Chapter 17: Playing Catch-up (Patreon)

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." – Albert Einstein

Split, you son of a bitch! Jeb thought, concentrating hard on the thread of Myst emerging from his palm.

When he’d first gotten started with Myst, he’d tried to split Myst into more than one thread, and it had proven so difficult that he’d labelled it ‘impossible’ and never revisited the idea. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Through experimentation and a hell of a lot of singed hairs, Jeb had figured out that the best results through rubbing Myst against itself happened when the two streams were going directly against each other.

So far he’d managed to curl the thread back on itself and strike against the base like he was lighting a match, in a long, hard pull, but each and every time it resulted in a blinding explosion.

The reaction had been far too fast for Jeb to understand exactly what happened, so he stretched it out by literally stretching it out, creating a loop that was over a hundred feet around. When he violently dragged the tip across the base, Jeb was just barely able to make out the fact that the reaction which changed the nature of the Myst started at the emanation point, then travelled up the string until it hit the tip, which then exploded against the emanation point, disrupting it and rendering the entire thing useless.

Jeb’s other notes he’d taken about Zesh’nei’s Translation were starting to point him in the right direction, though. One of the references mentioned ‘strings’, plural, something he’d underlined, but never been able to act upon. Now that he had some indication that it was possible to split a string, Jeb was determined to do it.

Perhaps by splitting one Myst string into multiple strings, he would be able to funnel the energy of the reaction out the Primary, leaving the – for lack of a better word – converter, unexploded, and able to continue the reaction indefinitely.

It was as good a hypothesis as anybody’s.

Hard as balls in practice though.

Jeb felt like a vein was going to pop in the side of his head, staring daggers at the trembling string of glowing orange Myst. Currently Jeb was trying to tell it to go two directions at once, resulting in the twitching bit of Myst in front of him.

It felt just as impossible now as it had before, like trying to split your arm in two at will.

Side note: Your arm does not split into two at will.

What if I did this? Jeb thought, picturing putting the string into a wood splitter, shearing it in two through brute force.

The string wiggled and flattened for a moment, but it didn’t split.

You son of a bitch.

Jeb grabbed his pen with the string and made another note.

Splitting with a wedge: failed.

Splitting by unraveling: failed

Splitting by tugging: Failed

Half a dozen more failures covered the page, Jeb had a fairly kickass memory at this point, but it was human nature to try the same thing over and over again out of sheer stubborn insanity, and having a note there telling him not to waste his time really helped.

Jeb sat there on the desert rock, the cold night air starting to warm up as the sun rose above him.

Maybe my stats are too low? Jeb thought, thumbing the Appraiser ring on his finger.

Jeb pulled it off and used it on himself.

Jebediah Trapper

Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Lagross’s Power.

Body 21 (20+3)

Myst 71 (50)

Nerve 26 (25)

Abilities: >>FATAL EXCEPTION. Ability missing or corrupted. Awaiting resolution by Administrator.<<<

Accolade Pending: Lagross’s Power suspended due to multiple instances. Awaiting resolution.

Assuming no accolades or stat potions, and a solid 5 on every starting stat, that makes me roughly the same as a level…eighty. Wow, not bad.

Body, Myst, and Nerve had all gone up a handful of points over the last week. Probably in conjunction with making Deals for people’s Abilities.

Jeb’s gaze wandered up to the Accolade section.

Hmmm….I wonder if R-R-RubU’s Mysteries would help with Myst manipulation? Jeb thought. The original R-R-RubU had been a toad-man from the Tutorial with a focus on Myst-based attacks. When Jeb had killed him he’d gotten the Accolade, which granted him a healthy chunk of Myst.

Right now, it was just sitting there unused, because the gods had disabled his account.

Jeb looked down at the strand of Myst above his palm.

Yeah, I could take a break. Jeb glanced around. He was out in the middle of the desert, so if he summoned some kind of enormous monster or got hit by a meteor again, it wouldn’t endanger any of his kids.

Jeb slipped the ring back on and searched his body thoroughly, finding a lump below his collar bone, and one under his jaw. These lumps were the accolades attached to his body by the System, only interactable via the tiny window that was Jeb’s Appraiser.

Pretty sure it’s not just an appraiser.

Only two lumps, though? That doesn’t make and sense, Jeb thought, patting down his feet for the umpteenth time. He had four accolades left to remove, so there should be four lumps.

Finally Jeb glanced at his right hand, which he’d been using to give himself the check-up.

I’m an idiot, Jeb thought, switching the ring onto his left hand. If this doesn’t work I’m gonna have to start checking my prostate for magical lumps, Jeb thought with a scowl. He wasn’t looking forward to that.

