When I awoke, the first thing I thought of was how thirsty I was. The second thing I thought was: How could that fire-making ability possibly work? I couldn't get it out of my mind, even when I was sleeping. The actual mechanics of it made no sense whatsoever. As I grabbed the bucket from inside the cabin and headed out to the creek to get some fresh water, I kept trying to figure out exactly how it had to be interfacing with me and determining my intent. The walk went by in a blink as I was deep in thought the entire time. Even when I filled the bucket up I was trying to conceive of a hypothetical system which could worm its way into my neural network and use my thoughts as input to create such an effect.
Part of the issue is that I don't really know how the technology that makes up my mind works, on a fundamental level, I sighed. Obviously I understood what I was and was able to perform maintenance, repairs, and modifications to my previous bodies with relative ease. However, the actual inner workings of the computational devices which made up my mind were never shown to me, nor were they ever explained to me. I could operate a computer, even write a program, but the devices that constituted the basis for my mind were orders of magnitude more complex. I don't even really understand how the information in my mind is stored, beyond that it's a mimicry of biological neurology, I thought dejectedly, whenever something like this would come up before I could just send it to command and have them provide me with an answer.
Before I knew it I was back in my cabin, seated at the table with one of the ceiling lanterns in front of me. I examined it, finding that it had a simple oil reservoir which fed into a wick through osmosis. Taking a breath I closed my eyes and positioned my hand around three centimeters from the wick. Okay, I thought, I'll repeat the same thought pattern which worked last time. The lantern was a much more complex shape, so I focused just on the part near the wick. In my mind it was black, then I made it glow white. There was a feeling that I didn't notice before, a sensation which was hard to describe and flowed from my head down through my chest and into my stomach. I opened my eyes and saw that the wick had ignited, and the lantern was now lit.
The first thing I did when I saw the flame was open up my heads-up display. Sure enough, the blue bar which was normally full had lost a small sliver. The four sub-bars indicated that the sliver was actually just a larger depletion from the first of the bars, which was already refilling by the time I had looked. So this is definitely some kind of energy storage, I concluded, it also relates to the healing ability, so this all but proves that these two phenomena are connected. I blew out the lantern, then placed my hand a bit further away and waited for the blue bar to be full again. It's time to test some things, I thought with a half smile.
Once the bar was full I repeated the process of lighting the lantern from around five centimeters. The blue bar depleted by the same amount, or at least an amount so similar that it was visually identical. Why wouldn't my operator add an option for a numerical display? I wondered as I watched the bar slowly refill. Once it was full I tried again from nine centimeters, and the strange sensation in my head turned from a light stimulation into a cross between a punch to the face and the feeling of bleeding out rapidly. I gasped and leaned backwards in my chair from shock as the feeling spread through my body, then exhaled once it vanished. What was that? I couldn't help but ask myself. It was exceedingly rare that a sensation was so powerful that it caused me to involuntarily react like that.
The blue bar had lost almost a quarter of its total length. I popped open the sub-bars immediately and saw that the top bar was almost totally empty. More interesting was that the other three bars had each lost a sliver and were creeping downwards as the empty top bar filled much more rapidly than it had before. Some kind of balancing between cells? I guessed. If this energy storage used a similar principle to electrical storage, perhaps the top bar indicated some kind of fast charge and fast discharge capacitor and the other three were higher-density storage. The balancing stopped when the top bar reached one third full, and the three high-capacity cells did not regenerate.
“That could be bad,” I thought out loud, before remembering just how depleted the overall bar had been when I was half-dead from fighting the merchant guards. Clearly it had some way of refilling itself, but I didn't know exactly what it was. I suppose I could try food, I thought as I checked the green bars. Ones which I was beginning to associate with plant-based nutrients were lower than the others, so I elected to try out some of the preserved vegetables. It's strange that these bars fill up so rapidly when I eat, I thought, chemical digestion takes a while. Maybe there's some kind of nutrient scanner that can figure out what it's going to intake and then adjusts them based on that? Yet another mystery was logged into the back of my mind for later investigation.
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After some careful consideration I had gone back to lighting the lantern from different distances. Instead of nine centimeters, I went to six, then seven, then eight. Each of those distances worked very well, but at around eighty-seven millimeters the cost of lighting the lantern began to rise dramatically. At first I thought it might simply be normal signal power falloff of some kind, degradation by the square of the distance, but even without numbers to measure the blue bars I could tell it was far higher. I wasn't sure, but it might have even been falloff by the factorial of the distance. The real question wasn't why it was so extreme, but why it only started at eighty-seven millimeters.
