What was it that my operator told me before this mission? “Watch out for enemy agents”? I tried to recall while sitting in the cell. It was morning, or it felt like morning because I had woken up and was no longer tired. The only person I had seen since awakening was a man who topped up the oil in the lanterns out in the hall. He looked at me, but said nothing and left after completing his task. Could Yaavtey be an “enemy agent”? Is that why he's so powerful? I wondered. Could he be something like me, but maybe in a more normal infiltrator body? I reasoned that since infiltrator bodies were typically a bit stronger than warbreed were, it would be easy to throw around someone in a more creator human-spec body like mine when using one.

It could just be force magic though, I thought, it's comical that I would consider that the more mundane option at this point. It's just that I don't know how to confirm if it is or not. While thinking of force magic, I walked to the cell door and held my hand up to the lock. With my eyes closed, I tried to poke and prod at the mechanical internals to open the door. Unfortunately, just like it had initially been with heat magic, I couldn't quite figure out how to make the effect appear inside of something without being able to see it. I tried “grabbing” the locking bar and just moving it backwards, but the system inside was either made to resist that kind of tampering, or I just couldn't manifest any force on something I couldn't see.

Out of some sense of frustration, I walked to one of the stone walls and punched it. I felt my knuckles crack, then mold back together underneath my skin. In a panic I checked my heads-up display, only remembering that my blue energy hadn't been regenerating once I felt the regeneration kick in. As expected, I was still stuck at just above sixty percent in my short-term reserves, having wasted some of it on healing and messing around. In a huff I walked back to the spot I had been sitting in and plopped down, awaiting the constable's visit.

What felt like several hours passed and still not one person had come to see me. Do they not catch other criminals? I scoffed to myself, not that I am a criminal, since I've never been convicted. I began to wonder if the constable actually intended to make good on her threat of giving me nothing to eat until the bedding was gone. She said it would take a few days to eat it all, I thought, she can't possibly be intending to just leave me down here for days, right? I glanced over at the now dry bedding and my stomach groaned.

Another hour went by and I was hungry again. Against all reason, I went over to the pile of bedding and began to try to find pieces that looked somewhat edible. When I stuck my hand inside, I was surprised to feel something hard touch my fingertips, then even more surprised when it started to move and scratch and my fingers. I jerked my hand back out and saw that it was being held onto by a large black beetle, about three centimeters long, which clicked its wings at me before trying to bite my skin. On reflex I shook it off, throwing it into the wall in front of me. The beetle was unphased and simply went back to the pile of bedding and continued eating.

I spread open the pile with my hands and saw that there were dozens of insects inside. Just great, I sighed, the only food I have is being poached by organisms so stupid that their entire nervous system is barely more complex than a hunter-killer drone's NPU. One of the beetles dug its way out of the pile and started to crawl towards me slowly. Absolutely no survival instinct, I sighed, then flicked the beetle with my finger and sent it flying out of the cell into the hallway. The insect barely understood what had happened besides that there was no longer any food nearby, and skittered around in circles in its new home in the cell across from me.

I took a nap, and when I woke up I was itchy. I tried to scratch my skin and fix the problem, but to my absolute horror I felt bugs all over me. My body panicked before I could catch it, and I yelped and jumped to my feet, ripping off the rags I was wearing and slapping beetles from my skin in a cold sweat. After I was sure I had removed the last of the insects from my clothing I slipped it back on, not wanting to be caught by the guards while naked. Again, the beetles had no concept of what was happening. Not a single one had been killed by my display, so they just twitched their antennae and went back to their unending search for food.

Damn I'm hungry, I thought as my stomach growled again. I couldn't bring myself to eat any of the bedding, especially now that the beetles had found it again. Something about the notion of eating food covered in insects triggered my ever-inconvenient gag reflex, so instead I sat and waited. In my mind, I tried to construct the mental image necessary to use force magic inside my body to enhance my strength. I found it quite easy to imagine the lever arms and other such things necessary because they all followed limbs I was already used to using, but I couldn't possibly know if they would work as expected because I didn't want to risk using magic. I was broken from my trance by a small, sharp pain on my toe, and opened my eyes to see that once again a beetle had found me and was trying to chew on me.

“Fine then,” I said aloud in English. I crushed the beetle with my fist, splattering yellow-brown guts from its carapace all over the floor. The other beetles, even one which was nearby, had no reaction. Truly, a form of life that deserves extinction, I thought to myself derisively, They can't even heal rapidly like other animals can. Or can they? A thought popped into my head and I grabbed the next closest beetle, holding it up off of the ground as its legs flailed about for something to hold onto. I pulled one of the animal's legs off, watching for some kind of reaction. At first, there was nothing, but within a minute the hole left by the missing leg had closed over completely, and a small bud had formed. They can heal, I thought, very quickly too, but they can't rapid-heal. Why?

