Okay, our job as exploiters is to identify any instability in the System, figure out how to repeat it, then see if you can find a way to exploit it for profit. It’d be cool if you could figure out some kind of duping glitch when it dumps the data.

I understood maybe half of that, Calvin thought.

Oh, right. I Keep forgetting you savages don’t have access to the internet. Don’t worry, your grandkids are gonna love it.

Calvin’s tongue poked out the side of his mouth as he put the finishing touches on the last wooden sign, tapping the woood chisel over the last letter.

Use your imagination! The two dozen signs prompted in Juntai script, which was an interesting, blocky language that easily inscribed in wood and stone via chisel.

“Okay, all of you ready?” Calvin asked, handing one sign out to each Nadia, each one bearing a Lure enhancement to the parietal lobe, allowing them to feel people’s desires. Calvin imagined jabbing one of them in the side with his knuckles as vividly as he could.

“Eek!” All two dozen Nadia’s flinched, nearly dropping their signs.

“Perfect.”

Yeah, if there’s no distance limitation between their experience sharing, she’ll be overloading the System in a matter of minutes. Now that I’m running a diagnostics program I can I.D. exactly what Nadia’s limits are before the System goes kaput. Once we get that we can plan accordingly.

“I’m not so sure about this,” the foremost Nadia said, rubbing her side where he’d imagined poking her.

“That’s too bad,” Calvin said, pulling a dozen knives out of his bag. He offered them to the assembled Nadias.

“Pair up. Every pair take a knife, and tear your partner’s clothes provocatively. I’d do it myself, but” – Calvin glanced over at Kala, observing with a raised brow. “The old battleax is watching.”

Kala snorted.

“Once you’re good and lewd, spread out onto each major street intersection with the sign. Should only take a minute or so.”

“What exactly is happening here?” Nadia asked.

“Oh right, I forgot, you don’t remember. Last night you had so much psychosexual stimulation that the System itself couldn’t account for it. We’re going to try repeating that in a couple minutes.”

“Soo…I got mind-fucked so hard the system stopped working?” She asked incredulously, arm tucked under her chest, the other holding the sign over her shoulder.

“That’s the working theory.” Calvin said with a shrug.

“I just want to know if it’s possible,” Kala said with a grin.

“I swear to Kvothe,” Calvin said, pointing at Kala. “If you think being a Chained spirit is a way to indulge your basest fantasies, I’ll disabuse you of that notion right quick, wife! I’ve seen the kind of shit you get up to in Shadowboxing when you know you’re a copy!”

Kala had the decency to blush a little before Calvin turned back to Nadia, who was busily working in teams to artfully rip her own clothes. Calvin averted his gaze, not out of any sense of propriety or wanting to honor his wife, but because Nadia was a crazy bitch, and lusting after her was like handing a known burglar the keys to your house.

Once that was taken care of, they dispersed through the streets of Juntai, leaving Calvin, Kala behind.

The two then climbed up on top of one of the nearby two-story buildings where they had a clear view of three streetcorners, and proceeded to watch three Nadia’s devolve into a shivering mess on the hard-packed earth streets.

“Sliver jerky?” Kala asked as they sat on the roof, offering him a thin strip of meat. “Ella and I found them when we were out shopping. One copper for ten pound of the stuff.”

Calvin took the nearly black meat and inspected it, holding it up to the sun and admiring the way the light shone red through it for a moment before snapping off a bite. It was immediate punch in the face of meaty flavor, more intense than the smoked jerky back home in every way.

Do they have some kind of salt we don’t have or are slivers just that tasty?

“Unsummon me!” the Nadia beneath them managed to gasp between wordless vocalizations, surrounded by a veritable wall of man of every age, jostling to get a better view of the temptress. “I give up! Please, I can’t do this!”

“Sure you can,” Calvin said, taking another bite of sliver jerky. It wasn’t like she was going to remember anything, anyway.

“This is really good,” Calvin said, patting Kala’s head while his wife glowed from the attention.

Below them, Nadia seemed to reach some kind of uber-climax, her back arching in a manner that seemed almost painful.

Shouldn’t be long, now, Calvin thought, idly kicking his heels while Kala wiggled beside him, angling for more pets.

Gazes from more perceptive men and women landed on him every now and then, picking him out as an oddity, sitting atop the building above Nadia, overlooking the scene.

Those gazes were all mixed of curiosity and inquisition.

Except for one.

In a split second, Calvin felt recognition, then fear, then alarm. He snapped his eyes to the side, where he felt the gaze coming from.

