Chapter 202: Side Effects Include Ninja Lawnmower Rocks

Captain’s log:

Two months in, and here’s where we stand on Practice Stone research.

First, the obvious. An object has to be being used for its purpose for the Practice Effect to come into play. This means that something that passively does its job, like the sun or the water condenser, is constantly Practicing, while something like a bow is not being used for its purpose if it’s just sitting there.

Second. Sentient and Sapient creatures were thought to be immune to the effect. They are not. They are highly resistant. The sentient mind resists having a single defining Purpose, while the Sapient mind resists it even more. Despite this, a Resonance showed small changes in the subject’s ability and behavior after a single instance. The potential for abuse is rather high, so the experiment was deemed a failure and the official results falsely claimed sapients were one hundred percent immune.

No one likes to think they can be shaped like clay at the whims of some mad scientist.

-Note: shape people I know like clay. They’ll thank me later.

Third, the properties of the crystals themselves. An object does not require direct contact with the Practice stone. Each one creates a field relative to the size of the crystal, about four feet on average, objects that are moved or carried are often adorned with them so they stay within those fields. The fields themselves are waves, as was proven when I managed to create a resonance event.

Fourth. Resonance events. By creating an enclosure of identical crystals at precise distances from each other, they create an invisible resonance in the center of the formation, where the speed of an object’s Practice is improved at a cubic rate dictated by the number of stones. This is the only known method of boosting the Practice Effect.

-Ioun stone formation? Food for thought.

Fifth. Purpose is teeth-grindingly difficult to pin down, and as a key component in my escape plan, I have to fully understand the way objects are assigned purpose and how to manipulate that. The Grass-mowing rock I told all the villagers I had modified to mow grass showed no sign of improvement for two weeks.

I knew there was a possibility that it could be changed to mow grass, because it kept the grass it was sitting on down. With that as a basis for a very limited, awful functionality, I wanted to see if it would improve, perhaps moving at a slug or snail pace while battering down the grass. After no improvement, I decided to put the rock in a resonance formation with twelve identically cut stones, boosting the Practice effect’s speed by a calculated one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times. The reality is more likely to be less, due to microscopic differences between the crystals.

I would be able to calculate the practical number, but the rock was gone the next morning, and now I can’t find it. The damn thing seems to be hiding from me.

-Sidenote, Try a resonance formation with a robot butler.

-Side Sidenote, the grass looks amazing.

Sixth. Identifying and isolating Purpose is kind of a pain in the ass. There’s no material that can do it….except, the helmet the villagers use to protect their noggins from harmful Laws messing with their heads. I was graciously lent one of the finest helmets in the village to run experiments on. With it in the center of the Resonance Formation, it dampened the practice of a light-creating stone by roughly ninety eight percent.

The problem is, the helm is most likely blocking Law altering reality, rather than Purpose. Which is weird because it uses a Law to gain strength. Nope, not gonna touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Now. I’ve also confirmed that an object can change purpose from one to another over time. A splendid example would be the sword creating the waterfall on the other side of the village. I theorize that some substances might provide a ghost of resistance to Purpose, like a window filters out an imperceptible amount of light.

If I were to follow the Grass mowing rock’s scheme, I could skip identifying and studying the identity of Purpose in the Practice Effect’s system, and simply make an object capable of harnessing specific types.

Which I could then reverse engineer to identify how Purpose works. And if all else fails, I could just go for it. But how do I make sure the creation does exactly what I need it to do? The stakes are too high to just wing it. For example, The grass rock’s purpose has evolved, creating pretty patterns in people’s grass. I assume someone saw a lined pattern and thought, oh man, that’s cool, then the rock started doing it more, creating a feedback loop.

The problem would be if people start attributing certain unwanted behavior patterns to the dungeon. The most likely outcome I could see was ascribing some malevolent divinity to the Core, and expecting it to demand sacrifices.

Then it would start demanding sacrifices.

Enter a horrible feedback loop of awful until everyone is dead.

No, I need to create something that only allows Garth’s Purpose through, or failing that, only allows a predetermined Purpose to affect the Core.

Garth tapped his pen on his book, thinking.

Oh well, only way to find out is to give it a shot. time to Start growing Purpose filtering and magnifying materials.

