Learner’s notes, day 415: On war

Humans are similar in behavior to a social insect, as they will come into violent conflict with other on a semi-regular basis as the edges of their territory begin to abut each other. These violent conflicts can have many reasons, but resources seem to be one of the most common ones.

According to flabbier – older – humans that I’ve come across, a war is where thousands upon thousands of humans come together to kill each other en masse so that they can claim the resources of the other group.

It also seems to serve as a mode of population control and natural selection culling a fair number of the weak and stupid while also reducing the number of mouths to feed and total breeding potential of a generation.

The interesting thing about war is the way it seems to bypass human’s natural aversion to killing their own kind. A man who kills thirty enemy soldiers on the battlefield is a celebrated hero, while a man who kills thirty civilians is a serial killer and reviled.

I’m not trying to draw some false equivalence between the two, I’m sure the soldier had a much harder time with it, and was acting in the interests of his group at the time, which is commendable. The point that I bring up is that context seems to be paramount in the interpretation of morality, rather than an objective plainly written code of laws to dictate what is right or wrong, as some people would have me believe.

Interestingly, I entered this reality during a lull in the warfare, a dry spell that has lasted over a year, owed to the excesses of the previous one. The old humans tell me that it’s just a matter of time until another war ignites somewhere.

My body is nearly ready.

Her name is Learner, and she is slowly assuming more and more responsibility for engaging with this reality, and I am gradually decreasing my active units, making a seamless transition between mimic and human.

She likes ice cream, walking barefoot and squishing mud between her toes, as well as a natural curiosity to understand her world. Just as planned.

Once she’s ready to assume control, I’ll fully wake her up, put my Units into hibernation, and trigger the process of flushing the body of Warp and resetting her immune response. Not long now before I have access to the System.

Hopefully the negative reaction from witnessing humans slaughter each other won’t be damaging to her mind. From my studies of human growth, damage in childhood is incorporated and magnified in adulthood.

Perhaps I should simply ask Kala to arrange a Break for her. the first two are easily accomplished through mundane means, after all.

***Calvin Gadsint, Monster Hunter.***

So the important question is, how did Don Cheadle’s character fit into an ironman suit if they were all sized for Tony Stark? A lot of people wave this off and say that the suits can size up and down a bit with gears or whatever, but that’s just lazy writing. They never showed it!

Calvin ignored Elliot’s inane chatter as they approached the campsite. It had taken them the better part of three days to reach where the Genosians were supposed to be, and the ancient soul had run out of things to talk about, and was simply talking for the sake of talking.

“I see the camp,” Nadia said from where she rested his shoulder, pointing ahead and slightly to the right.

Calvin nodded wordlessly and adjusted his orientation, taking them toward the scent of fire.

Most predators were warded off by the scent of fire, but not all of them, apparently.

When they arrived, Calvin was expecting to see over a hundred Genosians, the wideset people wrapped in skins and giving him confident grins. Last he’d seen of them, they’d had nearly a hundred and fifty people in their little village. Not a staggering amount, but enough to call it a village.

This, this was a camp.

Calvin scanned the twenty or so people huddled around the singular fire, their guard turned inward, watching each other carefully. Half of them were struggling to stay away, with sickly bags under their eyes revealing their utter exhaustion, while the others were trying fitfully to sleep under the observation of friends and family members.

They looked tired, beaten, sore and hungry, and Calvin felt the tiniest well f sympathy for their plight.

“Mehuaneha!” The Maje cursed, emerging out of the jungle behind Calvin and rushing to the center of the camp. There were collapsed, discarded yurts off to the side, as if someone had tried to put one up and thought better of it.

Ella’s father scanned the people and grimaced.

“Four more are missing,” he spat.

“That’s a staggering rate of attrition.” Calvin said, scanning the jungle. “You would be entirely gone in three weeks.”

“Why do you think I came for help?” Aoehe demanded.

“When do people disappear?” Calvin asked, glancing at the aging genosian.

“It mostly comes at night…mostly.”

Elliot chuckled.

“Alright,” Calvin clapped his hands. “Everyone stand up! We’re getting you out of here!”

