A bit later, once Eli was sure that Dara was sleeping, he sat cross-legged on his end of the blanket and went through his storage. It was a mess in there, and he’d already figured there wasn’t any order to things, and Lugh just knew what was inside without needing a cheat sheet. The fact that he couldn’t be sure what was in the bracelet felt like an itch he couldn’t scratch. There were so many dangers in this world already, and there could be something amazing right there on his wrist. The trouble was, the two of them were in the middle of bandit-infested woods. Oh, and apparently, at least one demon was skulking around in the forest.

The DS seemed to work off his intentions, but not perfectly. He tried less directed objectives, just thinking about what was in the storage to try and get a sense of things. He tried it in different ways, imagining a magic carpet to help speed them on their way above the trees or a gun to keep any demons at bay, but with no luck. When he searched through the DS, his intention was like a hand flailing around in a vast dark space or trying to organize a giant warehouse with all the lights turned off. His hand might hit up against something randomly, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere fast. Frustrated, he felt an urge to take everything out, organize it, and then put it back in the way he wanted. He thought there might even be a way to dump everything at once, but that could be a monster of a mess out here in the woods.

Okay. Screw this – other shit to do.

He’d been thinking about a few ideas since this whole fiasco started and added them to his mental list ever since. He finally felt like he had a small window and fragile privacy to do some of it.

Murmuring to himself, “Guide, show my status.”

Name: Eli Tal

Species: Human

Race: Restricted (Anomaly)

Level: 7

Evolution: High Mundane

Abilities: Tracking, Identify, Mana Scan, Healing, Flamethrower, ???

Modifiers: Mana Saturation – mana regeneration substantially increased

Eli was still level seven, but he’d been level six before the bandits. He paused, wondering if he’d gotten the first six levels when the cultists died. Before stumbling into their ceremony, he hadn’t known about his level or status, so it was possible. Of course, he still didn’t understand how they’d all died. He’d thrown a rock at the one holding the weapon near Dara, but his tumble behind the tree meant he didn’t know what had happened after the stone left his hand. Something obviously occurred since they'd all shriveled up like mummies by the time he checked their bodies.

Frustrated with the unknowns, he again wished for a few spreadsheets to track and structure his thoughts. Sadly, Guide wasn’t much help since something was obviously wrong with the piece of technology. He’d already tried using one of his favorite old programs for notetaking, but Guide only responded with, “Command Unknown.” Concerned, he’d tried to access his other programs like his music playlists and image gallery. However, Guide responded, in the same way, every time – he was quickly coming to hate those two words with a passion.

Stymied, he went at the problem from a different direction and tried to find the local files he’d set up back on Earth for quick access. Again, Guide’s two-stupid-word response reared its ugly head, so Eli went down the entire troubleshooter checklist he’d memorized, but with the same results. A hollowness settled in his chest, like a piece of him was somehow missing, but he had to face it; his old files were gone.

It was strange but realizing that the data was gone hit him harder than expected. Sure, it was only a few thousand songs, plus hundreds of pictures of his family and friends, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever get those files back. He knew he’d never forget what his family and friends looked like, but there was something compelling when looking at a picture, a literal snapshot of a point in his existence that he could look back to as a signpost on his life. An image might hold old memories he might have forgotten, even smells and tastes brought fresh to mind, yet maybe now gone forever.

His music was different, yet the same, as a song could seemingly transport him back to another time in his life. The ones that really hurt weren’t even his personal favorites but were more like little memories encapsulated within the melodies. There was that one Bon Jovi song his grandma used to sing when cleaning or his mom’s Mariah Carey album played every holiday season even though they hadn’t celebrated Christmas. While he could clearly remember some of them, he knew that others would slip through the cracks of his memories and would eventually be lost to time.

He tried not to dwell on it since if the files were gone, then they were gone. Instead, he focused on making the best of the situation by moving on to other ideas he wanted to try. He was pretty sure that at least a couple should work – assuming more of the command authority bullshit didn’t get in the way.

Eli sat there for a bit, thinking about how he wanted to change the HUD. He’d first changed the layout about a month ago, almost as soon as they’d installed Guide inside his skull. After his surgery, the engineers and doctors ran him through a bunch of tests, one of which was editing the visual interface. He hadn’t liked the default setup and knew he’d have to stare at it for every waking moment until and unless he had Guide removed someday. It had been another one of his surprises a few days ago, waking up in Lugh’s strange cloud room and seeing the old default HUD again. Of course, he hadn’t worried about it much with everything else happening since then.

“Guide, add a toggle button for each of my abilities. Also, include a button for my status. Each should be the size of the standard toggle design but with different colors. Set colors so inactive abilities are a darker shade and, upon activation, brighten. Use default settings.” He paused, visualizing the shape he wanted for quick access while leaving enough flexibility to add more abilities later since he might always get more. “Use Wheel Configuration Pattern template. The center spoke is my status, with the others my abilities. Set this in the HUD above the chat window.”

