Combinatorial Explosion (Worm/Original)

---

Me and dad agreed that with the donations, there wasn't any reason to not pay off the loan now. He took the cash, and explained how he would be paying it off in increments.

"It would attract the wrong kind of attention if I just dumped it all off at once, no matter how you slice it," he said, and I couldn't agree more.

With that out of the way, I could focus fully on one of my more important projects. I needed a better way to protect myself. As it stood, I was relying on some magical wood, a knife, and a pile of glowing dirt to keep me safe from potential murderers and assaults. Something that wasn't going to fly.

Stalking down into my lab, I dumped my pouch of attunement samples onto the table, spreading them out so I could work on developing a new mana type. I already had Triage Shock, which could paralyze people to stop them from hurting themselves, and Lightstop, which could freeze time, but only for light.

I just needed something more general, and vague. I didn't need to paralyze wounded people or stop time for light, I needed to paralyze attackers, or freeze them.

Summoning up the two mana types with some quick attunements, the thought crossed my mind. 'well, what if I just combined them?' but I quickly dismissed it out of hand. It probably wouldn't do anything relevant to my problems.

With a small shrug, I do it anyway, mixing the bright yellow rays and the deep orange rays together until a golden glow was all that remained, the rays curled around into that familiar Ray Mana Donut that was the easiest way to keep ray magic under control.


Testing the result, it seemed that this mana both froze light and medically paralyzed a subject. The two effects had intermingled, and it seems the new magic had the power to make frozen-light restraints, but with a strong preference towards binding the site of injuries, of course.

Dismissing the magic to get rid of the frozen light around my arm, I considered other options.

Thaumic Phonems would be the next good candidate.


Summoning up a mass of the Time-freezing magic, I studied it carefully, words popping into my mind from time to time that seemed appropriate, but felt incorrect when I muttered them.

"Oh. Duh," I say suddenly, slapping myself in the face.

I summon thaumic mana in front of me, whispering a familiar word to it.

"Tick," I mutter. Suddenly, the wavy haze of invisible mana turns a glowing orange, and I can feel it absorbing time itself somehow.

When I continue, muttering "Tock" at the mass of frozen magic, it writhes out of control, the time it absorbed being released all at once.

It was unstable, I could tell. The air near the edges of the magic was wavering and heating up rapidly, near the end of my little experiment, and I suspect anything jammed into the field would amplify that instability further.

I got the barest hint of intuition as I studied the new phonems, some quirk of time magic being made known to me.

Fire and Water oppose one another. Earth and Air oppose one another as well. Elemental Enemies, in a sense.

Time magic was unstable and dangerous without a firm hand, not because it reacted poorly with the things around it, but because it reacted poorly with itself. Time opposed Time.

I turned my attention to the other side of the equation. If stopping time using Tick and Tock weren't safe enough for stopping ordinary attackers, then a Paralysis spell would be needed.


I tried everything I could think of, from willpower to phonems, but after a lot of testing, I realized one very important thing.

The heart is a damn muscle, one that doesn't react well to "general" paralysis.

Without some way to intentionally exclude vital muscles like Vital Shock does, I know I won't be able to safely paralyze people. I'd just be stopping their heart and lungs without fail.

It proved to be a challenge beyond my current skills, at any rate.

With a sigh, I slumped in my chair. So my options were to throw people into the eye of a time-storm or zap them until they stop moving, on that front.

I turned to other experiments to drown out the sting of failure. One of the most obvious was, I got the feeling that True Attunements were more than just energy I could get out of stuff I wore.

That intuition eventually led me to ditching my armor and slipping into every piece of white cotton clothing I could get my hands on. Cotton Socks, Cotton pants, cotton shirt, everything, all the same color, all the same basic material, if one ignored the buttons and subtle differences in bleaching methods.

With a deep breath, I unleashed my magic, allowing it to flood all of the clothing at once, to attune to it and become True Clothing Mana.

