Chapter 26: Delving Into the Stats

  Jack was instructed to take it easy for the next four hours or so until the run, and to ‘absolutely not’ use his powers. He was to rest, eat as much as he could stuff his face with, and finish any familiarization not finished up with on his statistical bio.

  Of course, he was also supposed to pick out a minimum of two outfits. Though Lindsay wanted to know what he liked immediately, he told her he’d check it all out ‘later,’ not wanting her to see him cringe at whatever ill-advised things she was essentially trying to dress him in.

  After he went to his quarters and showered, he took a look. Sure enough, she had links to some sort of custom outfit store complete with her own choices for the clothes, already ready to ship and deliver on the hour for prices that made Jack physically wince. Worse, she’d picked some stylish shlock of two tones where one leg of a tracksuit was black, the other hot pink, and the hoodie had the same two halves but in opposite positions. There was also a shorts and athletic shorts combo, together with high-priced sneakers. A note attached said, ‘With these colors, we’d kinda match!’

  Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope. Nope!

  He scrolled through her other options, closing them out with more cringes and even one involuntary hiss.

  He finally found something more reasonable and conservative in style and price, and it even had a note saying ‘This is similar to the one I’m planning to wear, too!’ Of course, the color was black and hot pink. He almost moved on, but hesitated, noticing he could easily change the secondary color. After changing it to blue, it was perfectly satisfactory. He ordered a set, then changed the color to… dark blue and ordered it, thereby efficiently ending his shopping spree. He made sure to do a rush delivery on only one.

  As he was closing the rest out, though, his eyes caught on another, not only reasonably priced, but on flash sale by 40%! That was impossible to pass up. It was a sleeved, collared athletic shirt with some different shorts or pants. A few t-shirt options under the sale as well. He got three more outfits and was otherwise satisfied.

  He made coffee and dug out some home food to cook. Eggs and pancakes, five of each, utilizing some Infused cooking oil and syrup topping. Even this presumed over-targeting of his hunger did not even put a dent in it. He opened his Mem interface and browsed potential food delivery options. When he saw pizza, his mouth watered. Five pizzas it was, loaded with toppings and Infused ingredients in the dough and sauce. He hoped he wasn’t going to eat all of it, as that felt just a little bit horrifying.

  The pizza arrived shortly by drone. He sat down on the couch and dug in. As he devoured a whole pizza with both glee and disturbed feelings, he found his eyes unable to really focus on the vidscreen. He decided to distract himself by reviewing stuff. Before he forgot, he looked up the ‘domain modifiers.’

  Huh. Interesting. Looks like I’m among the bedrock types, but we have dangerous specialists from other sources. Possibly trending more vulnerable, too? That would mean they’d be more carefully protected.

  He moved on to his stat bio.

  He basically understood everything up top on it… but decided to get a solid definition of the differences between Pressure and Force.

  Alright. Sure.

  Primarily, he had not reviewed the ‘imbues.’ Builders of Great Things was noteworthy for synergy… if it worked with his powers, and he imagined it did, anything he built would have fifty percent better material strength. Nothing to sneeze at there.

  While he understood what it did basically, he decided to fully familiarize himself with Super Sapien Resilience before moving on to Perpetually Learning.

  Memoria gave us all a learning boost? I guess we’re not quite so different from our ancestors as the masses believe. Eh, we probably needed it here in our ivory tower just to counter complacency. I know as well as anyone how completely blind people are to what is inevitably creeping toward us. I stuck my head back in the sand with them. Instinctive. Didn’t plan on it, tried to avoid it, but I did it all the same.

  He moved on to all the weird-looking Bondmaking stuff, to see what Quallakuloth and Neex had gifted him. It made him just a teensy bit nervous to know. One of them was pretty self-explanatory, but he’d somehow dodged thinking about it in the fog of the prior stresses.

  Jack had to pause here. Hmm. ‘Most notably that of a Degenerative source.’ Is that what happens to us? Bit of corroborating evidence because it fits well with Neex’s mention of Marring and Quallakuloth’s vision of cancer. What were we damaged by, or who?

  Of course, he had no answers there, so he moved on.

  Once again, Jack had to pause, as what he was reading gave him some trepidation. This is somewhat more extreme than I imagined, but I guess it could be worse. Right?

  Internally, he asked Mini-Mem, “So, how much exactly am I going to change from this?”

  “I guess it depends on your perspective,” Mini-Mem replied. “Technically, it’s a hell of a lot of modification to your lungs and respiratory system. It’s unknown tech, too, or at least some sort of hybrid functionality of human and octopien understanding. In this case, it’s a good thing, because this is superior to how we’d be able to fashion it without some kind of power being leveraged. Nothing crazy to your outward appearance and only a slight mass increase. Mostly uncanny stuff.”

  “So no fins or webbed fingers or anything like that?”

