The conversation drifted to less-important topics after that, though Deyana did make a point of asking about some of those “brain ads” Symphir had brought up, if only to show that she wasn’t bothered by people talking about it. It was even true– at present, even if it hadn’t always been. Hearing about some of the negatives of the AR-infested world even helped with that, to a degree. She didn’t think she’d be getting her implant fully connected and active any time soon even without the more direct negatives, but having a more complete picture was always better.
The internet was already unusable enough with ubiquitous video advertisements and their constant grasping for attention. She had absolutely no desire to allow anything more involved.
Eventually, she finished her part of the tattooing. Telling Symphir to put her underwear back on, Deyana left the room and sent Faycez in after her to finish his part.
Geria was waiting for her outside, looking mildly annoyed for a moment before she seemed to take a breath and steady herself. “He is still keeping some secrets, but he wanted you to look at this design.” She gestured at a pile of papers with runes written on them, and Deyana could tell even from across the room that they lacked the colored shine of portal-dust inks that would make the runes actually magical.
Even a cursory glance told her that was intentional: written on the sheets was a step-by-step explanation of how they were going to lay out, power, and eventually remove the runes from an almost thousand square-meter area. The numbers he was using seemed odd (for one, Faycez’s calculations assumed about twenty percent of the mana would be lost to ink inefficiency, when even the lowest-quality ones lost, at most, four or five percent) but Deyana decided to just trust the expert on that.
Besides, that choice built-in a safety margin. Something she’d absolutely want, given that, if she was reading the plan correctly, they’d only get one or two shots at it, then everyone would know exactly where they were and have a general idea of what their strategy was.
Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the situation at large and the specific thing they expected the ritual spell to do would almost certainly give away their location as soon as it went off. If they copied the look and effectiveness of some established party’s siege weaponry, they might have been able to avoid being investigated afterwards, but Faycez and Geria had apparently done some math and determined that path would be unlikely to do enough damage to count as a significant contribution.
Not incredibly surprising given what she knew about the guilds and parties in the area, but it meant that a significant portion of the plan laid out before her was about cleanup and contingencies for escaping.
Deyana had some input to offer there, at least, mentioning some things that they had apparently missed while Geria noted them down. Chief among them was, in her opinion, that Symphir would have a lot less of an issue getting out than they’d assumed.
For reasons she hoped were about to become clear, as Faycez and Symphir came back out of the crafting room, Symphir now actually dressed in a tank top and shorts, along with an adorable lop-ear bunny beanie. It took some effort to keep her reaction to just a smile, but she did, just barely, manage it.
“Done?” Deyana asked, the question more rhetorical than sincere.
“Yup. Time to test it in practice, so… out back?”
Deyana’s eyes went wide, and she shook her head rapidly. “No! No. That would be… Well, you’ll be fine there eventually. But uh… we need a little bit more space than that at first.”
Both Symphir and Faycez narrowed their eyes at her. “It’s not like I’m new to speed enhancements."
That got a nod back. “Yeah, I mean. I figured that, but the specific combination… just trust me on this? I think the practical experience with it is going to be more useful than any explanation I can give.”
Mostly, she reasoned, because the effect is so much more than you think.
Ultimately, it came down to fairly basic Newtonian mechanics.
F=ma, expressed as a=F/m. Except, because of magic, the force was bigger, the inertial mass was smaller, and the final acceleration was multiplied- as it turned to speed.
So Deyana was hardly surprised when, after making sure that Symphir was set up at the end of a long, straight, highly visible, empty street, what she witnessed wasn’t so much the start of a sprint as Symphir flinging herself into the air at speeds that would make a jet pilot sit up and take notice.
Followed, of course, by immediate panicked flailing fading into the distance as that arc tore away from the starting point so quickly that she almost certainly was going to have to land under the effects of the perception acceleration… or bounce, and hope for the best.
Deyana hoped for the former, but she gave it even odds.
Still, it felt like she should comment. “She really has practiced with speed before! That looks like she’s going barely over a mile. Still, probably not the backyard kind of test.”
