Chapter 24: [email protected] [sic]

Our trip back to the surface went fairly well. As in, we were able to get to the top in a record time of... I think it was like, four hours? The sun was up when we got back to the surface, and I was briefly scared that people would be around, but the invisibility field around the fountain seemed to last until the entrance sealed. God, the look on Nora and Flurry's faces when they realized we were in the Fountain Dimension!

Anyways. It was pretty simple to close up the fountain, just another pulse of magic. Then the water started back up, and I was able to finally bathe all the blood out of my hair and eyes and, I'll be real, a little bit inside my mouth. I'd probably be hacking up monster blood for weeks. Ew. But hey, the feeling of getting a real shower after... several years I think! That was really good. Especially with my new body.

I'd... probably need to analyze further what I said down there. What I'd figured out. But that was a problem for the next time I took a shower! We all know that's when you analyze your problems.

Nora was a little bloody, so she washed off a bit as well. Thankfully, all the blood and gore washed off us easily — the water seemed to drain away, too, so we didn't have to worry about dealing with the effects of washing off in stale water. Or people realizing that the fountain was extremely bloody. That was also a thing that I was glad we did not have to deal with. As for Flurry, the ever-tinkering mechanic simply sat down in the water and started to play around with some magical runes. It was, uh... weird, seeing that from the other side. Normally I was the one tracing sigils in the air.

Actually, the whole situation was a little weird. Once I washed the last of the blood out of my hair and blew it dry using the last of my Style reserves, I walked over and sat next to her. It looked like she was messing around with different kinds of spell, pulsing a tiny bit of mana through them to see what they'd do without causing a lot of damage. Huh. I probably should learn how to regulate my Style reserves like that. It'd make combing my hair back into place after instant-drying it a lot easier. And less embarrassing...

"So," Flurry said, breaking me from my thoughts. "You were... extremely right about the whole magical coding thing."

I nodded, wordlessly. "Uh... I guess I'd like to ask you to teach me how to manipulate sigils like that, but I don't have your wonky head, so..." Flurry scratched the side of her cheek. "Let me know if, uh, there are any advances?"

"Sure. I guess the most simple thing is that you can swap out different elements for other ones, and usually the spell won't change a ton?" To illustrate, I pulled up one of my screens and drew the light spell she'd given me, then pointed out the symbol for light. "You already know how to modify spells to a point, right? Like, the whole air-jet thing used to be a flamethrower. Which, honestly, seems less useful than what it became, but whatever — basically any element can be substituted as long as it's the same 'class', which is a term I'm gonna use to lightly define... er, hm."

I pondered the class thing for a moment. "Basically, a class of element describes the functions and implementations of the elements in that class. For example, the Air/Fire/Earth/Water element quartet is a pretty common one to get tied together — because they're all from the same class, I think. Air and Fire and Earth and Water can all be subbed in for any physical spell element slot, where something like... I guess the closest thing is the 'Holy' or 'Light' elements can't always be subbed in. Like, if you made a spell which specifically created and then shaped Earth, it'd not really work well with the Holy element: the spell element corresponding to 'Holy' doesn't really have anything to be shaped with, so it'd work in a different way.

"The main issue then becomes the implementation and finding of new elements. I'm sure you'd find more from like, a scholar? But practically all the spells in the book you gave me only manipulate the physical side of things, meaning the air, fire, earth, water, light, and... I guess the best way to put it is the 'cell' element. Like, your average healing spell — especially the one you showed me in your spellbooks — that basically just uses the Cell element along with a few spell structures to procedurally create more life in a given target. Subbing that out for Earth would do weird things, but it'd still fundamentally be 'take an input from the target, process it, then fill injured parts with the element you're slotting in.' And, like. That's cool and all, but there's absolutely more than just the Physical class of elements. Plus, this is only the first step. There's also all the lines, the start/end points, and more things I'd love to experiment with that likely have just as much of an impact on spells as everything else. There's a lot of spells that seem almost identical, but that have very minor changes to how they're cast or written that make them do wildly different things."

Flurry listened raptly, grabbing her notepad and jotting things down while nodding. "So that means that to improve your spell creation, um... machine? Process? Whatever — to make it better, you need more spell structures? And more information on how they work?"

"Yeah. Pretty much. I mean, ultimately I've already got more power than I think most advanced mages would? Surely any players. So it's not a huge need, but I don't think we can rely on our enemies being as easy to dispatch as the one down there. Probably need to up my strength anyways." Actually, that was... I should probably ask about what Flurry did to the flesh mass. "Um, speaking of, what did you do to that thing?"

Nora came over and sat next to us, thoroughly soaking in the fountain's water as Flurry stammered and blushed. "A-Ah, well, it's nothing that special, it's... well, basically, I had this crystal I took from some humanoid bandits that we passed when getting into the city? And it ended up being basically a hand-sized explosive device, but it was super low-powered... um, but the reason it was explosive was because of magic and a weird spell? As far as I could tell it took advantage of fire magic to instantly heat up a lot of flesh, which would. Well, you supercharged it by handling it first, and then the thing it was heating up was dense as hell... and once the water in its blood started to boil, I realized it'd just keep heating up, and eventually the crystal probably shattered and released all the magic energy..?"