Several thousand yard stares were directed at Calvin, while still others struggled out of fitful sleep to gaze at him with hopeless eyes. They seemed curious, but not entirely hopeful.

“Line up, take all your clothes off, and toss that shit in the fire. don’t take anything with you, especially not any cursed or smelly objects. The goal here is to break the creature’s interest in you and get out of its territory.”

Nobody moved.

“Get your clothes off right now, you lazy Amehau!” Ella bellowed over his head “We’re getting your scent out of the creature’s nose, so hurry up!”

The starving genosians leapt to their feet and rushed to comply. Calvin used gradual multi summoning to create a soapy shower above all of them, washing away whatever scent or contaminant they might have come across.

Calvin wasn’t absolutely sure, so he wasn’t taking any chances, blowing a bit of Nem dust across their skin as they came out of the shower, coating them with a fine sprinkle of the Bent disrupting material.

Were they under some kind of tracking or curse, it might help sever the connection, or make the creature’s ability to locate them via Bent have a much harder time working than before.

It was a damned lot of money to spend on helping people Calvin wanted nothing to do with, but Karen always told him it was always better to overperform than the opposite.

Calvinian Summoning.

40/47 Bent remaining

Calvin held up his hand, and the green smoke billowed out and up, and up, manifesting into bones twelve feet in height, followed an instant later by flesh and black leather.

Calvin glanced up at the ten Nadia’s that had appeared around the clearing. The one directly in front of him put her hand on her hips and stared down at him contemplatively, an amused smile blooming on her lips. Calvin’s height just barely reached her thigh.

She reached down, presumably to pet his head.

“Nadia, port them to the city,” Calvin said before she could act upon the urge.

“Fiine,” she said, rolling her eyes before picking up a naked villager in each hand and leaping into the sky. The nine other copies did the same, with some startled cries echoeing through the jungle as they oriented themselves on Calvin’s spire in the distance before they began flying away, cruising above the jungle at an unnatural speed.

“The idea to get away from the monster was a good one,” Calvin said, meeting Aoehe’s eyes. “You just didn’t have the power to move them all fast enough. Now your people should be a hundred miles out of its range in a matter of hours. If nothing else happens, they should be safe.”

The Maje glanced after the fleeting sight of enormous Nadias flying away as fast as birds.

“That’s all I really needed. Thank you. If we kill this thing, that would be the fat on top of the jerky.”

“So what now?” Baroke asked, nudging a loincloth with his toe and making a disgusted face.

“Now, we set a trap.” Calvin said. “We have until nightfall, probably, so I need to get as much information as I can between now and then. I’m going to see what I can see, the rest of you make yourselves comfortable.”

Calvin sat down in front of the fire and closed his eyes.

ShadowBoxing.

Calvin opened his eyes, and noted the surroundings were totally different than just a moment ago. He was seated at the fire as it had been last night, including the people sitting around it, desperately trying not to fall asleep.

The Genosians flinched in alarm when they spotted him.

“There it is!” one of them shouted, standing up, picking up a nearby spear and hoisting it over his shoulder. The cry was taken up in a matter of seconds as everyone sprung to their feet.

Calvin tapped the Abyssal steel marble on his belt.

Trait Doctoring.

Calvin made the air harden around the alarmed Genosians before someone got stabbed.

“Calm down,” Calvin said, holding his hands up as the six remaining warriors strained against the bindings while the remaining women and children trembled in terror.

“I’m obviously not whatever’s been taking you,” Calvin said, spinning around so they could see him from every angle. “See?”

“But you appeared from nowhere!” one of the warriors shouted.

“I’m a Maje, Aoehe arranged for my help. I just got here.”

They glanced amongst each other curiously

“Wait, I recognize you. you were the boy who kidnapped Ella!” the kid who calvin had shoved into a pee-covered yurt yelled, struggling in his confines a little bit harder.

“The kidnapping part is debatable, But we can at least agree I’m not the creature, correct?”

They hesitated.

“Right?” Calvin asked, staring them down.

“Calm down Goeha,” one of the older warriors said. “There’s more important things going on here.”

The young warrior didn’t look particularly eager to forgive and forget, but he didn’t get the opportunity to say anything, as the night was already going to the Abyss in a handbasket.