Above the chat window, a multicolored wheel appeared on his HUD. It was broken up into six wedge shapes around a circle in the middle, each a different color. At the moment, he only had Mana Scan active, and it was the only wedge lit up, while the others remained a darker shade. He’d reactivated it again soon after Dara had fallen asleep.

During the ambush earlier, he hadn’t been able to use his Mana Scan until he activated it aloud, which slowed down how quickly he could react. He’d noticed that the speed of his thoughts had felt normal while the world around him, and his body, slowed down, limiting the rate with which the rest of his body could move. Looking at the memory differently, he considered whether it was less about controlling time but instead increasing his perception of the world around him. Could his thoughts speed up while the world around him continued at a regular rate, like hyperspeed thinking?

The idea didn’t jive with the other evidence, specifically how Eli had hit so hard. The first spearman had been launched backward from a single blow like he’d been hit by a car. He’d started to think it might be a physics interaction like mass times acceleration equals hitting like a dump truck, but hyperspeed thought wouldn’t explain his powerful attacks. He didn’t even know what triggered the time effect as he hadn’t seen the arrows or bandits until after he felt time slow. The notification and path of the arrows had only appeared once he saw them already in flight. He tried imagining time slowing around him or his thinking speeding up. Still, nothing happened. Without more to go on, he’d have to shelve away the mystery for now.

If Eli couldn’t test the time-dilation ability, he’d just have to try something else, such as his theory about the magical rations. He’d recently taken a bite of Mana Candy, the blue-wrapped floral brick, and had the nice mana buff to show for it. He had the rest of it unwrapped in his left hand, though the taste of medicine and flowers blended with the texture of a soap bar hadn’t improved since the last time he’d tried it.

Using his Mana Scan, he focused on his right hand, trying to zoom in as far as possible. When he’d healed Dara, he saw specks of green and blue that might be her cells, but there was no way that he should have been capable of seeing them. He’d need a microscope or something similar to pick out individual cells back on Earth. Here though, his Mana Scan let him focus, to zoom his vision, which was pretty crazy.

It wasn’t precisely only sight he had gained either. While his cells lit up with tiny blue and white flecks with little else to see, his feelings told a different story. It was like his DS, where other senses jumped in to help like he was almost subconsciously getting additional details. Of course, it could be just his overactive imagination telling him something incorrect, but he’d already trusted his feelings, which had worked while healing Dara.

“Crap, enough stalling,” Eli muttered with a frown and took a few breaths while focusing on what he wanted. He toggled the unknown ability from earlier, which looked pretty funny with “???” as a red wedge-shaped label in his HUD. Unlike his Flamethrower ability, he wasn’t as sure what the new power really was. For now, he’d keep the question marks until he had a chance to test the new ability.

His Mana Scan dropped, replaced as before with a biological scan filter over his normal vision. He held up his right hand, the limb somehow highlighting for a moment, and he imagined seeing inside it. His skin turned transparent, and long strings of fibrous tissues were revealed within his palm. Flexing his fingers, he watched the highlighted new areas dancing and moving along with his motions.

He smiled, lost in the wonder and magic of the moment, but then pulled his attention back to the task at hand and imagined zooming in on the tip of his thumb. A strange resistance and ache built in his eyes, like using the wrong eye prescription while reading the small print. He tried to ignore the growing pain but frowned at the results. He’d hoped that the biological scan’s zoom would give the same level of details as his Mana Scan, yet he couldn’t seem to get it to magnify nearly as well, and his head was already pounding from the effort.

He blinked away the zoom, and much of the ache almost instantly vanished. Studying without any magnification, he played around with making different parts of his hand disappear to reveal deeper layers until only his bones were visible. He moved his fingers again and noticed that the rest of his hand was still within his vision, but it was like a greyish shadow surrounding the highlighted bones. However, when he purposely unfocused his eyes, the layers blurred together until he couldn’t tell what he saw. He had to focus on separating his hand’s layers to see the details again.

Intention seems to be king here, but how do the abilities even work? How does magic function on Lurra?

The real goal with all his experiments was to create a magic system model, and he’d already started thinking of ways to construct something for the task. Like with the physical laws he’d grown up with on Earth, he hoped the magical environment followed repeatable and testable scenarios. Applying the scientific method could work wonders in making sense of the world he found himself in, assuming magic followed logical rules.

While Eli was no scientist, he’d worked at building and reviewing complicated business models over the years. When tasked with analyzing a business back on Earth, he’d have started by breaking the company down into its most fundamental components and identifying its various drivers. What were the smallest pieces that drove the revenue? How about the associated costs to produce those sales? There was a causality to every variable and connection that could be traced from start to finish. He’d then construct a “bottom-up” model with those fundamentals and drivers as his base and then move upwards with all the individual transactions added in until the whole company was captured within the structure. Once complete, he’d have a better understanding of the entire system.

