The internet was fascinating. Seth discovered this when he eventually tired of reading and, lacking any chores to do, pulled out the laptop. He thought he was getting better at using its programs, but it still felt a bit ungainly. Landon had told Seth that he used the laptop like an old man. Regardless, once Seth opened the browser and spent a while trying to remember Landon’s offhand comments about how the internet worked, he was managing to access some websites.
Seth had to make liberal use of the dictionary program also on the laptop, as his relatively conversational understanding of English proved inadequate. He knew that he wasn’t using the internet the most efficiently, but he found a use that worked for him. The browser opened to a search engine, which was Seth’s lifeline. He could type questions or even just words into it and sometimes a result or two would appear with a purple title. If he selected one of the icons along the upper part of the screen it always loaded something, but he wasn’t sure of the use of many of those websites.
Seth used the laptop frequently over the next few days, between asking the internet various things, transcribing chunks of his books and scrolls, and listening to the ‘country music playlist’ that his dad also liked even though he couldn’t understand the language. Seth also began using the notepad program to make extensive notes about his plans and goals for his essences.
His most ambitious goal was a possible way to independently heighten his Plant essence to basic level through a difficult method mentioned in the Plant tome. Animal, Plant, and Fungal essences all shared some common characteristics and an unusual way to advance from low level more reliably than most essences. It required learning to shape the composition of the essence using chosen species, then pushing the connection to the essence to expand it, encompassing more and more of their aspects. This was less ambiguous than simply trying to increase one’s understanding of an essence, and even let you somewhat track your progress, but required either fine control or blunt willpower and a tolerance for soul aches.
Part of what drove Seth’s interest in the idea, other than the obvious utility, was that it required a lot of novel, disparate plants. He thought over what sorts of plants he wanted to use while dutifully learning to assemble a campsite or put on armor. The armor Levi had bought was relatively minimal, but still heavy. It was like a long vest of boiled leather with rings of armorstone in an almost grid-like pattern across it. Apparently, as Levi had explained, interlocking rings would have weighed more than the additional protection was worth. There was also a leather and stone gorget that protected most of Seth’s neck and a similar cup for the groin.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Overall, it was armor insufficient for anyone likely to get up close and personal in a fight, but would mitigate most types of wounds that Seth couldn’t heal with relative ease. He could restore lost limbs, so they were better off free to move. He couldn’t heal decapitation, so he had the gorget. An arrow or claw could get into the stone rings, but being pierced was far easier to heal than being cut open. The cup might have been superfluous from this perspective, but Levi had correctly assumed Seth would rather avoid having to heal his groin to begin with.
The boots turned out to be more comfortable than Seth had expected, but after some testing of his Loss essence clothing with Chadwick’s violent assistance, they turned out to be unnecessary. The ghostly undershirt, overshirt, underpants, and pants all proved to be remarkably resistant to cutting or piercing. The slightly tight shoes were resistant to blunt force as well, more so than the new boots. The downside was that if any of the clothes were successfully damaged, they briefly discorporated before reforming on Seth’s body. When this happened to the overshirt or pants, they recorporated outside whatever Seth was wearing, no matter how tight the fit. Mercifully, the underpants didn’t insist on being the innermost layer, recorporating on top of the groin cup.
Seth’s advanced training as a healer continued largely theoretically as the sailors proved not to be especially injury-prone. He did get some ‘practical’ experience with healing poisons, when some members of the crew discovered he could get rid of drunkenness, hangovers, and even alcohol poisoning. One sailor offered to stick himself in a barrel of beer and give Seth some practice with suffocation and drowning, but Levi put a stop to it. When the laptop turned out to have a fair amount of information about anatomy and a variety of medical conditions, Levi had Seth translate a few novel details so he could record them.
They also spent some time trying to puzzle out more information about Gene essence. It took half a day of effort for Levi to learn to sense it, and once he could, he shared Seth’s surprise at how far the Gene essence projection went. Levi described the feel of Gene essence as being more ephemeral than the other essences that he knew how to sense. Seth had an automatic ability to sense Gene essence around him due to his connection, and they narrowed down where he was sensing it: inside people.
This should have been obvious, but he had been thrown off by the fact that it wasn’t present throughout the body like Plant essence was in plants. It was as if there was just a small clump of it in each person. He confirmed that that clump of Gene essence was also registering as a sound, the noise that people’s abilities made. Once Seth understood the connection, he gradually shifted that perception fully away from a distracting faux physical sense. The mind’s eye perception of the essence projection was more accurate anyway.
Before phasing the hearing aspect out entirely, he spent time using both perceptions to make sure he understood what he was sensing from people at least as well as he had learned to hear them. Through the ‘size,’ ‘density,’ and ‘color’ of the Gene essence, Seth could estimate the number, strength, and essence makeup of a person’s abilities. After that, Levi said they had spent long enough on the unusual essence and needed to move on, though Seth should still practice with the perception and creating aligned areas when possible.