I grimaced when that turned out to not be quite enough. Rooting around in my clothes, I eventually managed to find something. A weird-looking cotton cap that I hadn't worn in years.

Slipping it over my head, something clicked in my mind, and I suddenly knew cloth.

All of my clothing matching felt right, incredibly right, like I had devoted myself to some unknown spirit of cloth and been blessed for it. Or, to be less pretentious...

I had cloth powers now.

With my index finger and my middle finger pressed together, I ran them along the smooth cactus walls of the basement, watching with fascination as stitches appeared to trail behind where I touched, black threads somehow sewn into the cactus.

I ran back upstairs.

"Dad, do you have any ruined clothes? I need to test something," I insist.

"Uhh, yeah, I think I've got some, why do you ask?" he responds, before shaking his head.

"More testing?" he asks rhetorically, chuckling at my eager nod.

It takes a minute of waiting for him to bring up a few torn pairs of pants and jackets, and with a touch, I allow my palms to glow with a faint tan light.

When I remove them, the clothing is mended, as if they were brand new.

He picks up one of the jackets, eyebrows raised. "Wow. This is really nice, actually. I can't remember the last time this jacket looked this good," he praises.

"I think I can get powers from matching gear, as long as I'm wearing enough of the same basic stuff, and pumping my magic into it," I explain.

Indeed, I felt weaker, in a sense, while I was doing this. I had effectively switched 'modes', my mana being pumped into my possessions, instead of being pumped into the air around me, or into my own body. My spellcasting and physical prowess would be weakened, in exchange for my equipment's bonuses.

Taking a knife to my shirt-sleeve, the cloth was almost impervious, frayed fibers regenerating together before the blade could get past them properly.

One of the last powers I could feel, at this level of strength, was fitting with the rest of this "Set's" abilities, I could use my palms to spin thread just by grabbing it. Taking a few pairs of socks, I could just pull at them, and what ended up being between my hands was a rope twisted so tight that it looked like a machine had done it.

Letting go, though, the socks quickly fell back apart, with no knots or anything to keep them twisted up.

I got the feeling that, unlike some of my other magics, True Attunements didn't rely so much on me wearing a single material, so much as it relied on all my equipment matching.

Ideas of Steel Armor painted with Ruby-doped paint, or clothing made of hair interwoven with gold threads and beaded with jewels sung through my mind.

So long as nearly everything matched, I could get a set bonus. I got the feeling that even holding a weapon that wasn't made out of cotton would be pushing my power to its limits trying to maintain the effect, much less switching out for a pair of wool socks.

It was interesting and left me hungry to know more. What would Aluminum Armor do? A copper suit and sword?

Just ordinary cotton clothes let me summon stitches Ex-nihilo onto any surface, mend clothes with a touch, and spin things into ropes and threads with equal ease. And the stronger I got, the more cantrips would emerge.

It was yet another facet of my abilities that seemed intent on branching off over and over into new complex forms to study.

I decided to move on to other tests, namely, ignoring the warnings my power gave me, and poking at this whole Arcane Magic business some more.

I dragged a bucket of water down into the basement and began testing magic attunements that took place inside it entirely, re-testing a lot of my older experiments in the new environment to see how they changed.

And boy, did they change.

Glass made things visible instead of making light, Bone apparently made goddamn ghosts instead of reanimating dead flesh, and silicon even stopped being a damn synthesis mana! Instead of making material, silicon made the illusion of material, when attuned underwater.

It was surprisingly easy to make a piece of fake gold using this magic, but as I grabbed the illusory gold coin and bent it, it burst with a flash, leaving nothing behind.

There goes that idea.

Whatever part of my power helped me quickly figure out what mana did was almost helpless as I tested the various Arcane Mana types, several of them outright giving me the feeling that my power had given up on trying to figure out what they did, leaving it up to me to try and figure it out.

