Highfive jumped to his feet and clenched both fists at the news from Bo. "Yes! Hell yes!" He suddenly made a prayer sign, closed his eyes, and turned heavenward. "Please, Mother, give her something good, please give something good, something good, something good, please, please, please…"

Ira looked over at him quizzically. "Does prayer like that actually work?"

Bo snorted. "No." She glanced over at Highfive. "I promise I'll get something good, Fiver."

Highfive clapped his hands and pointed at her. "I'll hold you to that."

"Are you going to trance out now, then?" Jack asked.

Bo nodded. She turned her gaze to Ira. "Guard my body."

Ira nodded solemnly and stepped closer, putting on an unconvincing 'tough' look as she crossed her arms.

Bo then turned and lay on her back, closing her eyes. This was somewhat weird to see, as she usually preferred lying face down.

Highfive flung his hands, face perturbed. "Why a guard? Why specifically her?"

Jack shrugged. Such mysteries were likely not for their tender, simple brains.

"Quiet," Bo commanded, and silence persisted for a minute or so. Then she had a subtle 'going more limp' effect relax her body. Less subtle, her head flopped sideways with her mouth open. Inevitably, it would've resulted in some drooling, but Ira was there to gently but swiftly readjust her back upright, returning her to a dignified state of appearance.

Is that part of why they made some kind of pact? But she sleeps normally right there, and not so dignified… okay, stop it, Jack. Don't try to understand it. This way lies madness.

He glanced at Highfive and saw the wheels were turning there, too, his eyes burning with the concentration this required of him. Not good. Clearing his throat slightly to get his friend's attention, he gave Highfive a 'look,' with a slight shake of his head.

Highfive let out a sigh and nodded in reluctant agreement, admitting Jack was right.

Ira was peering at them both, arms crossed once more. "I'm still trying to figure out how you two do that. And why."

"Do what?" Jack asked, glancing at Highfive. 'Could she be onto us?' the glance asked.

Highfive's doubtful facial reaction and twist of the head meant something like 'No way, we're too subtle, and this is a bro thing. Deny everything.'

They heard someone breathe sharply, and they turned to regard Inkblot. A completely undetectable shift in his facial expression said, 'My wise counsel concurs.'

"That!" Ira exclaimed, thrusting out her hands in emphasis.

"We have no idea what you're talking about," Jack replied.

"Nope," Highfive agreed.

"I also lack the imagination," Inkblot declared.

Ira sighed and shook her head, continuing to glance between them all suspiciously. It was a testament to the development of her 'human spycraft' that she didn't look at Jack and Highfive with one eye each, independently, as was likely her instinct right then.

They otherwise waited with bated breath for Bo. It had been a tedious crawl getting her the last Fractional Level. They grew sober, likely everyone wondering how much strategy might change with her coming mutation. Perhaps she'd solve her energy issues? But that was probably baked into the balance of her powerset's broadness and impact. It would be something else. A new 'move,' more than likely.

Jack had a sudden inspiration to channel memorite and have his Allotment active while she was under, so his Interpet was more 'flipped on.' Would he sense something happening within her, that way?

There was the faintest sense of her using her powers as he focused on her, purely from an innate perceptual perspective. Nothing exciting. Just as he was getting bored with it, there was a sharp surge.

He experienced a keen sense of something like thread-lines/tendrils/webs/angles twisting and rearranging primarily 'near' her in some uncanny 'actually not here at all' space that he was familiar with as tied to the System, but also wrapping around her and extending into her.

What ensued was just… bizarre. Freaky technology.

His greatest intuitively-derived encapsulation of the effect was much as expected: expansion happening via a kind of surgery, with pre-existing frameworks. Vastnesses of stints — or perhaps modular forcefields — relocating and guiding as the bones of many limbs grew in whatever way they willed. It was the seeming randomness of tree limbs extending to bathe themselves in newly accessible special energies. All the better to soak up a cocktail of many powers, amplifying and mutating at once. As opposed to branching into a mere bombarded atmosphere, though, these trees dug into reality itself.

His observation of these wonders sucked his perceptions into an unavoidable fascination, like too many alien colors blasting into his 'soul-eyes' and hypnotizing him. A powers kaleidoscope. Time stood still, and he lost all sense of himself, going zen as if perfectly meditating. It was far stranger than being the one 'inside' — he was definitely not where she was, just 'near' to the external happenings. Where the rubber met the road, if the latter was physical reality and the former Mother Knew What.

