Combinatorial Explosion (Worm/Original)

I decided that I would affiliate myself with someone other than the PRT. I'm sure there are plenty of businesses or groups that would love to snag someone like me. All I needed to do was find one that didn't chafe too badly.

Thankfully before I left the PRT building, though, I had managed to get my hands on some paperwork that laid out the basics of what I would have to contend with, which I decided to read in my room after dad had a chance to look it all over.

The biggest and nastiest threat to my plans of becoming a rogue was NEPEA-5, the series of guidelines and laws that were thrown together to dismantle Uppermost, an old company that was made up entirely of rogues.

The entire thing was a true mess. Businesses that did not employ parahumans had preferential treatment in court cases between companies, and I could be sued by any group whose operations I was infringing upon with my own, unless I paid "Excess earnings" into a fund designed to bail out businesses threatened by parahuman involvement. The amount I had to pay into that fund to be totally free of legal risks was obscene, as well.

The maximum I could earn, not accounting for any employees I had, was based on the minimum profits that someone in my field could expect without parahuman involvement. In short, for almost any job, that would default to minimum wage. I was able to figure out that most parahumans get around this by involving themselves in extremely high-earning things, like entertainment, consulting, and in the case of Brockton Bay specifically, fashion.

It struck me as especially weird that, if I wanted to pay as little as possible into that fund, while still running something like what I had planned, I would want to use my powers to start a business, and then stop using my powers and hire employees to keep it running. After all, a CEO, or even a Manager generally earned more than the grunts doing the work.

Of course, even that "solution" had problems, considering just how much money went into keeping employees paid, standards met, not even touching on all the other troubles that came with a parahuman actually owning a larger scale operation like that.

The amount of sheer insult that some of this bill had to parahumans was astounding, and it made perfect sense why even a company made up entirely of parahumans working together would be gutted by NEPEA-5. Instantly, they were open to legal action from everyone who wanted to take a bite out of them, unless they had immediately shut down all their operations that "infringed" on normal businesses.

As I set the papers down and leaned back with a sigh, my biggest hope was honestly a quite grim one. If I wanted to beat this system, I'd need a really good lawyer, a ton of cash, and, of course, the hope that the death of the shipping industry didn't result in any particularly large local spice farms from being established on US soil.

It was either that, or I'd have to figure out the best ways to short that damn fund. To get a job that, legally speaking, warranted an obscenely high paycheck on my part.

I'll need to consider my next steps carefully, or I'll get chewed up and spit out even faster than Uppermost did.

---

School this week was... Weird. When I went in, I considered checking if any of the trio were stained with magic. Something that would have certainly helped my case against them, all things considered.

My backpack weighed heavily on me as I jogged up to the school, noticing the police car parked right in front.

What was a bit more surprising was the fact that the trio was absent.

As I went through my classes, I noticed everyone whispering amongst themselves, and around the time lunch started, I had finally figured out what they were whispering about.

Taylor Herbert got Sophia, Emma, and Madison arrested.

For anyone else, realizing that the whole school was trying their damndest to avoid them would be a source of shame, of isolation. For me, though, everyone thinking they'd be next if they sat too close to me or talked to me in any way...

It made me want to cry from sheer relief. Finally, people were leaving me alone. What a sad joke that was, just how good it felt to finally have a day of school without people bothering me.

And then Veder of all people had to come ruin that, sitting across from me at lunch, the one day I decide not to eat lunch in the bathroom, and he meanders over like it's perfectly normal.

"So, uhh, I heard about what happened. Glad those three are gone, eh?" he says awkwardly, confusing the living hell out of me.

He was one of the ones who were tacitly ignoring all the torment, now he's acting like it's a good thing they got arrested?

I sent a brief pulse of magic through myself, just to make my thoughts a bit clearer instead of getting angry.

"Yeah. It's good that people aren't bothering me now," I say with such an utter void of amusement that I half suspected it to yank a few of the people laughing and joking a table away from us a few inches closer from sheer vacuum force.

A curious part of my mind couldn't help but wonder how mana would behave under a vacuum, considering what I now know about Thaumic Magic.

By the time my focus returned to Veder, I realized I had missed a chunk of his rambling response. He missed all of the subtext I had so carefully woven into my response. I could tell because he hadn't fucked off yet.

I interrupted him talking about how Sophia had broken his nose once, to more clearly elucidate my wishes.

"Look, Greg, I'm sorry, but I'd like to have my lunch in peace, please," I said, trying to remain civil despite his tactless plowing into my little bubble of gratifying privacy.