There! Between Jeb’s ring and middle finger was a fifth-dimensional lump, and another in the crook of his elbow.

That’s all four of them…now…which one’s R-R-RubU’s Mysteries?

From what Jeb could tell their positioning was slightly symbolic. That meant the two near the large muscle groups of his pectorals and biceps were probably Lagross’s Power and Krusker’s Brawn. That meant the other two, under his jaw and between his fingers were probably Siren’s Cunning and R-R-RubU’s Mysteries.

Jeb didn’t want to pry something out of his face again, after how badly that had gone last time. Jeb erred on the side of working his way inward from his extremities. That allowed him to settle on the little lump between his fingers.

Jeb pulled some duct tape out of his jeep and wound it around his hand, securing the ring directly over the area in question, then he opened up the toolbox in the back and dragged out some needle-nose pliers.

Not the best tools ever, but they’ll do.

Jeb cut away a bit of the duct-tape, revealing the swirling grey Myst creating the portal to the fifth dimension. Then he reached in with the pliers and grabbed the lump.

With a quick yank and a proper application of Myst as  a catalyst, the Accolade was yanked out of Jeb and into the real world.

It was…a pipe.

The thing was a pipe, carved entirely out of ivory. It was weathered and gunked up with decades of residue.

“Ummm…” Jeb turned the artifact this way and that. There were worn carvings of frogs along the sides of the pipe, along with some truly tight script of indeterminate nature. Large portions of it were worn off, though, so Jeb had little hope he would ever be able to translate.

I wonder… R-R-RubU had been able to make weird Myst-reactive mucus bubbles when Jeb had been fighting him in the Tutorial. Jeb was fairly sure he’s gotten the right Accolade, what with the frog decals.

Curious, Jeb fed a thin stream of Myst into the pipe. A moment later, a clear substance began to well up inside the pipe well, before spilling out onto the desert sand.

Well, it tried. The material was so viscous that the spill was able to support itself through sheer tensile strength. One big glob of snotlike mucus.

That’s nice. What the hell am I supposed to do with a pipe full of snot? Jeb thought, grimacing at the snot-filled pipe.

For an instant, it reminded him of a bubble-maker he’d used as a kid, and Jeb suddenly knew what to do.

He took a deep breath, and he blew on the pipe. The mucus expanded, rising above the pipe itself to create a massive bubble the size of Jeb’s head.

Jeb took another breath and kept going.

When the bubble was big enough to trap a dog inside, Jeb reached out and touched it. The material was dry and soft, but still a little. It felt something like skin fresh out of a shower. It was nearly perfectly transluscent. He pushed a little harder, and the material dented around his hand, but didn’t give. Weird.

Jeb pushed it off of the pipe and into the desert, where it rolled downhill, picking up sand as it went until the bubble was much more opaque.

Jeb brought the pipe back to his face with the intention of making more, partly because he was studying them and partly because it was fun. When the bubble at the bottom of the hill twitched, Jeb took notice.

Raising a brow, he moved the pipe.

The bubble twitched again.

Jeb made a big expansive move, swinging the the pipe to the left, and the bubble jerked into a roll before stopping a few feet further left.

Hmm..

Jeb focused on the pipe, and thought about moving it.

The bubble responded again.

After a fair amount of trial and error, Jeb discovered that up to seven bubbles could be independently controlled by the bearer of the pipe, and that the bubbles themselves acted as energy conduits.

Heat, Kinetic, Myst, sound, electricity. Jeb was able to transfer all of these types of energy freely between the bubbles, but not matter. The rock he threw into one of the bubbles simply came to a halt, and the designated end-point released a puff of wind as the kinetic energy stirred the air.

Well, that’s really neat, but it doesn’t really solve my current Myst-splitting problem, and I’m not pulling another one out of me. Jeb now fully enforced the ‘one Accolade at a time’ rule, after the Gresh’s Subtlety debacle.

Hmm… I guess it’s back to the grind.

Jeb sat down and siphoned a string of Myst out of his palm. He stared directly at it, trying to will it apart. No, I already did that, Jeb thought, referring to the list of failed thought-experiments. I need a new way to think about this.

In the background, beyond the Myst above his hand, Jeb’s attention was attracted to one of the bubbles, wiggling in the wind and bumping up against a cactus, the wind ramming it into the spiny plant over and over again without popping.

Jeb frowned as his attention moved from the wobbling bubble to the stationary cactus, his eyes fixing on the green buds of new growth on the desert plant.

Buds?

Budding?

Jeb glanced down at his list of failed attempts at splitting his Myst.

What if Jeb could convince it to…grow a separate string?

Jeb was not an arborist, or a phytophile, or a tree hugger. He had the most dirt-basic education about plant growth, which was to say: only what he’d osmosed over the years.

