Two weeks had passed since Vael and I visited Bloodsands, and I’d made the decision to spend the night in her bed. I hadn’t spent a night alone in the spare bedroom since. It had been two weeks of hedonistic pleasures with some training and responsibility woven into the mix.
I’d say we were going at it like horny teenagers or like rabbits, or something, but I think both of those things might be an understatement. I don’t know if it was some change brought about by my Awakening, my body changing, the connection I felt with her, or what, but I’d discovered an intense hunger within myself. The sex being mostly amazing—and sometimes a disaster—certainly helped, but I found that I was craving the emotional sensations as much as I was the physical ones.
Vael was there for it, delighted and more than merely reciprocal. There were times when I felt almost detached from things and surprising myself with my own advances. We’d had a somewhat serious talk about what we were and weren’t comfortable with, my own limits being something I had to discover for myself, but I’d promised to be open with her. She didn’t have much in the way of limits, which I assumed was either a product of her current job, or maybe just an expression of her own hedonistic streak.
If I had a time machine and could go back to a previous life and circumstances, I think I’d be perfectly happy to just live with Vael and work on holomasks and play World of Divers. Maybe in a parallel universe, there was a Kiera like me living her best life with a flirty Sul’vari woman who came into her shop one day asking for help fixing her slate.
But I wasn’t content to just coast. I’d gotten the chance to live out a dream I thought I’d been denied. Awakening as a User and becoming a Diver was what I wanted, and that’s what I was going to do.
Vael had been unable to source another portal of a suitably low tier for me to Dive following my first. Unregistered portals were already something that wasn’t widely talked about or circulated, and while there wasn’t a shortage of portals open in the city on any given day, the vast majority were of the legal kind. Vael could get me into those with a mentorship and training pass, but wasn’t wanting to put her name down as being an active Diver again. Something about a lot of pressure from third parties dropping on her lap when she came off “hiatus.”
So in the meantime, I’d spent a heck of a lot of time with a dataslate propped on my lap, poring over official documentation and training materials for the knowledge portions of the Diver licensing examination. It was ungodly fucking boring, because most of this stuff I knew like the back of my hand, and having to read babysteps explanations for everything in detail was monotonous. Especially since the exam questions often wanted you to parrot back almost verbatim what was being stated in the materials.
Civil codes, taxation policies, standard operating procedures for emergency events inside a Dive, and so on. The more interesting and engaging stuff to me was the material about the duties and obligations that came along with holding an active Dive license. The city could basically militarize you on demand if needed, and you were legally obligated to respond to certain city codes and emergency conditions. The stuff about making sure you had communication devices and how you’d be tasked out by the Civil Defense Authority was honestly interesting.
Not that I wanted to be stuck in the middle of some kind of major disaster. I couldn’t help getting a little curious about the stuff the CDA had. A lot of cutting-edge tech that was exciting for my inner nerd. There was a digital exam I could take in three weeks to get one of my required certification checkmarks ticked off toward getting my license. It was something constructive to do, and helped settle my anxiety about staying in motion.
I’d say that things were going really well, but I think that wouldn’t be entirely truthful. A little over a week ago, I had a bizarre dream, and more nightmares had continued to happen every night since. Last night’s dream caused me to wake up far too early, all sweaty and shaking.
Vael and I had been out shopping in some street vendor stalls late at night, and I’d heard something that drew my attention. It had come from a dark, narrow, and trash-lined alley, and I was locked into checking it out in my dream. My rational mind was telling me absolutely not, but dreams being what they are, I abandoned Vael and went to investigate on my own.
Creeping down the cramped space, I heard increasingly loud and nauseating sounds: wet, juicy slurps and crunches. I had to get closer; I had to see what it was. There was a hunched shape at the end of the alley, but I couldn’t make it out. Closer and closer I crept one tentative, carefully placed footstep at a time.