Faycez didn’t appear to gape at the sight, though it seemed a near thing, Instead, his hand went up to his chin, finger covering his pulled-in lips. He opened his mouth with a small pop before sighing, shortly. “You know, now that I’m doing the math…”
“It doesn’t feel like it should work that way, huh?”
Faycez nodded. “It does not.”
New Group Chat: Deyana, Faycez, Geria, Symphir
Symphir: ‘deyana you bitch’
Symphir: ‘shouldve known it was gonna be crazy’
Symphir: ‘almost went through some NPC’s windshield’
Deyana: ‘Make sure to jump the intersection on your way back!’
Symphir: ‘mAkE sUrE tO jUmP tHe InTeRsEcTiOn On YoUr WaY bAcK’
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Symphir: ‘Fay, only 60 mana, but also 15 health and 30 stamina’
The number wasn’t completely outside of her expectations, but Deyana still held back a wince. Stamina was an extremely common specialization, and that only reminded her of why. The slowest-scaling of the three stats, unboosted stamina gained only a single point per level– which meant that single jump, though admittedly impressive, had used between a bit over a quarter of Symphir’s maximum, where the mana was about ten percent and the health less than five.
Admittedly, that was due to her specializations in health to begin with, but it was still comparably low enough to be almost negligible.
Faycez: ‘Interesting. How much is it costing now?’
Symphir: ‘Less than I’d expect. Averaged, three-ish mana, negligible health, one-ish stamina per second.
It was hard to tell from so far away, but a few comparisons to landmarks on the street let Deyana know that Symphir was easily making fifty kilometers an hour just running back. Even that seemed like it might be less efficient than was technically possible. Full, second-long, surprisingly-floaty bounds between steps obviously wasted a lot of the energy moving up and down, but there was also the human form factor and musculature to consider… Part of Deyana couldn’t resist get distracted analyzing possible solutions to that, but ultimately they didn’t matter.
“The perception acceleration and Poise should help her manage it in the future, but it’s going to need practice. And probably for her to run it at lower than maximum capacity in the future.”
Faycez nodded, his eyes still fixed on Symphir running back towards them. “That makes sense to me. She’ll likely be inside, figuring it out until we quit for the night…”
Deyana looked to Geria for a moment, but answers weren’t forthcoming from that quarter. “We should probably go, then. At least temporarily. Minimize how likely you are to get caught up in things.”
He took a deep breath in, blowing it out slowly before responding. “Of course. While I wouldn’t mind that too much, the risk is a bit much for her.”
“Not for you?” Deyana asked, fairly certain she knew the answer but asking anyway.
He didn’t hesitate for a moment. “For me, a reset’s more annoying in that someone else has my in-game notes than anything else.”
None of them spoke while Symphir jumped over the closest street’s intersection with a motion more equivalent to a short hop than such a huge motion, landing so smoothly that Deyana was instantly certain she’d activated the perception acceleration. A few moments later, she was decelerating while pulling up to the three who had remained, finally coming to a stop a few meters away for a few moments, then walking up to them at a normal pace.
“It was a little funny,” Symphir said.
Deyana blinked once, tilting her head to the side, then shrugged. “You were really confident about it.”
“Yeah…”
“You could have known what it would be like, so I–”
Symphir cut her off almost immediately. “But you didn’t think so.”
“I didn’t think so.” Deyana confirmed.
Symphir’s gaze turned to Geria, and something passed between them– Deyana expected at least a message or two, and a potentially troublesome possibility crystallized in her mind. Avoiding it, though, would at that point be much worse than allowing it to happen. “Thanks for this, genuinely. But you two should go for now, before someone comes down this street for whatever reason and sees you two.”
A few more words were exchanged, along with friend requests between Deyana, Geria, and Faycez, before Deyana and Geria left from in front of the house, walking together down the street.
The silence between them was noticeable, even for as short as it was. The tone different from previous instances, Deyana considered broaching the topic herself, but couldn’t quite bring herself to take the chance that she’d misinterpreted.
“I am disappointed,” Geria said, simply. “Do you know why?”
Part of her raged at the implication, but Alex shoved that part back into the childish corner of her mind it had spawned from. It wasn’t meant in the way many would have meant it, and she was determined not to make that mistake. Again, at least. “I have ideas, but none substantiated enough for me to say I know.
