Last Command of the Witheld Arc 1: Rebirth

Griffin Tucker Vasilias, Great House Scion, Reborn Lvl 2

Mount Discovery, Province of Aragonia

It had taken another week and a half before Griffin felt ready to get back to his search. He had been eager to get back out there as soon as he possibly could, but the plasma cybercentipedes had other plans. The halls outside his room had become a major monster gathering place and dozens of cybercentipedes now rested on the walls, ceilings, and floor all around his doorway. Of course, when the Mother was around, the rest of the little ones made themselves scarce.

Griffin had seen a Mother tear through a swarm of plasma cybercentipedes in a feeding frenzy. It had really driven home the point Kismet had made earlier: these were only Mothers in name and wouldn’t hesitate to eat the smaller plasma cybercentipedes.

He had no idea how long the cybercentipedes were going to swarm around his door but he had a feeling their new behavior had something to do with the tensa he was able to see with his new senses. He was able to see a vague blur of silvery energy in the walls of the room. The energy seemed to form a complex net through the entire wall, save for a couple of spots where the net seemed to be blurry or fuzzed. He couldn’t tell what was going on with the net of energy in the wall but the monsters seemed to prefer to congregate around those spots.

To pass the time while he waited for the hallway to clear of monsters, Griffin practiced using his different senses alone and in combination. He would make the windowall transparent and then use his precision telescopic vision to observe Heldon. It took practice, but with Kismet’s continued guidance on meditation, he found that could to spend hours on end focusing on different things, making tiny adjustments to the zoom level.

The resolution he could maintain even at high levels of magnification was truly astounding. He could make out individual birds in the trees at the base of the mountain they were halfway up. Griffin tried to make out the people who lived in Heldon, but he couldn’t keep his head and eyes still enough to make out anything beyond a few blurry smudges. He could tell that if he managed to keep himself still enough, he would be able to get even greater detail. But until he could still the vibrations caused by his breathing and heartbeat, he’d have a distance limit on what he could reliably pick out.

He tried seeing if he could use his other senses while he was zoomed in with his precision telescopic vision. None of his senses returned any information at his vision’s highest zoom setting, but his SONAR was otherwise the longest-range sense he had. When he combined the precision zoom with his SONAR, he could get a much more detailed picture of objects at even the most extreme levels of zoom.

One of the training games he played was the blind obstacle course. He’d set up a bunch of obstacles with conjured items, then turn out the lights and try to complete the course using only his new senses. He quickly found that while they were all useful in their own way, not every new sense he had translated to be useful to try to use in his obstacle courses. His infrared sensor was most effective very close while loud noises or odd materials could blind his SONAR.

His experiments showed him that, with a combination of his tensa sense, SONAR, and infrared, his HUD could put together a very reliable visual overlay of the environment even without light. It took him a little while to get used to the odd colors that the HUD used to indicate different things, especially when he was also getting the physical sensation of those senses, but the practice helped immensely. After a couple of days of constant practice, he could navigate whatever obstacle course he and Kismet designed as easily as if he could see.

He tried to incorporate everything about his new graft into his training regimen, including the ability to record the sensory input that came with his Sensor Suite. Griffin found that Kismet could also record what she saw and her recording would be in whatever senses he was using at the time. So he asked Kismet to record him as he went through his movement training and hand-to-hand drills and then they watched the recording and Kismet would critique it.

“I look almost like a kung-fu action star,” he commented after he’d watched himself execute a form-perfect 360-degree jumping spin into a kick. “If I was watching myself in a movie, I’d think I could kick my ass. Except by now, I’d be wrong,” he mused, chuckling a little under his breath.

Kismet asserted that he had only barely scratched the surface of the movement training. “You’ve finally started being able to go through the proscribed movements without making egregious mistakes,” she said, bursting his bubble. “But that’s not the goal, it’s only a step on your journey. And the forms are only meant to help you adjust to your Attributes’ effects on your mind and body.”

Regardless of Kismet’s admonishments, Griffin felt a warm sense of accomplishment. He had been working on this set of forms since he’d first gotten here and had been struggling with them the entire time. This was the first time he felt like he was making visible progress. He just wished the damn plasma cybercentipedes would stop grouping up around his door so he could get back out and explore again. He was getting sick of being stuck in the palatial suite of rooms.

