Grind 4.3

January 8, 2011, Hebert House - Instant Dimension, 6:23 PM

Reality cracked, everything acquired a tinge of grey, and there were three mooks. Teens in gang colours to be specific, who rushed us. Taylor just stood gaping while a Chinese boy ran at her and executed a decent spinning heel kick at her head. He got a clean hit on her because she was still busy gaping, she went down like a ragdoll. Oops! That was not supposed to happen! Taylor had a decent enough level in martial arts to be able to handle that.

I taser-shot the guy and knocked the two other mooks out with throat punches. Then I picked Taylor up, "are you all right?"

She nodded absently, "y-yeah, I couldn't feel any insects other than the ones on my own body. It took me by surprise."

"Ah, I should have thought of that. No matter, this is good training. You may encounter opponents who have a way to sterilize the surroundings. That should not leave you dumbstruck like this. I propose we do a few rounds of training without any augments every now and then. For now, bring out the swarm."

She nodded, opened her inventory and started to bring out thousands of bugs.

We'd been overjoyed by the success of putting invertebrates into the inventory, but when we tried to do it with the frogs, it was a bust. Apparently the more complex the organism's neural architecture, the more nerve damage it sustained from a trip into the inventory. What gave flies no problems, resulted in noticeable disorientation for bees, and gave the frogs grand mal seizures. Good thing we didn't try it with anything bigger, it'd probably put cats and dogs into a coma and outright kill humans. I guess it happened from the disparity in the electrical signals when the bodies going in and coming out were partially timelocked by the nature of the inventory subspace.

Taylor quickly spread her swarm in and around the house and started sending me mental messages about the mook density and placements around us. I smiled, "well, what are you waiting for then? Go wild!"

She grinned and nodded. Immediately I could hear screams from around us as she started swarming the mooks. She opened the door and went out, I followed her. The mooks were rolling on the ground frantically flailing at the bees, wasps, and ants deposited by the bees and wasps on them.

She proceeded to disable the nearest mook with a precise hit on the back of the Empire girl's head, the girl stopped moving. Taylor paused, radiating both glee and discomfort, "I got XP!" I nodded, "good, now don't be squeamish, these are not real people. Also, if they were real people, their sole aim is to attack you. This is self defence." She gave me a resolute nod.

Soon she was leaving a trail of unconscious bodies and had already leveled up once. These mooks were just too easy for her. I allowed it to go on for a few hours in which she picked up another two levels and some physical statpoints. Then I went through the party options again, found the XP distribution settings and set it to equal distribution instead of the default per-hit proportional setting.

Then I asked her to get back into the house and put her bugs back in the inventory. Once done, I collapsed the ID, only mildly startling Danny with our reappearance. I told Taylor that we were going back in, but this time without any augments or bug assist. I mana cleansed both of us so that she'd have no bug senses at all.

I opened an ID again, this time with mook level 14-18, which would be trained thugs with weapons but not firearms. Five gangers with knives and truncheons rushed us immediately. Taylor was ready this time, she took her loss of bug senses like a champ and swiftly ducked and sidestepped around the thugs' swings. She disarmed the two that attacked her like a pro and incapacitated them quickly with neck and temple strikes. I didn't bother disarming my mooks, choosing to simply outspeed them and dropping them before they could hit me. Taylor messaged me saying the XP was better this time, of course, because the mook levels were higher.

We continued non-stop till almost midnight, when Taylor announced that she couldn't go on anymore. Her physicals were looking much better though, they were all near 15 now. Her frame had already improved from gangly to athletic. I healed her cuts, bruises, muscle tissue microtears and lactic acid buildup manually, without using the previous scans (I was afraid that using the scan might just bring her gangly frame back). Which gained me a level in heal and a subskill called Refresh. Speaking of skills, Taylor also gained quite a few levels in kinetic resistance. I made a mental note to research what other resistances can be developed.

Though the refresh took care of the physical fatigue, there was still mental fatigue to consider, so we called it a night. I flew up and peppered the remaining mooks in the vicinity with taser bullet shots to squeeze the last dregs of XP from that session. Then we went back to her house and I collapsed the ID. Danny was still up and waiting for us. "There you are. Had fun? You're looking healthier again Taylor, and filthier though."

Taylor grinned nodded at him, then held out her hand again at me, "Cleanse please."

"Good thinking." I nodded and cleansed the both of us. Danny looked at the floor where all of our cleansed out dust, dirt and dried blood had accumulated at our feet, "Last time you did that I had to mop the floor. Aveek, do you have a blue magic to get rid of that?"

I gave a sheepish grin, then opened an inventory hole and swept it along the floor. It was well within my current 45cm mana projection range.

Danny snorted and shook his head, "figured so. It's late though, Dev called, he wanted you to know that he's off to sleep and you can let yourself in."

I nodded again, "Thanks sir. I'll do that. Anyway, as you would remember, I'm taking Taylor out to collect bugs tomorrow."

Danny nodded, "yeah, I remember, where do you plan to go? Do you need a ride?"

I shook my head, "No, we need to practice running to develop our mover abilities anyway. We'll go to the nearby parks and stuff, we'll stay in touch if it gets late."

I bade the both of them a good night and went back into a blank ID. I didn't have any pressing need to go home right now, so I stayed right there to do some experiments.

First thing I did was to construct a full-size mirror on a wall in front of me, it was just a layer of silver deposited on the wall. Not much mass overall, so it took only a few minutes to turn the construct real. Then I stripped and began fleshcrafting.

I took out a hunk of beef from the inventory and used it as fleshcrafting biomass to add more muscle mass to my body. Even with my biology skills it took a while to get the proportions and nerve connections right. I needed a way to get many more scans to collect the necessary knowledge. Well, I looked very muscled, overly muscled in fact. I played with the proportions till it looked better overall. I noticed that the additional muscle did give a +2 to my strength, but as a modifier, not an increment. I also realized using the same biology skills that if I applied these modifications to a normal human, they would probably develop complications later due to hormonal imbalances and metabolism rates. I gained a lot of respect for the amount of knowledge that Amy had to use for even minor changes.

On a whim, I scanned myself, and opened it. Then opened Danny's and dada's scans, then applied dada's stocky skeletal proportions, Danny's skin complexion and increased the height of everything proportionally. Then added Taylor's hair colour and length from her scan, but kept the collagen structure to my straighter hair than Taylor's curls. I saved this new mashup as a file. Now I fired up fleshcrafting again, pointed it to the file and applied it to my body. I was a completely different person in a blue flash, the face could still be recognized as mine, but the 6'4" buff frame, white skin and absurdly long brown hair made it look completely different.

I changed the melanin content again to a more bronze complexion, narrowed the hips slightly, increased muscle density and changed the fast/slow twitch proportions to more fast-twitch muscles. Decreased hair length to shoulder length and then scanned myself once more and saved it. This build apparently gave me +3 STR, +2 DEX, +1 VIT and +2 CHA modifiers. I finally opened an unmodified scan and applied fleshcrafting with it again, I was back to normal in another blue flash.

You've gained the ShapeShifting subskill of FleshCrafting!

Avatar Options are now unlocked.

You can now switch between saved avatars directly.

Equipment windows are now unlocked for your party.

You can now switch clothes, accessories and wielded weapons as saved sets.