Geria didn’t turn to look at her, not even changing the rhythm she was walking in as she spoke again. “Certainty is one thing. I often look for it, myself. But I would hear your ‘ideas’.”
The dark, angry twist Geria put on the word was so emphatic that Alex felt as much as heard it. She took a moment to think– not to come up with a lie, something that tried to fight its way off her tongue before the truth had even been established, but to understand. Both herself and the question. “Treating you like you weren’t able to make choices for yourself. Could be fair or unfair, depending on how each of us approached it. Not interacting with you the way you would prefer. Unfair.” She paused, holding up a hand to signal that she still had more to say. Especially given how much she needed to force the words out. “Cowardice. Fair.”
“That is not what I expected of you.”
“I rarely am what people expect.”
There was a long pause. “I had thought your reticence was because we were already busy.”
“That’s part of it. How much of that conversation did you actually hear?”
“None. Most. Symphir gave me a summarization of the first part. I… asked her to ask you some things.”
Alex thought about that, unable to quite place what that meant, exactly. She didn’t see a way to wriggle off of this particular hook, and wasn’t entirely sure she should, discounting her personal aversion to actually dealing with the consequences of her actions. Ultimately, the conversation as a whole was completely out of her control.
That realization came with a spike of terror like sourceless lightheaded dread from breathing air devoid of oxygen. The breath that followed wasn’t much better, just enough stabilization to push past the screaming buzz in her ears to hear what Geria said next. “Which… I am sorry.”
Alex found herself unable to respond for several seconds, mind left behind at the low-hanging bar of confusion. “For what? You’re not–”
“I had assumed,” Geria said, continuing as if she hadn’t spoken, “that I understood why you were not acting; that you were just the type of person to be generally flirty and did not mean anything by it. You have not been dishonest with me. I should have just asked. My disappointment is in myself as much as you. Because now, I learned something about you that you had not intended to share yet, and I am embarrassed to have done so in the way I did.”
Alex didn’t want to let that stand on its own. “It’s fear.” There was a momentary pause. “From me. It’s not that I didn’t want to say anything. But I didn’t want to… no. I couldn’t bring myself to ask both of those things at once. Especially with the reality being that I’m completely single at the moment… asking you out and to accept that exclusivity is off the table.”
“I cannot say you were entirely wrong. Had you done that, I suspect I would have turned you down.”
Alex felt the shift– near-instant and barely voluntary. Nervous breathing slowed, rushing heart-rate placid in a moment. Tightly controlled muscles relaxed, and the building pressure behind her forehead receded, replaced by a pervasive tiredness and mild disappointment. “Okay.”
There was another long silence, but with the new detachment Alex didn’t feel it anywhere near as keenly. Instead, when Geria spoke again, it was almost a surprise.
“That is it? Okay?”
Deyana blew out a breath, a corner of her lips turning upward against her will. “Of course. I care about how you feel, so why would I try to convince you of something that you don’t want for yourself?”
Silence fell again, slightly interrupted by the thmp-zzzz of streetlights turning on beside them. “I can understand your perspective. I feel like I should clarify. I would have turned you down. Having thought about it more than I would have in that situation, I have decided that I will not do so in the future. Turn you down, that is.”
Between one step and the next, Alex felt herself nearly trip on air as she spun to face Geria, who was regarding her with an expression that she might have mistaken for passive on another person’s face. Her next words came out nearly a whisper. “I… I’ll keep that in mind.”
Geria nodded once, then broke eye contact to look over Deyana’s shoulder. “I will be logging out now. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”
Geria’s character started moving away under the control of the AI before Alex was able to bring herself to respond.
“Yeah…” she said, staring out at the empty street instead. “I look forward to seeing you, too.”
order of magnitude, so that's a plus.
third of the actual forces involved. Not a mistake that Alex would have made, and that is the maximal output those runes can apply while being in their most efficient realistic form, but still.
believe how much of a pain in the ass it is to find the jerk of an average runner. I ended up having to just scale professionals relative to the speed difference.