The day he finally decided it was safe to set out on his search, it was with little real hope that he’d find the ethershard he’d seen in the video. The corpse of the Mother was big, but the way they mowed through the smaller monsters, Griffin didn’t think there’d be much left by the time he got to it. But he decided to go through with the expedition anyway simply because of his increasing cabin fever.

I must be nuts if I think wandering through a monster-infested abandoned weapons testing lab is preferable to chilling in my room practicing magical martial arts while making endless junk food, he thought wryly. But he couldn’t deny it. He knew if he stayed in that room for another hour, he’d start gnawing on the wallpaper.

As he crept through the halls, he had all his new senses active. The new senses he’d recently gained were more than just visual layers, they were entirely new sensory inputs. He mainly experienced his SONAR through tiny pressure differences on his skin that he was able to interpret unfailingly; bizarrely, his infrared sense was mostly taste-based. Or at least, that’s how he thought of it. His tensa sense was the most difficult to define since it didn’t correspond to any of his existing senses, and yet had aspects of all of them.

Griffin wanted to get used to interpreting the entire suite of new sensory data at once, but it was hard. There was just so much information coming at him from so many new and interesting sources that it was easy to get distracted if he didn’t keep focus. Lucky for him, the halls were clear of the disgusting monsters.

It took him all morning to make his way through the labyrinthine corridors and he was hungry by the time he got back to the destroyed lab. The smell filtering through the closed door made him gag making him glad he’d decided against eating lunch the last time he’d taken a rest break. At the time he’d been tempted to use his Adaptive Conjuration to try to recreate a bologna sandwich with chips and a juice box—a childhood favorite lunch with the kind of bold flavors that stretched his ability with the graft. The smell out in the hall made him doubt that he'd eat dinner tonight.

He tried to project his SONAR through the door to see if the lab was still empty, but he couldn’t get a clear idea of what was in there. Even his tensa sense wasn’t able to penetrate the closed door or wall very far—only enough for him to see that there was tensa in the wall itself much like the enchantments in the walls around his room. The patterns the tensa made in the walls here were much fainter than in the walls of his room, though they hadn’t yet faded entirely.

He put his hand on the doorknob and hesitated, not quite knowing why he felt so nervous about opening the door. Is it maybe because you don’t really want to go diving into another dark hole with a huge cybernetic insect at the other end? Griffin thought drily. Because that’s an eminently good reason to hesitate. Still, he wasn’t going to find his next ethershard by waiting for it to fall into his hands. If he wanted it, he had to get it.

“You can do it,” Kismet said in his ear. “Your plan is a good one. Just make sure you follow it and don’t get any bold ideas.”

Griffin blinked at her and shook his head slowly, “Bold ideas? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t go trying to fight the Mother—you don’t have any weapons or offensive grafts,” Kismet said seriously.

Griffin laughed, “I don’t know who you’ve been hanging out with for the past few weeks, but believe me when I say that I have no desire whatsoever to fight the Mother. With or without weapons. That’s like asking me if I want to try to fight a semi-truck that has laser beams for headlights with my bare fists.”

“I’m glad to hear that, but don’t act so stunned,” Kismet said. “A common side effect of Reborn unlocking their Attributes is an increased sense of invincibility. I’m telling you that in your case, it is not warranted.”

Griffin stared at her flatly, then quietly opened the door to the lab. He’d decided not to bring his oil lamp this time, relying instead on his tensa, SONAR, and infrared senses in the dark and using his HUD to provide a kind of night vision. It took him a few moments to adjust to the photo-negative appearance his HUD painted the room in but Griffin was used to it by now. He’d been practicing using his senses in complete darkness for the past few days for just this occasion.

Griffin was able to quickly navigate through the rubble-strewn room, trying to be as quiet as he searched out the hole the Mother had dragged the corpse through. The lab was just as he’d left it the last time he’d been here, complete with the terrible smell. It wasn’t quite as strong as it had been, but Griffin found himself missing the hazmat suit he’d conjured the last time he was here.