  “Nope, none of that, just a big tentacle tail right out of your tailbone. For proper octopien handshakes, ass to ass.”

  For a split second halfway through that delivery, Jack believed it, with pins and needles prickling through him. “Don’t frag with me, damn you! This is serious shit.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t affect your outward appearance already. Though you should’ve been expecting otherwise, right? Over here, messing around with some mysterious deep sea eldritch god.”

  “You only live once, right? And you said ‘nothing crazy’ to my outward appearance — I was clarifying. Anyway, moving on.” Despite his slight queasiness, Jack crammed an entire slice of pizza into his mouth. Nothing short of a second apocalypse was going to stymie his current appetite. “Do I need to eat some other special stuff? Vitamins?”

  “You’re getting most of it — with higher absorption — through the Infused additions. This mod is low on the priority totem pole right now, whatever you do. You won’t see the mod until you get Inner Energy to 1.0. That’s a sufficient diminishing returns area without Fitness improvement beyond Normal grade. You could add vitamin supplementation regardless, though. If you’re going to try eating every hour or two, maybe triple the dosage spaced out would ensure maximum value.”

  Jack immediately got up and went to the cabinets to fish out the lime-flavored vitamin packets he’d seen and prep one. “Completely insane, by the way. All this eating.”

  “Just as insane as getting your powers over a decade late, which usually develops along a default and better planned gradient, allowing a much slower build-up of required stores and transformative evolution.”

  Jack stirred nasty lime vitamin powder into a glass of water. “You mean like the Auger kid?”

  “Hence the ‘usually,’ Mr. Sarcasm, but even there it was slower than you. You’re far and away the record already, Jack.”

  “I love it when you praise me.” He downed the vitamin-infused water in one go, with ease that slightly surprised him.

  “Well, you’re not a prodigy, you’re just massively late. Too old. Undesirable to develop in a slow gradient, nor truly feasible.”

  Jack made a face as he moved the nasty aftertaste around in his mouth. “Can we get back to the praising?”

  “You’re a medal-honored military hero that should be proud of saving lives!”

  “Not like that.” Shaking his head, Jack made his way back to the couch to continue eating while also drawing up the remaining imbues to review.

  Jack paused briefly after reading the last, barking an amazed laugh. Is that note from Quallakuloth? Regardless, this is incredible. I wonder if the Archon thing will ever apply here on Earth? I have no real way of knowing the relevancy.

  This doesn’t feel very Neexy. The opposite, really. Hmm. I think I’m going to ask about this when I get the chance.

  A lot of situational benefits. Jack was fairly curious what Magnitude at higher levels could achieve, so he asked, “Mini, can you give me some examples of my power use at different levels?”

  “And spoil the surprise? Fine, maybe a little! At 10.0 Create, you’d have Allotment 1200, and be able to lift a small camper trailer briefly, or hurl around a large steel safe of 900 kilos for a while. At 20.0 Create, you’d have Allotment 6400, and be able to lift a small jet, box truck, or wrecking ball sized chunk of metal. At Create 50.0, you’d have Allotment 80,000, able to hurl around tanks or some of the larger steel girders. Or the famed Hoba Meteorite of Namibia! Estimated at over 60 tonnes.”

  Jack squinted. “I think that’s in a textbook in tenth grade Earth Science…”

  “Ninth.”

  “Right! Yeah. Mr. Deter! Wow, ancient history. Okay, so levels multiply in power to some degree.”

  “Your Allotment is 100 at Create 2.0, increasing from 75 at 1.0, and will increase to 150 at 3.0. The ensuing lower levels are jagged with greater percentage boosts in effectiveness, but eventually it declines to something like 10% per level, though it still varies level-to-level. Some levels have bigger jumps than others. As an interesting incentive, perhaps I can craft you something of a chart of your prior levels, your next level, and examples of maximum lift? Including non-metal things for comparison to what other powers might affect.”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Here you go! Current level in bold.”

  “Nice. I look forward to bumping it. Fractions exist, right?”

  “Correct. Less relevant than whole Access Level increases, but good for the raw power. It’s entirely percentage-based as a gradient. 2.5 would be 125.”

  “Good. Smaller achievements on the way to larger ones…”

  Jack crammed more pizza, glancing over his internal data and not seeing much of anything pertinent left. He turned on the vidscreen and flipped through the channels. PDTL (Professional District Throwball League) was on, but it was Sejong and Arash districts, which he didn’t care about.

  Thanks to living at AMMA in the Ragnar District for a huge chunk of his life, he was forever a Ragnar Marauders guy — not that he watched religiously. They were doing alright, but the Da Yu Dragons were unstoppable so far, as was typical. Sports were big in Da Yu. Meanwhile, the Ragnar field hockey team was so bad that Jack couldn’t watch them. A bunch of bums!

  A real shame we can't throw goats. The bastards.

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