There was a similarity in how science built the standard model of particle physics. The idea that unseen tiny particles combined to form matter and reality went back centuries. Scientists kept digging further and further down to find the elementary particles of the universe, and each time the scientists thought they’d found the very bottom, such as with the atom, they discovered the next layer down with subatomic particles. Then, scientists broke down subatomic particles further. They kept digging to find smaller pieces, and each discovery contributed to the bigger picture in understanding the entire system and universe.

Using their knowledge, built over centuries of testing and refinement, scientists could explain just about everything within the known universe. Well, outside a few stubborn areas, at least. He didn’t think science was perfect, but he felt it was better than assigning natural forces to the gods or other absent yet mighty beings.

The downside to his magic model plan was that it would take a lot of work to create. On top of the heavy lifting, he didn’t know all the pieces involved since he couldn’t be sure that some parts of this puzzle weren’t literally invisible to him. After all, magic was a thing here, and he didn’t know what that might mean in many situations, so he’d just try to reserve judgment while hoping that this world’s magic had some grounding in logic and reason. If not, then he was up a shitty creek without a paddle. He was also doing this alone since he no longer had a strong team helping to shoulder the burden.

Damn, I wonder how they’re doing. What happened at the office? Did anyone else get snatched? No, don’t worry about what you can’t change. Talay. Focus on the now.

Gathering his thoughts again, he experimented a bit, toggling back and forth between his two abilities while studying his hand, and found out how much his head didn’t like it, judging by the pounding at his temples. It only got worse if he tried switching while his view was magnified but still noted the interaction. After all, even as unpleasant as the headache was, it was still a result, and there might even be a logical reason for the pain that he’d someday discover.

He turned on Mana Scan again and zoomed in until he started to feel the strain. He took a bite of the Mana Candy while focusing on his cells, ignoring the headache, and watched for a reaction. The moment his body started to break down the brick, there was almost an explosion of blue energy in his stomach that spread outwards. A big chunk of the blue color moved towards the large white ball in his chest and, when the blue light touched the white mass, instantly brightened as if it had a dimmer switch that had just been turned up.

He’d already guessed there had to be some connection between the Mana Candy and the ball, but it seemed they both might be mana-based. Or at least the ball fed on mana, though it was always possible that it converted it to some other form of energy. He hesitated, thinking of the name of the mana ball inside him. Maybe just call it a core? It made sense and jived well with the old fiction he used to read. Plus, a mana core sounded a lot cooler than a mana ball. Maybe someday he’d be able to throw magic fireballs?

Smiling even with his pounding headache, he continued experimenting while trying to replicate the effects of the Mana Candy. He figured that with a name like that, the colorful lights in the air he took for mana would probably work for a test. Assuming that didn’t work, he could try using the energy within his core.

With a plan in mind, he turned to the challenge of getting the colorful little lights to listen to his commands. Willing them to move elicited no apparent response, though he tried a few different ideas, including whispering some audible orders. Stymied, he started adding some visualizations to see if that helped. He’d already gone through a few failed attempts when he tried imagining himself within a pool of water, the colorful clouds somewhat reminding him of the currents in a fluid. He added a little whirlpool within his image, one swirling around his waist. With an abrupt lurch, the closest lights swung towards him.

He suddenly realized this might be a bad idea since he wasn’t exactly sure what he was dealing with. But a moment later, an electric feeling shot through him, making him feel energized like he’d eaten a couple of Mana Candies at once. Abruptly bursting with vitality, he visualized the swirling lights flooding into him and flowing throughout his body to create more of the little blue lights he’d seen before. There was a sharp pain inside his chest, and a quick blaze of white like the world’s largest camera flash went off in his face before the world went black.

ERROR

WARNING

BZZZZZZZZZZ!

“Ow. I’m awake Guide. Stop with the buzz,” he groaned from where he’d fallen on his side, sprawled unceremoniously on the blanket. Groaning in pain, he toggled off his abilities and rolled onto his back to lay there for a bit. The alarm mercifully stopped, and he toggled his status.

Name: Eli Tal

Species: Human

Race: Restricted (Anomaly)

Level: 7

Evolution: High Mundane

Abilities: Tracking, Identify, Mana Scan, Healing, Flamethrower, ???

Modifiers: Well Fed, Mana Saturation – mana regeneration substantially increased, Mana Oversaturation – Error

A string of messages from Guide filled the chat log, and Eli had to scroll to see them all – rarely a good sign.

Mana oversaturation detected

Partial Evolution detected

Basic protocol limits exceeded

Enforcing limits

ERROR

Enforcement jeopardizes continued existence of User

Calculating…

Body adapting to excess mana

WARNING! Report immediately to the nearest Sanctioned Temple. Authorities will be contacted at the earliest opportunity.

Did I break Guide? Did I break me?