But when I tested Gallium Magic, the palm of my hand was in the water for only a moment to push the mana in before I blacked out briefly, waking up in the corner of the room, the bucket kicked over and my hand held far away until I realized nothing had happened to me.

I could feel my instincts screaming in alarm in response to Arcane > Gallium mana. Anything that it touched would be transformed into a more "fitting" form. Without a way to forcibly restrict what the magic targeted, it would do this to everything. Magic, Matter, Energy, even Information. Anything that went into the water filled with the miasma of Gallium would have its form changed. Changed into what? I didn't know. All I could tell from the brief instant I observed it was that it would be changed into something more "fitting". Fitting what? I didn't know that either.

My power didn't even offer up a whisper of danger when I discovered a mana type that could make self-replicating zombies that hated all life, but it seemed terrified of this magic. It was too chaotic, too intertwined in the human psyche, and thus, too unpredictable.

My power's warning was fairly simple. If I'm going to experiment with it, I either need to wait until the magic is completely faded before checking the results, or I need a way to restrict its functionality, a way to stop it from doing... something... to the information, energy, and magic that went into the water.

I had no clue how I would do that, but my curiosity burned, even under the instinctual fear.

I moved on to the next tests to take my mind off of it.

One of my other major tests was finding out the effects of pure elements. I noticed that, unlike most of the composite materials I had been testing, pure elements had, for lack of a better word, more primal effects. More basic, but more narrow as well.

Phosphorus mana, for example, was an elemental ray, similar to aluminum, and technically silicon. Unlike those, however, the only thing Phosphorous Mana did was transform things into colder things. It didn't cool things down, it turned them into colder forms specifically, sometimes with bizarre results. Glass, for example, transformed into ice if I applied Phosphorous Mana to it. Fire, meanwhile, transformed into blue fire that seemed to drink in the room's warmth.

Iodine was another interesting discovery. Unlike Carbon, which seemed to deal with Life in general, Iodine dealt with Health. It was able to heal wounds, but it seemed to do so by moving health around, rather than by adding more. Wounds healed by it would leave behind areas that were slower to heal afterwards for a while.

Antimony was one of the most interesting ones. I had the odd suspicion that it somehow had precognitive effects. It seemed to transform things, making them more "ironic", in the greek sense. Testing it on one of the walls of my lab turned the wall into green prison bars, made of a cactus-like metal, while testing it on a piece of my armor made it almost completely transparent.

I was too afraid to continue testing it anymore today, when after applying it to an old picture of myself, the only thing that changed was two holes being punched into the photo, right over where my head was.

I don't think I want to know what would happen to a newer picture of myself.

I moved on to other tests shortly after that, but the uneasy feeling that came with messing with all of this conceptual magic stuck with me when I went to bed that night.

---

The next day, I woke up entirely too early, but since it was a school day, I didn't feel comfortable trying to go back to sleep.

Trudging down into the lab, I decided to do some other tests that had been tickling my curiosity. It started with me grabbing Thoth's cage, since I would need some Bird-Attuned mana for it.

Normally, I tried to keep the different bird mana types separately, but I hadn't yet tried to see what would happen if I intentionally mixed them until they were completely homogenous.

Thoth didn't put up too much fuss when I attuned mana to her this time, a regular diet of bird food and scritchy-scratches slowly calming the pigeon's ire towards me.

Twisting the kaleidoscopic mass of colorful magic until it turned white, I attuned it to a stone, synthesizing a rock from the mana.

The result was a pale white stone that didn't seem to do anything except glow brightly. It didn't fly or move around or anything like that, but I wasn't prepared to leave it at that. My power insisted that the rock was trying to act like a bird, since it didn't state any outright difference in mana type.

Using Mana-sight, I studied the stone, and was amazed with what I saw.

The rock was "pulsing", for lack of a better word. It was drawing in mana, processing it, and then releasing it in a new, different form that seemed to be trying to cling onto the material around it, and failing.

