Interlude: Attaboy

It was bewildering how often his life changed.

First he died, then he traveled, then he was captured and maybe died a second time. Then he met Doctor Quimea, had a real bed, learned he was Atticus, and learned the sword.

Now it was all changing again.

It had started at his window.

“Gob! Hey gob!”

The hissed voice percolated to his attention through the latest series he was watching. He opened his eyes to the dark window and saw a white face looking in at him.

After he picked himself off the floor, he registered that it was Nykka, the white girl with the sword, staring in at him.

He didn’t choose his words carefully.

“Who are you calling a gob, you...white...girl!”

She waved her hand up and down rapidly, like she was patting something. Attaboy stared at her for another moment.

“What are you doing at my window?”

His window was far from the ground. He peered around, to try and see exactly what was keeping her from falling.

“Open the window!” she hissed.

Attaboy looked over his shoulder at the door to his room. He knew it was locked from his side, but apparently it was locked from the other side too. Still, it seemed like a lot of trouble to go through just to visit him.

Fortunately, he had spent some time opening and closing his windows earlier in the week, so he knew how to do it. At first, the guards kept coming in to visit when he did, but eventually they must have gotten bored of the fresh air.

A thought occurred to him. This was a situation that called for Atticus.

Dijiann. Put the words and dreams back.

A wave of clarity washed over him as the part of his mind he called Atticus opened. His thoughts surged and the words and memories rushed in a thundering current.

He stepped to the window and allowed Nykka entry.

“Why are you here?” he whispered.

“There’s no time. Quimea-”

Attaboy interrupted her. “Quimea has lost patience. You are here to...what, rescue me?”

He knew he shouldn’t be talking to her this way, but it felt so good to use his mind, to show this girl she wasn’t so superior after all.

Nykka’s white eyes widened slightly. Even with his full mental powers, Attaboy wasn’t sure what to make of her appearance. Her lack of skin pigment and the white hair signified albinism, but he had no good explanation for the lack of pupils in her eyes. Possibly it was lenses of some kind, since it was apparent she could see.

“Come with me now, and I’ll explain later,” she said. “We only have a few minutes before the security systems gets running again.”

Attaboy knew there were many problems with this situation. There was absolutely no reason to believe that he would be any better off if he left with Nykka. It could even be a maneuver by Quimea. Still, he already knew his response.

“All right. Let’s go.”

Chapter 33: Spinning

Crouching in the darkness yet again, Lilijoy’s heartbeat steadied and slowed. She had just placed her second-to-last patch on a competitor she was almost certain was not the leader. Now she should have two hundred points, two points ahead if nothing else had changed.

She ran a quick survey of the air currents in the room with her infrared vision. There was a faint channel of warmer air connecting the entrance and exit, flowing more or less through the center of the room. She moved to the center of the air current, crouched down facing away from the direction of the subtle flow, and activated her highest level of Stealth.

She had discovered that Stealth mana was very flexible in its effects. She could dampen the sounds from her feet and breathing, blend the outline of her form into shadows, conceal her body heat and so on. If she channeled the mana to her eyes, she was much more likely to see hidden things, including other people.

The only problem was that she didn’t have enough Magi skill to use more than one effect at a time. She could hide or she could seek.

Or I can cheat, just a little.

A few mild subdivisions of her conscious processing was a good workaround, for now.

Since she was reasonably sure that the current leader was at least her equal in skill, she thought that they might be able to discern her location. In truth, she was counting on it.

Instead of using all her available Stealth mana to hide, she channeled half of it to her nasal passages and tuned her sense of smell to the air flowing around her. Then she waited.

The scents of the other students in the training room swirled around her. Sweat, leather and other scents resolved into more personal stories: A Ratkin girl who liked oranges. A nervous human boy who had no food scents on him, probably an Outsider. The pungent scent of a Weasle-kin, and the sandlewood cologne used to cover it.

Her first visitor arrived from her right rear, a whiff of metal and cedar, along with a light acrid smell that Lilijoy associated with reptiles. Their steps were not perfectly silent, and Lilijoy could even feel faint vibrations through the floor from their movement.

Now she had a decision to make; she had hoped to lure in a shark, and instead it seemed she had attracted a guppy. She could hear the sound of a tongue flicking through the air; they had likely found her by scent, which was somewhat ironic. If she allowed them to plant a patch, she would need to remove it before it faded from sight, but that would betray her plan to any other observers. She had resigned herself to taking the patch and trying a different strategy, when she caught it, a faint metallic aroma she couldn’t place coming from just behind her, coming from a place her other senses insisted was unoccupied.

There you are.

Her opponent was using the other stealther as cover, just a she would have done. Lilijoy sped up her thoughts and spread Flash mana throughout her body, weaving it through the Stealth mana. That was her ace in the hole.

