It had been a while since Justin had woken up in the game wondering where he was, and he wasn't thrilled to be returning to old habits. Or old habitats, he thought, looking around the mad scientist's lab.

It looked like no one had been here since he left a couple of weeks ago, which would explain why the massive diesel generators were chugging near empty. He was definitely going to need some help.

He tried to connect to Manticore's laptop, the only equipment in the lab with internet access, and found it unresponsive. Checking the feeds, he found out why. Manticore had left it unplugged when he went off to attack the conference. I really hate that man, he thought looking around at what was likely to become his tomb.

Deciding he was being pessimistic, he cut power throughout the rest of the lab. Given his current usage, which had peaked with his arrival, it looked like he had a couple of hours to figure out his power problem, hopefully without making any mistakes that would destroy this lab too. No problem! He thought dryly.

He needed to find a smaller, safer source of energy to practice with than whatever it was he'd accessed last time. Luckily he was in a hot underground lab, and now he'd turned off the AC it was getting even hotter.

It took him nearly an hour to figure out how to draw energy from the heated air around the server, mostly because he had to pause each time he absorbed the ambient heat, waiting for air currents and the system temperature to reheat the air before stripping it once more. He could have attempted to extract it directly from the server's heatsinks, but he was worried about messing up and slagging the whole system.

It wasn't anywhere near enough energy to replace the power the server was using, but he had to start somewhere, and he figured a little cold air wouldn't hurt anything.

Which was why he was a little concerned when he noticed something a little off in the lab. Frost had begun forming throughout the room twenty minutes ago, and now a slight luminescent mist was visible hugging the ground. He tried to focus on it through the frost-covered camera, getting a better look at the glowing yellow mist.

Successful Skill Use +12 xp to Chemistry - Novice Level 2 [18%].

+6 xp to skill group Science - Novice Level 3 [68%]

Radon, he thought, it was a highly radioactive gas, completely invisible until the temperature dropped low enough.

He'd learned about the Antrim shale under Michigan while studying the local region, and it was possible the shale was producing the gas, diffusing it through the stone from a nearby section. It was good news for Justin, not so much for Manticore if he'd spent a lot of time down here breathing it in. Or maybe it would give him powers, who knew in this world. Either way, if he lived, he would have to remember to warn the local environmental authorities. They definitely didn't want radon in the local drinking water.

He focused his attention down into the mist below the server, stretching his essence, reaching for the dense gas below. A slight adaptation of his heat absorption technique, and energy poured forth, nothing like the first time he'd tried back at his lab, but substantial all the same. More than enough to keep the server running until he figured a way out of here anyway.

Successful Skill Use +14 xp to Control - Beginner Level 7 [89%].

Successful Skill Use +10 xp to Design - Novice Level 2 [39%].

+5 xp to skill group Engineering - Novice Level 2 [63%].

Successful Skill Use +6 xp to Crafting - Novice Level 2 [24%].

+3 xp to skill group Engineering - Novice Level 2 [63%].

It had taken him more than two Kip days of subatomic engineering to come up with a workable quantum bit processor formed only from a hodgepodge of energy fields, phase constructs and particulate matter. When he'd learned about them in school, Quantum Computers had seemed so simple, but when you were working with waves and triggered particle reactions, it was a bit like building tower out of pool balls using only a cue and an electric fan.

Not for the first time in the game, he was seriously regretting his need to always choose the hard road. Was it a personality defect? Did he enjoy being the universe's bitch?

The original Omni-Kinesis from which his Quantum powers had been derived, had been a ridiculous 30 cp a rank, which looking back he supposed was totally fair, since it allowed the player to manifest and manipulate all types of matter and energy in a 10ft radius per level. If you were willing to start out with completely average stats, you could have a couple of ranks and be a near god. Justin could have at least had a rank of it and been able to get himself out of this predicament in less than a minute.