It was beautiful, though. Mindbogglingly complex and beautiful technology, functionally fairy dust to mere mortals. One thing was clear, though: this fairy dust had millions of different flavors interacting together just in one person's fragile soul. Millions at the least. Somewhat paradoxical to the idea of expansion, he was certain they reduced as they combined, even if slightly. He thought he understood: collapsing probabilities. Technically less 'change' possible, as Levels were climbed. There was an end state eventually, a final Level one would achieve, one way or another.

The hypnotic vision rather abruptly ended when Bo shot up with a gasp, hands going to the top of her head as she took a deep breath, eyes wild, excited, and flickering. Jack felt his own whiplash as he snapped back to reality.

"Well?!" Highfive said demandingly, also wide-eyed as he stared at Bo.

She swallowed and nodded, only glancing at Highfive briefly. "I got something good…" She suddenly darkened and whirled, grabbing a throw pillow, and suiting its name as she hurled it right at Jack's head.

Such was his state that he only barely turned his face as the pillow bounced off. "Huh?!"

"Creep!" Bo chirped, much more shrill than usual, still scowling at him. He honestly wasn't sure how serious the glare was, Bo being Bo.

"What did I do?"

"Don't act dumb! I felt you leering through my Calibration phase. It may be like nothing more than a moment to us, but that's a timeless moment. And there you were!" She crossed her arms and continued painting him with a withering glare. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Wait, people can do that?!" Highfive exclaimed, dumbfounded. "Wait. I don't even know what he did!"

"Outside observation of a Calibration Access Level gain," Inkblot offered. "I've heard of it. Certain powersets do it better than others. Some say you need a high Interpret, too."

Under the gaze of Bo, Jack cleared his throat and said carefully, "I apologize, but I also had no idea that would happen."

"Precocious."

Jack winced. She was either genuinely annoyed or wanted something… wait. That was the answer! "Market?"

She nodded.

"I buy lunch?"

Her lip turned sideways slightly as she made a disappointed shrug.

Clearly, she wants more on the table. Hmm…

Bo sighed and rolled her eyes heavenward. "What should you have done in the first place?"

Jack's eyes flickered, his brain failing to cough up the solution to the puzzle that was Bo.

Ira saved the day with a helpful mental clue. "Ask first, Jack. Permission."

Oh, thank Memoria for delivering me this gemstone of the sea!

"I should've asked to observe your Calibration," Jack answered.

Bo nodded. "Good. And thus you…?" She gestured with a rolling hand as if leading him to an obvious conclusion.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

It was, in fact, not obvious. "Apologize for not asking?"

Bo shook her head, continuing to roll her hand.

I think this hazing is part of the price itself. Internally, she's loving this, I know it.

Despite this, Jack took pride in his ability to figure people out, so he wasn't going to throw in the towel or get belligerent, as most no doubt would with Bo. Despite this, he remained at a loss, so he cheated and pinged Ira mentally. "Any help here?"

Ira replied, "I believe the saying is 'I got nothing,' I'm afraid."

Shit! She even stumped Ira! Eh, well, she is a secret Octogirl still learning humans…

Still, it perhaps informed him that it was not a matter of something in the elusive, irreducibly complex, ever-ponderable 'girl feelings domain' at work. Bo was naturally quite the nuanced individual, of a subtlety he genuinely respected. She was probably leading him to something he could ferret out in his own power.

Let's go back to 'market.' What would one trade for- oh, right. Duh!

Jack smiled suddenly at her. "Could I interest you in an attempted observation of my own Calibration Access Level gain, when next it occurs?"

After all, she's just as weird as I am.

Bo stared blankly at him, in what most would probably take as something like 'What the hell is wrong with you?' But Jack knew her better than that. He waited, face unreadable except for raised eyebrows.

Finally, Bo said, "And you describe your observations in fine detail. Deal?"

Jack nodded. "Deal."

Highfive scoffed and blurted, "You two are crazier than overripe fraggin' bananas. Anyway, can you spill the damn beans, already, Bo?! You're killing me, here!"

