“…and therefore, that ultimately means that Slimes cannot categorically be classified under any taxa known to Earth,” I concluded, nodding contentedly to myself. I tugged on the front of my garment, peeking down at my companion beneath. “Man, Slime-bro, your people sure are some special stuff, aren’t they?”

Boy, that had been one wild train ride of a thought. I didn’t even remember how I arrived at that conclusion, except that it involved Bang and Boom, a bunch of rejected ideas, debating the moral acceptability of the creation of Suicide Slimes, and about ten other intermediate steps in between.

Slime-bro, who looked as though he had been sleeping, peeked out drowsily, blinking in confusion, before sliding out from beneath my shirt and plopping himself down on the adjacent seat. Had he not been listening in?

Ah, well, I could always retrace my steps to how I had arrived at that conclusion.

“Oh, have you been sleeping, Slime-bro?” I chuckled, running my hand over his slimy, slightly damp skin. “Don’t worry; don’t worry. I’ll repeat it again –“

“By the Deities’ blessed names, please don’t.”

I blinked, gaze snapping toward the front, where the groan that bordered on despair had originated from. Seated in front of me, in the other row of seats that lined the interior of the cabin, was an uncannily familiar boy.

Come to think of it, hadn’t he been the one that I’d seen hiding underneath the chair?

More importantly, though –

“My Bang!” I shouted, reaching out to grab one of my three precious samples back from the boy, who held the tank in his hands. “Thief! Grimer – I mean, Slime-bro – hit him with a tackle attack –”

“Keep it down!” the boy urged, offering his stolen possessions without hesitation. His eyes darted around the cabin, nervously eyeing the doors on either side of the moving carriage. “Take it! Just take the damned thing!”

“Uhh… thank you? Oh, Slime-bro, cancel that last move; you’re not actually allowed to attack the trainers themselves.”

From where he’d been peering in confusion between them both, before rearing his small body backward on the seat, poised to leap forward and strike, Slime-bro followed through with my newest order, returning back to perfect normalcy.

“A Slime…” the youth muttered, staring blankly at Slime-bro. “Of course you’d have a Slime with you. A Slime that understands speech. Sure. Why the hell not?”

He sat there with tired-looking eyes, hands limply raised in frustration, leaning back in his seat. For several seconds, I just sat there, trying to piece together what had happened.

Outside, amidst the scenery passing by rapidly through the window, the sun was already starting to set. Given that it had been mid-day when we departed, a good few hours had to have passed since then.

To me, though, it had only felt like several seconds. Why? I had been about to load Boom into the cabin, before I noticed that boy hiding underneath the chairs, and then he’d waved his hands –

And then those ideas came forth. Those grand, majestic, tangentially-related ideas that had each been barely explored before yet more notions of great science leapt out to replace the previous one’s presence.

I studied the boy more closely. He twitched at the increased attention. Far from looking like a thief, highwayman, or hitchhiker-slash-serial-murderer, he simply looked tired, as though he’d sat through a sixteen-hour-long experiment before losing all his samples at the end because he’d accidentally tripped and fallen.

I would know. I’d been there before. That soul-crushing sensation wasn’t something I’d soon forget.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Aksal didn’t mention that anyone would be joining us…”

He was silent for several seconds. “Kylan. Aksal’s my uncle,” he finally said. Then, he winced. “And please, for the love of all the Five Deities, are you finally back to normal?”

Huh. Aksal had a nephew? Now that I thought about it, the name Kylan did sound familiar. Perhaps Aksal had mentioned him in passing before.

Still, why did he seem to have such a poor impression of me?

“Normal?”

That sent another twitch of annoyance, nervousness, and – fear? – through Kylan. He breathed heavily, before glaring at me with hardened eyes.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve been doing for the last four hours?”

I glanced at Slime-bro. Oddly enough, he too looked subdued and resigned. “I mean… you did something to me, and then all those miraculous ideas started flooding in…”

“Ideas. Sure. That’s what you’re calling them?”

I was getting the sense that perhaps Kylan and I started off on the wrong foot. It was probably for the best that I tried getting a sense of what had happened from the beginning.

“So… Aksal told you what we’re going to be doing in Grynasar? You’re coming along with us too?”

Kylan hesitated for a moment, before nodding. “Yes. Let’s go with yes.”

“Oh, cool. Nice to meet you, then. Name's Eric.”