His other project over the past week had been the supplies he thought he’d need for this little trip. He’d recreated his favorite gear bag from LARPing practice with Adaptive Conjuration, a big red and black duffel bag that had plenty of room for everything he’d need. Into the bag, he’d stuffed a wide assortment of survival gear. Of course, he’d created and packed a rope and a grappling hook. He’d never used one before, but he was damn sure not going to be running around a monster-infested ruin without a grappling hook. He’d overdone it a bit if he was being honest with himself—there was no way he’d need ten flares. Griffin had just gotten so excited that he’d managed to make a flare that he’d made far more than he needed.

Grinning, Griffin dropped his overstuffed duffel bag down on the rubble by the hole. He unzipped it and dug around inside, pulling out a neatly-tied coil of rope and, just for giggles, a couple of flares. He tied the end of the rope to one of the exposed steel reinforcing rods that had been torn and bent away when the first Mother had burrowed up through the floor.

Then he popped a flare, still grinning at the bright reddish-pink flame the flare produced. He tossed the flare down the hole, feeling like a true adventurer as he did, even though his Sensor Suite made the flares largely redundant. His SONAR had already told him that the hole led into a cavernous room with tall ceilings and several large counters or solid desks arranged in rows countless rows and columns. His SONAR showed a chamber that was an entire kilometer long and a kilometer across. He had no idea how many of those tables or whatever there were.

The cold combined with the orderly rows of large counters or tables reminded Griffin of data centers on Earth. “Is this like a data warehouse or something?” He whispered. “It’s cold enough to keep high-powered computing equipment cool, and I can’t see why else you’d have so many big bulky box things in rows like this.”

Kismet shook her head, “I don’t know. I don’t believe this has to do with their computing or analysis efforts, but I do not yet have enough information to say for sure.”

“Oh look!” Griffin pointed, “There’s the remains of the Mother that might still have the shard!” The corpse he sought had been unceremoniously dumped across several of the tables about fifty meters into the room and then heavily gnawed on. There was no evidence of the living plasma cybercentipede Mother.

Griffin’s flare sputtered and spat, its magenta light beating back the darkness in the other room a little, but not nearly enough to make out much detail. Griffin tugged on the rope, double and triple-checking his knot, then tossed the other end of the rope down into the room below. It wasn’t a difficult climb, but Griffin was sure that at any moment, the living Mother would come back and devour him while he was dangling in midair. He did his best not to catch his skin or clothes on any of the sharp bits of rubble since he didn’t think he could conjure anything to help with a broken bone or tetanus.

Griffin reached the floor of the new room and shivered. It wasn’t just cold in here, it was freezing! A frozen mist swirled in the air near the ground He rubbed his arms, trying to generate some warmth. Kismet flew around, taking stock of the area as Griffin dug into his bag and pulled out the parka he’d packed. The damn thing had taken nearly four hours to get exactly right and he’d still had to settle on buttons rather than a zipper, but at least it was warm. Kismet had given him an incredulous look when he’d bundled the thing into his bag, but he’d insisted it might come in handy.

“Looks like it was a pretty good idea to pack this jacket after all,” he remarked, unable to contain the note of triumph. Then he shivered again. His breath puffed out in thick white clouds. “Why the hell is it so cold in here anyway?”

Kismet’s voice sounded in his ear and her chibi form appeared in his HUD, this time wearing a lab coat and a pair of big wire-frame glasses. “There are still heavy enchantments connected to an independent tensa supply. We haven’t absorbed any enchanting or runescript Synthskills yet, so I can’t read the runes but I can still make an educated guess: I believe that the enchantments are cold-based preservation enchantments.” She frowned and admonished him, “Before we go another step, I must insist: don’t rely only on your new senses, Griffin. I know you just got them and you’re eager to practice, but you’re crippling yourself unnecessarily.”

Griffin blinked at her, surprised at the sudden outburst. “What do you mean?” He asked. “I’ve been doing everything you told me to!”

Kismet sighed and said, “I know it’s easy to forget since you are unaccustomed to it, but your anima is just lying limply around you like a wet poncho. You should always, always be using your anima. If you’re not gathering tensa with your Ten Star Vortex technique, then you should have it in one of the detection or stealth configurations. You can’t afford not to think like the Reborn you are!”

Griffin sighed, rolling his eyes. The sweet taste of victory had soured a little, but Griffin rallied. She was right of course. It was easy to forget about the new organ that his Rebirth had given him.