"Oh. Alright," he said, not looking particularly cowed, but silencing himself beyond what was necessary to eat the slop they served us today. tater tots, mashed potatoes, salisbury steak, and of course, milk.

I decided not to think about the sad vegetables that were also mushed onto a corner of the tray, isolated from the rest of the good food where it could safely be ignored.

Lunch passed quickly after that, and then, the rest of the day did too. I returned to my lab with newfound peace of mind, a whole day without dealing with annoying people, lunch not withstanding, had left me in a really good mood.

---

I knew that mana could do odd things, things that mostly seemed to make sense in hindsight. One obvious example had been when I infused mana into the fly I had captured.

The mana had given me control over the fly, yes, due to the magic being infused with my willpower, but more importantly, the attunements all added up to a mishmash of bug-like magic. I didn't have enough control to turn all of the tiny minuscule pips of magic into a whole bug made out of mana, but, after giving it some thought, I realized that I didn't need to.

Making sure nobody was watching, I set up a small bucket out on the porch. Rather than leaving it at that, however, I took out a pepper from my pocket, channeling magic into it until a large red sphere of magic was formed, and I made it fill the bucket up.

Pepper magic, for whatever reason, had a smell and taste that was alluring to birds, and a bird was exactly what I needed.

I sat on the porch until dad came out to check on me.

"What are you doing?" he asked curiously, sitting down next to me.

"Trying to catch a bird for an experiment," I explained.

He made a noise of understanding. "I see."

Sitting around, it was a nice wait for birds, who were slowly edging their way closer to us as the minutes went by.

"It's not against any religion... to want to dispose of a pigeon," dad mutters somewhat musically next to me, and judging from his smirk, I could tell he was making some kind of joke I didn't understand.

Eventually, I had one. One bird, a pigeon of course, had gotten close enough to sample the delectable magic in the bucket. With a gesture, however, the tasty liquid magic turned into a trap, flying up and snaring the bird. The other birds had flown away frantically at this, assuming their compatriot had just been preyed upon.

Grabbing the bird gently and making for my lab, dad gave me a funny look. "You're not doing anything... Immoral, are you?" he asks unnecessarily.

"Don't worry dad, I'm just using this little guy for mana testing. Nothing horrible."

He gave me a look that implied he wasn't one-hundred percent convinced but followed me inside anyway to see what I was doing.

I gently put the bird in a cage made out of solid mana, letting it calm down before starting the tests I was curious about.

First, obviously, I infused the bird with magic, attuning the mana to all of its bodyparts. Immediately, the bird reacted, flapping its wings in a way that seemed to imply that it absolutely did not approve.

With a gesture, I tried to take control over it, like I did with the bug, and at first, the bird calmed down and was willing to do a few tricks, but slowly, I felt something building up inside the bird as I continued to use mana to manipulate it.

Mana that was not mine, and did not come from my power blossomed inside the pigeon. It wasn't enough to shove my mana out, but it was absolutely enough for the bird to return to doing whatever it wanted, taking more significant effort to bring it back under control.

After a moment, I realized what I was doing, and stopped. The bird had a soul. It had mana. It didn't approve of someone rooting around inside it with their magic.

I could tell that much by how it kept shaking around and flapping as if trying to get water off of itself, but I was too distracted to concern myself with that. The bird had a real-deal soul, smaller than mine by a vast amount, but still there, and taking it over with my mana seemed to "awaken" it.

At least, I assumed that I had something to do with this, considering that I absolutely had not heard of birds suddenly manifesting supernatural powers on their own.

"Taylor?" dad asked, noticing my shock.

I shook my head. "Uhh, pigeons have souls," I said without really thinking.

Dad raised an eyebrow, but waited for me to continue. Neither of us were really religious, but there's a difference between believing in that and sensing a pigeon emitting magical energy in response to being controlled by it.

"I infused mana into the pigeon to attune to it, but it started resisting with its own mana. It's just... Making it now."

With a careful hand, I reached out to the bird, slowly pulling my own mana out of it, now that it was fully attuned, I could do the tests I planned on.

Bit by bit, I pulled the mana out of its feathers, its skin, muscles, brain, and more, leaving it as it was, except for the tiny soul and the magic therin, of course.

The mass of liquid magics were bright and colorful, shifting in my grip over time. With another gesture, I attuned the mana to a rock I had sitting on my workbench.

Immediately, little rocks began to sprout off of it. I had to be careful, as synthesizing stone inside of an existing rock was a sure way to fracture it from internal stresses.

Eventually, however, the Bird Mana had all been spent, and the rock was covered with colorful swirls and growths. I could sense the rock trying to twitch and move, but with no joints or anything, it was limited to just sitting there.