The cabin lapsed into silence. He seemed to harbor some lingering ill-feeling toward me, and just to make sure we started off on the right foot, I didn’t want to press in too quickly on the topic that I was most interested in. Namely, what he had done earlier to make me simply ignore his presence, and let those ideas come forth freely.

“So, uhh… will you be helping the guild, then? You’re an [Alchemist] like Aksal?”

“No. I’m a [Trickster],” he said slowly, each word calculated, still continuing to size me up.

A [Trickster]! From the name alone, I could guess that it was of the [Rogue] archetype. I tried making myself seem as unthreatening as I could – if we were going to be working together, I couldn’t have him being so mistrustful of me.

Besides, I still needed him to spill the secrets of what likely had been a class skill that he’d used a few hours back. It was unlike any other skill I’d seen or heard of thus far, and I wanted to know how it worked.

“Uncle Aksal says you know how to cure the Blighted Curse.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question, but the tone of his voice was enough to know he doubted the claim. Still, he’d chosen to talk, which was progress in the right direction – sooner or later, I’d have him tell me everything about how his skill worked, and what else he had in his arsenal.

Considering his question, though, there were quite a number of semantics there that would alter my own answer…

“You’d need to define what you mean by cure,” I said slowly. “See, even though Vergence’s version of smallpox or whatever orthopoxvirus causes your Curse seems to have a natural history of disease that progresses more slowly than Earth’s, it has the same eventual mortality. If by cure, you mean that I can successfully treat the disease at all stages in the way an antiviral might be able to, then no, I probably can’t, because by then viral titres would probably be far too high and the person would be killed before any useful immune response sets in; but if by cure you really mean prevent from spreading, then kind-of, although now that you mention it it’ll also depend on whether or not Vergence has any sizeable subpopulation of immuno-deficient individuals for which vaccination is not possible and the R-naught value of the virus keeping in mind the sociogeopolitical situation here and –“

“Stop!” he interrupted harshly. “Forget what I asked! No more!”

I blinked. That was a rather… enthused response. Had I done anything to earn such ire?

“Just answer me this,” Kylan said, gaze focussed. “You have a way to stop the Blighted Curse.”

Again, much more semantics hidden beneath that, but I figured that what he really wanted was reassurance. I could give him that.

I nodded. “Yeah, probably. The Alchemist’s Guild will be the one who’ll do the big heavy lifting, but Aksal thinks it’s quite possible.”

“I see… and you’re from the same place that Hero Shinya Haruto comes from?”

“Yup! Don’t expect me to fight off the Demon Lord, though, because I’m practically useless in combat. Besides, I’m only Level 8. No Demon killing for me!” Kylan reacted to that admission, seeming startled, but I was unfazed. I leaned forward in my seat. Time to go in for the kill. “Biology is all that I’m here for. Anyway, speaking of Levels, what level are you? And what skill was that, earlier?”

“Level 14,” he replied after a brief pause. “And remind me never to use [Distract] on you again. Ever.”

“Why not? It was great! I felt like I had so many ideas –”

At that innocent question, he shot me an icy glare, and even Slime-bro looked disappointed in me as he shook his head, hopping off the chairs on my side to join Kylan’s. Kylan’s face paled, before he began speaking agitatedly, words rushing out from his lips.

“Why? Why? I just sat through four hours of you speaking nonsensical words like ‘calcium fluxes’ and ‘self-organising suicide Slimes’ and ‘phytogenetics’ –“

“Phylogenetics,” I corrected automatically. Huh, pretty impressive that he’d actually managed to say those words correctly, considering that most were entirely foreign to Vergence.

Kylan continued, undeterred. “– and a whole spiel on ‘electron transport chains’ that came up exactly the same, word for word, four times; and something about Slimes, Pokemon, Ditto, Grimer, EV training –“

It continued on in much the same vein. Truth be told, I vaguely remembered what he was talking about, but my attention span directed at each topic had been so brief, that they hadn’t really been fully committed to memory save for the most major points. And even though people often complained that I tended to air my thoughts aloud, going as far as to call me an airheaded scientist, I’d never once been told that I’d continuously talked for a four-hour-long stretch.

I hadn’t even remembered what Kylan was now telling me about self-propelled Boom-Bang-packed Slimes, but apparently, at some point that had been something I’d mentioned. How had my thoughts led to that point, and more pertinently, how could that be replicated?

