C'est La Vie (Worm/MtG) #05.2
A/N: In which highly advanced science happens and a wound is re-opened.
—
The ocean's surface gently rolled beneath my feet, rising and falling as the water rolled in and receded.
A slight pull on a fraction of the Blue-infused seawater beneath me kept the surface firm beneath my feet, the surface tension of the water kept stabilized enough for me to stand atop it.
My weight was a constant, if minor, drain on the Blue-infused water, but that really wasn't a concern any longer.
I'd wanted a greater volume of water, but now that I had it—more than I could have wished for—I didn't know what to do with it. And to top it off the new impression in the back of my mind wasn't even half depleted, nor even a quarter.
It was only the cove, not the whole of the ocean, but the results so far... I was more than happy with that. Compared to the Visitors Center lab's capacity, its pool of energy was several times the size from what I'd been able to tell monitoring how it dimmed only slightly after drawing on it.
I stared out at the ocean, out to the horizon before looking down to the churning water beneath my feet; a gordian knot of tangled and twisting currents that minimized the loss of Blue while ready to be called on at a moment's notice… once I had a use for it that is.
It had been like that for a few minutes now, ever since I wove it moments after seizing the new impression. There had just been a rush to just do something with it, to use it, to actualize some of the things that had come to mind the day before. But, when it actually came to doing something with it, that sudden rush had guttered out. It wasn't that I didn't know what to do, rather I didn't know what I couldn't do with it.
The issue was finding a place to start. If the parameters I observed the day prior remained constant as I understood them, then there wasn't much that it couldn't do— esoteric applications aside.
Freezing it, boiling it, shaping it, suspending it— I was only limited by my imagination, and that was the problem. I squinted against the sun and smiled slightly. 'Problem', that was certainly one way to put it.
It was almost laughable, thinking about it that way.
Since coming here I'd developed two new powers, at minimum; powers that on their own would have qualified as a versatile power set. Yet here I was, using a knockoff form of hydrokinesis to walk on water as one of the most basic applications of the Blue.
I shook my head and called on my swarm, defaulting to the drills I had occasionally assisted the other Chicago wards with: target practice.
I imagined the exercise was going to be akin to playing chess against myself; not particularly useful for training, but it would give me a starting point to test things, and at the very least it would give me a bit more practical experience in manipulating the water.
From the beach, I heard Artur shout, felt and saw him scramble back against the tree when a series of middling-sized swarms of fliers flew past, making him drop the small whittling knife he'd been using to carve one end of his walking stick.
As the swarms began their approach over the hundred or so feet of water between me and the beach, I spun up the water in time with the fliers scattering on their final approach. The fliers' attack runs were coming from every angle, going wide to circle around, climbing to come in from above, and dropping down to attack from below. They were closing fast, and on their approach I untangled the gordian knot, connecting each strand to the now rapidly spinning concentric rings of Blue-infused seawater that surrounded me.
Spinning clockwise and counter-clockwise, tendrils of water rose up around me and when the fliers entered within a few yards l lashed out. It was cheating, my knowing where they were, but "they" also knew where the tendrils were, and with a little attention, I was able to strike a reasonable balance.
As the battle raged around me, I was struck by the image it inspired; tentacles whipping from the water as if from the Kraken of legend, fending off and tearing apart a desperate flying army. I promptly buried the memories of hydrokinetic monstrosities that followed, wrenching my focus back to the test.
Despite my efforts, and thanks to my efforts, the fliers slowly drew closer even as they were picked off. Bobbing and weaving, diving and climbing, my attacks being dodged even while I countered near misses by splitting tendrils or flattening them to swat the fliers from the air.
A weakness was becoming too apparent though: the tendrils' reaction time was lacking.
The bugs were falling; ten, twenty-two, thirty-eight, forty-four, fifty— A small fruit fly stutter-stepped past a tendril to land on my arm.
I slowed the tendrils and pulled the fliers back for a moment to look at the tiny fruit fly. Its size was definitely one reason it had gotten through, but that wasn't it alone. Its speed, and my tendrils' lack of it.