Hopefully picturing it will be enough, Jeb thought. He couldn’t help but recall when the fairies had first taught him how to use his Myst, they’d used a lot of nature imagery. Jeb had chalked it up to the circumstances of fairy living, but maybe there was something more to it. Maybe.

Okay string, you’re going to give birth to a bouncing baby string, and it’s going to be beautiful. Jeb though, focusing on the Myst above his hand.

In case there was a minimum size requirement, Jeb siphoned the thickest rope of Myst he possibly could, a solid strand about the width of his thumb, lazily pulsing above his hand in time with his breathing.

Jeb focused on the side of it.

No pushing, no splitting, no more mental yanking on the string. Instead, Jeb simply imagined that section of the string was primed to sprout. Jeb experimentally weakened the layer around where he wanted the branch to be, but the entire string almost dissipated, leaving him back at the starting point.

Let’s focus only on the branching. Jeb furrowed his brows, picturing the change. Branches start from inside the tree, before anything was ever noticed in the outside. To that effect, Jeb imagined a whorl of Myst in the stream. A tiny little eddy in the steady flow of Myst, it gently pressed up against the edge of the string, looking for a new direction to go in.

Jeb’s eyes widened as he perceived a little something happening, but there was no outward effect.

Maybe… Jeb very, very slightly weakened the wall where the eddy pushed up against.

For an instant Jeb’s Myst string bulged outward on the side, like a burl on a tree. A moment later, the entire thing popped like a balloon, losing Jeb a decent amount of Myst.

He wasn’t upset though. He was manic.

I actually changed the shape of the string! Jeb had changed the shape of the end product before, sure, but it was always end-destination changes, like pouring liquid into a mould. This time, Jeb had made a change, and the original string continued along, regardless of the swelling coming off of it.

This could be the missing ingredient to both having multiple targets with one string, and converting one kind of Myst into another.

That could open up a world of possibilities for Jeb.

He could go from telekinetically manipulating two things at a time, to three! or more!

I wonder if Telekinetic Combatant would have been easier to start using Zesh’nei’s Translation with. Jeb had discarded the higher-tier class during the Tutorial because he’d considered it to be a one-hit wonder. If secretly had the key to using multiple different types of Myst with ease, Jeb would…

Probably do nothing. I doubt I would’ve made it through the Tutorial without the Mystic trapsmith class anyway.

Grass is probably dead on the other side of the fence here.

Jeb took a deep breath, focused on recovering his Myst for a moment until his inner star was surrounded by plumes of white-hot gas.

Alright, let’s figure this out.

As it turned out, learning to split Myst was a lot like learning how to drive a clutch. He had to precisely weaken the walls of the string -the clutch- then funnel a very small amount of Myst into it though the internal eddy he’d created -the gas-.

If he weakened the side too much the string poofed, releasing all the Myst into the atmosphere with a small thunderclap, and if he gave it too much gas, it would bulge out like a burl, then poof.

IE: Stall out.

Creating a working split was a micromanaging balancing act that Jeb expected would become second nature after he’d been doing it long enough.

After a good half hour, Jeb got his first working split. Two wiggling ends of his Myst string, that he could move independently of eatch other.

Out of curiousity, Jeb used one string to pick up one rock, and the other to pick up his shoe. Then he had them do a little orbit around each other before he had the shoe clomp through the desert sand while the stone whipped around him and struck a boulder.

I have solved the one object per string rule.

Up until now, Jeb could only move one ‘object’ at a time. He’d picked up several separate people or objects before, but there was always a band of air connecting them, spoofing the ‘one object’ limitation, and they’d all had to move in the exact same way.

Now he could move two things independently with one string, it…didn’t change a lot, honestly, not until he pumped up the number of branches.

Those are rookie numbers in this business, Jeb thought, frowning. Gotta pump up those numbers.

The nagging doubt returned. The sindio was obviously far beyond where Jeb would ever reach in his lifetime, what difference would it make if Jeb picked up a couple new tricks between now and the raid? The sindio would already know the tricks. They’d be so far in the back of his bag of tools that he’d likely forgotten they existed.

It was like pitting a toddler against a UFC champion, then a 5-year old.

Result was gonna be the same.

He’s gonna be distracted by the Enforcers. There’s a small possibility I’ll be able to waltz in with minimal resistance. Having a few extra tricks against his dungeon and minions might just save my life.

Twenty seven year olds will do poorly at first, but eventually win through superior numbers.

Jeb took a breath and got back to work, practicing his splitting until he could do it almost every time, save the occasional bungle. If he were going to use it in combat, splitting Myst needed to be as natural as breathing, but for the moment, ‘almost every time’ was good enough to start experimenting with Zesh’nei’s Translation again.