Once the tirade concluded, Kylan sat there, breathing heavily, staring crossly at me. Couldn’t imagine Aksal ever becoming irate, but looking at his nephew now, I supposed that that would be how he’d look like.

[Distract]. How did it work? Unlike a [Fireball] that launched a magical projectile, or an [Infuse Mana] that I could scarcely detect, this seemed to be more akin to the [Animal Breeding] that Aksal mentioned Prisca could use, except it had altered my thoughts in some way, an act that even modern day neuropsychologists couldn’t definitively explain.

Naturally, I wanted to find out just exactly what Kylan had done. I remembered that I had been attempting to figure out just who Kylan was and why in God’s name he was hiding underneath the chair at the time, before he’d used the skill, and my thoughts had suddenly been shifted toward the tank of Boom that now rested on my lap.

It wasn’t a field I was specialised in, but I did have to sit through lectures on neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and a few brief lectures on neuropsychology and human behaviour during my undergraduate years as part of preclinical training. From how I’d experienced the skill first-hand, I had a theory that I now wanted tested.

“[Distract],” I said, attempting to contain my excitement to preserve some sense of dignity in front of Kylan. It wasn’t good for first impressions if I let myself become too enthusiastic. “How do you use it?”

He continued staring at me, and I grinned nervously. It took several more moments before he was willing to speak.

“Normally,” he said, stressing the word. “All I do is find something I want the target of the skill to be distracted by. In your case, though, Nyx above knows why it did what it did. Even when I stopped hiding under the chair and took away that damned tank of whatever the hell is in it, you continued talking and talking and talking –“

Yep, Kylan was slipping back into complain-mode. Funny, I couldn’t imagine Aksal being like that. Still, I considered what I’d learnt, and how it reinforced what I’d initially suspected.

[Distract] altered selective attention.

Covert attention and overt attention were two different concepts, by definition dealing with visual attention, although there were likely analogous pathways for the other senses. The former dealt with the brain attending to objects that weren’t visible or otherwise not actively being looked at, while the latter was more obvious, in strict definition terms dealing with simultaneous gaze fixation, although equally sounds, smells, tastes, and physical sensations could be attended to in analogous manners. He had shifted my overt attention initially, making me look at the tank of Boom.

Had the skill also directed the topics that stemmed on from there, even when I was no longer attending to Boom? From Kylan’s brief description of what normally happened with the skill before he’d collapsed into his current verbose state, that didn’t seem to be the case. Had they come naturally of my own volition once he used the skill and directed my attention toward Boom, without any further input on his part?

Attention was a field that despite years of research, we didn’t have definite answers for, much like most of neuropsychology. What we had were models – and though I wasn’t very up to date on the literature, I could base my initial proposal for how [Distract] worked on Treisman’s attenuation model of selective attention.

The reasoning of it was simple and elegant: with multiple sensory inputs being fed into a person at the same time, there was competition over what anyone could attend to. Treisman had built upon Broadbent’s earlier filter model of attention, whereby inputs were filtered based on physical properties, blocking out unattended messages, and which was hypothesised to be the bottleneck stage in what actually limited our ability to attend to multiple stimuli at once. From there, the resultant flow of information could be processed at higher levels, before being fed into working memory.

Treisman’s model had one minor deviation. Based on her results in dichotic listening tasks with volunteers, she had proposed that immediately after sensory filtering at the level of the primary sensory organ itself, there was an attenuation filter that instead served as the bottleneck. An unattended message had its input diminished at this filter, but it still continued on to be processed at higher levels, unlike Broadbent’s model which proposed that only the attended message was allowed to pass through. With it, she had explained phenomena such as the cocktail party effect, whereby a stimulus that someone was not attending to amidst other competing stimuli could have meaning ascribed to them, such as when a person’s own name was called in the middle of a loud social gathering, something that the Broadbent model couldn’t satisfyingly explain.

I knew that there were limits to the model, and that there had since been newer models that were proposed to account for its weaknesses – but for now, this would serve as a good enough starting point.

Stimuli competed for attention all the time. Back when I’d entered the cabin, Kylan’s unexpected presence had demanded centre-stage, competing against everything else coming at my senses – the wind brushing at my skin, Slime-bro’s minute shifting beneath my clothes, the warmth of the sun, the colours and grain of the wooden carriage, the tank of Boom I had been holding… and those were just the overt. Buried beneath it all, there were a near-infinite number of subjects that could, but were not attended to, and among them as a minor drop in an ocean of subjects were the many experiments I could do.