Then I was able to make out what it was. Someone squatting, barefoot and covered only in filth and rags. The way their body was contorted was wrong; limbs were oddly proportioned, just slightly too short or too long, hands with finger joints in strange ratios. The person was eating noisily, smacking their lips and gnawing on a bone or something.
I must have made a sound, stepping on a piece of garbage, or maybe I gagged. The figure turned ever-so-slowly, greasy, foul hair obscuring their facial details, but it didn’t mask the glow of User eyes: a pale amber color. Something dragged across the ground behind them, and the sight made me whimper. A grotesquely bloated lump of pallid flesh bigger than the figure itself, lumpy and misshapen. A maw split into four parts, with the mouth partially open. Part of an arm and a hand were sticking out, and it finished swallowing down its meal as I watched, frozen in place. After I’d made the connection, I could see the shapes of numerous bodies forming the lumps and bulges of the tail.
I took a step back, trying to flee, and fell on my butt. The figure moved faster than it had any right to move, and its fetid breath hit my face as it climbed on top of me. I saw my own face up close, covered in gore and grinning down at me with a mouth that was too wide, and filled with sharp teeth.
I’d woken up thrashing and flailing around in bed, fighting the sheets and blankets that were wound tightly around me from where I’d been tossing and turning. It was a good thing that Vael was out for a few days; I was pretty sure that I would have punched or kicked her in my waking panic. I’d calmed down quickly after waking, and felt extremely dumb for having gotten so worked up over a nightmare that was more like the plot to a campy horror film than anything.
A cup of coffee and a big breakfast had straightened out my mental state.
My continuously growing appetite was something that had been bothering me. Since my Awakening, I’d been eating more every day that passed. A couple of weeks after my Awakening, I felt like I was a gross slob. A heaping tray of takeout that would have lasted me a few days before was now a single meal. Vael had told me that it was fairly normal, but I couldn’t help the way I felt about it. I was just so damn hungry all the time.
I was terrified that I was going to wind up gaining a bunch of weight and getting obese. This fear was only reaffirmed by my weight ticking up on Vael’s bathroom scale; in three weeks I’d gone up nearly six kilos from 56 to 62. The thing was… I couldn’t see any difference in the mirror at all. No curves beyond what I’d become mostly familiar with already. No softening of lines or facial features. My clothing and underwear fit the same.
Vael had told me that these things happened with bodily tempering, but I didn’t think I was doing that; at least, I wasn’t doing it consciously. And I wasn’t working out all that hard, so I doubted it was muscle mass.
I had gotten into the routine of doing stretching and some basic calisthenics with Vael each morning, copying what she’d shown me, but with far less repetition than her routine. She kept herself in shape, and I wasn’t able to match her on any exercise, even the basics of simply holding a pose or a stretch. Meanwhile, she complained, guiltily, about how out of form she was in her own routine.
Vael’s apartment door beeped and locked behind me as I finally finished bringing in my haul. I’d had to get an autocab just to carry all the crap I’d bought back with me. This morning when I was trying to detox from my nightmares, I’d been rummaging around in the kitchen by myself, and an idea had struck me. Vael, like most Sul’vari, had somewhat extreme tastes when it came to her palate. My late-night reading about their species had informed me: “The Sul’vari senses are primarily attuned to the presence of mana, and as such, they find most human food to be lacking in taste and texture. For this reason, human foods that are at the outer limits of the human palate are considered the most appetizing.”
It explained the popularity of extremely spicy foods, the love of coffee, and delicacies such as bitter paste. I had met humans who enjoyed these things, but as acquired tastes. While she was away handling some business with her work, I figured I’d try and take a stab at training my abilities in a new and different way.
I was going to try and grow some plants. I’d done a good amount of research, and had narrowed it down to a few candidates, and I’d decided to try with extremely spicy chilis first. Worst case, I was out some credits for random pieces of recycled junk: some used hydroponic trays, a water pump, a jug of nutrient concentrate, and a water bill that was as high as everything else combined to fill the trays.