My eyes narrowed as I considered the weak point: Things too small, too quick, or a combination of both, could get through.
The fliers resumed their attack and, replicating the fly's movements, the attrition rate dropped within moments. More attacking fliers made it through and I was forced to increasingly refine the tendrils' movements, configurations, and attack methods to compensate and counter the fliers' evasion.
In some tendrils biological systems were replicated to pump water, constricting at one end to drive it in a crude imitation of the vascular system, or they were given a pseudo musculature to try and give them twitch reaction times. Both worked, though only to an extent.
In other tendrils I was throwing ideas at the wall while trying to keep myself constrained to energy-conserving methods, such as spinning tendrils out in a connecting double-helix that improved flow and pressure at the cost of dexterity, while in others tendrils were narrowed to use less water over greater distances and extend the reach while increasing their reaction times. There were upsides and downsides to each method. At the same time, in others, I set aside efficiency and brute forced the approach, pulling and pushing the mass and forcing the water to react as fast as I could move it while monitoring the energy drain.
At some point in cycling through methods of moving the water fluid mechanics had come into play. It was a spontaneous development on my part, something I didn't fully notice until it had happened, but when I did vague memories of architectural research suddenly gained new relevance. Plumbing designs were replicated in a number of tendrils, secondary channels or outer chambers taking shape while water was cycled at speed along their lengths; a trap, primed and ready.
I was only left waiting for a few seconds; a hornet dodged past one such tendril and in a fraction of a second a barrier in the chamber was thrown up to block the fast flowing water while simultaneously weakening the surface tension of the 'pipe' carrying it.
The results were spectacular: The rushing water rebounded against the barrier, causing a sudden pressure change, and in a fraction of second the weak point ruptured from the force of the micro-scale water hammer.
The blast of high-pressure water vapor killed the hornet in an instant, tearing through its wings and breaking its fragile body into pieces by tearing apart its joints and thorax. It was only the first.
Several seconds later the attacking fliers began to die in droves as I quickly replicated and refined the design in more tendrils, then that number multiplied when the pressure was augmented with some steam made by accelerating the movement of some of the Blue-infused seawater. The layer of water sheathing the channels had to be reinforced, which slowed reaction times, which in turn made me incorporate the pseudo-musculature and I had to refine it further to compensate for the downsides that brought on, but the end result was that it worked.
After several minutes of constant attack, the small swarm was dead. It was a bit underwhelming. Too underwhelming.
With only a moment's consideration, I called on another swarm of expendable fliers to try again, this time re-configuring their number towards heavier, more durable species that I thought may be able to break through.
They came.
They attacked.
They died to the last.
The weaponized water hammer's design had to be modified slightly, greater pressures and more water vapor was required with some of the heavier shelled species, but that was it.
Those were only bugs, however.
The rotation of the rings surrounding me slowed, then stopped, and the tendrils receded as I repositioned a significant portion of the Blue-infused seawater a dozen yards away.
For a few moments I just stood there and surveyed the damage.
The water was littered with insect corpses in a wide area around me, enough so that after the water calmed a number of small silver fish began darting up from below to take them away. An easy meal.
I shifted my gaze to where the water was massing and breathed deep.
The exercise had been effective, more so than I'd expected going into it, but only to an extent; a good test of a microscale application. The question now was if it would scale.
I was only left a short while to ruminate on that before the swarm arrived with the target: a large, waxy-skinned leaf from the jungle as large as my torso. Not the best target, but serviceable for an impromptu test.
Best to be careful, though.
Experimenting with high pressures and temperatures like this wasn't exactly safe. As a precaution, I enclosed myself in a thin barrier of water several millimeters thick, holding the water still so that the barrier was transparent.
The fliers moved to hover in place above the faintly glowing spot the Blue-infused water had concentrated at and I held the image of the water hammer design in my head. Making several tweaks to the design and modifying it for scale I raised a single, Kraken-sized tendril from the sea and pointed its tip at the leaf.