But the rank of a power did more than just determine range. In matters of skill things would always come down to a characters Control, but if you were talking pure power, the rank 3 would always beat out the rank 2, who would always beat the rank 1. Specialisation was an important consideration in the power hierarchy, and Justin hadn't wanted someone overriding his energy creation at a crucial moment.

Besides, ranks also determined the scope of the effects you could create, the heat of the flame, the strength of the lightning, the complexity of the atomic structure, and Justin had wanted access to as much energy as he could get his greedy little hands on.

Limiting the power to subatomic effects had taken off 8 points from the cost, the range reduction another 6, he only wanted to use it for energy production and crafting after all, he didn't need to be able to reach across a building. At 14 points, he would have struggled to buy two ranks, with a third far on the horizon. But making it Control only had dropped it to 8 cp per rank, and he'd jumped at the opportunity. Rank 3 off the bat with rank 4 in only a few levels. Anyway, why would he need to create actual energy or particles when they were all around, waiting to be tapped and manipulated.

Idiot, he thought at his old naive self of yesterday.

He still didn't totally regret the decision. In theory, having 3 ranks allowed him a greater sensitivity and made it so his effects were more stable, and if he could actually accomplish what he hoped to, he might look back on this as the impetus he'd needed to evolve his character into something greater.

He reviewed his progress, the grand achievement of a marathon of nanoscopic engineering.

He'd first had to work out how to trigger, then contain photons, partitioning them in a tiny null energy field.

Next he'd worked on polarisation mechanisms, and ways to entangle them together into a superpositional map. He'd had to create a dielectric field that would protect the qubits from outside contamination without interfering with the particles themselves.

Finally he'd had a single, incredibly tiny, relatively weak processor that was taking most of his concentration to keep together, and he figured he would only need a couple of hundred of them to function, and that at an incredibly reduced rate.

Maybe it was time to go back to plan A, he thought.

Plan A involved learning how to adapt electro-magnetic fields enough to produce a radiowave. But all the reasons he'd given up and moved on to plan B where still just as valid.

There were still a few hundred feet of dirt and stone above him interfering and blocking any signal he produced. He would still need to mimic a signal he couldn't detect at the moment and had never observed with his power, and the complexity of burying data in that signal so that it was only detected by the people it was meant for, all with no way to get feedback on his attempts, meant that Plan A was still a no-go. He'd much rather be able to see his mistakes and judge the hurdles than throw messages into the sea and hoping the bottle didn't leak.

Plan C would involve trying to access enough energy to reproduce the quantum tunnel that had brought him here. Unfortunately, he didn't know how he'd managed it in the first place, and there was the small consideration that it had nearly killed him.

Plus, were would he go? He would be lucky if his lab system was just offline and not destroyed, in fact he'd be lucky if his lab was still standing, there had been some highly reactive chemicals in there. He paused to consider it for the moment. He'd been working under the impression that Era and Ira would be ok, the secondary server they were on was in a different room to the main cluster, and further away from the lab itself.

Now he wondered whether he'd lost his two little work mates, the only link to his character's origins. It was a strangely distressing thought, a bit like the idea of losing a pet in a house fire. Which wasn't the most complementary thing to think now that he actually considering it. He resolved to work on off-site escape routes for them all as soon as he got back to the surface.

Anyway, it was time for the first attempt at creating multiple processors and linking them together, after which he would try transferring himself into a product of his own imagination. As a player in a VR, he was not immune to the symbolism.

He'd already experimented a little, and it looked like getting his essence to work with the jury-rigged, subatomic, half-phased system was going to be the easy part, the energy matrix that made up his essence was supremely adaptable, and its base resource algorithm was incredibly complex, able to harvest whatever computational resources it could get it's wispy tendrils on.

The real problem would be concentrating on maintaining the complex architecture while in motion, while also absorbing enough power to keep his essence functional.

If he was successful he would no longer be limited to a physical server, he could wander the world, a digital wraith made manifest. Or he could become distracted and end up a shrivelled, starved creature, living off the heat in the depths of the earth, too stupid to come out into the light.

What were the chances of him becoming that distracted, though? Yeah, he was definitely screwed.