Nothing but a rowdy crowd of cheering men, every one of them Juntai.

Hmmm… is there a Ilethan spy in Allast?

Calvin wouldn’t be surprised if the mind-mages had their tendrils all the way out here. Juntai was, after all, a major untapped consumer of copper and producer of wood. Iletha would eye this distant nation like Guar stud eyes a bitch.

***Carem***

I’ve never had a woman explode on me. Carem thought as he walked down the street, still struggling to organize the wealth of foreign ideals, concepts, skills and ideals.

Not literally, anyway. Right at their most excellent moment together, when the girl was close to becoming him, and he was close to having everything she could offer, she burst into green smoke, leaving his roots exposed to the biting chill, dry of the air.

Exposed roots were painful, like having a raw nerve besieged by the elements, and it distracted him momentarily from the jumble of new information, allowing it to scatter through his mind with little oversight or acknowledgement.

He’d have to pick through his mind for foreign influences later, but for now, he simply marveled at the wealth of Mind he’d managed to get from…whatever she was, before she’d vanished.

Eight points of Mind! More than I’ve ever gotten before.

More than he ever needed, to be honest. His Mind was now at a staggering Seventy-two, enough to put the greatest legends to shame. His highest mind Attribute, though, was Intuition, at thirty-seven, just over half of his limit. It would take decades to push his mental limits high enough for any of his attributes to reach seventy-two: He might even die of old age first. In the mean-time, he would most likely see his limits continue to rise to unattainable heights.

Too bad there’s nothing you can actually do with Seventy-two Mind.

A flash of foreign memory triggered at the thought, causing him to stagger, nearly losing his footing.

ilethan…mind…magic.

A gale of foreign sensations and half-remembered knowledge swept over him. All of it was vague and disjointed, like facts he’d known once and only recently remembered.

It seems…It seems as though every other part of the world values Mind much higher than Juntai. Carem came to the conclusion as he weathered the storm of vague memories.

The girl’s half-memories gave him the impression of staggeringly powerful beings capable of terrifying feats using Mind attributes. Her father for example, controlled his family members through a web of strange…living relays for his will, mindless in their own right. The man wouldn’t hesitate to tear someone’s will away from their body from a thousand miles away and add it to…a chair?

He half-remembered watching as an army choked on their own breath, had a vague impression of a man getting his head bitten off by a giant wasp.

The foreigner’s arts are the path forward, Carem thought, suddenly sure of it. He tried to focus his mind on anything the girl knew about gaining and utilizing mind-magic.

It was trying to grasp at water.

The knowledge was there, like a skill he’d known once but hadn’t practiced for decades. He could almost picture how to do it, but it felt just out of reach, almost like a dream.

Carem never got all of someone’s skills and knowledge, only a small fraction. And in this case, he got even less, because she’d exploded before he managed to drain everything he possibly could from her.

In this case, he’d gotten the knowledge that such things were possible, and the barest inkling of how to begin, but most of the practice would have to come from him.

Fair enough. He thought, mentally focusing himself as he resumed walking, heading for his tannery to retrieve the week’s earnings.

Carem was so absorbed in his thoughts of how to get started practicing the ilethan art without drawing attention to himself that he didn’t even notice the crowd blocking his way until he was in the thick of it.

What in Evern’s Suckhole is going on here? he thought, jostling against dozens of other hollering men. Eventually he found he couldn’t push further ahead without getting overly physical.

“What’s going on?” He demanded of the man next to him.

“Some Foreign woman’s putting on a show, I think!” the gap-toothed man beside him said with a wide grin.

Foreign woman? Carem thought with a frown before using his superior Strength to force his way through the crowd, stopping about three layers back when he finally made out another buxum Ilethan girl wearing tattered leathers, writhing on the ground, iron coins pelting harmlessly off her body.

Not another girl. The same one. How is this possible?

Carem got the vaguest impression of summoning something, using Bent to create something from nothing.

She’s a creation! A foreigner’s creation! Carem thought, glancing around.

Sure enough, there was a pair of foreigners sitting atop the nearby building overlooking the chaos, a dark-skinned foreign girl and a remarkably pale young man. They were eating jerky, intently watching the foreign girl hump air beneath them.

When Carem focused on the man’s face, he experienced a rush of memories of the man tying him up, tormenting him, using him for…

Carem’s mind began making associations at lightning speeds.

That’s the magician! That’s the one who created her! It was also the same man who’d noticed his gaze when he’d stalked the group of foreigners earlier. The pale skinned Ilethan girl was with the other foreigners!