Pulling at the mass of Blue-infused seawater composing the tendril, shapes began taking form; voids were created, 'pipes' tested and reinforced, complex structures rapidly incorporated and refined to channel the water efficiently, and beneath it, in the main mass, water began rapidly cycling through it to create a torrent of rushing water.
For nearly a minute I kept the construct primed but in standby, measuring and gauging how it held up as well as what needed to be reinforced and what could be refined further.
It had been overbuilt to keep the growing pressure contained, but in the time I monitored it I slowly stripped away water from where it wasn't needed, added somewhere it was, or pumped in unenergized seawater to lower the production cost until only what was necessary remained; no more, no less. Then I slammed shut the pipe the water was cycling through, weakened the tendril's tip, and flash-boiled a portion of the water.
In a fraction of a second, gallons of rapidly moving water slammed forward into the barrier, rebounded back along a U-bend, and broke through the weak point.
One moment the swarm of fliers held the leaf aloft, in the next they were dead, and steam intermixed with a bit of Blue-infused water billowed out to shroud the immediate area; the outside of my protective shell was fogged over as water vapor percolated on the outer surface.
My mind's eye was fixed on the dispersed Blue-infused water in an instant as the steam expanded, watching it billow out in my swarm sense and erase a number of fliers I'd had in the vicinity. But then it was gone, falling into the water and running out of energy or merging with the rest of the mass before I could fully grasp it.
I filed away the observation though, mulling over possible applications of that as I probed the temperature of the steam with my swarm for a few seconds and dropped my defences only once my swarm felt the steam cool enough for my swarm to survive in it.
Survivable was by no means cool though, and I was hit by a blast of humidity that made me think I'd stepped into a sauna and all but felt my unwashed hair frizz.
It took the gentle breeze coming off the ocean a few seconds more to clear the air, but once the steam was gone I was left looking at tiny fragments of leaf and dead bugs littering the surface.
For all intents and purposes, the target had been utterly destroyed.
I extended the Blue-infused mass out before me to form a stable path of calm on the water's surface and walked to the testing location, stooping once I reached the testing spot to pick up a bruised bit of leaf.
So the water vapor had hit it hard enough to bruise the cellulose?
My lips thinned. Or… had it been the steam or the pressure of the water vapor that did the damage?
Regardless, it had been effective and while maybe not deadly, it would be devastating to an unprotected target; someone hit by that would require immediate medical attention.
Though… that had only been water. If I had added something to the water, like sand or gravel, shrapnel, I would have turned the water hammer into a shotgun; it had been moving more than fast enough to carry debris. High-temperature water damage in conjunction with shrapnel wounds? That would've been deadly, no doubt about it.
I grimaced as a sour taste grew in my mouth. The idea that what I'd made was purely offensive, however, that that was the first thing I came up with… releasing the fragment of leaf to be carried off by the wind, I was left wondering what to do next.
For a minute, I reviewed the various methods I had used, noting which had or hadn't worked against the fliers, and which could be repurposed to other uses. But among the methods, I'd used to augment the tendrils, one of them stuck with me; or rather something tangentially related to it did.
The replicated circulatory system had worked, to a degree, but it was the idea of replicating biology with the Blue-infused water that caught my attention, hard.
I glanced to my stump then raised my remaining arm to the sky, turning my hand to look at it from every angle.
Was it possible?
My eyes narrowed and I discarded the doubt. No, the real question was if it was practical.
Simply shaping the Blue-infused water cost it a small bit of energy, moving took a bit more than that up until conservation of motion came into play, and maintaining a shape took even more. Actually moving a set shape though, making minute modifications every second, that would drain it even with the most conservative of movements and energy conservation methods I'd figured out so far— it had been by far the greatest drain on the Blue-infused water making up the tendrils during the simulated attack.
But...
Still examining my arm I slowly sat down on the water, absently noting the odd, slightly damp sensation of the surface before returning to my examination.