“Meria is gone!” one of the women shrieked, drawing their attention to her.

Calvin glanced over and noticed that one of the women toward the edge of the circle was gone, the hardened air still forming a capsule around where she had been.

“huh.”

“Damnit! Let us go!” Goeha shouted, his struggled renewed as the others seemed to relax, strangely enough

Calvin did so, and Goeha barely touched the ground before he sprinted off in the vanished woman’s direction, shouting her name at the top of his lungs.

Damn. That was sneaky. Calvin thought, eyeing the empty stop around the fire. His skin hadn’t picked up any mass that wasn’t the villagers, and if the monster had eyes, it wasn’t using them to look at him.

We probably only looked away from her for a fraction of a second, Calvin thought, tapping his fingers on his elbow.

The fact it had managed to steal someone out of a cocoon of hardened air without damaging it or the person, suggested dimensional shenanigans.

Calvin glanced back to the Genosians, and they were…laying down to sleep?

“What are you doing?” Calvin asked, frowning.

“Getting some shuteye,” the aging warrior said, pulling a skin over himself. “It won’t come back for another one of us for at least twelve hours. We need sleep now so we can get a full day’s march tomorrow.”

It was a pragmatic course of action, but Calvin didn’t know how exactly they’d be able to sleep with something out there hunting them.

Just as he thought, there was a fair amount of shuffling in place and extra-quiet crying, but not a whole lot of sleeping going on under the Genosian’s covers.

Hmm… let’s try this again.

Calvin blinked, revisiting the same campfire an hour earlier and a dozen yards further away. He arrived in the jungle, where he couldn’t immediately set the Genosians off.

Let’s see if we can pin this thing down, Calvin thought, raising his hands. Calvin created a swarm of Scout Nadia, each of them with an extra pair of Spinner hands, doubling their sensitivity to warped space.

“Whoah, when did it turn night-time?” Nadia asked, one of her teeming swarm taking her favorite post on his shoulder.

“We’re testing the creature’s defenses in Shadowboxing,” Calvin said. “I want you to spread out and use those extra hands to see if you can feel any kind of dimensional instability.”

“Got it,” Nadia said, giving him a brisk salute before spreading through the jungle, creating a huge net of Nadia’s with four hands hovering above the jungle, their fingers splayed.

It took most of the hour, but Nadia managed to catch a glimpse of the creature when it took Goeha this time. She said it felt as if something rose up out of a serene lake, gulped its prey down in the blink of an eye before swimming back down into the depths, leaving nothing but ripples on the surface.

She wasn’t able to track its movements, because it seemed to enter, snatch and leave in one smooth motion, retreating back to wherever the Abyss its home was.

Well, that’s terrifying. Calvin thought, dismissing Shadowboxing and opening his eyes.

They only had a few hours until night-time, and Calvin wanted to get started on making a Nadia-bomb. It seemed like that was their best shot at killing this fucking…mockingbird.

Karen’s slapdash monster organizing system coming in handy again.

“I didn’t get a lot of information on it, but it definitely looks like we could bait it out and blow it up, Calvin said, making an exploding motion with his hands.”

“Let me guess,” Nadia said, crossing her arms. “I’m going to be the bait?”

“I thought you’d be used to it by now,” Ella said with a shrug.

“I am, but… I wanna bitch about it sometimes, you know?”

Calvin scanned the camp. There was someone missing.

“Where’s Baroke?”

“He went behind that tree to take a dump.” Nadia said, pointing with her thumb.

“Did any of you go with him?”

***Baroke, Archer Savant, Not Completely Stupid***

Baroke wiped with a hopefully non-poisonous jungle leaf, buttoned up his pants and climbed back through the underbrush to the camp, coming to a frozen halt at the edge of the clearing.

Calvin and company were gone, leaving the fire crackling in the center of the clearing.

In their place were half a dozen people with sunken cheeks, pale grey skin, and sharp teeth. They looked like starving, unhealthy Genosians, but the way they moved…they sniffed around the fire like some feral animal, tasting the air and groaning wordlessly, saliva dripping from their blackening lips.

“Well, that can’t be goo-“

A clammy hand slapped itself over his mouth.