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As it turned out that distance wasn't constant. During an experiment to try lighting the lantern by placing other parts of my body near it instead of my hands, I almost drained my blue bars again by trying to light the lantern with a toe from seven centimeters. A number of tests followed, at which point I found that my feet only had an effective lighting distance of six centimeters instead of eight. More tests then showed that my head, apparently all of my head, produced an effective distance of fifteen centimeters and my chest and abdomen could manage between eleven and thirteen depending on position. This just gets stranger and stranger, I thought as I got up from a particularly awkward position that I was using to test lighting the lantern with my simulated genitalia (effective distance: ten centimeters).
I would say the main factor is proximity to my head, but if that were the case then my lower body wouldn't work as well as my hands do, I thought. Initially when my head had shown the greatest range I had figured that it was some kind of proximity to the brain, but of course the kinds of bodies that I was given didn't exactly have brains, and my equivalent was usually stored in the chest. Maybe the spine? I wondered. The distance around the spine was fairly consistent until it approached my head. As I fiddled with my hand and experimented with gestures I soon put the line of questioning to rest since I wasn't getting anywhere.
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The gesture I finally decided on using was a very simply extension of the index and middle finger on my left hand, with a twitch of the thumb to indicate the activation of the flame creating effect. Once I worked out the kinks, I sat in front of the lantern lighting it and blowing it out repeatedly while performing the gesture at the right time. My experimentation with my other body parts for lighting fire had given me enough practice that I could both look at the lantern and light it at the same time, so while forming the gestural habit I took to studying the exact effects that were being manifested.
Sometimes the metal heats up, I thought as I lit the lantern for something around the fiftieth time. As far as I could tell the heat was produced evenly across the area of effect with no obvious gaps. It's literally just like the white in the mental image would suggest, I shrugged, so then why did it overflow like that? I was now creating the mental image so quickly that I wasn't even really paying attention to it, so I suspected that I was making some kind of mistake. Or maybe... I had an idea, and blew out the lantern. Instead of the lantern itself, I simply imagined a sphere of white appearing at the approximate range where the wick was and it ignited. I don't even really need to know what I'm affecting, I noted, I just need to know where I'm trying to create heat.
After the two-hundredth lighting I took a look at my energy levels and saw that the short term storage was mostly depleted again. After another quick check of my nutrients, I ate some food and sat back down at the desk. Why I was so tired after the first accidental use of this ability at Pae'eyl's home? I wondered, Maybe I was just residually tired from cutting the wood. An idea popped into my head and I brought the lantern back in front of me. Instead of keeping the glass side panel open so I could see the wick, I closed it before trying to light it, letting the foggy glass obscure my view of the interior. To my surprise, my gesture didn't work. I opened the panel and gestured again, lighting the lantern immediately.
I tried lighting the shut lantern a few more times to no avail, growing frustrated with my failure. Finally, instead of using the gesture I resorted to a more manual method and made a mental image of the lantern, then attempted to light only the interior. So that worked, I sighed as the now very familiar light glowed inside the housing, but why didn't the gesture work? I blew out the lantern again and shut it, then sat back and performed the gesture again. Instead of simply tapping my thumb inwards to create the fire, I held it and willed more power out of myself. There was very little sensory feedback when performing taazmoydh, but I had gained some sense of what I was doing in my practice and knew I was using more effort than before.
Nothing happened again, and with an exasperated hiss I somehow moved and stretched the effect to widen it and sweep it across the interior of the lantern. The lantern ignited quickly, but as I touched the small handle to open the side I heard a hiss and smelled burning flesh. Pulling my hand back reflexively I saw a burn healing rapidly on my finger and thumb. A check of my heads-up display showed that I had used about five times as much energy as I normally would have. Well that was interesting, I thought with a smile, I wonder what else I can do with this.
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I stood outside in the dark in an area where I had ripped up all the nearby grass so that only dirt was on the ground. I don't need to accidentally burn down this cabin, I thought, I'd have quite a time explaining exactly how that happened. I set my lit lantern down and placed my target, a rock that was around ten centimeters by ten centimeters with a flat top, in the middle of the clearing. Making the gesture with my left hand, I placed my right near the rock so that I could manifest the effect neat it. Good, I thought as I felt both the pull of power draining out of me and a bit of heat coming from the rock, now let's just- I closed my eyes willed the shape of the effect to change again, but this time I squished it and pushed it into the stone. The feeling of power being used grew stronger, and I willed as much to flow out as I could.
A loud crack sounded out and my first instinct was to duck down and search for shooters. My right hand pressed up against scalding stone and hissed painfully, and I chastised myself for being so stupid. After my hand had healed I looked down at the rock, which had snapped in two along a jagged stress line I identified before using it. Even in the dark there were distortions in the air from heat radiating off of the stone. “Well it's not glowing,” I said in English. “Still, I’m satisfied regardless.” Nobody replied but the sounds of the nearby forest.