Chapter Eleven

Three, tangentially located behind Pa Pa Jiang’s restaurant, New York City, Day 41

After several minutes of wracking its inherent knowledge, Three had to conclude that its only hope was channeling. A simple sorcery couldn’t resolve the issue of developing Ms. Winters mind and nervous system to be on par with a human, Three couldn’t comprehend the depth of the spell required to achieve that; Three imagined that spirit magic could probably achieve it, but the only spirit it had contact with was its creator, and it doubted she would help; the best solution would be to use a two or three layer creation on Ms. Winters after killing the woman and learning the basic pattern of a human, but that would take miasma, leaving channeling the only remaining option.

In order to direct the channeling however, Three had to have a strong pattern, one much more complex than the basic pattern Three would get from killing her. Returning its focus to the woman, still unconscious, Three sent a pulse of mana through the girl, which immediately began to be subsumed, but before it was, Three devoted all its concentration to remembering the mana flows and biological systems the pulse revealed as well as it could. Keeping that in mind, it repeated the process, but this time different information came through, so Three did its best to remember that too, and scanned again. Unfortunately, this time, when it tried to add what it observed to the combined total, the patterns overlapped, and conflicted. Turning to focus on the pattern, Three noted that the conflicts and inconsistences seemed to be all over the place. Three made a few more scans, struggling to add them to its memory, only to find it becoming less and less clear, as gradually her nervous system and brain and surrounding areas in the pattern became confused clouds of conflicting information. Three groaned to itself, as those were the systems that it needed to replicate, not lose focus on. Disappointed, it threw out most of what it had stored, and set about adding more detail to the pattern of those systems.

Several hours later, Three was beginning to feel like the seeming chaos of its scans of her brain and nervous system was more ordered than it initially thought, as it was beginning to notice a few emergent patterns. Unfortunately, just as Three reached that realization, she woke up and started to panic, screaming, yelling, struggling against the several inch thick stone supports of the cage, and even crying. It took Three a few more scans to realize that, now conscious and active, her systems were acting totally differently and had disrupted its sample.

Enraged at the critical damage to its record, it discarded the entire thing, and aggressively used a sorcery to restrain her, binding her limbs, pinning her to the ground, and restraining her with the stone>, not caring about the strain of a three layer sorcery at the moment. When tendrils of stone reached out and dragged her to the ground before hardening in place, she became absolutely terrified and nonsensical, sobbing uncontrollably.

Deciding to ignore her, Three began to rebuild its model again, scanning her over and over and over again as mana became available, adding more information to its model and trying to figure out her patterns so it could cause Ms. Winters to mimic them. After a while, the incoherent woman obviously began to notice the scans, visibly reacting to the waves of mana, struggling and screaming as each one struck, and at the same time, Three began to feel an ache as the complexity of the pattern grew ever more complex and occupied more and more of its attention.

To Three’s frustration, that ache was revealed to be its core’s capacity being strained, and when that ran out, the pattern memory tried to use the damaged portion of its core, and the delicate magical construct was subsequently shredded and broken down by the micro-fractures. It couldn’t physically store all the information it needed to process in order to figure out how to improve Ms. Winters, so it would have to make a substitute for its core.

The only substitute it could readily make was a mana crystal, so, as they woman cried, begged and screamed for three days, three concentrated its mana into a mana crystal sufficient in size to hold the woman’s pattern imprint, and once it was ready, Three started up again.

Each time it scanned her, she trembled in pain and terror, too weak from hunger to scream anymore, but her body greedily subsumed the mana to recover and soon enough she was screaming and straining at the stone holding her in place once again. Each time, instead of remembering everything, Three would make a faint imprint of its observations in the more fragile mana crystal, gradually overlapping them over the tens, then hundreds of scans it did over the course of a month, sparing just enough attention to keep Ms. Winters alive and the woman alive, restrained, and conscious in addition to its research.

Over time, the mana from the scans did more than just keep the woman alive, as her body channeled the mana, under the constant stress of her imprisonment, her body and muscles bulked and her sense degraded, turning her into something of a rabid barbarian, though Three couldn’t tell if that was actually because of the mana, or something else, however, as it noticed these changes, it gave less focus to her brain in the imprints and more to her nerves, which were becoming more enhanced over time.

Finally, to Three’s dismay, the woman managed to tear herself apart in a brutally violent struggle that finally managed to break through one of her stone restraints, but shredded half her muscles and caused her heart to rupture and barely functioning brain to hemorrhage too fast to heal, leaving Three with most of what it needed, but not a guaranteed shot at success, and since the pattern was recorded in a mana crystal, it only had one chance.

“Ms. Winters,” Three called the cat that had been lazing about deeper in the dungeon to ignore the woman’s screams, “Come to my core room, I’d like to try something.”

As Ms. Winters was getting up to head deeper into the dungeon, it sent a questioning impression, leading Three to believe he was asking why.

“I want to try to make you smarter, we’ll see how it works,” Three answered.

Seemingly understanding the concept, Ms. Winters hurried to the core room while Three began to refine the impression left in the crystal, increasing and decreasing its definition based on an intuitive understanding it desperately hoped was inspired by its newfound basic understanding of humans after her death, rather than guesswork. By the time Ms. Winters had arrived, Three thought its chances were as good as it could hope for, so it pushed as much mana as it could into the crystal for an hour, overcharging it into a vaguely ordered mass of energy before channeling it headlong into Ms. Winters, who immediately began to shake and seize with the task of processing the enormous mass of mana.