He wants to know how his creation was destroyed, and this is a show to lure me out! This is a trap!

A sudden brush of memory alerted Carem to something else.

He can feel gazes! He can feel my gaze!

A wave of ice-cold fear shot down Carem’s spine as he instantly lowered his gaze back to the Ilethan girl on the ground. He forced a smile onto his face and began bouncing up and down, pretending to be another one of these stupid monkeys rather than a sliver caught in a snare.

He went so far as to take an iron coin out of his purse and toss it at the girl, watching the show for a bone chilling minute before pushing his way out of the crowd, making sure not to let the foreign magician see his face or feel his gaze.

I think he didn’t notice me. Does he know what my face looks like? Does she know what my face looks like?

The girl on the ground seemed a little too…preoccupied to recognize him, so that was a complete unknown, and the magician hadn’t picked his face out of the crowd…possibly.

There were just too many unknowns!

This first thing he needed to do was get his emotions under control, then he could worry about whether or not a foreign Mind-User was hunting him.

At each street-corner, Carem came across a similar scene, reinforcing the idea that these artificial women were set as bait for him to stumble across.

Carem shuddered and briefly considered heading back to his home and hiding away from the word for a few weeks until everything blew over.

No. Nothing out of the ordinary. I have to go about my day as usual. If they don’t know who I am, I mustn’t stand out, and if they do know who I am, four walls of flimsy wood aren’t going to keep them out.

Extensive training has increased your Attributes!

+1 Stability

The System seemed to agree with his course of action as he took deep breaths and calmed his mind.

If they don’t know who I am…then…this could actually be quite a lot of fun, couldn’t it?

***Calvin***

Calvin glanced up at the sun, past its zenith and slowly losing altitude in the sky, gradually lengthening the shadows in the city.

We’ve been at this for hours and got nothing, Calvin thought as the Juntai equivalent of guardsmen picked up the drooping princess by her arms and hauled her to the local drunk tank for being a public nuisance.

Opportunistic beggars were scooping up the iron coins she’d been showered with, scuttling across the roads like scavenger crabs over a guar carcass.

Odd. That should have crashed Nadia’s System extension hard and fast. There might be a secret ingredient that we’re missing, or the System already patched out the problem. Unlikely, given your tenuous connection. I’ll try and see if I missed anything.

Go ahead, Calvin thought, standing and stretching. I’ll get back to work.

“Care to visit east Allast?” Calvin asked, holding his hand out for Kala to stand. He’d visited the logging camps to the south, and now he wanted to see what the city was like on the east.

Kala accepted his hand and gracefully rose to her feet.

“I’m hardly suited for covert operations around here,” she said, glancing down at herself. “I stand out like a sore thumb.”

“Call it a date, then.”

“What about..” Kala nodded in Nadia’s direction.

“She’ll be fine.”

Calvin opened the mental connection Nadia. If anyone does anything you don’t want them to, you’ve got my permission to rough them up a bit.

I̸̧̠̹̭̭̓͋̿̉̀̉́͋ A̷̡̛̪͎̤̘͓̺͗̋̌͗͠m̶͎̘̝̲̥̞͈̜̈͂͐́͌̀͝͠ D̸̤̺̱̫̝͓͋̔̐̓̚͜e̢̳͕̥̟̭̗͓̿̎͌́̄̇͆͡s̴͓͉̳̣̼̤̖͚͙̀̏̃̓͗̀̀̇̏̕í̸̢̢͔̬̲̣̣̰̲̀̾̅̒̈͘ŕ͕͎̤̦͗͗̎̆͟͜͝͠ę̴̛̹͖͉̗̤̘̲̥̽̉̾̾̍͒̈́ Î̡͕̼̦̪̤̌̐͒͢͞n͉̜͔͖̟̲̯̎͆̆̀͑̍͢ͅc̠͎̳͙͉̀̆̉̿͒͌͘͠͠â̵̖͍͈̮̆̔̌͆͐̐͘͢͟͞͠r̴̛͎̠̺͙̎̂̐͜͠n̶̞̗͕̫̼̰̍́̀͛͌͢a̷̧̠̞̣̼̫̹͖͓̺̍̈́͂͂̓͐̿̒t̠̪̖̥̺̭͎̠̆̒̉̉̄͌̀ḛ̦̙̩̖̑́͌̅̐́͘ͅ!̛͈͔̰̟̰̪̈́̂̇̒̎̑̈́

“She’ll be fine,” Calvin said again, this time reassuring himself as much as Kala.