Learner’s Notes: Day 9

Hooters use something called money to exchange for goods and services. I find this odd as it has no inherent value. Sure, copper and silver could be melted down into tools, but gold is simply useless. Somehow everyone has surrendered to the same delusion that the shiny substance has value, and goods and services continue to change hands over and over again in front of my eyes for nothing more than an idea.

The metal is useless, and yet many ‘wealthy’ hooters will wear a lot of it to display how much ‘money’ they have to other hooters.

This display seems to make hooters with less money do things for the ones with more money…for free. This makes no sense to me. Usually these things are minor, such as moving out of the money-laden hooter’s way faster, but sometimes I see tangible benefits such as giving the wealthy one a seat, or preforming small favors, competing with other unladen hooters for the gold-laden one’s attention.

This behavior reminds me of the horker spawn we saw nursing at their broodmother’s teat, jostling each other out of the way for access to the live-giving nourishment.

Requires more study.

***Magenta***

Magenta left the confines of her burrow the next morning, stretching and yawning. She felt better. More whole. The mutations had finally finished, and she was ready to head out on her mission.

Nothing like getting a bright and early start, She thought, smacking her lips. She walked lazily back to where she’d left the corpses. There were still two well-built Genosians to snack on before she left for the desert, after all. They probably wouldn’t be as tasty as the fat one, but she could make due with nothing but tough muscle if she had to.

She was dragged out of her thoughts regarding Genosian flavor profiles when she noticed that the bodies had been removed. Studying the ground she noticed the ground had been trampled around them, but there was no blood like a predator might have left, messily feeding on the bodies.

No, someone took these bodies and carried them away.

More Genosians, she thought with a growing smile. The runaway archer had brought friends.

Magenta began following the tracks, until she spotted a group of six Genosians sitting on fallen logs, chatting around a fire while their dead rested against the trees.

She stalked closer, until an arrow whizzed out of the bush, causing her to flinch. The obsidian-tipped arrowhead carved a gash across her face.

Out of seemingly every bush, camouflaged hunters jumped out with primitive bows and axes, intent on killing her.

At least my next mutations won’t be far off, she thought, bounding up to catch the first prey that leapt toward her. They’re just so eager.

***Sometime later***

Well-fed and well exercised, Magenta happily trotted off to the east until she got sleepy and made herself another burrow, awaiting the next set of mutations.

***Calvin***

Extensive training has increased your Attributes!

+2 Stability

+2 Strength

+2 Endurance

+2 Kinesthetics

0/34 Warp remaining.

“Check this out,” Calvin said, jamming an Abyssal Steel tube into the Cystal lattice’s pale side. The odd, clammy monster jerked a little at the pain, but otherwise stayed still. It wasn’t able to form it’s protective covering because Calvin had deliberately changed out one of its catalyst organs with a Spinner finger. Without a shell, and under Calvin’s complete control, it simply sat there as he did experiments on it.

“Now this creature can steal Bent and use it to digest matter to create something I like to call undifferentiated mass. See that clear goop coming out?”

Calvin held the bottle underneath the tube, catching the goop as it fell out.

“This stuff is highly concentrated…anything, and packaged in such a way that the vast majority of its weight and volume don’t exist. It’s possible that fourth dimension shenanigans are at play here, but that’s not the focus.”

“But… Calvin said, showing Goob the bottle full of clear liquid. “This stuff is useless to us, because it was made from a summoned creature. Watch.”

Calvin unsummoned the crystal lattice and the goop in the vial vanished in a puff of green mist.

“Cool! It…didn’t do anything.” Goob said, deflating.

“Now,” Calvin said, moving over to the sluglike creature he’d been feeding Bent and stone every hour or so for the past six hours.

“This one, I’ve been feeding since breakfast, and you see how much we have in here?” Calvin asked, pointing at the many tubes leading to individual class jars of different catalysts, each carefully labeled by a knick-knack.

Each jar was almost completely full of liquid.