The question was how to go about shaping it. I could do it from memory, build it slowly until it was a mirror of my left arm… or maybe make a mold? After a moment of consideration, the mold option came off as the simplest and quickest method to test. Opening a hole in the surface beside me, I reached down to just past my elbow, where Amy had rounded off my other arm's stump, before closing the water around it.
The water was cool and had that damp-not-wet feeling, then cold and constricting as I tightly wrapped my arm in Blue-infused water.
Fixing the surface tension to make the mold, I split it open enough to pull my arm out and, shifting the arm-shaped void to my right, I stuck my stump into the opening before sheathing my stump in a thin layer of water to connect it and grip the maimed limb. I didn't draw it out though, hesitating for a few moments and testing the hold it had on my stump before separating the mold from the rest of the mass and lifting it high.
I breathed deeply as I stared at it, a lump forming in my throat.
And just like that, I had two hands again. Two left hands, but hands nonetheless.
A happy laugh burbled up as I pulled and pushed at the hollow, arm-shaped mass of blue in my swarm sense. Lifting the prosthetic in front of my face, I slowly closed the fingers to make a fist then stretched them wide. The simple motion was slow at first, but once I reached the thumb— in place of a pinky —it was then almost reflexive and only took an absent push to flex the transparent digits.
Staring at the arm, it felt like a hole that I'd never noticed had been filled.
I was whole again.
I blinked away a bit of wetness and, bringing the arm close, I ran my living hand over it and felt the damp coolness, the unresisting shell of water that made up the hollow prosthetic… My stomach clenched and I gripped the arm hard enough that my fingers hurt but I felt nothing from it.
My flesh and blood hand shook, trembled, but the watery one remained rock still and steady even when my stump trembled because I didn't make it move.
I let go to stare at the prosthetic and was suddenly struck by the alienness of it the feeling soured.
It wasn't the same, it wasn't my arm… nothing more than a pale imitation.
The prosthetic was functional, certainly, I wasn't going to deny that, but it was… not. I searched for a word to put to the feeling, but the closest word I could think of to describe it was 'weak' and even that seemed inaccurate.
It may have been hollow, but that meant nothing if I could get enough momentum behind it. I could knock teeth out if I punched someone with this. It being water was irrelevant; hit the water fast enough without breaking the surface tension and it would be like hitting concrete. But…
Extending it to my side, beyond the still waters I sat on, I dragged the fingers through the water and felt nothing; no cold or dampness, no warmth from the sun, nothing.
The prosthetic was like a shell, or a balloon, and one only kept from popping by the Blue and my conscious attention.
There was nothing to it.
I stared at it, wanting it to be better, to feel the wholeness I had before and as if in some vain attempt to ameliorate the issue I added more Blue-infused water to create a framework within the fake limb.
It did next to nothing. The most it did was let me circulate the water more easily.
I wracked my brain to think of a solution but the source of the uncomfortable feeling wasn't a physical one, rather a mental one: it was psychosomatic.
The absence of my arm hadn't been bothering me since I'd awoken on the island, not really, and I hadn't thought twice about the good fortune of not being saddled with that kind of mental trouble. Whatever function its absence served in letting me interact with the impressions and Colors had probably helped, but now— "Chtob ya sdokh, chto za khuynya?"
I froze, only then becoming aware that Artur had stopped working at his walking stick, had stopped doing anything else altogether, and was watching me through a pair of binoculars.
On the beach, Artur lowered the binoculars. "Bozhe moy, v kakuyu khuynyu ya vvyazalsya na etot raz?"
I snapped around to look back over my shoulder, the tone of what he'd said suddenly making me feel self-conscious. It was something, something about what he had said, but then there was the image: me, doing all I had been doing in plain sight… I hadn't even given discretion a second thought. Without a second's thought, I enclosed myself in a thin shell of Blue-infused seawater and sank beneath the waves.
