Book 5 - Chapter 40 - Interlude – Clover – Blind Trust I (Patreon)

AN: Ended up getting a bit stubborn about splitting this one, or I coulda had it up Sunday. Meh.

Will get the tMFUtM chapter up as soon as I finish it (and the overdue chapter afterword for 20), but it's nearly 6 AM here and I should probably go to bed soon.

Clover hadn’t lied, per se. Every single reason she gave her human for why she reset her first two classes was completely sincere! They had been part of her logic from the very first day that she started to consider the elf-inspired idea, even. But. Because of course there was a but. There was one other reason, one important reason, that she kept to herself. It was kind of selfish and she didn’t want to undermine her good arguments with selfishness. Who was impressed by selfishness when viable logic was to be had?!

Her human didn’t really appreciate the difference, but Clover was no longer tagged as a [Rabbit]. She was an [Artisan].

And the difference meant everything.

“Good morning, Clover.” Lyadra, one of the park tenders, greeted her with a nod. Until the reset, the woman had always either ignored Clover or spoke in infant-speak calling her cute and fluffy—very true, but she was more than that!

And ever since the reset, the woman finally knew it. She greeted Clover just as she would any elf!

Clover bobbed her head in acknowledgement and hopped along, unable to keep her tail down. She was never going to take her broadened acceptance for granted, especially since it wasn’t like Lyadra was the only one that greeted her as she made her morning commute each day. Many elves did! Because Clover was no longer an animal, she was a people. Person. Whatever!

As usual, Vivincea saw her approach through the window and opened the door to Teacher’s workshop just as Clover arrived, sparing her from indignation. She clucked a friendly greeting to him, but—as usual—he seemed disinclined to converse. He was so nice and sweet, but he was so quiet. He preferred to just keep his head down and handle whatever research anyone needed done. Admirable. Boring!

He should at least pursue his own research and ideas. Like she did!

“Ah, Clover. Excellent timing, I just placed my latest observations on the wyvern’s anatomy on your desk. Could you go through them to make sure nothing contradicts the previous records?” First called out before Clover made it halfway across the floor.

Like she sometimes did. Ugh. Okay, fine, the mystic anatomy project was very interesting, and she was super curious to learn all that she could from it. But—the but was important! She hated spending so much of her precious time cleaning up after other people. She was proud that they could count on her and it seemed that her own repeated failures had made her far more sensitive about problems and issues. She liked helping, it was just… well, her days were all too often inundated with finding mistakes in other people’s work instead of pursuing her own.

Her own work, not her own mistakes!

She really was busy trying to learn everything she could about body size adjustments with Biomancy. It was a fascinating—and very personally relevant—field of study! She’d once expected the nervous system to be the bottleneck, but her own data proved it was the heart. Blood pressure and blood oxygenation rates had to be carefully adjusted with every step of the increases in size or unconsciousness resulted!

…Or, sometimes, something worse. Clover still felt horribly guilty about the two times it happened, but she was genuinely grateful to the pygmy field mice for their noble sacrifice that they neither asked for nor understood. She made sure that each had plenty of treats for as long as they lived—something that she absolutely wasn’t the tiniest bit jealous of—and respected them greatly.

Which was something she genuinely wished her peers would adopt. Sure, the mice only lived for a year at most—and in nature they seldom got anywhere close to that. But that was no reason to treat them as disposable! Was a bit of care so much to ask?

In a somewhat worse mood, Clover finished her journey to her workstation. Noble sir III awaited her in his cage, somewhat hidden behind the neat stacks of papers that other people had piled onto Clover’s once-untidy table atop her very important and probably finally correct math.

Math was mean. Every time she got used to its rules, she found new rules and exceptions to rules. There was always more math to learn. But even if it was a jerk, math was still important. If Creation was the language of the gods, then math was the language of the System—the language of reality itself. And Biomancy was nothing less than the power to change reality, which meant that she needed to become just as fluent in math as she was with Creation.

“Want to see something neat?” In lieu of a typical greeting, Nyria pulled Clover out of her thoughts with a rhetorical question. She had a pleasantly pleased smile, which meant that she had something great to show off!

Clover gave her bestest friend her undivided attention. Mostly undivided—she still needed to make space for herself on her workspace.

Nyria had given herself lilac-colored skin and two-toned purple and pink hair with Biomancy, which were both very pretty, in Clover’s utterly unbiased opinion. The elf was Clover’s only peer that had taken her seriously even before she became an [Artisan], which basically made her Clover’s favorite person! Well, favorite after her human and Teacher, of course. And so, she watched with rapt attention while Nyria scooped something off her own workstation.

“Behold.” The elf parted her cupped hands, revealing her latest noctsilk glowworm hatchling.