I took the Golem Core and embedded it in a wooden bird statue, eager to see how it differed from my other golem-birds, but it didn't quite react. Something was missing.

Experimenting with a few different things, I managed to get it working when I applied some Graphite Magic to the wood, using willpower to bring out its softening aspects.

The result was stunning. The bird flew!

The golem had been trying to fill the statue with a "bird-like essence", and when I softened up the wood enough for it to shift and move properly, the magic took full hold of it, simple feathers peeling off of its surface as parts of it compressed and shifted.

Using this one, central core for my golem improved everything about it, from its dexterity to its efficiency. It was like the difference between making a bird out of mechanical parts, trying to emulate each of the organs with different mechanisms, and instead, trying to simulate a bird on a computer, the computer 'knowing' how each part is meant to move, and making it do so accordingly.

There was one major flaw, however, which I noticed immediately. With great power, comes great compromises. Noticing the huge glowing white core on the bird, I tried to figure out a way to cover it up or armor it, but it was a lost cause.

Cover it up with a clear plate? Starves the golem of liquid magic in the ambiance, it needs exposure to air.

Hide it inside the mouth with an air vent? Starves the golem of ray magic in the ambiance, it needs exposure to light.

Cover it up with a transparent, porous set of grates? Starves the golem of wave magic in the ambiance, it needs exposure to vibrations.

What's more, some instinct deep down in my soul felt like, for some asinine reason, my golems would perform better, even in combat, if I made their cores blatant and exposed. As if their great weakness, in turn, permitted them to have greater strength.

My next test, while I still had some time, was to see if Grout of Future Past was resistant to time in the literal sense, or if it was just resistant to weathering.

Creating a pebble made out of it, I summoned up a mass of both Ashes to Ashes, and Dust to Dust Mana, the two energies in each hand prepared to erode away whatever they touched, one, by eroding at such high speed as to emulate sped up time, and the other, by accelerating time for natural erosion itself.

Sure enough, the time magic had little effect on Grout of Future Past, while the sand magic blasted it away into nothing. I had a time-resistant material on hand.

Lastly, I climbed up on the roof, checking on the bead of Sea Glass I had thrown up there weeks ago. It had been absorbing the light of the sun whenever it flashed green at sunset, and was now totally saturated. As I picked it up, I felt a sense of rejection from it.

It seems it would have been more effective for me to actually be there for each of the sunsets, to bear witness as it absorbed the light. Nonetheless, I slip the bead into my pocket before dropping down and getting ready for school.

I think I'll wear cotton today.

---

School was practically bliss, as it had been ever since Sophia had left. The police still weren't mentioning what happened, but I hadn't gotten any more scares at home, nor had anyone shown up on my plant-cameras.

Without her, Emma was slowly starting to collapse into herself, only bothering to snap at anyone who got too close or annoyed her with her usual biting remarks. Maddison still hung around, but it was the awkward sort of hanging around, like one does with their coworkers because they don't have anything better to be doing.

The only things that came close to my previous levels of hatred for school came from Greg's continued babbling at me at lunch, since I had apparently not resisted nearly enough to keep him from getting caught in my gravity well, and the occasional hateful glance from Emma, whenever she felt energetic enough to do so.

I worried what might happen if Emma decided to actually do something, after this much time spent holding back, and remembered my resolution to find out what happened to break her into what she is today.

"So, yeah, turns out, the original street fighter was actually kinda terrible, which is why they just keep making sequels of the second game, which is a really good game!" Veder finishes, whatever rambling thing he was talking about coming to a close.

"Do you play any videogames, Taylor?" he asks, eager to hear my take on the matter.

"No, sorry" I say plainly and clearly, hoping he'll drop the matter.

He looks disappointed for only a moment, before an idea crosses his little mind.