Jeb referred back to his notes, wrote down his progress, then made a split before guiding one end of the split down to the base of the string while the other one remained straight.

If splitting Myst was like learning how to drive a stick-shift, then Zeshnei’s Translation was like doing all that while walking a tightrope with a bomb on your back. And you really have to pee.

Jeb’s hypothesis turned out to be correct: It was possible to direct the altered myst out through the primary string, allowing the converter to maintain the reaction.

Read: possible.

In practice, Jeb was able to maintain the reaction for three seconds, creating a brilliant flare of heat and light suspended in the air for just a moment before he lost his concentration and a bit of the modified Myst leaked into the converter branch, causing a chain reaction that detonated the Myst in a fraction of a second.

By this point in time, Jeb already had no eyebrows left, and large parts of his hair were dramatically shorter than they had been when he’d started, so there wasn’t much effect on his appearance.

“Greetings, beloved friend!” Jeb’s manic practice fugue was severed by Michael’s over-enthusiastic greeting. Jeb blinked and looked up.

The muscle-bound angel flew down from the sky and dropped onto Jeb’s sitting boulder. He looked a bit regal, posing with his hair flowing in the breeze…if you ignored his height.

“Michael. What’s up?”

“My lamb bid me inform thee of news most terrible!”

“You know you don’t have to talk like that.” Jeb said.

“But it matches my image!” the angel cried, drawing his flaming sword and extending his wings to their full length.

“What’s the news?” Jeb asked.

“Be alarmed, for there is an ancient evil in possession of nuclear –“

“I know that one, anything else?”

“Several of the Enforcers who have been called in to dispatch the sindio are ‘reformed’ reapers, considered disposable by the Empire. You should watch your back around such people. It’s entirely possible they may try something in the chaos of the battle. You and several of your children make quite a juicy target.”

“Good to know. Anything else?”

“Oh. Umm, she wishes for you to take her place as guardian of her child should she perish in the battle against evil.”

The idea that anyone could look at him and think to themselves ‘yeah, I want that person near my children’ was baffling to Jeb. He clenched his jaw as he considered it. That was a hell of a lot to ask a guy, but really, what was one more orphan at this point? A drop in the bucket.

“I’m willing to look after her kid, but let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that, okay?”

Such is my duty!” Michael said, whipping a salute with his flaming sword before leaping into the air.

Good to know Casey doesn’t have any hard feelings about the scan, at least, Jeb thought to himself as the angel retreated into the horizon, aiming toward Solmnath.

As the visitor disappeared, Jeb refocused his thoughts

Now that Jeb had the hang of splitting, he needed to create a sustained reaction using his approximation of Zeshnei’s Translation, and hold it for quite a while. Fifteen seconds was Jeb’s first goal.

Once Jeb did that, he could maybe start trying to get something more nuanced than a ball of white-hot plasma out of it. Jeb’s theory was that the speed of the feedback loop, the rate of friction and possibly even the direction might all have an effect on the finished type of Myst.

The reason Jeb kept creating white-hot plasma was because it was the first one he’d discovered, it was easy to do, and it was safe.

Relatively.

Compared to transmuting body parts into lead, summoning eldritch horrors, or creating nerve gas out of nothing, a couple heat explosions and some burned eyebrows were actually quite safe.

And I mean, there are uses for white hot plasma, even though I appreciate a bit more flexibility than simply burning things to a crisp.

Maybe there would be a situation where a crackling ball of heat and light would be more useful than a telekinetic blade in terms of dealing damage, but Jeb couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

A slime? Do slimes exist on Pharos? I don’t think they do.

Jeb took a deep breath and successfully branched his Myst into two strings, then fed one backwards, creating a feedback loop.

Come on, come on…

Boom!

The reaction spiraled out of control, flinging Jeb backward in a smoking roll. He came to a halt, coughed out some sand, and mentally ticked off the time.

Three and a half seconds.

It wasn’t enough of a difference to chalk it up to improvement, but it was still early in the day.

******

In the distance, the scattered pirates watched as the witch lights flashed in a steady rhythm. Unnaturally white, they painted the surrounding barren mountains with brief flashes of bone-white illumination. None of them had ever seen their like, and not a single one of them dared venture towards the strange flickers.

They had plenty to deal with as it was, hunted from the sky by a flying Myst-user who was picking them off one at a time without even revealing themselves. Some of them believed it might even be a reaper, rather than a bounty hunter. Many Reapers chose their victims from among outlaws, knowing that by their very nature, pirates would never seek help from the empire.

Erron help us, The pirates thought. It could be both.