The idea had been spawned with Elliot suggested speeding up blood production via temporarily increasing bone marrow through dupdomancy. If it created enough blood from real nutrients, was it possible that some of it might remain after they’d been created?

“Now watch closely.” Calvin said, dismissing the crystal lattice.

The creature itself disappeared, dropping its tubes to the ground.

The liquid in the jars, though, began to bubble furiously, green mist rising out of the top.

“Awesome!”

“Indeed,” Calvin said, standing behind Goob. He hadn’t actually tested it before, and if it destabilized the undifferentiated mass, he wanted someone or something to absorb some of the high-speed, self-replicating glass shards.

Why get a safety glass when you have an apprentice?

Exactly.

Thankfully, there was no explosion, and eventually, the disintegration of the liquid slowed and finally came to a halt, leaving the tiniest film of liquid on the bottom of each of the jars.

“Yes!” Calvin shouted, pumping a fist. He had just proven that it was possible to make more Alchemy ingredients with a creature he’d summoned…as long as all the materials came from reality, and the efficiency wasn’t great…

All problems that could be worked on in the future. For now.

“So how does it work?” Goob asked, reaching into one of the jars.

“Stop!” Calvin shouted, freezing the child mid jar-reach

“Unless you like the idea of having a giant cancerous growth on your finger. Or a really big finger, or a smaller Goob living on your finger. None of those sound very good, do they?”

Goob shook his head, whipping his hand out of the jar and putting it behind his back.

“How it works is like this,” Calvin said, bringing out a slice of bread he’d gotten from the kitchens and setting it on the table.

“Add the Catalysts together,” He said, tipping the two jars carefully over the bread, a single drop from each, one on top of the other in the center of the slice.

“Then the undifferentiated mass.” Calvin said, putting a drop in the center, watching the young wizard lean closer with wide eyes.

The bread exploded in front of them, out to a bun with a radius of four feet in an instant. It drew a satisfying squawk out of Goob as the bread smacked him in the face with the force of a modest punch, toppling him over a stool.

The boy climbed to his feed in seconds, panting and staring at the giant loaf of bread jutting out of the original slice.

“Holy Guar!” he said, stepping closer and enthusiastically poking the bread.

“Instead of a crystal lattice, we’ve got a bread lattice. Hah. Have some,” Calvin said, ripping off a chunk and eating it. Mmm, that’s a good bread. I should try this with some garlic and butter.

Goob snatched a chunk and started devouring it. The boy probably hadn’t been able to have a good meal since the rationing began.

Calvin spat his out while Goob wasn’t looking.

“Anyway, that’s one of the ways I plan on helping with the food problem,” Calvin said. “Can’t have people starving between now and when we finally get rid of these creature

“Can you use it to make anything?” Goob asked, looking up at him.

“Sure,” Calvin said with a shrug.

“How about gold?”

“Why?”

“Because then you’d be rich!”

“Aside from being rare, gold has very little value.” Calvin said. “And I’m already rich.”

“What about girlfriends!?” Goob said. “Could you like, use this to create a girlfriend, or like, several of them from one!?”

Technically you could, but it would require a 3-d printer with space age precision.

“No. A real wizard makes his girlfriends the old fashioned way. Meet a girl who has a lot in common. Someone who likes magic and either conquering nations or supporting someone who does. Easy.”

“Easy for you to say,” Goob muttered kicking the floor sullenly.

“Don’t overthink it.” Calvin said with a sigh.

Goob’s sullenness lasted about as long as it took for him to land on another thought. “Could you use it to make your junk bigger?”

“Remember what I said about cancerous growths?” Calvin asked.

“What about storing a lot of stuff, and recreating it?” Goob asked. “What if it ate like, a house, and you could carry around that house in a vial and just pour it out, and there’s a house again. That would be cool!”

“That’s actually…” A really good idea.

It would need some kind of blueprint to recreate the undifferentiated matter back into it’s original form.