They were kind of her hobby and specialty. Even before she became a [Biomancer], Nyria had been breeding and working with the descendants of her first Bond, trying to make them naturally longer-lived. And Biomancy hadn’t just accelerated her efforts, it allowed her to broaden them.

And the latest result came in the form of a cute little worm wriggling in her hands that wasn’t just bioluminescent in one color like the species naturally was—there was both yellow and green. Clover was excited enough for her friend’s success to (carefully) hop in place!

“I still need to make sure she grows up nice and healthy, of course, but so far it looks like I was right about being able to use separate glands for each section of her body. That said, I don’t think this will breed forward, unless I figure that out, but I know Lumornor’s been working on figuring out how to make pretty much anything breed true. It’s always best to let the most knowledgeable handle the hardest stuff.” Nyria gave Clover a meaningful look while she said the last bit.

Clover showed her friend her tongue before she turned to First’s papers. Nyria might be happy with being a narrow specialist, but Clover wasn’t. She couldn’t be. If Build a Better Bunny with Biomancy was ever going to reach its utmost potential, she needed to be an expert at everything! She needed to reach the level of First!

“Hey fuzzball.”

Most books agreed that any scholar needed to pace herself, but those silly authors had clearly never been close to a breakthrough before. Thanks to noble madam V, she had finally—finally—come up with a working theory for how significant a size change could be before re-acclimatization without further growth became essential! She just needed to check her math at least thrice more, then test it with some other mammal-type creatures to ensure that her results weren’t over-specific to pygmy field mice.

But being close to a breakthrough meant that she was staying in the workshop even after most of her peers left. It was only when fatigue nipped at her paws fiercely enough to make her thinkies—er, thoughts—turn suspect that she grudgingly forced herself to return home. More food, preferably something more flavorful than the hay she was obligated to constantly graze upon, then she could finally succumb to sweet, sweet sleep.

Yet there was an unwelcome disturbance sitting in her home, strumming away at his noise-inducer.

“Don’t mind me. An and the kid are asleep, but I’m still working on my new song. Want to hear what I’ve got so far?” Neyvern offered with a bright smile.

No, she did not. In fact, she would have preferred to trade an entire jar of the good treats just to avoid hearing it! Her human’s friend was always far too loud, even when he wasn’t singing.

Somehow, and Xaoc alone knew how, the elf seemed to utterly misconstrue her very clear stamp of disapproval. Instead, he took another sip of tea—their expensive tea, given the aroma—before he settled back into her fifth favorite napping chair and began to screech as he worked his noisemaker with his fingers.

“Shout from the heart!

“When your fears seem dark,

“Shout from the heart!

“You gotta find that spark,”

Seriously, what did anyone see in him? Loudness was never a good thing. Categorically, it was a problem—an unwanted and unnecessary one, at that! Also, was it just her, or did every single song he had sound pretty much exactly the same?

Clover couldn’t be bothered to feign politeness. Haunted by his caterwauling, she turned away and hopped down the hall, bound for the bedroom. She hoped that closing the door would muffle him enough that she could manage to get some rest. Opening said door in the morning would be a challenge, but she was willing to fight with doors that were clearly made by people that hated bunnies when there were no witnesses.

Except, as she rounded the corner, she laid eyes on her very occupied bed. And it wasn’t like her human had suddenly returned home, no. That would have been nice.

Unfortunately, Solareon—notorious rabbit-eating brute—was sprawled out on her back, sound asleep, selfishly taking up the entire bed.

And with that horrific discovery, Clover made her way out of her home. Spending the night exposed in a park no longer sounded like a bad thing.

Build a Better Bunny with Biomancy had seemed like an impossible dream when she first started to pursue her master project. A perfected rabbit—the ‘elf’ of rabbit kind, just as immortal and ideal as elves were—was quite a lofty goal, after all. And the more she learned and the closer she came to being able to realize it, the more complex it became.

Every part of the body was interconnected. A change in bone material to reduce brittleness required cascading changes that each required other changes to accommodate them. And that was just for the least of the improvements that she hoped to make.

Nature itself was filled with examples that could be used, but Biomancy was a nascent art. And Clover wasn’t willing to wait centuries upon centuries for her peers—both present and future—to catalogue every living creature to find any pre-existing solutions that she could utilize. She needed to blaze her own path!

It was like Teacher had said during that first lecture: “that which was the domain of the creator gods can be seized by elven hands—no ascension required.” Except she wasn’t an elf, but that difference was mostly irrelevant. She just needed to think like a goddess!

Easy to proclaim. Not so easy to do. And unfortunately, Clover was pretty certain that she messed something up so severely that she needed to revert to an earlier phase of her plans and build from there. Again.