My impromptu bathysphere descended ten, twenty, thirty feet, forty before reaching a rock and sand seabed. I absently spread out the mass of Blue to anchor myself in place, weighing myself down in the sand and latching onto the rocks; only then did what I'd just done with the Blue sink in. There was complete and utter silence as I stared out into the dim depths, the light from above scattered and flickering, ever-shifting as the tide churned the surface above.
I was quickly drawn from my thoughts by all there was to see down here, the sheer volume of life. Small seagrasses grew in the sand, while flat, disk-like corals extended out horizontally from a shelf of rock a short ways away and red, fan-shaped ones grew upward while a dozen other types in every color and shape grew out in all directions to make intricate, multi-colored mounds of sea life.
A lone shark swam in the distance, pale grey and white-bellied while silver-bodied and yellow-tailed fish schooled away from it.
Nearby, small, orange-bodied fish darted between rocks and coral outcroppings.
I blinked in surprise when a larger, brightly colored fish with oversized front teeth lazily bit off a piece of coral.
It was all so… otherworldly, but beautiful. Slowly sitting back, I rested my head against the shell of my little bubble to watch for a while.
It was some time before I forced myself to face reality again and took a few minutes to notify a stressing Artur that I was still keeping watch, send an air tube to the surface so I didn't suffocate, and a dozen other things to vainly stave off having to acknowledge the situation. I couldn't ignore reality forever though.
A shadow of the uncomfortable feeling returned when I finally looked down again; less so than before, but there, like a sour aftertaste in my mouth. The worst part was that I knew it wouldn't go away, not easily, not if Defiant's rare, candid comment on his tinker-tech prosthetics were anything to go by.
A 'pebble in the shoe' was what he had described the feeling as. An apt description, now that I knew what it felt like. The uncomfortable feeling was something that had nagged at the edge of my consciousness, a discordance that I couldn't resolve. The limb was there but not there… phantom limb syndrome.
At least Defiant had recovered his sense of touch and had had brain implants to manage his new limbs.
I sighed and 'rolled' the fingers, this time pulling at some of the structural supports in conjunction with the shell itself. I half imagined it was like pulling a ligament. Again, it helped, but it just wasn't the same, and the uncomfortable feeling persisted. My discomfort aside though, I needed to make this work, I couldn't just throw away something like this.
I sighed and examined it with a critical eye, gently biting my lip as I looked it over.
Maybe fixing the shape would help?
It paradoxically was and wasn't a minor thing to reverse it, turning it from a left hand into a right; it just took inverting its shape in my swarm sense. However it didn't alleviate the feeling as expected; instead, if anything, correcting the hand only exacerbated the feeling. The very malleability that let me fix it reinforced the idea that its presence was transitory.
The prosthetic was there, but… impermanent. If I lost focus, or lost access to a water source or ran out of the Blue, it would just fall apart. It was… the water the limb was made up of wasn't solid, not in the conventional sense; there was little actual substance to it.
As if to prove myself right, I released my hold on the mass of Blue representing the prosthetic and the water constituting it splashed across my lap before quickly soaking into my shorts. I swallowed, and staring at it the void left with the prosthetic's dismissal suddenly yawned; a numb hollowness left in its absence and the most pronounced the feeling had ever been, as if my arm had only just been removed.
Pins and needles ran all the way down the arm that wasn't there and I grabbed at my stump, gritting my teeth against a sudden stab of bone-deep pain.
The feeling was all in my head, I knew that, but that didn't lessen the effect it had, didn't dampen the pain.
Eventually, the pain faded and I wearily stared at the empty space where my hand was making a fist, my nails damn near digging through my palm.
I shut my eyes against the feeling and reminded myself that it was all in my head.
It was one thing to know something intellectually, but another for it to actually matter; this was one of those cases.
Cold spreading across my lower half drew my attention and I latched onto the distraction. My eyes slowly cracked open and I frowned at my lap, at the pooling water slowly soaking through and making my legs cold… the Blue was still there though.
I absently pulled at it and drew the water from my clothes.
What the water had been wasn't lost to me though.