Or a predetermined form… Can’t my body already do that, or something similar? Calvin thought. Blade body was able to recreate the knives that were stored inside him, down to the little dents and scratches in their blades. They were being disassembled and reassembled at will.

How? Calvin frowned.

Maybe if you could isolate whatever stores the knifes in your bloodstream, we could either use it as a design storage catalyst, or more likely use the sensitive material from the Lure bonded with it to create some kind of design ‘snapshot’…

Damn, this sounds like it could take a long time to iron out.

But the ability to carry a kingdom in a jug. Imagine that.

You think the people would be grateful to spend most of their time as inanimate goop?

Probably. Who knows?

“Or you could, Idunno, put it in a water bladder and throw it at a girl, and have it explode and just absolutely drench her.” Goob laughed wickedly, his gaze distant as he retreated into his imagination.

“How’s the project going?” Evor asked, entering the laboratory, empty since the majority of the wizards in the city had been killed. They’d fared much better this second time around, but there was plenty of space to spare, and Calvin had received his own lab and his own assistant, as part of the package deal for supporting the retaking of Gadvera.

He could basically ask for any price he wanted at this point, and he had. The lab was a rather small portion of it. From Elliot’s and Kurawe’s recommendations, he’d asked for land to the southeast, money, and a title.

What he wanted more than anything else was fame, though. He needed people to follow him in droves when he went to cut his own kingdom out of the jungle to the east.

The best way to get that was to be the messiah who fed the hungry and clothed the poor. So Calvin was working on ways to transmute rock into bread through Abyssal alchemy fuckery.

“So far the results are good.” Calvin said, motioning to the massive loaf of bread dominating the table.

“And it’s not a construct?” Evor asked, frowning as he approached, looking over the bread. Calvin felt a pulse of Bent shoot out and try to dispel the bread, leaving it exactly the same as before.

“Did you make sure it isn’t poisonous?” He asked, eyeing the large hole the boy had devoured out of the side of the massive loaf.

Calvin glanced at Goob, who was poking some of the other half-dozen bottles Calvin was planning on using to make armor and weapons with.

“We’ll know soon.”

Evor’s expression soured. “I’d rather you not use Goob as a lab rat.”

“He doesn’t mind.”

Evor narrowed his eyes some more, his face taking on wrinkles Calvin didn’t know he had.

“Then can I get some rats, please?” Calvin asked.

“That can be arranged.” Evor tilted his head toward the door. “And I was to tell you Andra needs more troops.”

“Ah,” Calvin said, setting down the jar and putting its lid back on. “Thanks, I’ll be right there.”

“Make sure all the lids are airtight,” Calvin said, making sure his own was locked tight before setting it under the table.

“I’ll see you when you get back, sir,” Goob said, giving him an overenthusiastic salute.

Calvin glanced down at the jars in front of the kid’s chest. “Yeah…no. I don’t trust you alone in a room with these. You’re coming with me so you don’t try to flood the gold market, or make a cancerous twin pop out of your neck.”

“That would be so cool!”

Was I ever this bad?

More or less.

Goob levered the tops down on the bottles, put them under the shelf and sprinted to the door.

Calvin glanced back at the jar with the tiny film of liquid at the bottom, trying to estimate its worth.

There were maybe fifteen to twenty-five drops of liquid in the bottom of the glass, enough to make somewhere around a thousand pounds of gold, if one were so inclined.

Calvin scoffed and shook his head, briefly tempted to pick it up and carry it around with him everywhere he went to protect it from being stolen.

Not only would that be awkward, it would also draw attention to the thing’s perceived value. He didn’t want anyone to steal it, but if they did, would it really be the worst thing? He would just tighten security, and wait for the idiot to reveal themselves by suddenly having more gold than the entire royal family.

Then Calvin would kill the idiot and life would move on.

I can think of something more valuable than gold.

Oh yeah?

Plutonium. A thousand pounds of that would be something.