Chapter 23: Chapter Twenty Three

The next day I took off. I was exhausted and our only real lead needed a decryption expert anyway, which Callie was looking for. She reported our findings to the guild, getting a light slap on the wrist for moving without backup, mostly because with Attic Bat's death I think they didn't want to pile on her too hard. Still, I decided that for my day off I was going to have Benny over to hang out and finally do some exploring with my wish power.

I admitted I'd been neglecting it a bit. Sure, I'd tried to start filling my quota, but I couldn't really experiment with strangers. I needed someone in the know, and I'd been too busy to do it. In my defense, my life had gotten nuts. Pretty girls, new powers, evil serial killers, the whole shebang. But still, this was my power and the better I could use it the more advantage I would have going forward. So I called Benny to come over, told him to get anything he could use as compensation and then sat down to wait. Wait and think.

To begin with, I went over what I knew about my abilities. Firstly, my power had a harder time affecting those of higher impact, and having lower impact seemed to make things cheaper. This lined up pretty well with how Impact worked for everyone. Mortals were easy to mess with and higher ranks were a bitch to affect unless you had a ton of power. Secondly was the mechanics of my power. As far as I could tell, the Wish ability was some kind of meta power that made powers, at least temporary ones.

When someone made a wish, my power seemed to create a sort of one time use template for that wish, treating it like a consumable ability. The stats needed for the wish were channeled through the ability to make it function, the base amount amplified the structure of the wish...somehow. But the wish was destroyed in that process. The ability seemed to use the connection of the wish to draw the compensation into the ability itself like a second type of fuel, and when it was destroyed that compensation flooded back into me along with the stats that were used.

For things like bank transfers, it seemed it was the concept of the compensation that was used, which worked the same. That made sense given the nature of abilities as a conceptual force. That same conceptual nature also helped explain why trying to wish for secrets was apparently incredibly cost inefficient. Whereas normal cultivation empowered things through renown, based on the feeling I got when trying to feel out that encryption wish, the opposite was also true. Ignorance was its own sort of power, and a secret kept had conceptual weight that I needed Perception to get past.

I also knew my power was unique in some way, or at least special. The existence of that three times modifier for wish granting and the fact that altering my power destroyed it meant that somehow my ability had been optimized. Given the process for synergizing I could only assume someone had built the damn thing, probably the original Wishmaster, and I couldn't imagine the amount of skills he'd needed to include to get it to where it was. I also had no clue how the hell he'd managed to create some sort of bloodline for it.

From what I can tell most abilities were semi random, and someone could get anything. The existence of an entire line of people with the Wish ability, or even a fraction of that line, meant the Wishmaster had done at least two things with powers that made no gods damned sense to me. I shook that train of thought off though. It was interesting but didn't help with my actual experiments. As if summoned by the thought I heard the doorbell ring and let Benny inside.

He gave me a grin and carried a backpack in, tossing it on my couch. "Hey man, brought the stuff. You ready to get this show on the road? Because I have so many things I want to wish for. I know we can only do four today but still, I'm pumped for this." He gestured over to the bag. "Not to mention I called in some favors with dads old friends and got some pretty valuable stuff to offer as payment. I know you said the payments have to be legit, no back end deals or your power won't accept."

I nodded, curious what was in the bag, but not wanting to take it in case my power decided I was taking possession of them and counted them as mine. I didn't know the limits here and I wanted to be careful. "Ok. So before you make your wishes a few things. Like we said you only get four. Try to aim for stuff that doesn't involve high ranking Ascendant things. Skills are fine, can't do an ability until I hit G rank and get more impact. Other than that, go nuts." I nodded, thinking I got everything. I didn't want to limit him too much in case he found some loophole I hadn't considered.

He grinned. "Well hell man, I'm just spoiled for choice." He hopped up to sit on the back of the couch, something Zeke HATED for some reason and that he never did when my Uncle was home. "So I've been thinking this over, and I want to make my first wish something that'll help you. I know if you convince me to do that it doesn't work because the compensation will be unfair, but since it's my idea it should be fine. So with that said, I'm going to try the obvious. I wish we knew who this serial killer was."