Gathering it before me I shaped it into another arm and I examined the faintly glowing prosthetic.
I could use it, it was never the case that I wouldn't, but as it was… I grimaced as my stomach twisted. Maybe… maybe familiarizing myself would help.
Within the mental image of my swarm sense I pulled and pressed at the mass of Blue-infused water representing the arm, and in turn, the fingers curled, stretched wide, made a fist, pinched the index finger and thumb together and went through a wide range of motions. It was clumsy at first, but simple gestures quickly became second nature as I moved, pulled, and pushed at the blue mass to perform increasingly complex motions.
Unfortunately, throughout the practice session, it became increasingly apparent there was an ever so slight lag, a delay in giving the instruction and it actually happening; faint, but ever present. Nothing I was doing though, just a matter of how fast the prosthetic could respond.
It quickly became clear that the prosthetic's reaction time wasn't as fast as my normal arm, but in practicing with it I had to fully acknowledge the looming fact that it would never feel natural. I would forever have to maintain its shape and every aspect of its shape, consciously make every motion when using it... but I could do it, with it I would nearly be back to full capacity.
In too many ways though, it was worse than not having an arm at all.
Before, my arm had just been… gone, missing, not there, and its interaction with the Colors had alleviated feelings of loss, for better or for worse. Now, after making the prosthetic, the absence was a near constant, always at the fore of my mind, and even if I used the prosthetic it as well would be an ever-present reminder.
I couldn't just forget that my arm wasn't there. As things were now though, it would be better to use it than not, at least then I would get something out of it.
It didn't escape me how vain I was being, but… I grimaced and clutched at my stump. I didn't know what to think about it. Happy, ecstatic, that I had a way to remedy my weakness, but that all felt hollow now.
The only thing I could think right then was that it was the mechanics of it that were the source of the unease, or one part of it. If I could alleviate the uncomfortableness, if I made the prosthesis better, simplified it, made it less… obvious, maybe then it wouldn't be so uncomfortable.
Wrapping it was one thing that could work, but if I could detach myself from the idea that I was controlling it?
The idea of replicating biology with the water surfaced for a moment, and if not for the complexity being a non-issue I would've been forced to discard the notion; as I wasn't though…
The human body didn't move simply by individual muscles being pulled, but it was an interconnected system; there were the ligaments which pulled the muscles which moved the fingers and so on. A disconnect with cause and effect. That...
Dismissing the framework within the arm I was left with only the shell; the dermis layer. A blank slate to build from.
I struggled to recall as much as I could from senior year biology and anatomy courses, thinking back to textbooks and video lectures on how muscles, bones, and ligaments interacted, but eventually I fixed the image of a flensed arm in my mind. Pulling at the mass of Blue in my swarm sense, shaping it, a new prosthetic attached to my stump. I didn't look at it, barely acknowledged it was there, only reached it across my body to the fruit fly on my wrist and feeling at my intact arm; working my remaining fingers and monitoring which muscles moved against the prosthetic's fingers.
Within the arm rising from the floor, I created an elbow joint at the base, and from that outgrew a radius and ulna, then from there raised a tendril of water that split into a dense cluster of tendrils that wrapped around the 'bones'.
Within seconds the complexity grew exponentially from the simple construct, but I knew every part of its construction in my swarm sense.
I could do this.
—
Translations:
"Chtob ya sdokh, chto za khuynya?"
-Translation: Something like "Fucking hell, what the fuck?
"Bozhe moy, v kakuyu khuynyu ya vvyazalsya na etot raz?"
-Translation: My God, what the fuck did I get into this time?
A/N: Oh hey, something became longer than intended, what a shocker, though at the same time this is shorter than originally intended... But yeah, not all I wanted to put in here but ran into some laptop problems with my daily driver giving up the ghost after 10 years of use and lost some data that set me back a few days, but that's passed. Also, a note regarding updates, I am starting a new semester so that may set things back a bit at first and at busy times, but I will be updating within 18 days of the prior update no matter what.