After she had learned to use Flash and Qi together, she had spent several days learning how to combine Magi skill manas. Unlike Qi, stealth mana was gauzy and ephemeral, and initially her Flash had dispersed her stealth like a noisy dog running into a flock of starlings. It had taken her full processing power and a new kind of mental compartmentalization to learn how to draw Flash from her core as a fiery thread.

She had stumbled on the key as she researched weaving and learned about the art of spinning yarn with a charkha. Initially, it was the resemblance to the word chakra which caught her attention.

She soon knew that the ancient device for spinning thread was named for its circular shape and motion, much as chakras were named for the spinning cycles of energy contained within the body. It reminded her of the spinning energy in her core, and after much trial and error, she created a secondary vortex, a spindle on which to twist and gather her Flash mana energy as it emerged from her primary core.

Mental compartmentalization was required to create a second spindle for her stealth mana. It was not a dramatic division of her mind, as when she split with Jiannu, more an enhanced multitasking. Her ability to split her attention in this way was inversely proportional to her ability to speed her thoughts; she could either think faster or have more separate strands of awareness, or a bit of both.

To spin both types of mana and then weave them together throughout her body required three subdivisions, which left her with just enough processing power to keep up with her movement speed in Flash.

Without this ability, she would never have dared to attempt the maneuver from under the walkway in the previous class session. She hadn’t had much time to put it into practice; it was only this morning that the Inside system had recognized her efforts.

New Ability Discovered!

Mana Manipulation (Rare)

The new ability didn’t have tiers, which intrigued her. It was like Two Minds One Self in that way. After she noticed this, she remembered a conversation with Professor Anaskafius from the early days of her training.

“Professor, why doesn’t my Two Minds One Self ability have a Roman numeral next to it?” she had asked. “Does that mean I can’t raise it?”

“Oh, quite the opposite, in my opinion,” he had replied. “You see, there are other abilities like that as well. Some call them ‘hidden abilities’, because they are almost impossible to obtain. Due to this, they are kept secret by those who possess them, and only passed down to a few favored disciples.”

“So I guess you can’t just learn them at the Academy.”

Anaskafius gave a little laugh. “Oh my, no. Even if you wanted to teach your ability to others, you would find that the students here simply don’t have the necessary foundation to learn it. There may be the occasional rare exception, but by and large, hidden abilities don’t show up in the Garden, other than those unique to a particular species. Students here rarely pass beyond level twenty before they graduate, so you can imagine the gap in understanding.”

“So it’s more of a Purgatory thing?”

Anaskafius winced. “I do detest that name, almost as much as I detest the place. But yes, of the many differences between here and there, one of them is the development and use of hidden skills and abilities.”

“What’s Purgatory like, Professor? Why don’t you like it?”

At this point in the conversation, Anaskafius had refused to say any more on the subject.

“I’ve already said more than I should. Those who go to Purgatory and return to the Garden must vow to never speak of what they know, at the cost of losing their powers. What I can tell you is that the Garden is no more than a nursery, though it has grown large over the years with those of us who much prefer its comforts. The first fifty levels you might gain here become merely the first step of a long stair.”

In light of that conversation, it was interesting that the ability was classified as rare, which meant that she was far from the first to learn it. As she understood it, rare abilities might be present in one of a thousand to one of ten thousand people, very rare started at about about ten times less common than that, and legendary abilities such as Jessila’s Juggernaut might be held by between zero and one hundred beings total at any given time. From this, she judged that Mana Manipulation might be one of the more common hidden abilities.

She dragged her mind out of reminiscence. It was an indulgence she allowed herself because it only occupied a fraction of a second relative to the slow rate of the events developing around her. Forcing herself to focus on the faint unidentified scent, she held herself utterly still, counting the concentration of the unfamiliar particles as they reached her olfactory system. Ten parts per billion in both nostrils, then fifteen, then twenty, gradually shifting to a higher concentration.

Lilijoy felt a little bad for making Guardian’s environmental simulating processors work so hard. She had noticed that her sense of smell had become closer to what she experienced Outside, and she still wasn’t sure if she was adapting to the Inside, or vice-versa.

As she focused on locating the smell source, her echolocation began to sense a blurry void about fifteen feet behind her. The other person, the lizard-type, was lurking close by too, and she did her best to ignore them. Everyone was waiting for a distraction, an outburst that would allow them to close the distance. She put all her remining processing power into accelerating her thoughts, and the world around her slowed.

Finally, someone set off a strand of hanging bells across the room. Tinkling sound passed around the space; to her echolocation hundreds of tiny sparks exploded and launched, bouncing around the room like marbles tracing the outline of everything they hit, other than the dark void now only ten feet behind her. Her sped-up brain and enhanced hearing rendered the intake of breath from the competitor to her right as a sound like thunder.

They were making their move. The void behind her was moving too, now faster than the air current carrying their scent.