It wasn’t Diving, but I’d been itching to get hands-on with some kind of training that I could see tangible results from. Trying to learn sapient mana medicine without any formal training was beyond the pale. I wasn’t going to go volunteer in some clinic to be zapping people’s pets. So stepping several additional rungs down that ladder, I figured I could make do with some glorified gardening.
I stripped down and changed into shorts and a tank top. Things that Vael enjoyed and said complemented my figure, but that I wasn’t feeling nearly brave enough to wear in public. Maybe someday, a future Kiera that was far bolder and confident in her own skin in public.
I got everything set up, used the pump to transfer water from the big storage containers into the trays, and carefully measured out the proper amount of solution to add to the trays.
With all my preparations done, now all I had to do was overcome my own anxiety about failing at the most rudimentary things ever.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor with my legs situated under the low table I’d set up the hydroponics tray on, I rested my hands on the side of the tray and let my fingertips rest on the wet substrate. I’d placed a single seed for a Scotch Bonnet chili into the tray. They seemed to be Vael’s favorite, so it’s what I’d gone with.
Closing my eyes, I reached out with my senses. There was barely even a blip of color in my aura sense where I’d planted the seed. Like a single stuck pixel on a dataslate screen. I focused all my attention on trying to isolate that single point from the background. Then I began to build a charge in my circuit. After weeks of daily drills, this was becoming fairly easy for me, and within moments I could feel the energy of my own mana thrumming under my skin throughout my body.
It felt amazing, like always. A pleasurable tingling sensation all over, like getting goosebumps from a red bean ice cream. Part of me wondered if it was this way for other Users as well, or if this was a life-aspect thing in particular.
Now it was time for the next step, and the one that was far more challenging for my current skills. I had to channel and guide my mana out of my circuit and into what I wanted, while trying to keep it from fizzling out and leaking everywhere. Which was a lot harder than it had any right to be. Vael had explained to me that difficulty in controlling your mana outside your body grew exponentially more difficult with distance, and that was one of the fundamentals for why casting was set up the way that it was.
This wasn’t casting; it was just channeling, and I was going a handful of centimeters from my fingertips to the target. I think I did a pretty good job at it without wasting a bunch of effort and my own energy in doing so, because I felt the mana start to extend from my fingertips. To my senses, it was like tendrils of yellow lightning reaching out, forking and flitting around. I tried to control my breathing and concentrate on getting it to go where I wanted, and not wherever it seemed to want to take itself.
There, toward the little blue speck. Squeeze and push the forks together to try and bundle them into a single structure. Slowly raise the pressure so it’s going out further from my fingertips…
I felt something happening with my mana. The smallest amount of pull, like a pair of magnets at the very outer limits of their attraction. A lessening of static friction. The bundles started to want to curve toward where I was trying to guide them, and it took a tiny fraction less effort to get them to go there.
I could feel moisture beading on my forehead.
I can’t get distracted.
I massaged my power just a touch more, and then, it was like things just suddenly clicked into place; the magnets slid and snapped together. I’d locked on to the blip of the seed, and my mana was now going where I wanted it to without me having to fight to get it there. It still took effort on my part to both push it outward from my circuit, and to contain it so it didn’t leak and diffuse away to nothing, but it was a major step forward.
The seed had connected to my circuit, like a remote node, some kind of transponder that was receiving my mana and that I could pass it through.
Nothing else really seemed to be happening, so I tried looping and circulating the flow of my mana through this remote node. The pixel was changing color, lightening from a darker blue to a lighter blue, and then shifting into a green. Was it bigger? Had it gone from one pixel to two or three? It was hard to tell, but something was happening, so I kept it up.
Moments passed, and as I watched, the pixel started to expand. It grew in size, and then, a trail from one end, then the other. One became two, and then more. It was working!
I didn’t dare to open my eyes and distract myself from my progress, so I kept them firmly closed and watched using my aura sense only. The seed looked to be growing into a proper plant shape, but it was a bit abstracted from what I would have expected to see if I was looking at it normally. It looked like clusters of strings extending out from a central bulb, extending in opposite directions like they were radiating out from two poles.