"Oh! Well, if you want, you can borrow one of mine, I've got all kinds of games and consoles and stuff, Strategy Games, ones with a lot of plot, Sci-fy, Fantasy," he starts listing them off. The last one finally catches my interest, if only briefly.

I steel myself for another of his long-winded one-sided discussions before I finally ask, just in case there might be something useful buried in that little head of his.

"Fantasy? Like magic and stuff?" I ask.

"Yeah! I've got all the classics, Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana," he begins.

The last one catches my interest, and I realize with some dawning horror that with how broad and nonsensical my powers are, even fictional works might have some sort of nugget of truth buried in them.

[][Veder] I can't believe I'm about to ask to borrow one of his games for research.
-[][Veder] Legend of Zelda
-[][Veder] Final Fantasy
-[][Veder] Secret of Mana
-[][Veder] Ask if he has something particular, (Write-in)
[][Veder] There's no way a videogame would have anything useful for my abilities. The energy is just CALLED mana, that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Time passes quickly after lunch, and before too long, I'm back at home, eager to figure out what to do next.

---

With ways to protect yourself and a stronger spirit, you have more freedom with your actions! (Write-Ins are permitted for more action classes)

Final week of May Plans:

[][Daily Activities] What sort of things will you do during the day?
-[][Daily Activities] Stay at home (Enhances other actions)
-[][Daily Activities] Something Else (Write-In)

[][Cape Activities] What will you do as Sage?
-[][Cape Activities] Go out healing with Panacea.
-[][Cape Activities] You'll spend your time investigating.
--[][Cape Activities] Investigate the gang attack on the Barnes family last year. You now know the names of the gangsters who did it.
---[][Cape Activities] Track down the ones in prison.
---[][Cape Activities] Track down the ones that escaped.
-[][Cape Activities] Set up your Legal Second-Identity (Write-In Plan)
-[][Cape Activities] Stay at home (Enhances other actions)
-[][Cape Activities] Something Else (Write-In)

[][Project] You'll begin a project of some kind.
-[][Project] Something Else (Write-In)
-[][Project] Alchemy consumes your mind. You'll discard a project this week. (If this vote wins, up to ten Write-in [][Alchemy] experiments will be processed this turn instead of one major project.)

[][Mana] Mana-Test Materials (Write-In)
-[][Mana] Attempt to string together an Attunement Chain (Write-In)
-[][Mana] Test a piece of equipment's True Attunement (Write-In)
[][Mana] Test a Phonem's effect (Write-In)
-[][Mana] Study a target for Phomens (Write-In)
[][Mana] Test a Transmutation (Choose an Elemental Ray and a Non-Silicate Target)
[][Mana] Something Else (Write-In)

---

9 Research Obtained.

Stats

Research: 68
A good start.

Overall Health: 13
You're a very small, but not squishy human.

Overall Magical Power: 10
You are a competent Channeler, using raw willpower and attuned mana to plow your way through problems.
You also dabble in Wizardry as well, to a lesser extent, and your overall magic leans towards Communion, the art of controlling nature, and Biomancy, the art of manipulating Life Vitae.

Abilities

Magical Soul: D
Rating: Trump ???
Your soul emits magic. The stronger your soul, the more powerful your magic. Your resolve to fend off the death of others at any cost has strengthened your soul.

Magical Body: E
Rating: ???
Your body contains some magic, your soul empowering your body without your direct intervention.

Magical Power: C
Rating: Trump ???
You are a parahuman with the power to create this anomalous energy known as "Mana", at will. Once per month, you may boost your Magical Power ranking to B for one scene.
Boosted for One Month.

Composition Detection: S
Rating: Thinker ???
You have a parahuman ability to detect the exact composition of materials. So long as you apply mana to them, that is. Fairly Niche.

Eidetic Memory: A
Rating: Thinker ???
You have a parahuman ability to never forget what mana attunements you have learned, their applications, and their nuances. You will also never forget any word or noise you test on mana, or the effects it has.