Chapter 28: Chapter 11

As I meandered down the hall- making sure I stayed to the edges of possible camera coverage and kept my face down when that wasn’t possible- I started messing around with how my perception worked. I had just accepted that the prosthesis must work exactly how they did when first powered on, but now that I was thinking about it, a lot of the system didn’t make sense without it being much more capable.

 

My biggest tipoff was how I could decentralize one of my perceptive fields. While magic theoretically could account for any oddity, I chose to believe that the system was designed to not rely on that too heavily. More likely, the horns picked up everything in the full radius, then simply cut out most of it and dumbed down the rest. Similarly, the wireframe field was most likely configured to be like that so there could be  ‘focused’ and ‘unfocused’ zones equivalent to central and peripheral vision- but a whole lot weirder.

 

I could probably ask Cleo if there was a UI for changing its settings, but figuring this out on my own would let me alter it on the fly much easier later. With that in mind I start just trying things.

 

First off, I wanted to be able to turn it off. Without being completely worn out, I have clue how I would’ve been able to sleep while still seeing my entire flat along with parts of the ones around me. Luckily, no one had been doing anything… compromising at night, but it’d still be nice to be able to not have information flooding my brain until I passed out from exhaustion. With no better ideas, I opened and closed my eyes a few times to focus on the feeling before trying to associate the feeling with not processing visual stimuli.

 

Surprisingly, it kinda worked. Not well, mind you, but things got a little dimmer and fuzzier. Every time I repeated the exercise, what I saw got more and more indistinct. Around when my slowed-for-safety walk got me to the end of the wing, I was able to fully not see when I wanted.

 

Next on the list was altering the size and detail of the fields. If my guess at how this system actually worked was correct, I could theoretically see everything in a 400 foot radius at uncomfortable levels of detail- but that might break something in the prosthetics or my brain. For now, I left the wireframe field alone so I could comfortably navigate while I messed around. At random, I choose a single pen sitting in a cup on someone’s desk to be the center of my focus. I could see the pen and read the branding on it, but I didn’t have enough detail to make out the ball in the tip nor any of the small scratches that must cover its surface.

 

Like with how our eyes normally focus, by trying to stare at this pen- and only this pen- for a few seconds, the field drew inwards. The pace was anemic, like the system was asking me if I really wanted to enable the option to do this, but I held focus on the pen until I could only make it out. There was a little bleedover from surrounding objects and something felt like it was straining, but it had the intended effect. Let alone the ball in the tip, I could see the curvature caused by the ink’s surface tension inside the tube that held it and the microfractures where the cap was forced to expand in order to friction-fit onto the body. The other unintended effect of focusing on one object was that the field was now roughly pen-shaped, confirming the fields were more malleable than just being spheres.

 

Going the other way, I relaxed the ‘muscles’ that felt strained when I was focusing to expand the field outward. When it reached the previous default size, something felt like it settled in nicely- offering a little resistance as I relaxed more. Painfully slowly, I was able to see a larger volume, but the detail dropped off fairly quickly. At the point where I could no longer expand the field, it got to around two-hundred feet across and was utterly useless. Everything was vague splotches of muddy colors, with only objects containing a high amount of what was probably ULE being distinct enough to describe as an unchanging shape of some description. 

 

Moving this field around, I quickly caught something interesting: the basement for this wing was a complete deadzone for ULE. At first I thought it was just an oddity caused by my mind trying to make out anything distinct, but as I focused the field down to a more reasonable size, the feeling of wrongness grew. Unlike the shielded rooms, this area was completely dark. It left like a chunk of the world had been deleted, but as I felt around the edges and found the entrance, it made sense. The sign at the top of the stairs was labeled, “ULE Isolation Storage.”

 

While I knew that the velocity-thing was probably in there, my repulsion I felt from that area far overwhelmed any inclination to seek trinkets. Just perceiving it was making my skin crawl- and the thought of going in made me feel like throwing up. 

 

As I looked away, I muttered, “what the hell is that place?”

You are reading story A Guide to Safe Use of Magically Enhanced Chemical Weapons at novel35.com

 

{The most effective weapon against both MGs and demons: a complete anti-magic zone. Any feeling of wrongness or revulsion comes from your unconscious understanding that you require ULE to live since becoming a magical girl. I’m surprised that they were able to make one as removing all ULE on every dimension of reality is no easy feat. Should you go in, and run out of ULE, your body would start cannibalizing itself similar to starvation but at a much faster rate. So don’t.}

 

“Damn. You don’t need to tell me that twice.”

 

Despite my distaste of being anywhere near the Isolation Storage, I contained my tour down the wing built over it. To be honest, the fun of wandering around a military research facility was starting to lose its appeal, but I was already here and figured I might as well finish my tour. Instead of trying to catalog the contents of the labs and storage rooms, I decided to go back to messing around with my perception.

 

The pen had confirmed it was possible to alter the shape, but there was no easy analog for that to normal sight. If anyone had been watching, seeing my try to grab and stretch thin air would've been hilarious I’m sure. In a fit of exasperation, I decided to close my eyes and turn the whole thing off for a few minutes while I leaned in a doorway, enjoying the faint noise of air circulation fans humming.

 

Before I turned the prosthetics back on, I focused on restricting myself to a more normal field of vision; defining the area by imagining sticking a cone to my face. As silly as it was, thinking about it like that did the trick- for the detailed field at least. After a bit of experimentation, the same trick worked for cubes, cylinders, and whatever other shapes I could think of. The weirder part I figured out was that I could fix the field to be relative to a part of my body, either overlapping or offset. While not practical as far as I could tell, being able to move the field around with either my mind or gestures was neat I guess.

 

With my experimenting done, I pushed off from the wall and scanned around me to check where the guards had ended up while I wasn’t paying attention. One was coming up the only stairwell nearby, and the other was just down the hall from where I was unintentionally hiding behind a pillar. I had to stop myself from swearing at the fact I had somehow got myself sandwiched in a patrol pattern that was so lenient it was almost comical. I couldn’t make it to any of the labs without likely being seen, and I couldn’t wait because the guard coming from the stairs would have perfect line of sight on me once they started up the last flight.

 

Silently praying for [Act Like You Belong] to continue hard carrying, I crossed the hallway, nodded to the guard down the hall, and slipped into the closest lab- making sure to turn on the lights. 

 

As I passed into the room, they looked briefly confused, started going about their route again, did a double take, then a triple take, checked their watch, looked around, checked their watch again, then finally started walking to the door I had entered. With a quiet “fuck,” I ran over to one of the computers and jacked in, forcing myself to look bored by swiveling in the chair as I waited for it to boot up. The guard briefly paused with their hand on the doorknob before entering the room just as the one in the stairs finally made it to the top and passed by outside, not even giving the lab a second thought.

 

Continuing the act I had stumbled into, I looked over to them, yawned, and asked, “need something?”