It’s been two hours since he heard laughter.

The Team seated near his left huddles in close to one another. A sunburnt man pinches little nubs of doughy food ration and plants them in position on the bare tile. He instructs the others which nub stands for which member, and how to safely fire an energy ray over the shoulder of a defender. He does not say aloud what happens in case of a mistake.

Todd moves past them, and as he goes he idly tugs at his left wrist. The [Knuckle-shell Bracer] is tight and uncomfortable where the cords tie around his inner arm. A scarlet carapace covers his forearm with one large plate. It extends down and flares out a little, past his knuckle and forms a thick knobby lip of keratin. The plate is affixed to his arm with shoelaces, which thread through and around a rubbery, fingerless glove. Todd’s not sure what the glove is made from, probably something unsightly from a Redburr crab’s insides instead of its outsides.

Swinging his arm idly to feel the weight, Todd brings the bracer to a guard position, trying to decide how it will change the way he fights. The flange down at the knuckle restricts the range of motion of his wrist, blocking him from turning it out; but the benefit is that the forward offensive lip of the plate is out in front of his fingers. If he ever needs to throw a punch, the stony knobs along the keratinous joint look like they’d hurt something fierce.

Todd spares a glance far across the plaza, past the upturned mouth of the bug tunnel, and towards the alien quarter. By now he’s discovered that when he looks at them crooked, he finds it easier to see past the barrier. Watching them now, he sees the groups of five formed up and he sees the crimson of their own shell armor. He sees their leaders stalking from group to group, and comparing his side with theirs, it’s strange how similar their preparations appear. In fact, if he crosses his eyes, they almost look human. He steps away; his own kind needs his attention now.

The Craft Geeks are still close enough to hear. Todd looks back and watches them for a moment. Sweating, distressed, and focused they tear through a lumpy pile of disassembled fresh bug parts. Periodically, one of them emerges from the tunnel with a new carcass. The highest level bugs produce better raw materials, and much of the parts left over from the original swarm fight have already been discarded as trash quality.

Abigail and Jingshu argue fruitlessly with Harold as they try to adapt the right hand [Scarlet Crawler Gauntlet] design pattern to a left hand schematic. It seems too much of what they are learning to do has come from a crafting crystal, and they are running out of time to experiment with making adjustments to the instructions.

The gear they are feverishly making is intended for as many low level cultivators as can be equipped, and Todd is guilty to be walking away with a single piece. But the [Knuckle-shell Bracer] came from one of the simpler designs, so it’s the armor he had finally accepted. They had insisted, and he has to admit it feels a little safer to have.

His wooden shin guards and chest plate have received something called an inscription. Each section has little geometric patterns carved into the surfaces of the wood. Abigail had made them, using the strange iron scorpion wand that Harold had earned that morning. She’d called them [F.2 – Ambient Refinement]s when he’d asked. She’d also said they were useless until they reach [F.10] at least.

He hadn’t asked for an explanation, she’d seemed a little irritated.

Moving on, Todd walks past another team, and another. He watches a young man and an older woman holding sword shaped [Mercury Rod]s and practicing basic strikes and parries. He stops at a group which is seated in meditation, inspecting their breathing and posture: their form is inadequate. Being too tired for self-consciousness, he reaches out and physically adjusts the posture of a woman that had studied with him in the morning. Her expression flares with outrage at first, but then she recognizes him. She studies him distrustfully for a moment, but he glares impatiently back at his graduate.

“Elbows out, palms up. Back straight. Deeper, slower breaths. Better,” Todd grunts. Then he exchanges a weary nod with her and leaves them to their Cultivation.

“Todd!” Randall calls out, just loud enough to get his attention. His friend lumbers over towards him. “You taking your [Skill] meds?”

Todd observes the bowl shaped shell under Randall’s arm. “Yea, I’m taking it in my room. It’s quieter.” He points his chin at Randall’s new gear. “They making helmets?”

Randall lifts up the top half of a large Redburr’s external skull. Hanging bands of shell and jaw mandible are wired in curtains along the sides and back and as Randall fits it onto himself, he pushes it tilted forward so it dips over his eyebrows.

Todd snorts. “That looks uncomfortable.”

“Oh, it is,” Randall snickers. “I’m gonna ask ‘em for a chin strap next time. Catch you in the morning?”

“Yea. I’ll be up early,” Todd agrees. He’d rather not leave room for surprises. “For all we know they’ll take us in our sleep.”

Waving a casual goodbye, Todd continues around the shop crystal and towards the wall. A rancid sulfuric burning smell hits him as he reaches the alchemy cauldron, where a grandfatherly restaurant owner, an aged southern belle, and a retired dairy inspector huddle unhappily around the cooling iron pot. Blackened sludge bubbles over the edge and into the fire and yellow smoke pools in the air.

Todd backpedals and takes a longer route around them, trying to hold his breath. It looks like alchemy is still a disaster, which is made worse by how many nexus coins he’d spent contributing to start up materials. Nothing to be done about it now.

Reaching the wall, Todd reaches out to touch his zone residence building but halts. The restrained sound of weeping has stopped him. There in the very corner of the plaza wall huddles a tight circle of his elders. Nayira is standing there, as is Walter, and Soup Nina too. Nina turns and catches Todd’s gaze, but her face is strained and her eyes tell him this is a private moment.

Jennifer Roth is sitting beneath them, Todd sees her through their legs. The sound of her sobs shake her body and her face is buried deep in her hands. Walter spots him second, and then Nayira. Todd decides that this is a moment best not to intrude on. He places his hand firmly against the stone and then the array takes him.

