Grind 4.0
January 8, 2011, Brockton Bay, 10:52 AM
It was official, Taylor was a complete monster. I used to think I was a respectably cheaty munchkin; I had been humbled. She managed to absorb all the knowledge I had amassed in a couple of hours and casually asked me for more! It had taken me almost a week of nonstop learning to do that! Goddamn cheater, we'd spent the rest of that day experimenting, and the results were not bad.
I so desperately wanted that multitasking skill of hers, so I'd scanned her brain while she was doing her hyperfast learning trick. Then I'd given her some exercise pointers to raise her physicals and told her to keep working out while also experimenting with the bugs she was already amassing in the basement. While she was doing that, I'd tried meditating on her brain scans.
I had to download a ton of books on quantum physics and neurology before I could even touch those scans. In the process I discovered another trick. Instead of trying to read the books from the memory chip, I scanned the chip and then tried to parse the scans mentally, I was immediately flooded with quite a few knowledge skill learning prompts. When I declined them and checked my skills tab, all those skills and subskills were sitting there greyed out, ready to be learned, and they were there in Taylor's window too. I trawled the net and queued a ton of torrents which had collections of DIY, self help, academic, peer-reviewed journals, military manuals, and topic based library torrents in a wide variety of subjects too.
Anyway, it took me a couple hours to learn enough quantum physics and neurochemistry to start on Taylor's brain scan. What I found was freaking brilliant! The corona kept her brain in some weird macroscopic quantum superposition of multiple states of the entire cerebrum, while the corresponding cerebellums were kept in some kind of forced entanglement. It allowed thought and sensory streams to be split, but consciousness to be unified... These parasites sure knew their shit! I flooded my own brain with mana and tried replicating the effect - Bam! Multitasking skill obtained - as usual, it was a mana hog in the lower levels, I realized even after some training it would be difficult for me to maintain more than 5-6 streams without starting to drain mana beyond my regen, oh well, more to grind. At least for starters I immediately split off a single stream and set it to meditate permanently, instant increase in mana regen, and now I could learn while doing other things!
Speaking of the parasites, Taylor did ask me why the AI called them so, I gave her the barebones explanation. She had a mild panic attack, I had to explain that there's nothing that we could do immediately and definitely something that we would be doing about them eventually. She told me she'd actually seen the beings! She started to explain but I just told her to message me the memory (in hindsight I must say I had no idea what I'd done by teaching Taylor Hebert to send mental messages! She turned out to be a total chatterbox!) Turned out she could only send text at her level, no memory messages yet.
The parallel meditating stream of my mind noticed that there was a new dot below my mana conduit, it was more outflow than in, I realized that was the mana conduit from me to Taylor, to power her gamer skills I figured.
Taylor couldn't access Mana though, I tried so many ways, once I even tried to mentally drag and drop the mana capacity skill into her conduit - I was just given a message reminding me that Mana was solely for me to use and Rob was a dick. Fair enough, I'd actually be quite jealous if she started using mana too with her absolutely OP powerset!
It turned out that at the lower levels of Gamer's Mind and Body she still needed to eat and sleep, and she didn't have mental controls for her interface. She also didn't have the emotional dampening thing, and her body actually showed marks when she got injured, the small scratch we tested did visibly heal within 5 minutes or so. She'd have to level those two up fast enough to get the anonymity protocols soon.
Within the next two days she'd leveled up all of her skills above level 10 though, and had pushed her physical stats above 10 too. Charisma only gained 3 more points, because she'd only interacted with me and her father. Got to get that girl out of the house. Her need to sleep had decreased, regen was faster, and she got her own inventory with gamer's body level 10. Too bad it was not a shared inventory, that would be broken in so many ways. Gamer's mind at level 10 gave her memory/sensory messaging ability. She sent me her trigger memory.
So I saw the goddamn space worms... We're up against such bullshit level things! Rob, you better have given me enough time. I wasn't sure I could scale up to that kind of a level even in a few years!
We'd discovered a whole new aspect to her powers yesterday though, as soon as her Administrator power and its subskills leveled up to level 10, a number of changes occurred. Her Range was constantly increasing and was at around 250m at level 10, her Sensory and Command skills now encompassed details about each insect's fine motor control, including their limbs, wings, mandibles and spinnerets, she still couldn't see, hear or feel textures through them though. Finally, the Control Targets added amphibians, suddenly she was waxing about how many frogs were there in each of our backyards! Her power could not be turned off, and that was a major headache if/when the control targets would start encompassing bigger and bigger animals (I didn't want to scare her with the implications of what it could do to humans!).
But none of those were unexpected, what was unexpected was a new subskill being added to administration, it was called ?-Upgrade Slot-? and the description mentioned that given the right data packet, a new subskill can be added. We tried various things, my scans of Amy's healing, of Vicky's aura, of my inventory... None worked, she couldn't read those scans either, they came to her as data files in messages.
So I went a different route and tried to scan aspects of her own power, I scanned one of her insects, then dove into it. I could see the dimensional hole through which her control signals were coming from, but nothing else. I didn't mess around much with it. Instead I mana boosted the fly, it was superfly now! Anyway, as soon as I mana boosted it, I got AI assist messages declaring that the dimensional control signal has been scanned and a response has been created according to anonymity protocols, that was interesting. Applying the response removed the insect from her control. That had potential, I sent the response file to her in a message.
The moment she dragged that file into her upgrade slot, it turned into a new subskill called Administration Selectivity! At level 1 it was just an off switch for her Administration power, and just a few hours of fiddling with pushed it to level 2, where she could selectively exclude individual species. It was only after she confirmed that ability that I told her of my fears of her uncontrollably mastering humans in her range, and we both shared shudders of horrified relief.
In terms of my own training, I spent most of the time absorbing the gigabytes of stuff I downloaded, Taylor took another couple hours to get all of it though. At least my few parallel multitasking streams helped decrease the time by at least half. I made sure to get university level competency in all general subjects, a deep study of military and combat tactics and strategies, and lots of PHD level electronics, I was working up to a goal here. I also scanned and studied a variety of Taylor's bugs and frogs, and the 4 human scans I had gotten by now, hence Biology levelled up considerably, also got a level up just with XP from reading scans.
In the nights I fought a lot of mooks and leveled up IDs to 10, then I had control over the level range of mook spawns. Last night I tried fighting level 15-20 mooks, they dressed like mercs and most had knives or guns, it was fun. At the current level of boost I could easily soak dozens of bullets before I had to take cover to regain HP. The taser bullets worked like a charm, but they needed much more juice if I was aiming at their padded vests than their skin. I managed to level once more with last night's combat XP.
This morning when I came over, Taylor had already upped Selectivity to level 4 and could choose to shut off groups of targets in localized patches, her range was about a block now, and she could tap into the insects' tactile feedback. By now she was also possibly the world's best entomologist and amphibiologist with all the research papers she'd had me add.
But I digress, the agenda for today was different, I was going to take her out to meet Lisa, on a quest to improve her charisma. Though my actual goal was to enjoy some lovely chrysanthemum tea while the girls would do girl things. But you know how it goes, man proposes...
Beta by MaddTitan