It steadily grew in size, and as it did so, I started to feel less of my mana returning to my circuit than I was pushing out, even after accounting for normal losses. I pressed a bit harder and increased the flow I was putting out, and the rate of growth picked up. A few moments later, after it had expanded further, the growth slowed down, so I repeated the cycle.
The bigger the plant became, the more mana it was taking to maintain the same rate of expansion. Interesting. It seemed fairly linear, but the rate at which I was starting to feel a dip in my total reserve was accelerating steadily. That was fine. I’d burn my entire mana pool if it needed it. Vael had told me that regularly depleting and refilling my pool was a sure-fire way of expanding my capacity and building my channeling skills at the same time.
The mental image of the plant grew until it was nearly a meter tall, at which point it felt like it was sucking my mana at a pretty fast rate. I had maybe a few more minutes of channeling it like this left in me before I was totally drained, and I could feel it. My breathing had picked up, I was sweating, and I felt a warm and almost sore feeling in my arms where the mana flow was circulating.
My senses were telling me that the shape I was looking at wasn’t changing much at this point, but there were several glowing specks on the upper lines of the bushy shape. I had to assume that those were seed pods, or maybe flowers, with the way they were distributed. I tried my best to direct the flow of my mana within this thing that had gone from a dot connected to my circuit to a full-blown proper structure. It wasn’t too difficult to get the mana to flow where I wanted it to go within the plant, provided I was connected to it in the way that I was.
So I pushed the flow of my mana so that it was being carried through the glowing spots, all wired up in series like a string of lights. They grew brighter in response.
No, that wasn’t right. There was a problem. The lights weren’t being lit uniformly. Some were brighter than others, and some had barely changed at all. I understood why; it was like a resistive circuit; I was losing energy with each one down the chain. I pulled my mana back and tried a different tactic. I tried to wire them up this time in parallel, rather than in a series, so that each one individually formed its own circuit back to my pool. It was much more effort to do it this way, but once I’d managed to get all of them connected up at the same time, I was able to flow mana once again, and this time, all of them lit uniformly.
Unfortunately for me, doing it this way was drinking up the remainder of my mana at a quick rate. I kept at it until I was breathless, panting, and covered in sweat. My arms were trembling, my hands felt hot and sweaty, but I kept going. Finally, I didn’t have enough energy to maintain the connection, and everything extended past my body evaporated in a wispy puff of yellow.
I groaned and slumped, feeling like a partially deflated balloon. It looked like my experiment had been a success, maybe even a total success, just based on my initial assessment. A plant about a meter tall and nearly as wide at the upper reaches stood, firmly rooted into the tray. A couple dozen bright orange, wrinkly, and bulbous peppers hung from the plant, looking fully ripened. My tail had coiled itself to my right side and partially around the table, and was reared up like some kind of mutated snake. It seemed to have taken an interest in what I’d done.
Maybe it wants a pepper? I can never tell with this thing. Does it even have taste buds? I certainly can’t taste anything through it, and thank fuck for that.
I dug through the bag of miscellaneous supplies I’d purchased and located the set of shears I’d gotten specifically for harvesting, should my experiment work. I carefully snipped one off the plant and held it out by the stem to my tail. It booped the tip of its head against the pepper, then took the offered treat and crunched it in its oddly shaped mouth. Either it didn’t have taste buds, or it wasn’t sensitive to hot peppers, because it didn’t react at all, other than to drop back to laze on the floor.
“Yeah. I feel that right about now,” I said in agreement with it. I took the bottom hem of my tank top and dried my face on my shirt. I felt around the band of my shorts. There was a little skin that gathered where the elastic was tight. I poked and prodded my lower abdomen. It didn’t feel like I was getting extra padding.
The buzzing of my slate startled me out of my musing. I fished it out and unlocked it to see if Vael was messaging me.