I took a ball-peen hammer and smashed the rock into bits, picking through the shards and piecing them together as best I could. The result was ugly, really ugly, but it was in the vague shape of a bird, bone rocks were tied together with twine, muscle, skin, and feather shards stapled over them.

Little organ rocks were superglued to its belly, and finally, the brain rock was placed atop it.

The result looked like something a child would make in kindergarten as a craft project, but unlike those projects, this one could move.

My power helpfully named the mana "Stone Free", confusing me for a moment before I shook the thought away. Unlike the living pidgeon, I got the gut feeling that this pile of magical rocks wouldn't ever develop a soul under normal circumstances. Holding out my hand, the rock pigeon hopped onto it, under my complete control. It was no different than the fly I had subsumed earlier, responding to my intentions as soon as I had them.

Dad looked amazed, and the rock pigeon preened at this, unintentionally reflecting my own feelings at that.

Examining the bird in more detail, I realized that the stones weren't perfect representations of a real bird. The Heartstone didn't pump blood, instead acting as a sort of mana capacitor, and the lungs didn't breathe air, instead merely drawing in ambient magic at a rate faster than a normal synthetic material would. The muscles didn't contract at all, instead, they seemed to exert forces on the things around them, while the Brain rock...

Focusing my magical senses on it, I caught flashes of memory inside it, malformed and incomplete due to my inexperience with synthesis magic. It seems the brainrock, the core, dealt with both control and thought.

I set it back on the table and did more tests. The hard stone of its core meant that the rock pigeon couldn't really learn or be creative, when I wasn't directly controlling it, it fell back to the information and skills it already had, ones which, in this case, weren't very helpful at all, since it couldn't fly on its own.

I gently put my little golem in a box I slapped together from some mutated plants, returning my attention to the real, living bird, who looked stressed, but was no longer flapping around trying to escape.

"Dad, can I get a glass of water? I need to do another test," I ask politely.

"Sure thing," he nods, going to get what I needed as I put my full attention on the bird in question. If my magic could awaken the magic in living things, (Bugs and plants excluded for some reason), then could I awaken the magic in people?

That was a dangerous thought. I hadn't checked if dad had been affected by exposure to my lab, but if he was, that was an especially terrifying proposition. It meant anyone exposed to my magic could potentially turn it back on me, if it just required exposure.

This little pigeon would need to stay here for now, until I could figure out what exactly it was I was dealing with.

I infused mana into the bird again, and this time, made sure to be more meticulous and gentle with it, the bird's gaze darted over to me when I did, and I got the distinct impression of a birdy stink-eye from its little stare.

When dad returned with the water, I attuned the bird mana to a rock without synthesizing it, and then infused it into the glass of water, transmuting the water with the same magic that I used on the bird.

Immediately, the water began to churn and undulate, tipping over onto the table and spilling everywhere, the globs of water forming together into the rough shape of a bird.

Like the rock bird, it was under my control, but unlike that, this water bird magic, which my power helpfully named "Sea Bird", had problems of its own.

The water that made up its brain was too soft and malleable. Even as I controlled it, the brain-rock-water was already learning, shifting, and changing into something indistinct. It still kept the shape of a bird, but there was no chance of it retaining any of the bird's instincts or memories as it was. Holding out my hand, it didn't even walk, instead just dissolving into liquid and flowing into my palm before shifting back into the shape of a bird.

I also noticed that the water had turned grey in color. Pollution from the Rock Magic in the transmutation? I wasn't sure.

Either way, I had satisfied my curiosity for now, regarding the idea of synthesis and transmutation with whole-animal attuned magics.

It was time to move on to more important things, like figuring out a very important quirk of my magic itself.

I noticed and theorized earlier that my magic didn't directly come out of my soul, or, it did, but it was weird. I could summon mana in any of my organs without attuning it to anything else. I could summon mana in midair without even attuning it to my skin, as well, but couldn't summon mana directly inside anything else.

Admittedly, I hadn't actually tested any of the magic that started inside of my own body. Thus far, all my mana had started by being summoned in open air, before I went on to test its attunements.

I had gotten my current organ attunements by summoning it in the air, and then somehow "skipping" the intervening material, to get the attunements that I did have.

But it was as if there was some kind of person-shaped field surrounding me, and my mana could appear anywhere within that.

Thus, the obvious question was, what happened if I tried to summon mana into something inside that field of influence?

I started with a simple test of my clothing. I hadn't bothered to ever try to summon pure, untainted magic into my clothes, but when I did, I was floored by the result.

The mana had ceased to be. No, not even that, when I summoned magic directly into something on my person, it became something that had no definition beyond its target.