[Distract] changed that. Somehow, it had either shifted the workings of the attenuation filter, increasing the flow of information transmitted at that stage from the tank of Boom compared to what I saw of Kylan, and before I had intrinsically made the connection of Boom to the experiments I wanted to carry out of my own accord? Or it had acted at a higher level, changing the relative meaning and importance of the two stimuli by making Kylan’s odd presence seem uninspiring compared to the many fascinations that lay within Boom?

Or… perhaps even both?

Was there a difference? At the surface level, perhaps not: so long as the target was suitably distracted and attending to what the [Trickster] designated as an anchor, it didn’t really matter how the underlying neuropsychology worked.

Yet there were many nuances that lay beneath. If it strictly altered overt attention, with my change in covert attention having been something that occurred intrinsic to me, rather than as a result of the skill, it made the skill more limited in comparison. If it worked at the level of the attenuation filter, which according to Treisman’s original model was based purely on physical characteristics, high-level meaning could not be used as an area of consideration by the [Trickster] for how the distraction would function. It could not, for example, [Distract] a target by making him start thinking about all objects around him that started with the letter H.

If, say, the [Rogue] could change the way the brain perceived processed information at higher levels, though, there were many possibilities that lay within. What was the limit? Could it alter short term memory stores? If the target had been attending heavily to one particular subject, could the [Rogue] still force the shift to occur?

And more importantly, if it could suppress things that didn’t need to be attended to, much like all the miscellaneous tasks running in the background of a computer that really didn’t need to be, would it in turn allow for something to be attended to more strongly without facing competition by its peers? Could it be used for, say, a temporary cure for ADHD?

More intriguingly, could it be used to increase productivity, by not being distracted by competing stimuli, whether they were of covert or overt natures? There was a risk there, though – in order to make links between tangentially related subjects, the brain had to keep information ready to be accessed and attended to at any time. If [Distract] could hypothetically have its function usurped to suppress such information, those links may not be found or otherwise accessed, which would in turn possibly lower productivity and –

Oh, hey, chairs are pretty interesting.

Wait, what?

“Oh, Deities above,” Kylan moaned, staring at his hands pitifully. “There’s just no winning with you, is there?”

Unlike how he was before, Slime-bro now looked amused. Looking at them both, it took only a moment for the realisation to sink in.

“Oh… I talked out loud again, huh?” Man, I really should start clearing that bad habit. Back in the lab, it was fine, but nowadays I was starting to meet more strangers, and it was starting to make me seem like a raving lunatic. “Whoops, my bad.”

Still, he’d shifted my attention to the chair. That much was clear. Had that choice of topic been because it was the skill’s limit, requiring some sort of physical stimuli to be present, or had it been by Kylan’s own design?

And how had he made something as mundane as chairs compete with the much more interesting topic I’d been considering? Could it be that he had completely shut down the topic of my attention, halting my thoughts in that instant, in order to force me to pay attention to a boring, mundane wooden chair, and somehow think that it was the best damned thing ever created?

Because holy crap would that be amazing if that was how it worked.

“And here I told myself I would never [Distract] you again…”

Blah, blah, blah. Words, words, words. Kylan was such a downer.

“Can [Distract] ever fail?”

He was reluctant to answer, but finally replied after several seconds of me awkwardly maintaining a strained smile at him. “Only if your level or magical resistance is too high, or if it's blatantly obvious that the target is a distraction. Thank all the Five that you’re only Level 8.”

Magical resistance. Blerugh. I made a face at that, frowning. It wasn’t biological or measurable in concrete terms, or at least wasn’t something I could study at all, much like mana exhaustion. It was fascinating in the sense that something unobservable had such profound effects, and yet frustrating because it was unobservable.

Then again, hadn’t it been Galileo who said to ‘measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not?’ Was there a way I could eventually figure out how the arbitrary concept of ‘magic resistance’ could be quantified, once I finally got a working theory of magical biology strung together?

The idea that magic resistance was the determining factor rather than any internal biological resistance to the skill made sense, though, considering that it was magic that was somehow interfacing with myself through his skill. Magical resistance and magical assault, all occurring on the battleground of biological life. That notion warranted further thought later.

For now, though, I was limited to investigating only what I could measure and study. And Kylan’s skill was perfect for refining what I knew about models of attention.

