threw me for a bit of a loop.
I had actually lost ATP. As in my maximum points of the stuff had decreased by one. I now only had eight pips on my bar. It didn’t take long to find out why; I saw that my CR had decreased by two.
“Fuuuuuuck.” I said, in the form of a long exhalation. Madeline turned away from her console, pausing the rpg she was playing just as some character got dramatically impaled in a cutscene.
“What?” She asked.
“We can lose levels it looks like.” I said. She wasn’t getting it, her brain halfway between my words and the game she’d just been playing.
“We don’t keep our stats permanently. They can go down instead of just up.” I repeated, waving my display to clarify.
“How do you know?”
“Because mine just did. I lost some CR and a point of my maximum ATP.”
“Fuuuuuuuuuuck. . .” She sighed, sinking further into her recliner and ruffling her hair with one hand.
“Right?”
“It looks like my body stat went down.” Madeline confirmed, staring down at her own display. “Do you wanna use a hint and see if that tells us why?”
“Yeah, one sec.” I tapped the relevant button on my display, and promptly got an answer.
Hint: If you do nothing to contribute for 48 hours, your contribution rating will decrease.
Your abilities are a privilege, not a right.
“Well fuck you too.” I swore.
“What?” Madeline asked, clearly impatient. In response I read the hint I’d been given out loud word for word.
“I’m not sure I like that thing’s tone, Leo.”
“Neither do I, but at least it’s informative.” I replied.
“Yeah. We’ve basically confirmed CR is what determines when we get stats and abilities, right? I mean we’d guessed as much earlier but it's good to be certain.” Madeline said.
“Less good is that we can lose it. I mean leveling down is a pretty harsh punishment to give for just taking a couple rest days.” I put my head in my hands. It looked like we weren’t going to get away with just waiting for it all to blow over.
“You're not wrong. I was really hoping to coast for a bit longer, myself.” Madeline gazed at the window next to her. The blinds were still drawn, but I suspected she could see through the gaps.
“I mean, technically we could still hide. Yeah we’d lose CR, but shop items take a percentage so we could just buy four items a day and stay inside.” She said, finally turning her gaze back from the window.
“We could, but that’s assuming that losing CR is all that happens. I’m worried we could lose the display entirely if we wait too long.”
“That whole line about our abilities being a privilege does imply they'd be willing to take them away.” She agreed. “Who ever the fuck ‘they’ are in this instance.”
“You don’t have any additional theories?”I asked.
“Nope. Regardless, it seems pretty clear to me that we’re going to have to make a decision.” She looked me right in the eyes, her expression somber.
I perked up from my slouch on the kitchen counter. “And what would that be?” I asked, trying to keep the nerves out of my voice.
“Do we accept slowly dying in this room while we hope for someone else to fix everything?” She paused to let me consider before continuing: “Or do we go out and get in trouble?”