I ripped the rest of the beetle's legs off over the next little while, confirming my initial observation and noting that the beetles did display the basics of the second-phase rapid healing that I noted in the rats, just not the first phase. It must be something to do with the complexity of their nervous systems, I thought, it's the only difference that makes sense. Could it be that the subconscious magical processes that cause rapid healing are something they aren't capable of? Strangely, the beetle stopped moving. I put my finger to its mouth to see if it would react but nothing happened. It's dead, I thought, it died from its injuries somehow. Did it use up too much energy? Some of the buds that formed on the missing legs had started to sprout but halted when the brain died.

Using the rock knife I carefully cut the beetle open. I knew next to nothing about insect anatomy since the only things I knew about any non-human anatomy were from hunting and adapting my knowledge of humans back to general mammals. What I saw immediately was that the guts weren't yellow-brown like the other beetle, but just pure brown like they had gone rotten. Moreover, the insides of the beetle looked too small for its body size, but I couldn't be sure without checking a different beetle. I tossed the dead beetle aside and grabbed another living one, and sure enough its insides looked much healthier and larger.

“Ugh,” I grunted, my stomach growling loudly again. I don't have anything to eat here except bugs, I complained, just shut up and wait until the constable comes back. As if responding to me my stomach growled again, and I found myself looking at the twitching beetle in my hands and having a terrible idea. This is just going to make me throw up, I thought, I can't possibly eat one of these things. Still, my body and stomach disagreed with me. I gave in, steeling myself for what was to come, and placed the beetle in my mouth.

The taste was terrible. Bitter and metallic, it was almost vomit-like except for the crunchy texture. The insect was already half dead so it didn't struggle much, which was good because I couldn't bring myself to bite down on it. As it slid down my throat, I checked my heads-up display and was shocked to see that some of the remaining five green bars which were low had begun to climb by small amounts. As well, my blue bar was regenerating again, albeit at a snail's pace. I really don't want to do this, I griped as I looked at the pile of beetles on the bedding, but I know I should.

I ate four-dozen beetles that day. After the third, I began frying them with heat magic briefly before putting them into my mouth, which also let me chew them better. The frying also changed the metallic taste into one more like wood, which was a welcome change. By the time I finished and went to use the waste hole my blue bars had all reached one hundred percent, and my green bars were looking much more even. Strangely some of them had gone down, but all were above seventy-five percent. I made a pile towards the back of the cell out of the bedding that was left, hoping to attract more insects in case the constable didn't come back the next day either.

After digesting a bit, which thankfully did not lead to any gastric emergencies, I stood up and once again began to practice force magic. Since my blue energy was regenerating properly I had no reason not to test out my theories, and so I beat the wall of my cell with my fists. It really was as Koyl had said, using force magic to move one's own body was infinitely easier than using it to move objects outside the body. It was so easy, in fact, that I had a hard time telling if I had even used it before examining just how badly I hurt my hands on impact with the stone. I tried using force magic to protect my hands, but nothing appeared to happen.

Later on, I was sitting in my cell again and thinking. Moving around had caused me to sweat, which had wasted valuable water. The cell was damp, sure, but the amount of condensation that formed on the rocks was not nearly enough to keep me from getting thirsty and the water content of the insects was not very high either. Heat energy, and kinetic energy, I thought, some mechanism clearly exists that allows me to convert whatever this blue energy storage is into those two. It's free-form, following my own intent, so it has to be hooked into my mind somehow as well. I don't know how it works at all, but I wonder if it could do something else.

I brainstormed for a moment, then chose my target. Something very much like heat, something which heat could produce, but which was in actuality a very different effect. With my eyes closed, I held out my palm in front of me, then pictured a ball of air sitting atop it. Inside that air were a number of elements and molecules, but that wasn't important. What was important was that each atom had electrons bound to it which had certain levels of energy, and if that energy was increased somehow they would quickly shed it and return to their most stable orbital shell. Magic, taazmoydh, was nothing if not a mechanism to transfer and transform energy, so magic could take the place of a photon or an electron with higher energy transferring that energy into the shell.

I felt the familiar feeling of energy leaving my body. It was just a trickle, so little that I could have kept it up for hours without tiring myself, but it was flowing. My eyes registered a flicker through my eyelids, then a light. I opened them and squinted to let myself adjust, all while smiling unconsciously. A centimeter above my palm there was a small sphere of light, glowing brightly with a purplish hue and casting shadows all around the rocks in the walls nearby. At my command, the ball shrunk and floated up, hovering at the eight centimeter barrier where magic could no longer manifest, then moved to the tip of my index finger before extinguishing.

A rush of positive feelings emanated from my spine and passed over me, raising goosebumps all over my skin. I grinned to nobody in particular, then laughed quietly. The echoes from the hall laughed with me. I think I finally know what I’m doing.