The notes sank into the magic book, absorbed into the pages, leaving them once again blank. This way if he got mind-fucked again, he could get back some of his progress.

Om nom nom. Text floated to the surface of the pages.

“You’re not actually eating that, are you?” Garth asked.

Yes and no. The words I can spit back out whenever you want. The information sustains me. Everyone knows the more information a book has in it, the better it is.

“That’s snobbish.”

Maybe against childrens books.

“I loved Go Dog Go when I was a kid.”

Philistine.

“So, have you experienced any changes from the effects of the stones?”

I’m too awesome to be swayed by some pedestrian, low-level reality-warping effects. My Self correcting subroutines have prevented any changes.

“That’s good I guess.”

My Self-correcting subroutines have also increased their efficiency by about 0.005% since we’ve gotten here, which irks me.

“Ah.”

Garth turned to face several dome-shaped pieces of steel that he’d been able to refine out of the dungeon’s walls, designed to fit a certain basketball sized core.

They were steel now, but who knew what they would look like after he lied his ass off about their Purpose and gave them a couple nights in the center of a resonance formation?

“Alright, let’s get this show on the road.” Garth took his wooden card full of clearly demarcated plates of steel with colorful pictures on them, which were otherwise identical, and rolled it out of his hut, emerging on the outskirt of the village and rolling it into the village square.

Garth stood there for the next eight hours, explaining to each and every villager that came by exactly what they did and how they were different, firmly cementing the object’s Purpose in the collective consciousness, including his own. Kurt watched with suspicion, but some more chocolate kept him from saying anything.

“The brown one with the hammer on the front is for tools. It lets through any thoughts that reinforce an object’s sturdiness. The one with a flowerpot here, this one only lets through thoughts that make the object inside better at growing plants.”

“So it’s a flowerpot?” a drooling half-orc child asked, dirty finger hanging half out of his lips.

“NO!” Garth caught himself before he shouted further, balling his hands into fists. This was why this was such an inexact science.

“It makes things into flowerpots, dummy.” His tiny Corio friend said, poking him. She was a tiny little goat-person with tiny little horn-nubs on her head.

“You know what? Close enough.” Garth said with a nod. Now that I’ve spent the last half hour getting them primed, let’s do the one I really care about. It was necessary to explain the previous six so that any misunderstandings could be cleared up before he described the one he really wanted to turn out accurately.

It was like a filtration system for stupid.

“This one here, is tuned to my frequency alone, and only lets my thoughts through.” He said, laying a possessive hand on the purple one with green on top.

“It looks like your head!” the orc boy said, pointing.

This is going to be a long day.

When the artificial sun began to dim overhead, the number of gawkers had greatly diminished, because Garth had already explained the function of each dome to the entire village. The remainder were really just there because it was a convenient place to gossip.

Garth squinted up at the dimming gemstone in the ceiling, then back down.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Garth said politely to the corio mothers, whose herd/gossip instinct had caused them to surround him like an oasis in the desert.

“Of course,” Kerana said, nodding and moving out of the way as he packed up his cart and rolled it back into his mad science hovel.

Maybe not as much of a mad science hovel as it could have been.

Needs more crackling electricity and ladies tied up in compromising positions, Garth thought as he entered. The room was a simple, flat circle that he’d cut out of the stone, then erected a solid wall of wood around. It was bigger than most of the houses, but deliberately smaller than the village elder’s.

“Maybe Alicia would be willing to help with that.” Garth said to himself as he put each of the domes in the center of a ring of pre-cut Practice Stones, covering a single light-emitting stone. The domes had to be actively muffling the Purpose to something else to gain

“I feel like now would be the time for an evil laugh,” Garth said, rubbing his hands together in glee as the exposed steel ever so slowly began to turn paler. He was using twenty crystals each, after all, for a maximum speed of eight thousand times normal speed.

Probably closer to five thousand times speed, though.

In order to make sure they didn’t gain self-awareness and wander off like the lawnmowing rock whose whereabouts were unknown, he had decided to only use resonance formations under adult supervision. No more leaving the formation on while he slept.

It still hasn’t fallen for any of the traps yet.

