Turn 37

--- Maya ---

Seeing as she only had two days left before school, she decided now was the time to get as much work done as possible in a single day.

Since she was almost done with it -and the fact that it was the only one of her ideas she couldn’t test from home- she began by finishing out her stealth upgrade for DM-1 and any future drone minions she may or may not decide to build.

“Alright, now… how exactly are we going to test this?” She asked herself.

(Well it’s not that difficult to switch the stealth parameters from humans to squirrels.) Herself replied.

(You sure? I mean killing the occasional rat is one thing, but do you really want to fuck with squirrels? We don’t have a dimensional exit yet.)

She rolled her eyes, as she adjusted a couple of variables in the program. “Fine we’ll just set his parameters to rats instead of squirrels, happy?”

(Mildly.)

Shaking her head, she uploaded the last of the update before turning back to DM-1 as it came back online. “Alright, with that set… go.”

DM-1 gave her a little nod before hopping off of the table and running out of the room.

(Uh, what’s he doing?)

“Looking for rats to test the programming.” She answered before pulling up a program on her computer that connected her lab and DM-1’s software.

(How are we doing that by the way?)

“Jury-rigged a quick program to let us access his camera so long as he doesn’t stray to far from the lab.” She explained pulling up said feed on her laptop.

(Cool.)

With that said they watched DM-1 stalk the halls of the hospital, quickly checking each room for any more rats before eventually finding one on the first floor of the hospital.

“Okay, looks like everything’s running smoothly.” She nodded, seeing several sections of DM-1’s camera becoming colored as it marked where the rat could see, as well as a little counter in the corner measuring the current volume of the little drone’s movements.

DM-1 stealthily got closer to the rat, carefully avoiding alerting the little creature as she suddenly realized what was about to happen.

“Oh shit.”

The camera turned red as a faint snapping sound could be heard from the other end.

(Hmm, so we made the murderhood better at murder. Yay.) Her inner passion cheered dryly. (Also I’m not as happy anymore.)

---

“Okay, so what we can work on that won’t result in a form of self-traumatization?” She asked as she set up her laptop on her home desk, having fled the hospital before DM-1 could feed his latest kill to the bio-pod.

(How about energy?) Her inner reason suggested. (We’ve been neglecting that field of study for a couple of weeks now.)

(Yeah, but if we’re doing that let’s do something other than what we’ve been brainstorming.) Her inner madness told her. (You know something to clear the mental pallet after upgrading our murder-bot.)

“He is not a murder-bot.” She growled. “He’s just a bot… who likes murder…”

(Not much better dear.) Her inner logic admitted kindly.

“Just energy… random project…” She sighed, letting her fingers fly across the keyboard as the whispers happily ran up to her with all sorts of ideas that she could just barely understand as the mix of stress and shock-induced adrenaline fed into her mad place.

Given how much of her reality hacking work was based on the whispers running her body on auto-pilot, she ended up checking out of her own headspace for a couple of hours before eventually coming back to a near finished project.

Shaking her head and running a hand down her face, she pushed the whispers back just enough to take an actual look at their work, before promptly freezing.

(Is this what I think it is?)

(If you mean a complete hacking of one of the most fundamental forces in the universe. Then yes, yes it is.) Her inner logic agreed with just as much awe.

(Ha! Reality is our bitch!)

She couldn’t help but smile.

“Oh, we are going to have so much fun with this.”

---

While she had in fact managed to hack one of the most fundamental forces of the universe, if weakly-

(Hey, that’s still better than anyone else in existence!)

(No one’s doubting your genius sweetie.)

-She still found herself unable to manipulate said force with her current resources, given how no matter how she worked it she could not think of a way to properly utilize gravity as an ammo type.

(At least not without pulling some magic anime bullshit, that doesn’t actually work the way people think it does.)

She knew.

She’d done the math after watching a video of some Arcane using ‘gravity magic’ to try and see if that would let her crack the mental block to the tech, and she’d realized that they weren’t actually manipulating gravity. Instead they were taking the energy all Arcane could manipulate and either pushing up or down with it, rather than manipulating a localized gravitational field. Something anyone could do with a bit of wind or force. (Hell, I can probably do that the moment I crack kinetics.)

In her disappointment she’d written a scathing comment explaining why they were wrong and how they were a (filthy liar who tells liiiies!)

Still, given the potential of this energy type, she forced the whispers to give her every bit of insight that they had on this topic, until she’d taken the basic idea she’d developed after helping Izzy with her carnival games, and produced something that worked.

The fact that it could work on all of her collected energy-types was just an added bonus.

“Okay,” She blinked before popping another ibuprofen. “If all of this works correctly, then we should be able to now apply gravity -or any energy really- to an object of our choice…”

Pawing at her eyes, she took two notebooks from her school things, before applying the gravity effect to one of them and holding them up in the air.

“Now standard science states that two objects with the same amount of air resistance will always fall at the exact same speed.” She told the camera she was testing this with. “But if this program works as intended…”

She dropped both notebooks, both hitting the floor a moment later.

(Well, that’s anti-climactic.)

She rolled her eyes before pulling up her recording, and watching the notebooks fall frame by frame, a view that clearly demonstrated one notebook falling twice as fast as the other.

“…then you get this.” She smiled, just a little too widely.

---

Given how productive her day had been so far, she decided to keep going, to keep pushing her power and the whispers who were so eagerly giving her every answer that she asked for.

Her fingers glided across the keyboard typing out an upgrade for her AI, after all (can’t neglect my other minion!)

She giggled at her own joke even as her temples throbbed, leading her to reach for her headache pills, only to miss and send it rolling off of her desk, eliciting another giggle.

A knock drew her attention to the doorway where her sister was standing.

“Maya, mamá wanted me to…” Izzy trailed off staring at her. “Are, are you okay?”

She blinked, before tilting her head. “Yes?”

“Um, uh, you’ve uh, you’ve got something…” Izzy tapped her nose.

Maya blinked once more before noticing a wet sensation on her lip and swiping at it.

“Huh, nosebleed.” She commented upon seeing the red on the back of her hand. “Haven’t had one of those in a while.”

“I’ll, I’ll go get mom.” Izzy told her, rushing out of the room.

“Okay.” She nodded, before pinching her nose and making her way to her bed.

“Mija?” Her mamá asked having popped out of nowhere. “Izzy said you’re having a nosebleed?”

She quit pinching her nose and showed the palm of her hand.

Her mamá grimaced before handing over a roll of paper towels. “It’s been a while but I’m sure you remember. Nose pinched, head forward, count to a thousand.”

“Sí, mamá.”

Her mamá gave her a concerned look as she ran a hand through Maya’s hair. “You just take it easy for the rest of the night, and I’ll bring up la cena, alright?”

“Alright, mamá.” She nodded, feeling just a little lightheaded.

Her mamá frowned, before kissing her temple. “Regreso ahorita, mija. Te amo.”

“Yo también te amo, mamá.”