“Hey, Kylan, can you, like… make me think of cats, or rainbows, or cute little neutrophils, or funny histology slides, or –“

He waved his hand.

That chair is pretty cool.

I glared at him. He glared back.

“I’m not going to sit through another five minutes of nonsense,” he said simply. “And no, [Distract] doesn’t work like that. I need to see, hear, or otherwise target what will be linked to the skill’s victim.”

“Hm… so it’s strictly overt attention, then; good to know. Still… is that at the level of the attenuation filter, or at a higher level processing, or maybe even working memory? Let’s see… if this were Earth, I could do some testing with object tracking while recording with EEG leads or fMRI or PET-CT –“

He waved his hand.

Chairs are awesome.

“Hey, stop that, I’m about to get to the good part,” I said, scowling. It was strange, trying to orientate my attention back to where I had drifted off. “Where was I? Right, so if [Distract] functions by making a specific sensory input stand out more… could it be that it artificially forces the ascribing of meaning to a stimulus, kind of like how the cocktail party effect works or how a mother tunes in to her baby’s cries when –“

The chair is god-damned amazing.

“Kylan!” I scolded, as good-heartedly as I could. Simply put, I hated conflict. “There’s a time for play and a time for science, and – ooh, a time for chairs!”

Kylan smirked, and horror crossed my mind as I now realised what was happening.

Twice was coincidence. Thrice was happenstance. Four times was maaaaybe an honest mistake.

Five times, though?

He was seeking revenge.

A hand was raised in the air, and I knew that with a single gesture, and with a little expenditure of mana, he could keep me forever on the edge just before I was about to reach a satisfying conclusion. Without magic resistance – whatever that was – that could compete with his own skill, a mere Level 8 up against a Level 14, I was powerless to act.

Such an amazing, awe-inspiring power that I wanted to dissect and tease apart was now being used against me. Much like my precious mice that would frequently bite me when I tried scruffing them for dosing, Kylan knew who was actually in control. I had been powerless as a PhD student, the bottom of the scientific totem pole, lorded over by my experimental models, and now as a [Biologist], the latest object of my fascination had cunningly realised the power he held over me.

“Don’t do it,” I urged, hoping he would listen to reason. “Be a good man. You’re Aksal’s nephew! He’s like the nicest man alive! Think about the science!”

“Payback,” he said simply.

And thus, the tables were turned. Each time I tried to have a few moments of quiet to think to myself, even if I purposely made sure my lips were sealed, my attention was drawn toward the same damned chair that I would bet I could now recreate purely from memory. I had no time to layer my thoughts upon one another, with how frequent Kylan was using his skill, expertly reading my expression the entire time.

By the time that another ten minutes passed, when Aksal finally stopped the carriage for us to rest at a nearby village for the night as it passed sundown, day giving way to the still-unfamiliar night devoid of stars, I had already been thoroughly defeated. When he opened the door, probably expecting me to be fast asleep across the chair as I tended to do on long car-rides, he’d instead been thoroughly shocked to find a victorious Kylan holding his hand in the air, as I begged for merciful release.

Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, a sure sign of mana exhaustion sinking in with how frequently he had been using the skill, but by then I had already suffered a devastating defeat. Slime-bro was perched between us both, having been serenely watching everything unfold the entire time. Damned traitor. I would have to withhold his next dunk in the Slime-bath to teach him a lesson.

“Kylan? What are you doing here? What is going on?!”

“Aksal,” I said, turning to my only hope for salvation. “Your nephew is too damned smart for his own good. Also, I’m calling dibs on him now for the lab.”

Oh, yes. Neuroscience wasn’t my specialty, but I figured I had enough of a grounding in my undergraduate years to start from scratch. I had grand plans: I’d need to remap all the 52 Brodmann’s areas – because honestly, who could remember the names of all of them perfectly outside the field? – and then further subdivide the brain into functional divisions as best as I could remember, and with what I could piece together through study with Kylan.

All that consideration had stemmed from just a single [Distract], and that was just building on my rudimentary knowledge of neuropsychology. Who knew what other [Rogue] skills were lying in wait, practically begging to be tested on? And what of the skills of other class archetypes, which I hadn’t even begun to observe? And then there was still the whole magical beasts aspect that I had barely scratched the surface of…

Man, being a scientist sucked when I had so many interesting things to look into.