She took a few breaths. Nora snickered, on the other side of Flurry to me. "Basically it was a one off, I think. Any other enemy would just throw it away as soon as possible, and it's not as easy to use as a spell, so realistically we probably just want to get you a spell that'd do that. But, as far as I know a lot of the stronger spells take at least a few seconds to execute?"

I was about to speak up and say that I'd just instant trace them, but she cut me off. "No, like, not 'it takes time to draw them', like 'once you cast the spell it takes a second to activate'. I think it's probably got to do with the complexity of them — a lot of the spells you use are super simple, like your light and flamethrower and shield ones? So they probably don't take any time to show up. But the more complex the spell gets, the more stuff you jam in there, the longer it takes for your mana to go through it."

"I think," Flurry said, scratching her head. "It's been a while since I've tried to make complex spells, they're always a nightmare to test."

"Sounds like it. I'll keep that in mind." I'd need to remember this — adding a complexity limit to my spellcrafter would be a good idea. "You think people would pay for custom spells?"

"Fucking absolutely," Nora said. "Far as I know, most people pay out the ass for one-time-use healing spells. Giving people the opportunity to make them new, never-before-seen spells??? Yeah, people are gonna pay for that."

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Flurry nodded her head in assent, a wonderful smile on her face. "Better listen to the rogue, ya spellblade. Charge like, a hundred gilds for that service and it could still be too cheap."

Meh. I'd probably not be selling my spellcrafter anyways. Though, I supposed, maybe the creators of the game would use it..? I'd have to leave in some references to myself just in case, heh. Maybe put in one or two CylTech logos in there somewhere. Cylinder Incorporated. The Cylinder Business. 

I'd leave the name for later. For now, what did we have to do next..?

A sharp ping went off in my head, and I flinched a little while letting out a dumb squeak. The familiar glow of a subprocess sublimating into my normal stream of consciousness embraced my mind, which meant I'd probably finished reverse-engineering Pidgin. Whatever that was.

As more information arrived at my mind, it became clear. Pidgin was a messaging service, one outside the game and thus outside normal sendgem limitations. Which meant I'd somehow reverse-engineered an internet browser and connection as well.

I guess to be fair I already had a lot of internet protocols downloaded. It probably wasn't a huge difference in how the internet worked, so. That left mostly just getting the servers this game ran on to work with it.

Nora and Flurry looked a little worried, but I waved them off and got out of the fountain's cloak. Nobody was around — well, nobody that'd notice anyways — and the water dripped cleanly off my bodysuit with no issue. My cloak was a little doused, but a few strong wrings and most of the water was out.

Sighing, I opened the Pidgin client I'd half-reverse engineered and half-downloaded off my newly-acquired internet connection. Wendy's username was simple: "blithelyby", a hash symbol, and then a string of four numbers. It'd probably be bad social form for me to wait much longer than this to send a friend request, so I quickly typed it all in and sent the necessary packets off into cyberspace.

I guess... there really wasn't anything confining me to this one space anymore. I could fully get out of Beyovaria now, go to the real world where I was likely to belong more regularly. But... what would meet me there?

Would it be a familiar cityscape of neon and corporate greed? A utopian society of limited capitalist intention and such? Something weirder? And were there other AI like me, or was it just humans? Were humans the dominant species? God. There were too many variables. For now I'd simply set another subroutine to trawl the internet and eventually download a ton of websites to cache, so that I could read them on my off time. 

It felt a lot freer, at least. The internet, I mean. Back on Earth a lot of the internet was purely corporately funded intranet, even out of the Towers. It'd been a long time since the open internet was anything but a dream, and everyone basically used one of four main social connection services and practically nothing else. It was a crapshoot whether you could get your work seen. Total garbage for artists.

Er, I thought. I wasn't an artist, so... I dunno exactly, but it probably wasn't great. Here, though, it felt... well, there were less trackers. Practically none, actually. And a lot of the stuff I needed to work around seemed genuinely essential. Plus, the whole thing was decentralized — there were obviously a few companies creating social networking platforms, but none of them seemed as directly greedy as back home.

I hoped that was a good sign. Nora and Flurry got out of the fountain after I did — completely dry, damn the godforsaken artificer and rogue — and told me that they were going to go off and do today's prep work on their own.

Any other day, I would have argued. Today, though, I was tired as shit. Who cared about whether or not I deserved the rest? I gave the two as warm of a goodbye as I could, promised I wouldn't get into trouble, and headed back towards the inn for some much-needed sleep. Everything would ache when I woke up — the false adrenaline pushing my body thus far was already fading — but it'd feel good, I thought.

And anyways, a lot of the stuff I needed to do would take time. Wendy would probably be either offline or asleep right now, Nora and Flurry didn't need my assistance with finding supplies, and my internet trawler would take time to coalesce information into a comprehensible format. I'd take some much-needed time off for now, and work hard when I woke.

Once I got back to the inn, I near-collapsed onto the bed and cuddled up in my cloak (now dry from the walk back.) It was easy to fall asleep, my sore body slowly drifting away into unconsciousness.