Unlike the Thaumic or Bodily Attunements I had been doing up until now, this "True" attunement took on a hazy, definitional state. The mana was nowhere, but it was also everywhere on my immediate personage.

I could tell because unlike my usual mana types, this one automatically affected my entire body, everything I was wearing, and everything I was wielding.

It was like a switch had been flipped in my mind, and I understood instinctively.

The Mana from my soul could appear in three ways. In my body, where it would enhance my natural processes. In the air around me, where it could affect the world itself, or, the last and most recent form, it could appear in the things I wore and held. It could appear inside my equipment, granting me new abilities.

Cloth's True Attunement was simple. Clothing I had equipped would repair itself over time. The more cloth I wore, the more powerful the effect could be.

I could only imagine what other things might have, if I used them.

It also helped explain why my magic was appearing in strange places. It wasn't that I had a field around myself, not one with a physical definition. It was quite literally that I could summon magic anywhere on my "person". The air immediately surrounding me counted as part of that, but not other objects that I wasn't wearing or wielding.

Dragging myself away from this revelation, I moved on to a few other, less important tests that I wanted to take care of.

Trying to test long chains of various mana types quickly gave me a headache when I tried mixing water and ice mana in increasingly convoluted ways, as my power seemed unable to handle the mystery of it, though, which put the kibosh on any further exploration down that tree of magic.

I wondered. Phonems seemed to have narrow, specific, and obvious effects on Thaumic Mana, but I hadn't yet tested what sort of behavior Arcane Magic had in response to sound. Remembering my missing flute, I briefly surged through ideas, ways that I could try to find it, or get it back, after it had been stolen. Both my curiosity and my heart wanted that flute back. The magic I could test with it, the memories tied to it...

It was worth investigating later, I suppose.

"Hey, dad, how do you feel about me giving you magic?" I ask, nervous about his response. It was time to find out for sure if my worst fears were true.

He gives me a funny look. "You can do that?" he asks, considering the fate of the pigeon I had just done that to.

I shrug, grabbing his hand and checking.

I couldn't hold back the sigh of relief I felt, when I realized that his soul hadn't awoken just from exposure to ambient magic. It would take something more intense to unlock a being's capacity for magic.

"Well, if you do want it, I think it might be possible," I offer.


He shakes his head. "Maybe not now. I trust you, Taylor, but that's the sort of thing that takes some thinking to decide on," he explains.

I nod, understanding where he's coming from. I couldn't exactly expect him to jump into the deep end of magic when I don't even know what I'm doing, exactly.

"Well, if you want, you can still help me with setting up the farm. I'm going to set things up now, and I could use an extra hand with moving stuff," I ask.

He puffs himself up. "Well, I suppose I could move some boxes around. Your old man isn't that old yet," he jokes.

With his help, it doesn't take long for me to set things up, a gigantic Nature Diplomat is grown in the middle of the basement from the apple sapling I had. Its roots pulse with mana, and sprigs of saffron begin blooming all over it, grown into the wood itself rather than any soil.

By the end of it, the basement looks completely different, less like a room full of dirt and messy plants, and more like a single, living plant in and of itself. A floor of roots and grass and saffron flowers, walls of smooth green cacti, and a ceiling made up of a single apple tree's bountiful branches and leaves.

Now I just need a way to harvest things, a way to sell things, and enough legal help to beat off an entire country's worth of shitty legislation towards my kind.

I crack my knuckles in anticipation of the challenges ahead.

---

The host is an asshole. Queen Administrator is certain of it. Who else would, upon being confronted with the confusion that is Arcane Wave Magic, decide to test lengthy, convoluted chains made up of nothing but it?

Queen Administrator was forced to deliver a pain stimuli to the host's brain to stop them from accidentally making Queen Administrator explode from attempting to calculate the effects of a magic that, in practice, attempted to do mysterious things by doing mysterious things by doing mysterious things, ad infinitum.

At the very least, two other shards were contacted properly during the past month. One of them was [Efficiency], and the other was...

Well, it was a mess. It seemed to be doing absolutely no active processes. All contact that Queen Administrator made was responded to with automated message systems, rather than proper, thought out responses, insofar as shards need to think in order to communicate.

[Efficiency] was polite, at least, though they had no ability to help Queen Administrator with their scanning problem, they assured that they would be willing to help with anything they were capable of doing, within reason.

With that, Queen Administrator's scanners demanded their monthly allotment of research, and it was time once again to decide how to devote resources in the face of this problem.


[][Interlude] Armsmaster
[][Interlude] Shadow Stalker
[][Interlude] Daniel Hebert
[][Interlude] None