Emma didn't stop her weapons development there. Usually she had a hard time working on…God, anything. Even her own powers. Sometimes stress kept her from it, but other times it was just…boredom. Emma wasn't stupid, she knew that. But she also knew that she could hardly claim there was any great difference of function between her and a stupid person.

She was on a roll now, though. Tweaking her effects, adding fractional improvements here or optimizations there. She'd fortunately had the prescience to include all of such things in her Talisman already, but other areas went far beyond what she'd planned.

Emma could decide whether her yellow hardlight would be gluey and adhesive or just rubbery and yielding, and after some experimentation she found that strengthening the stuff with Matter made it require far more force to compress. If it remained strengthened while snapping back, then it would release a lot more stored energy for this same reason. Experimenting around with this theory let her get maybe an extra hundred metres-per-second from projectiles in her matter javelin as she accelerated them with Force and Energy. The results were not enormous, but they were enough that Emma was reliably leaving the things stuck clean into the inch-thick sheet metal Astrid had prepared for her demonstrations.

It really was convenient, using powers that just added energy directly onto their target. And a little scary. Between that and practicing her energy lance to the point of charging it in close to a single second, Emma now had weaponry that would cut through any of her current defences like they weren't even there.

I guess being a glass cannon comes with the territory of magic.

"How come Aexilica and Vari get to be superhumanly powerful all the time, but I don't?" Emma asked Larry, while she was between practice sessions. Her body ached with a strange phantom pain. Physically, it was fine, but pushing her magic so much so often left it feeling…hollow.

"Your magic is just different to most others." He explained. "It's not really a part of you at all, just something you drag out of the cosmos by wanting to. You skip a lot of steps other people have to struggle with. Unfortunately, that also means that anything you want doing to your own body needs doing directly and with a lot of careful consideration and precision to make sure it's done right."

She scowled.

"This is bullshit. I preferred it when I was still in a coma, at least then it made sense for everything to be balanced like a video game."

"Oh poor you." Larry snapped. "Poor Emma, stuck with her measly power to alter creation with a thought. Truly, none can understand your plight."

"Well I haven't been doing a lot of thinking for that, have I?" Emma snapped back. "I've been moving my hands around and casting basically just spells, only difference is I need to visualise all the components and assemble them piece by piece on the fly instead of just having a few syllables I can yell."

Larry glared at her, actually glared at her.

"I really don't like you." He sighed, at last. "You know why?"

"Because I'm a strong, independent woman who doesn'tdon't need ano man?"

He ignored the jab this time, just kept going.

"You're sitting on more power than most beings could even imagine—literally imagine—and your only concern is why it's not doing enough for you at this moment. You don't have a single thought beyond yourself. None of you fucking monkeys do."

"Coming from the cosmic asshole who's done nothing but ask to get home this whole time." Emma shot back, finding an unpleasant waver in her voice, an alien tilt in her thoughts. She didn't like this, not at all. It was nothing akin to her and Larry's usual spats. This was cutting deeper, more deliberately.

"I have my own ends." Larry replied, evenly. "They just don't involve preserving a bunch of murderous apes. You, on the other hand, are one of those apes, and you don't have an altruistic bone in your damned body. Untethered." He sneered the word, like it was a slur. "Makes me fucking sick to think of all that power wasted on a mind so small."

"Good thing you don't have a stomach to puke out of anymore then, isn't it?" Emma tried to keep her rage from showing, but failed. Fortunately Larry's was intense enough to drown it out, and she dumped the stupid bastard before walking off to continue her practice.

Emma had been hoping to escape any difficult conversations by doing so, but she'd been a fool. Such things would simply find her, they always had. Didn't matter where you lived or what you did, people always had their demands. "Put on pants", or "get a job", or any one of an infinite variety of other things. This time it was Aexilica doing the asking.

"Hey, Emma, a word?"

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Well, there was a disastrous start to any conversation. Emma had heard it before of course, in that same tone. The 'we need to talk' tone, the only odd thing about hearing it now was that Aexilica wasn't actually dating her.

"Sure," Emma replied, testily. Whatever this was, she'd rather get it over with sooner than later. She let Aexilica lead her away to somewhere more private, or at least that she felt was more private. Then stiffened herself, and prepared to hear whatever was coming.

"Realistically, how do you rate our chances against Groygar?"

Oh. Somehow it was relieving to talk about this of all things, there was something wonderfully simple about getting horribly killed.

"Not great still." Emma said, honestly. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I've made some weapons improvements, and armour improvements too. But…Come on."

Aexilica nodded in agreement, looking incredibly tired.

"So why are you doing it?"

It was a good question, which was annoying because it meant she'd expect to hear it answered.

"I have my reasons." Emma licked her lips, thought, then swore. "I need to stop being…In poverty, sleeping rough and moving around."

"And you can't wait to stop that?"

Emma thought about it.

