Jen had to admit she was a little jealous that Sam already leveled up his Words of Understanding skill, but she was still excited! She couldn’t wait to leave for the train and get headed south. She summed up their status as they were leaving the hotel room and heading to the train station “Twenty-eight days left. Two days to the border and another day and a half from there back to the States… assuming everything goes as planned. If not, our backup plan will get us to the States in six days. Then we’ll have three weeks to wrap things up and get ready for a 95% chance of death in The Decks.”

Jen constantly waivered back and forth between the excitement of magic and the depression of impending death. They discussed the death odds that appeared in their stat screen, and they both agreed that they were not going to start making their decisions based on some system they didn’t completely understand. They didn’t ignore it, and did consider the odds, but ultimately, they were going to rely on their years of experience to make decisions.

The train ride would take two days, and they purchased train tickets with a private room consisting of two small beds. Jen set up her laptop to hack the networks for monitoring any suspicious activity as they travelled. Sam set up his laptop and voice interceptor software with his headphones for monitoring. They would take turns monitoring suspicious tech activity while the other would monitor real life activity.

After the train had been going for about 45 minutes, Jen looked over at Sam. “Stay alert for anything, I’m going to try something I thought of last night. It’s nothing dangerous, and I will let you know what it is, if it works out.”

Sam shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

Jen closed her eyes and pushed her mana into her senses. She focused on the wireless signals that she knew computers used and were everywhere. She felt like she could sense something but didn’t know how to access the data. Jen then brought up her stat screen and then quickly waved it aside while willing for another screen to appear, and it did, looking just like her laptop. “That is so cool!” she whispered to herself. She then spent some time with her mental laptop hacking the networks and comparing her mental laptop to her actual laptop.

Jen excitedly whispered to Sam as she rubbed her temples, “It worked! Holy crap, I’ve got a laptop in my head, but damn, the mana battery in my mental laptop just ran out and left me with a headache from hell.”

Sam’s forehead wrinkled with worry, “Are you OK, want some Excedrin?”

She shook her head and replied, “No thanks. I’m fine, just need to relax a second, and…ohhh, I just received a system message about a new skill. It says…”

===

Psychic

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Level: 3 (Novice)

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Psychic connection to the world around you. Nothing will be secret from you if you can master this skill.

===

Sam asked,

“How much were you able to see, before your brain needed rebooting.”

“I accessed everything that I would normally access on my laptop, but maybe it would last longer if I just focused on one wireless network or one computer at a time.”

Sam thought about Jen’s powers for a minute and then urged, “Maybe there are other things you can do with this psychic skill. Try reading minds or try reading my stat screen.”

Jen gave a pained grin, but said, “Oooh, I like that idea. Let me rest for a few minutes and then I will try to and read your stat screen.”

After half an hour she said, “O.K. I’m going to try and read your stats.” Jen couldn’t sense any type of signal, but she could sense the mana in his body.

“Wow, I just thought about inspecting you and ‘Level 0” immediately appeared in my onboard with almost no effort”

Sam replied, “That’s pretty cool, I’m going to try…there it is! It just worked for me when I ‘Inspected’ you.”

“I want to know more than just your level. I’m going to try something else.” She replied. Jen didn’t try to inspect Sam this time, but tried to feel for his mana and “hack” into his ‘system’ by willing her mana to ‘pretend’ she was Sam, while at the same time, willing his full stat window to appear.

“Got it! I can see everything!” Jen exclaimed with accomplishment.

“That’s what she said!” Sam said chuckling.

They tried several experiments over the next day on the train. Jen could only get a sense of people’s thoughts and emotions, but she could read Sam’s stat sheet and system messages perfectly.

Most importantly, they discovered if Sam wrote the word “Forget” on paper and powered it up, when the conductor would stop by for their tickets, he would look right at Sam and Jen, forget they were even there, and move on. The only problem was when the conductor lingered in the door too long, and the mana in the spell ran out, he would shake his head and ask for their tickets. Of course, this didn’t cause any problems because they had valid tickets.

However, they were concerned about the border crossing because they would need to speak with customs agents for more than just a few minutes. Their papers “should” work, but after the email leak in Washington, there would definitely be extra soldiers everywhere along the borders looking for US agents trying to leave the country.

At the train station before the last leg to the border, Sam purchased some crafting supplies for making necklaces. “Watch this, I’m twisting the wire into the words ‘forget me’ and attaching it to the bottom of this necklace. It’s a ‘forget me’ necklace, we could make a fortune with these,” Sam chuckled.

Jen laughed and said, “You are so charming Sam!”

Sam groaned, as he tossed Jen the finished necklace, “You need to leave the puns to me, Millennial. Now just power it up when needed.”

A couple of hours later during lunch, Jen experimented with mind control by repeatedly sending a ‘message’ to Sam’s brain while he was eating lunch, “pick your nose!”

“What the hell is that?” Sam said as he looked up from his sandwich.

“What, did something happen?” replied Jen innocently.

“Yea, it’s crazy! A message just appeared in my system screen telling me to ‘pick my nose’.”

Jen giggled for a while before excitedly explaining to Sam what she had been trying to do.

Sam replied, “That’s pretty neat, you can send me mental text messages. It’s like a form of telepathy. That could be extremely helpful to us!”

After lunch, a little unexpected excitement happened when Jen tried to hack another passenger’s computer directly with her “on board” computer, it caused the passenger’s computer to…well, not explode, but turn to slag…like it received a really strong power surge from an outlet and partially melted.

After about six more hours of testing, Sam stretched his arms in a wide circle and said, “I’ve got to sleep, Jen; I’m about to pass out. I’ve drained and charged my mana so many times, I feel like my insides are raw where the power leaves me. Plus, we now have two working prototypes that may not even be needed.”

Jen expressed her frustration for the 100th time. “We’ve gotten some good results but just imagine what we could do with better materials and more time! We need to take advantage of the 12x growth rate we have for the next 30 days.”

Sam’s only reply was pulling a blanket up over his shoulders and closing his eyes. He reviewed his most recent stat notice before falling asleep. He had increased another level in his Words of Power skill.

====================

Words of Power

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The power of words can be expressed many ways

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Level: 9 (Novice)

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Words have real meaning no matter what form they take

===

While Sam slept, Jen reviewed her notes from all their testing. She was now keeping her notes in her “onboard” mental computer as Sam called it. Her gaming nerd was getting pumped reading over what they had done and all her thoughts about the remaining possibilities.

Notes:

Sam had to change the necklace to read “Forget me, not Jen” and “Forget me, not Sam,” so that they could use the Words of Power “forget spell” while being together. Sam’s Words of Power spells worked far better than hers – obviously, he was a higher level Sam could charge the spell up with his mana even if she wrote the words, made the symbols, or twisted the wire, but again, they worked far better if he created the charm himself and powered it The wire necklaces were able to be charged 5 times before they became brittle and broke. Sam could either power up the necklace 5 separate times, where they would work about one-minute each, or he could slowly and continually channel power into the spell for about 5 minutes. Jen could use and activate a necklace that Sam made and powered up, but not quite as well as he could. Jen’s “on-board” computer was able to type messages into Sam’s stat screen that he could read Not good to mix magic with modern technology.