After a moment to reorient, Todd steps over the broken pieces of his table. A large wicker basket sits in the middle of his room and against his bed. It hadn’t been there when he’d left and he steps carefully around it to the opposite wall. Inspecting the smooth surface, he finds no evidence of the tunnel his morning assassin had invaded from. Sweeping his hand along the floor, he finds no dust or stone chips either. Sighing, he returns to the basket and lifts one corner of the lid. The mangled buggy corpse of the Redburr hunter stares blankly up at him with its remaining eyes. He drops the lid dismissively.

Todd unbinds his bracer and guards and removes them, throwing each onto the bed. Then he pushes the bug bin, slides it up against the store relay wall, touches the panel, and finds the interface option to flag the body as junk for bulk resale. Maybe the crafters could have used the parts, and maybe the junk prices were a rip off, but the idea of leaving an unrefrigerated insect meat basket in his room to store for three days is unpalatable. The whole thing vanishes soundlessly and a measly ₦73 is added to his bottomed out nexus coin total.

Choosing not to regret his decision, he grips the hem of his robe and strips it off his body. Plucking his soap out of his storage chest, he pulls off the rest of his clothing and carries it into the alcove where he scrubs his garments with soap and then against the bare stones and under the falling water.

The skill treasure is soft between his fingers, the wax warming in his hand. He sits naked and cross legged on bare stone with his clothing spread out on the floor around him. Looking at the dark little bead inside the wax, Todd thinks about all the people outside preparing for tomorrow.

He should have been able to do more. Maybe he shouldn’t have skipped the crafting mission, maybe he should have picked a different skill, maybe the pixies could have been bargained with, maybe the deer people could have helped.

Todd finds it’s far easier for a man making plans to come up with maybes than ought-tos.

The easiest way to open the treasure seems to be to grip it with the fingers, and depress inward with both thumbnails so that it will tear open. The little droplet spills out of the wax and hangs precariously to Todd’s thumb, so he panics and sucks the whole digit. Then, aware of the small size of the dose, he tongues the wax ball clumsily to scrape the cavity clean of residue.

His heart begins to beat rapidly in his chest.

Todd isn’t sure if this is a symptom or garden-variety apprehension, so he quickly assumes a secure upright cross legged position. Changing his mind slightly, he scoots himself two butt lengths closer to the alcove into the calm sound of splashing water and he closes his eyes.

A brain generally has a high opinion of itself, the mind resisting instinctively against the thought that it is malleable: so in those first few moments, Todd begins to doubt. Then, something deep inside him drops out and his stomach lurches as he falls inward into his own mind.

He becomes both detached and hyperaware of his own body as he falls. His flesh hasn’t moved, but his awareness continues to drop as if from a staggeringly high distance. Then he is submerged in a roaring river, and in the boughs of a branching tree. It’s his blood, he’s inside of a vein, and the geometry of the vessel and the plasm, and the cells, and their organelles, and their heme proteins…

No, this is all very interesting, but he’s getting distracted. Todd instructs his body (far above him) to take a shallow breath, and send a thread of energy winding down his arm. He follows it, riding its course like a silver zip-line and it carries him into a space Todd can only describe as a cathedral of the bizarre.

The pixies had described his [Water Spear] as a fractal, and for the first time Todd understands what they mean. A fractal is a word for a complex shape that repeats itself, branching into tiny smaller shapes which are little reflections of the greater whole. Then those little shapes branch down into smaller shapes and so on, and so on, until the complexity is infinite, and oh he’s gone too far now.

Todd pulls back, and as he does he withdraws from a branching structure of translucent grasping trees. He instinctively recognizes that this offshoot has something to do with control. In fact, now that he’s seen it, he might be able to connect one of his cultivation channels to this section for finer manipulation.

The effect of the drug has taken him utterly, and Todd finds his mind racing with obsessive geometric calculations. He is magnetically drawn to the fractal in front of him, and his first brush with it has shown him that he could fall infinitely into the smallest piece of it if he isn’t careful.

Holding briefly, he surveys the full macro structure of his [Skill]. Two great spires curl lazily around one another, one greater than the other. Little bridges reach between them but never touch, and deep troughs cut down the length of each tower. The base of the fractal is lumpy and complicated, like a potato growing the first shoots of a new plant.

There’s more, of course there’s more. The translucent shimmering panes of energy that he sees are not flat at all, they are infinitely textured and subdivided, and oh he’s going too far now.

He’s pretty sure this part has something to do with force and pressure, which is useful but once again not the priority. No, the marksmanship challenge from games day had impressed upon him the importance of producing a cohesive, stable stream. A tighter, narrower cross section would be more efficient, more penetrating, and hold its trajectory over longer ranges.

Todd falls into the space between the towers, and as he does he sees that the needles reaching from one to the other are actually tiny helixes of their own. He sees a cityscape of little needles, reaching out to one another an unable to touch, wanting nothing more than to join and grip and hold.

Greedy, loving, the hermaphroditic electromagnetism of water.

Todd awakens to himself on the floor, cold and uncomfortable. He’d never really learned much about the dipole moment of H2O, or maybe he’d forgotten what he had. But he was aware of it now, an imbalance of charge, an internal electrostatic tension inside every molecule of water.

Just like the fractal, that internal tension becomes an external tension. Even though each fragment is neutral, they attract like opposites and bind together to become a fluid.

Todd knows there are deeper truths here, that he’s barely touched the edge of a mystery which could swallow him whole, but…

He throws himself onto his bed and pulls his sheet over his head. “Human emotion is a terrible metaphor for valent bonds,” he groans, bunching up fabric against his eyelids to block out the dim light.

A fleck of drool slips past his lips as sleep rises to take him. “Why didn't anyone tell me drugs suck so hard,” he slurs. “Who would ever do this for fun on purpose?”