"Sand in the Gears," Bo declared ominously, eyes shifting over everyone, as if she were beginning a ghost story. But then she smiled in that predatory way of hers. Words began to spill out with a feverish intensity that had been held back and restrained. "A continual AoE debuff to all physical sensory information. Distortion and displacement affecting perception and targeting. Fire-and-forget, or can center on a living target. Cost's energy, but the thing is, it's actually low." The next word was spoken with a shaking, thrust forth hand of emphasis, syllables saturated with emotion, in a combination of frustration, relief, and ensuing glee perhaps years in the making: "Efficient!"

After a pause for a steadying breath, she continued, "I can actually do something without draining and jarring myself to the bone at every turn." She took yet another breath and swallowed, obviously struggling with more emotion. "Do what Disruptors are especially known for. Debuff for the entire duration of a battle."

Highfive nodded soberly. "Man. I remember… I remember you talking about something like this… getting a debuff aura. And here it is."

"Even better than an aura. I can throw it around anywhere."

Highfive broke into a big grin and clapped his hands. "Hell yeah! We're about to frag shit up, baby!"

"Mmn. Some caveats. Partially resistable, time-based diminishing returns. AoE attacks need less targeting, after all. The flexibility also means a small radius of effect, which is three meters at Level Six. So, a total of 'bedroom-sized' right now. I can exclude teammates, but it costs more energy while they're in the radius. That wouldn't fatigue me much, even with minutes of operation, though. I think I could generate it continuously for about two hours for one Fatigue Grade, and it doesn't inhibit my other power use. With one person in there the whole time, it would be one hour, two would be thirty minutes, and so on."

"So, almost normal power operation energy?"

"Yeah."

"Dude." Highfive splayed his hands out and shook his head. "You gotta get your Fitness up. You could push that base to four hours, easy, just with a tiny boost to your SOFT score."

Bo deflated, shoulders slumping. "Come on, Fiver! I already am! This all-day fraggin' exercise makes it practically impossible not to."

"Not true!" Highfive held up a finger, his expression suddenly one of an instructing teacher. "If you don't eat correctly and work out in between, you won't gain!"

"Correct," Inkblot added.

Bo glowered at them. Talking through her teeth, she said, "I'm doing it, I promise. You think I like going dizzy in the middle of a battle when just serving my role? There's only so much that can be done in a short time."

"Can confirm," Jack said. "Fitness is a stubborn one. I'm getting there, but it's a hell of a mountain to climb."

"Yes. Exactly. Thank you, Jack."

"So, back to what's pertinent right now: let's see this thing in action. Pop the aura on us."

Bo looked pleased. "With pleasure."

The space around Jack suddenly went slightly blurry. It was… subtle.

"Shit," Bo muttered, voice also slightly warbled. "Hold on…gotta actually tune it, it seems."

Gradually, the blurriness got worse and worse, and then everything started to ripple and even bleed into random directions, but in continual motion, as if the objects of the world were composed of many puddles with erratic raindrops falling into them from impossible angles. Everything kept going lopsided this way or that. It made the exact 'center' of any given object hard to pinpoint, though he could tell a person from a couch, and pretty much where they were. Sort of.

"Whooooa," Highfive uttered, his voice not reconcilable with his blurred visual source as it scattered around and shifted volume. "Tripppyyyyy…"

"Thiiiis is increeeedible," Ira warbled, and then laughed. It was a wince-inducing sound within the current environment, and she cut off with a hiss. "Oh gosh."

"It's awful," Inkblot muttered flatly, and his voice echoed for several seconds.

On top of everything else, random smells amped up or died just as quickly, and the 'hair on the back of the neck' feeling kept going off, making people twitchy. Highfive gasped once and turned around as if attacked — he seemed to stumble away, his image dragging through space oddly for a moment.

"Woooow," Highfive called in a too-deep voice, and then finished as if a sped-up chipmunk, "I-really-hate-this-shit!"

Jack took a few moments to blink and focus, his brows drawing down in a frown. It gave him a huge headache, but something in the way that everything looked and felt annoyed him deeply and intrinsically. As a person, he wanted to defy the discord. Resist. As he focused on trying to make out people, the blur and the warbling lessened, like a hidden pattern was gradually being recognized. His visual focus was somewhat tunnel-visioned, but it helped reduce other false feedback.

Worse if you let yourself get distracted or start to panic. Which many absolutely will when first encountering this.