It took only a half a second for the clumsy one to reach her. She could ‘see’ the hand with the patch coming toward her leg ever so slowly. Just before it reached her, she burst into action, rolling back over her heels, grabbing the patch before it was even placed.

Now the tricky part.

Her first assailant gasped in surprise, and Lilijoy deliberately slowed her movement as she came out of the roll, her back presented to her real opponent.

“Thanks for the point!” she said cheerfully, breaking the silence of the room again. She felt the slightest brush on her calf while the lizard-boy in front of her hissed in frustration. Maintaining a semblance of normal speed, she spun away and plowed into the stealthed form of what she hoped was her primary competition. With the heavy contact, his stealth broke.

Curious. She recognized her competitor. He was one of the students she had met almost two weeks ago. . One of the clannies with the flashy armor. So why didn’t he smell like a human? Could this really be her top rival?

At that moment, the lights came up.

“Game’s over,” the instructor drawled. “Please form a line. You know the routine.”

“Were you two hundred?” The boy asked in an excited voice.

Lilijoy ignored him.

I didn’t remove his patch in time!

Now her odds of pulling out a victory in the competition were greatly reduced. Another realization dawned. The instructor hadn’t said class was over. He had said the game was over.

She turned her attention to Quatorze. “How did you change your smell?”

He stared at her blankly for a moment. She saw his eyes drift down to rings on his fingers.

“I’m just that good," he replied. "So were you?”

No point in denying it now. “Maybe.”

He pumped his fist. “Well now you’re one ninety-two! And I’m two oh-six.” He punctuated each number triumphantly.

Lilijoy looked back him. Then she shrugged and turned away.

He would find her patch soon enough.

***

Jessila loved her new cloak. Like most magical garments Inside, the Cloak of Shadows adjusted to fit her size. When the user desired stealth, it took on the coloration and patterns of the wearer’s environment. Otherwise, it appeared as an ordinary brown hooded cloak.

“More like cloak of adaptive camouflage, if you ask me,” Magpie said when she saw it in action. “Still, it gets the job done. Too bad about the other senses.”

The cloak didn’t do anything to cover sounds or smells, which had them all a little worried.

“Magpie, do you know anything about rings that help someone’s Stealth skill?” asked Lilijoy. “I think that this guy in the contest was using some.”

“There’s rings for just about everything, far as I can tell,” Magpie replied. “The clans churn them out by the bucketload. But good luck buying any decent ones. They’re tightly controlled, and any crafter making good ones for general purchase gets squashed pretty quick, just like with most magic items.”

“Well, I didn’t want any for myself, but maybe for Jess. I’m also curious about how they work. I could barely sense the guy, even though I was trying my best. Even the instructor had more smell than he did.”

“Huh.” Magpie shrugged. “I guess I could look into it. I’ve already bugged my trainer half crazy about the respawn stuff.”

“Well, it would be bad if we got caught just because they have dogs or something.”

“Oh, I know tons of countermeasures for that, don’t worry.” She waved a hand.

Lilijoy looked at Magpie. I’ve only known her a couple weeks. They had spent so much time researching and planning together, she sometimes forgot how little she knew the girl. At least she’s been less nervous for the past few days.

Whatever it was that had been bothering Magpie for the first few days of their acquaintance had gone away once they began to plan together. There was still something bothering Lilijoy though.

“Magpie, what’s the name of your clan?”

“Cook Clan. What makes you ask that?”

Why did her heart just beat faster?

“Just curious, I guess. Mr. Sennit thinks you’re Filipino.”

“Well, that makes sense. All part of the same gene pool, you know. I never knew my parents, so I could be, for all I know. Lots of different kinds of people live there too.”

Lilijoy moved her thoughts faster.

Jiannu, are you getting this?

Yes. This conversation is making her uncomfortable.

Should we worry?

That the person guiding us on our infiltration of Sinaloa, who did most of the planning, might not be what they seem?

I just figured she was a nervous person.

I just went through all of our interactions with Magpie over the past week and cross-referenced heart rate and facial capillary dilation. Her nervousness is more prominent in conversations with us. Additionally, she had micro-expressions of excitement and triumph any time we told her about ourselves.

Do we confront her? We’re leaving tomorrow!

Let’s wait. There are many things bothering us about all of this.

I guess so. Nagging feelings, huh?

I think I’m the part doing the nagging. Lets work it out tonight, when we can be alone.

With that, Lilijoy dropped back into her conversation with Magpie, who was just finishing the last few words of her sentence. She couldn’t resist a small experiment.

“I’m sorry you never knew your parents. I didn’t really have parents growing up either.”

The small twitch at the corner of Magpie’s mouth said it all.

***

The next morning, the four girls assembled outside of the Academy building, inventories full of the various supplies they might need for their expedition. The day was bright and still. A silence hung in the air between them, each wrapped in their own thoughts about what lay ahead.

Finally, Lilijoy broke the silence.

“So… how do we get there?”