Because no matter how many times she ran the numbers, her improved heart just wasn’t meeting the over-tuned brain’s demands for blood flow. And she wasn’t sure if she was even capable of ingesting calories fast enough to meet that brain’s requirements, even if she somehow managed to make a digestive system efficient enough to handle so much food!

Worse, her only other idea for how to improve her brain was even less promising. Based on the theory that [No Forgets!] could replace her brain’s natural ability to store memories, she had considered altering the structure of her brain to add more of the important-for-thinking bits. Except First’s experiments with brains suggested that structures they’d once assumed were nothing more than “storage” space on the brain weren’t just used for storage. Which preempted even Clover’s concerns that she might be wrong about how her Skill worked. Which was probably for the best, since she still had no idea how to even test that without risking her own memories!

For all that Teacher disparaged the creator gods, Xaoc and His peers had to be complete geniuses. It was hard to imagine that they’d figured out how to create life without raining hundreds of thousands of horrendously flawed rejects upon Pallos as they iterated their way up to even the so-called simplest forms of viable life.

Yet for some reason, He seemed to be uncomfortable with the praise she sent His way. Weird.

“Clover. Did you need something?” Teacher didn’t miss that she alone lingered as everyone else filed their way out.

That, or it had more to do with the quantity of papers she was carrying in various temporary appendages as she awaited his attention. Gingerly, she removed the topmost sheet of her explanation and held it up to him.

“Build a Better…? Ah, your self-improvement plan. Very well, give me a moment and we can discuss it.” Teacher took little more than a glance at the sheet, before he went back to closing the workshop for the night.

Soon enough, Clover sat herself atop the table that they gathered around for their biweekly meet-and-confers, while Teacher settled into his customary chair with a mug of warm liquor to read her report. She was kind of nervous. She generally tried to avoid bringing Teacher her problems—unlike some of her peers that tested his patience all too often—but she was stuck. No matter how she revisited the project or altered her plans, she just couldn’t find a path forward that matched her goals. She knew enough to know that one existed, but that didn’t help her find it!

“Ambitious.” Lumornor closed his eyes for a moment while a hint of a smile played on the corners of his mouth. “Truly, I underestimated the scope of your designs. You seem determined to reach further than many of your peers. I see that now.”

She found herself preening under the unexpected praise.

“Some of what you hope to accomplish would be useful to my own future projects. However…” He trailed off for a moment.

No, no howevers! She came to him for answers and assistance, true, but she wanted more praise!

Unfortunately, Teacher was a very observant man. He held up a finger, demanding patience from her, before he resumed speaking. “This project is beyond you, at least as things stand right now. Even if I was willing to undertake assisting you directly with it, we would still struggle to progress much further than you already have. The fact that you realized the exact same issues that I see is a credit to your abilities. It is a rare individual that continues to surprise and impress me time and time again—rarer still for one that came from such humble beginnings.”

He was buttering her up before he delivered words that she didn’t want to hear. She knew what he was doing, and she hated that she already had some notion of what would come. Naturally, buttering her up still worked. Of course it did—she was being openly praised by Teacher!

“I propose that, for now, we should shelve your ambitions. With a bit of patience, we will have a stronger understanding of the structures of brains and the biology of rabbits of all breeds. As you well know, dealing with smaller biological structures significantly increases complexity, due to the demand for efficiency. We have too little information to realize your goals at this time.

“But there is one particular species of which we have a far greater degree of understanding. Working from it as a base would give you a stronger foundation, both in terms of the body’s structure and in knowledge.” He paused there to take a sip of his drink, presumably waiting to see if she understood where he was going with it.

She did, she was enough of a Biomancer that it was kind of obvious. There was only one species on Pallos that they had a near-complete understanding of. Namely, the subject matter of the Medical Manuscripts: humans.

Clover ground her teeth in frustration, but she still forced herself to consider the suggestion. She wasn’t entirely averse to an elvenoid form. She had considered it more than once, actually. But she liked being a bunny! She just had a substantial list of changes and improvements that she considered to be essential to her continued fondness for her delightfully fluffy form.

Admittedly, an elvenoid form would actually solve a large number of her immediate issues, ranging from ‘easier time writing’ to her fervent desire to have a steady diet of savory pork chops. But there were downsides too. Even setting aside her fondness for her fluffy tail and ears—things she could stick on a human—there was a specific and significant problem.

White Dove ignored her pseudo-immortality only so long as she remained a bunny. If she became any flavor of elvenoid, she would be visited by the vengeful shepherd of souls. She would be cursed. There were multiple historical examples that proved that she would, including the legendary Ceryneia, the golden-horned—a deer that gained a class to transform herself into an elf-like being.