He also sensed Bo doing something, tweaking and changing the pattern as she went. This actually helped him recognize the pattern to things, as opposed to making it worse.

"It's gradually lessening, right?" Bo asked, her voice crystal clear.

"Yeeeeeeeah," Highfive answered.

"Correct!" a chipmunk-sounding Ira chirped. Then she snorted, trying to hold in her amusement. Steeling her voice into evenness, she continued, "Regardless-of-how-I-sound-I-am-mentally-taking-valuable-notes-for-posterity."

"You make it worse," Jack offered to Bo, voice warbling and echoing, "by modifying on the fly. So you know."

"Ah," Bo said. "Noted. I need to design a pattern and leave it. Okay. Some homework involved, then."

"Let's test accuracy," Highfive warbled. He picked something up off the table and tossed it at Jack. "Catch!"

It looked like the object was coming right at his face, so Jack flinched and threw his hand up to catch it. Briefly, the image passed through him, and he heard an unusual echoing sound that must be the object skittering across the floor. Somewhere.

Bo snickered. "And you call yourself an athlete, Fiver?"

"I think it pulled left of where it should've," Highfive muttered.

Jack walked over to where he thought the object was, which was probably a candy bar in a wrapper. It turned out to be beyond the radius of Bo's effect, being a rather large room as a whole. Her perceptions passed through a blatant dividing line, in a process something like rising out of a pool of water. The blurry object was, in fact, a candy bar and quite displaced from its apparent position while stuck inside the effect.

When Jack turned around, he more or less just saw everything as it was before the effect had bloomed, but there was a faint yet distinctive shimmer in the air showing the curved border of her radius limit.

"Huh." Jack picked up the candy bar and called, "You were right, Blondy! Went left. Significantly left."

Bo replied, "The displacement can be predicted regardless of the apparent pattern of cues. A toss-up whether I should make it shift around or stick — the shifts will help prediction over time, but remain more potentially confusing to deal with than just figuring out a fixed displacement. The fixed displacement is also more extreme. Kinda like stretching out a big rubber band one way and holding it instead of flopping it around."

"Maybe arrange for the fixed extreme at first, then randomize once they've adjusted."

"Yeah, I think I can do that. Just need to practice with it a bit."

"So," Highfive ventured, eyes still looking around in vague bewilderment, "you can't just actively play with the displacement to keep them guessing?"

"I can, but according to what Jack said — and I'm pretty sure he's right — I effectively drain the total effect every time I modify the set pattern. People may even be able to detect when I alter it. My instincts say that's bad. For the most part, it seems best to keep it random for a reliable, average debuff while we're focused on other stuff."

"Makes sense to me," Jack said.

"Alright, get this crap out of my face!" Highfive exclaimed, frowning, waving his hand, and squinting with watery eyes. "Makes my eyes itch, dude."

Bo shrugged and dropped the field.

Highfive sighed in relief and wiped his eyes. He came over from the back of the couch to grab Bo's shoulder and give her a little good-natured shake, grinning. "How about that! A good sixer pick up, right there!"

Bo pulled away from his grip with a 'tsk,' and she flopped backward onto the couch to lie down. Nonetheless, she nodded up to him. "It is. No Primary boost, though. Sad times."

"Those are rare," Inkblot offered, "despite Jack and Fiver picking them up. Don't count on it."

"Yeah, even Light didn't get one," Highfive said. "But hey, there's always Level Nine."

"And Twelve, and so on?" Jack asked. "I guess it's next to impossible to see outside of the 'multiples of three' type gains."

Highfive frowned. "Maybe. But getting past Level Nine is like the, ah… first dive overboard, for most of us. Er. Maybe 'thrown to the wolves' is better?"

Inblot turned to Jack. "It's well-known that anything above nine-point-oh cannot be achieved without some form of participation and contribution to actual enemy defeat. War and conquest, if you will."

Bo added, "Technically, stealing Allotment. Enemies abroad can't do anything without risking it. Play games of trying to take more than they lose during an invasion."

That did refresh Jack's memory on a few things he'd read, but he still raised his eyebrows. "Huh. Noted." After a moment, he chuckled. "Well, I guess that wouldn't be anything new for me, technically."

Everyone stared at him.

Highfive leaned on the couch back with his hands, which was a hell of a stoop for the giant. "You saying you saw actual action against an enemy?"

Oops.

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