And to make sure the light-emitting crystals didn’t get bright enough to melt through the floor, Garth was going to have to check on them every five minutes or so, which would be about a month of standard Practice.

He glanced at the wheelbarrow full of faintly glowing crystals.

Yeah, I got this.

He glanced at the dome that was meant to filter out all thoughts save his own.

The crystal under that dome, it kinda looks like Beladia doing a pinup pose.

“Okay, that’s taken care of,” Garth said, “Now, the ioun stone project.”

Garth took out the plates of mana sensitive stone he’d grown from cheap granite. The stones had turned almost Core colored, a milky, shiny, pale color.

Garth flexed his hand and manifested blackened thorn-like claws at the tips of his fingers. He started whistling as he worked, dragging a sharpened claw through the stone and peeling up large sections to make room for the mana channels.

First step, a new laser cutter, get some Practice on that, then make some Ioun Stones, then delve through space-time I should untangle the web of lies and uncover the secrets of the past before Alicia comes home with dinner.

I wonder what I should cook tonight. I guess it depends on what she brings back, but I’m thinking some kind of pasta. Not too much though, or I won’t have enough energy to indulge Alicia’s habit of getting tied up and whipped.

A few minutes into musing while he carved, Castavelle’s notebook started ringing, so he bopped it on the cover to stop it, and checked the crystals under the domes.

They were noticeably brighter than before, but didn’t show much sign of changing according to the dome’s filter.

That was fine. The filters were starting at a much lower point than the glowing crystals. The glowing crystals obviously made light, while the amount of Purpose that steel filtered was basically zero.

Garth took his lumpy, decidedly non-Beladia glowing crystal and set it aside with a note. He didn’t want his personal filter to think he only wanted Beladia paraphernalia, so he created half a dozen different purposes for individual glowing crystals, including heating liquids and spinning in a circle when exposed to heat.

The Purpose of the final dome was to only let his belief on what the object should do through, all

Five minutes made them brighter, but just barely noticeable. Let’s take this out to ten minutes, or two months per check-up.

Garth switched out the crystal in his personal filter and went back to work on a laser-cutter, humming along until a thought occurred to him.

“Oh, that’s what happened!” Garth shouted, slapping his forehead, barely missing himself with his claws.

About a week in, when the Grass-cutting rock hadn’t been moving, a kid had asked him why it wasn’t moving, and asked him if he was, perchance, full of shit.

Garth had tossed off a quick lie about the rock only moving when no one was looking, all stealthy-like. This answer had seemed to satisfy the kid, who’d gone off to play, and Garth had completely put it out of his mind.

The mythos of the rock had spread word of mouth without Garth knowing about it, and it had gotten ninja-powers, which explained why it was so hard to find.

Ninja lawnmowing rock, Garth thought with a chuckle before blowing a bit of dust out of his mana channels.

After about five years worth of Practice, Garth started seeing the first tangible benefits, with the Flower-pot maker specifically. The glowing crystal’s gains in brightness began to slow down, and then plateau, as it started to slowly widen out into a dish, with a little ridge around the edge. Garth imagined if he waited longer, those ridges would go full-on flowerpot.

Soon, all of the domes were doing an excellent job whitelisting certain Purposes.

Garth took the crystal he’d decided looked a bit like Beladia and put it back under the hood before returning to his laser cutter, which was Practicing in the center of a similar formation.

The cuts quickly became more and more detailed, the movements more and more precise, until Garth was forced to make a microscope to see the intricate details. At this rate, I’ll be able to sign my name on Abe Lincoln’s Mole. If I had a penny…which I don’t.

Garth was about to start work on the ioun stones when he heard Alicia approach the front door. He could tell it was her by the sound her feet made on the ground. She also seemed to be carrying at least twenty pounds of meat for future eats. I guess unraveling the very fabric of time was a little presumptuous for a single evening. Alicia entered Garth’s hut with a bloody leg of some unidentified monster over her shoulder, and a tiny Gorn sitting on her other.

The pint-sized storm god glanced around the hut with measured disappointment.

“Needs more clouds,” He said, kicking his tiny heels against her shoulder.

“This is new,” Garth said, straightening.

Alicia looked Garth dead in the eye and asked, “Can you make him go away?”