It was mail being forwarded to me from my World of Divers account.
Datura,
I’m really sorry to bother you about this, but I don’t have anyone else I can reach out to. Last time we talked, you mentioned that you were taking up Diving out in M.S.? Do you think you could do a fairly quick job for me? I’ll make it worth your time, credits, services–you name it. I know you’re not playing currently, or I’d offer you items, haha.
I’ve got someone bothering me who won’t get the message to fuck off. Can you put the fear of the Twelve into them, or something, anything to get them out of my hair?
I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t worried about it becoming a bigger problem.
-Ako
I didn’t have to think for very long before I sent an email back asking for her address. It wasn’t like I had much else going on. It would take me a good chunk of the day to get my mana back without spending money I didn’t want to blow on just food for fucking around. And sitting around the apartment pondering if I was getting fat probably wasn’t too great for my mental health, either. I considered Akosyn one of my closer matrix friends, so I wasn’t really put off by the request. A ride on the levs to go talk, and maybe to stick my puncher in someone’s face for a friend? There were far worse things to waste time on.
I dragged my butt up off the floor to get cleaned up and change into something more appropriate for meeting other people in. I still hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to do in terms of personal style, and what ideas I did have tended to be vetoed by Vael. The woman who seemed to be dead-set on putting me into some form of flirty clothing or another.
I’d say it was distressing, but she was good at putting together outfits that worked with only a single item to base it off. A skill I couldn’t hope to match. My go-to for clothing shopping so far had simply been, does my damn chest fit and is it person-with-a-tail compatible?
I briefly considered wearing the World of Divers shirt that I’d picked up, just as an inside joke for meeting Akosyn. Unfortunately, finding one that I fit into meant the lower part looked like a tarp, so Vael had taken a pair of scissors and some repair tape to it to morph it into a crop top. I decided against wearing it, even though Vael kept telling me that I looked great in it.
“You have an incredible figure, Kiera, don’t be afraid to show it.”
No, that wouldn’t do, not if I was going to try and shake someone down. I opted to dress in some of the more tactically-oriented clothing that I’d gotten for Diving, stuff with pockets and places to clip things on. I decided to wear my gear belt on top of the pants, and a longer jacket to go over top. It would be hot, but I wasn’t sure about my ability to walk around with a gun belt without getting hassled by locals along the way.
People commonly wore their weapons strapped, and in X-3, nobody gave a single shit about brandishing, so just carrying them around was also a totally valid option. As someone who was a User, I was afforded additional leeway to do what I wanted. Most street gangers avoided fucking with Users; it often just wasn’t worth the effort or potential risk. Most low-tier Users weren’t bulletproof, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t light you on fire or make your head explode or some other crazy shit like that.
I gave myself a once-over in the mirror. Dark blue pants, black tank top, and a gray and gold jacket that mostly obscured the gun belt and knife. My hair looked like shit and amazing at the same time somehow. It was so damn thick and always looked like it was some kind of shampoo commercial hair, but it was also shaggy and overgrown. Barely held in check with a handful of hair clips and pins to keep the mass of the stuff relatively contained. I’d had my hair cut twice now, and it hardly made a difference. It was growing absurdly fast, multiple centimeters per week.
Stupid fucking vitality aspect making me pay appearance taxes. I don’t even want to think about my nails right now.
It was good enough for what I was hoping would be a couple-hour trip up to 12-3. I grabbed a pair of Vael’s dark glasses that she wore to hide her User eyes when she was trying to run around incognito. It wasn’t the most effective thing on the planet, since it was a common trope. It made me look marginally more mysterious, at least. Maybe people would think I had some kind of nasty or dangerous aspect under the glasses. My necklace was proudly on display; that way I had some kind of excuse to think that people were staring at me for that and not the other thing.
Resident bad bitch over here, about to aggressively grow weeds on your turf. Fear me, for I can give you a migraine and fix your tooth decay at the same time.
I snorted at my darkened reflection and flicked the light off to catch the lev.