"No."

Aexilica sighed again, then nodded.

"Then I'll help." She told her, with all the cadance of a woman swearing an oath. Emma didn't like that at all. It made the words feel heavier, more important. Less mutable. Emma had always steered clear of promises, those received and, especially, those given. They were too…Restricting? No, it was more than that, something else, something—

—"Do you know why I first helped you get settled and fed when we met?" Aexilica asked abruptly, destroying Emma's train of thought and leaving her mind awkwardly blank.

"I…Uh, what?" Emma blinked, trying to regather the shreds of her ruined process and finding them all suddenly slick and ephemeral.

Aexilica repeated the question, which helped it sink into Emma's thoughts. It did not, however, make those thoughts any less gluey and shit.

"Because…Uh, you…You are a kind person." Emma smiled, as convincingly as she could manage. Not very convincing, probably. Aexilica didn't seem to mind.

"Because I assumed you were an idiot."

Emma blinked. "Oh." She thought about that, and remembered that Aexilica's word for someone with an actual mental disability was just idiot. "Oh, thanks."

Aexilica grinned. "Sorry, but you didn't exactly make it hard to draw that conclusion did you?"

"You didn't exactly make a strong impression either." Emma snapped. "First time I saw you you were sword-fighting a giant scorpion, not exactly the brainiest thing you could do is it? Actually—"

—"As time went on, I stopped thinking you were an idiot. Then I saved you, then you saved me, and then we kept on saving each other…So that's why I'm with you on this, Emma. If you think your life is worth risking here, then I think mine is worth risking to lower that risk."

Emma didn't know what to say about that, couldn't even imagine. She just swallowed, opened her mouth, tried to speak and failed. Closed it, opened it again. Became acutely aware she probably resembled a gaping fish and suddenly felt her cheeks burning. Aexilica just grinned.

"I don't think I've seen you speechless before." She noted, and Emma promptly turned around. No more face-to-face speech for her, not when she couldn't rely on the stupid thing to do as it was told and stay still.

"Yeah, well, you just opened up and stuff, it'd be rude to just respond with more of my usual wit wouldn't it?" The problem with facing away from Aexilica, was that it meant Emma couldn't see her face either. It was, she decided, worth it.

Aexilica laughed shortly, and Emma found herself suddenly struck by the urge to protect her. To wrap her in some barrier and keep the world from getting to her. Odd. It wasn't that she was new to human connection, just that, in her experience, it was more about…Well, connection. Actual connection, achieved with her strap-on. This somehow hit harder than that ever had, even at the peak of her fun, and Emma was all too aware that it clouded her judgement even more.

"I do have a plan." She hastily added, more serious than she preferred to be…Ever. But then, this was a serious matter whether she liked it or not. "One that improves our odds. They're not amazing, I don't think they'll ever be amazing, but depending on how this goes we have decent chance of landing ourselves a very winnable fight. Especially with all the improvements to our power."

The woman turned around to get back in front of her at that, meeting Emma's eyes with a sudden intensity.

"Are you sure?"

"No." Emma told her, seeing no reason to lie and a lot not to. "Like I said, we have decent odds. Not great ones. But this isn't a suicide mission or a lost cause for whatever that's worth. Especially…How much progress have you and Vari been making?"

Aexilica smiled at that, which was already pretty reassuring in and of itself.

"You can conjure iron, right?" She asked. "Make a block of it, as big as you can manage all at once."

Emma had been doing some experiments with just that, and so she was well familiar with her limits. A roughly ten-metre chunk of the ugly metal was what she could manage while pushing herself. She could make more, of course, but doing so meant conjuring it in multiple pieces and with a brief delay between each one. Emma regretted not figuring out her limits sooner, she needed to test whether the amount increased with her raw power.

"Thanks." Aexilica smiled, then promptly leaned down, gripped the block of iron with one hand and just lifted it up. That was pretty amazing already, that much of Emma's pig-iron weighed double her own body's mass. What made it go from amazing to ridiculous was when Aexilica started turning the metal block around in her grip, raising it, shifting it all without using a single muscle above her wrist.

"Holy shit." Emma whispered, and Aexilica grinned wider before tossing the piece of metal bodily across the room. She hadn't put her back into it, but it still went a good few metres and landed with a horrible crash.

"I'm stronger than Vari now." She explained, redundantly. "Much stronger. Though he's the better fighter by far, he still wins six times in ten."

"That is…Better than I expected." Emma frowned at that, deeply. Not with concern as much as thought. "Huh, that can't be a normal growth rate right? You must be close to ten times as strong as you were when we met."

Aexilica's smile wavered. Clearly, she had been having similar thoughts.

"It's not." She confirmed. "Vari says he's never seen anyone else who progressed this quickly."

That needled Emma, seeming somehow important. But nothing could be important enough to dwell on for long, not now.

"Well it's convenient in any case." She grinned.

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