She needed to seriously consider it though. There was a lot of risk involved, but Teacher wasn’t wrong—a human would be a much easier starting point for her experiments. In fact, cataloging the biological differences between humans and elves was one of the primary things being explored by her peers! She had planned to convince her human, whenever Ranthia finally returned, to help with that research by donating tissue and letting them study her, but if Clover could take on that role herself…

Will think. Clover wrote her promise on one of her mostly blank sheets of paper.

“Clooooveeeeer! I’m baaaack!”

She had been sound asleep, but some voices were worth waking up for! Even if it was delivered in singsong, as if she was still a young bunny. Hmph! Still, with her tail up and her ears erect, Clover launched herself out from under the (still griffon-stinky) bed, scattering the hay that had stuck to her fur as she rushed to the door.

Annoyingly, she nearly tripped when the Skill formerly known as [Blinkies!] failed to trigger. Old habits died hard, but it was worth waiting to get a better version of the Skill eventually! Hopefully. Claws crossed.

Instead of using her lost Skill, she made a boringly normal (but still very excited) hop to reach her human’s waiting arms.

“I missed you too, sweetling! So, what do you think of the armor?” Her human laughed as she scratched and petted Clover in all the right spots.

There were reasons that she was the best!

Honestly, Clover couldn’t have cared less about the armor. It wasn’t as cold against her fur as the old armor, but it was still hard and it got in the way of proper snuggling. It was armor—it had no place in a heart-warming reunion!

“It is so good to be home. You would not believe just how… cold Ithil is compared to here. Not the weather—the people! Sure, there were a few exceptions, but just a few.” Instead of properly pampering or asking Clover if she had any very important decisions weighing upon her, Ranthia started to complain.

It was kind of unfair, but her human had the advantage of being verbal. It let her effortlessly steal the initiative, but it was kind of nice to hear her voice after so long.

Clover’s fondness for listening rapidly waned as her human pivoted to angrily complaining about meeting a [Priest] devoted to Seira—Xaoc’s opposite—and having to be polite while he led her around a garden and pontificated about what it meant to serve the divine. Sure, that sounded incredibly tedious and annoying, but so was listening to Ranthia complain about it!

Absent a better way to communicate her disinterest, Clover chose to thrash and kick until her human finally received the message.

Some things were worth waking up for, but not worth staying awake for.

“Any plans for today?” Ranthia looked at her from the table, as she scooped more fruit salad into her mouth.

Lucky. Clover only got a single strawberry and a tiny thin bit of apple to go with her yellow pellets and hay. But there were all kinds of delicious fruit in her human’s bowl! Down with breakfast inequality!

She did have one advantage as a bunny though. She could keep eating while she talked! Her nose led her mouth to each morsel of deliciousness while she watched her modified claw scrawl away on the sheet of paper. All she had to do was move her paw a little when she was done and wait for her human to read and reply. Simple, efficient, and worthy of a second strawberry, a solid slice of apple, or even that big chunk of banana.

No, wait! All three!

At the same time.

“Really? I thought you only had lessons three days a week.” Ranthia protested Clover’s plans, blissfully unaware that she was interrupting extremely decadent daydreams.

Clover eyed her for a moment before she went back to eating and wrote her response.

“Six? What in Xaoc’s… Well, if you’re happy…” Her human was absolutely sulking. It was kind of adorable. But tragically, her spoon remained unwavering.

Eh, Clover was done with the tasty parts of her breakfast, and the pellets weren’t really any yummier than hay. She turned away from her bowl and, facing away from Ranthia, began to write out a longer message, dipping her claw into her little ink caddy every time she ran out. It was a somewhat new acquisition that made life easier on her—a shallow vessel that she could slip a claw into, that was designed to slide easily across any mostly-smooth surface! Excellent elven engineering all around.

She knew her human pretty well—Ranthia was absolutely going to be stubborn about her request. But if Clover got to examine living human tissue and Ranthia’s body, it would help her make up her own mind. So, she needed to explain herself very well in the original message, just to keep Ranthia from making up her mind and getting entrenched against the idea!

She had other things she wanted to ask her human that were related, but she needed to focus on her first request. Because taking on one thing at a time was the path to success! It said so in a book, and no book ever lied. Except for books by that one fake scholar that put a bunch of made-up junk and lies into an unauthorized update to the Medical Manuscripts, forcing Teacher to send approximately five hundred and twelve angry letters—but those don’t count. They were unauthorized.

Which she understood to mean something someone did that made people want to hit them with a mallet.

At last, Clover finished her message. She couldn’t write half so quickly as any of her peers, but at least each character was acceptably neat and readable. Her ears were twitching with unwanted nervousness, though she bravely seized the paper in a temporary appendage anyway and hopped her way onto the table to present it to Ranthia.

Tragically, given the frown that overwhelmed her human’s face as she read, Clover might have managed to underestimate Ranthia’s reluctance.

Clover gamely braced herself for the inevitable yelling.