[CYA] Chapter 175: Triple Jump (Patreon)

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lO_XNMxB_Ceki4gM4uiQai1AcwItP9il8L2y0PgbUR4/edit?usp=sharing

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<Alex, Real - Dorgon Calls for Aid, Innominate Dining Hall>

With the Innominate charging for a jump, the men had quite a few tasks to be about, so as much as they were enjoying their time together, they silently agreed it was time to disperse.

Even so, they’d barely stood when Alex frowned in thought. “Hey, we got four copies of Create Water and Create Food right? It was the ‘Unprepared Adventurer’ pack or something like that.”

Grant nodded. “Yeah, you got one, right? I’m not wrong that I see you using both of those on occasion… Am I?”

Alex nodded. “No, you’re right. Who got the other sets? I realized that I’ve learned some things about both, and it would be nice to be able to share.”

John nodded in turn. “That’s kind of you, but… Well, we traded away two sets to the other Initiates who joined us. I can’t rightly remember what we got in return.” He shrugged. “The last one.” His smile turned sad. “James got that.”

Alex felt a shock run through him. He hadn’t thought about James in… in a while. The shock passed, only to be replaced by a heavy weariness. “Ahh… I see.”

Grant clapped him on the shoulder. “Hey now. None of that. James was a good one, and he deserves to be remembered, not to have his memory drag you down.”

Alex sighed but waggled his head in vague agreement.

Grant and John shared a look, the younger man gesturing to the older. “Now, Alex. Your training schedule—”

Alex waved that off. “I know, I’ll cut back.”

John frowned. “Are you kidding? We’ve all been working on things nearly as much as you.” He barked a laugh. “I wish I had your motivation, and I’m getting there. That’s not the issue.”

Alex tilted his head in confusion. “What? What are you saying then?”

“I’m saying, stop overstacking. Trying to train while we’re making choices means you’re ill informed, and having your mind split too many different ways makes your training less effective.” He held up his hands to forestall objections. “I know we’re hardly ‘baseline’ humans anymore—you more than any of the rest of us—but there is a limit. I’m not your dad, and I can’t tell you what your limits are, but you do have them. Push them, grow them, exceed them, but do it in a way that makes you better, not lesser. We’re happy to train with you whenever you want, and that’s selfish of us.”

Grant nodded enthusiastically. “You’re great motivation.”

Alex gave a self-conscious smile, and John smirked. “All we’re saying is: Make sure you’re training to improve, not to forget. Alright?”

Alex hesitated, then nodded. “I hear you. I’ll… I’ll try.”

John clapped him on the shoulder this time. “That’s all we ask. I know we put a lot on you, and you more than carried your weight in the last scenario. Let us help. Grant and I are happy to chat with you whenever you’d like or need, and I know the women would be happy to talk too.”

Grant grinned at some funny thought but moved past it. “We should plan some rest and relaxation. There have to be such things available somewhere on this ship, even if it’s just a deck of cards.”

Alex nodded. “Oh, there is. Just think about it, and your implanted training will remind you of what you know.”

Grant blinked a few times. “Well, butter my toaster and start a housefire… I’ve been missing out on that?”

Alex grinned. “Hey, Grant.”

“Yeah?”

“Want to train?”

The younger man opened his mouth to beg off, but then realized what Alex was doing. He gave Alex a faux glare before laughing. “Well played, good sir. Well played.”

John chuckled. “Alex, you were coming with me for my rounds anyway, right? Then we’re all meeting up for food and to decide where we’re jumping to next.”

Grant gave a childlike whoop, turning and running down the hall. “Ping me when the meeting’s about to start!”

John and Alex shared a commiserating look. John grunted. “Eh, he’s young yet. Shall we?”

“Absolutely. Just let me level-up first.”

John’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh? I’d thought they were all low level critters. Did the mission give that much?”

Alex gave a self-satisfied grin. “They were, but my second class is level 1, and I used it extensively.”

He felt at his experience pool. As he’d hoped, since he’d used his low level class for the bulk of the work—including the recovery of the survivors which was the core of the mission—the mission's rewards had been credited to that class as well.

He braced himself and said, “Accept Level-ups.”

In the end, he got three levels from the nearly two hundred thousand kills, mission completion, and heavy, heavy use of the abilities of his new class and skills.

Level-Up:Stubborn Student of the Master - Life Runewright (Legendary), ELevel 1 → Level 4Stats allocated as appropriate

Alex felt a strange stretching within his own mind, and his Spherical Sense expanded, reaching nearly seven feet out in radius, and the general sense he got beyond that range seemed to sharpen just a bit.

He swayed on his feet, but only briefly, and his wide smile dissuaded his friends’ concerns before they could voice them.

He set the expanded sense aside, considering the increases.

Ahh, man! Just one level from the evolution… His eyes widened a bit. He really hadn’t pushed the class in the directions he’d wanted yet.

Alex swallowed—reflexively creating some water to wet his throat as he did so—and thanked the stars that he hadn’t gotten another level.

He had a lot of work to do before he was happy with how he’d used his class, especially if he wanted to ensure he liked his options upon class solidification.

John gave Alex a searching look. “Ready?”

Alex nodded. He had a skill selection waiting, as well as unassigned stat points to work with, but he had a few other things to do before he addressed either. It could wait a couple of days. “Yeah. Ready.”

<Alex, Real - Dorgon Calls for Aid, Innominate Dining Hall>

Alex forced his attention onto the myriad options for their next jump even as he enjoyed a mug-brownie soaked in cream, courtesy of his yet-to-advance Create Rations spell.

He had continued to max out the amount of mana that the spell would take with each casting, enjoying the sheer variety that it could create, seeming to cycle through his favorite foods, depending on what he would enjoy most in the moment, hitting the emotional side of food in a way he hadn’t even known was possible.

They’d done three more jumps through various systems completing small objectives along the way.

The first had been another aspected star, this one a variety of flame aspected, which Alex felt was just about the silliest thing he’d ever heard.

Shouldn’t all stars be fire or flame aspected? The answer was apparently no.

Many stars threw off magic as well as the standard electromagnetic waves, and of those, some were aspected in various ways.

This one had been fire—specifically the ‘devouring flame’ aspect—and they’d spent a day with the collectors drinking in the radiance and producing aspect.

That star had been a bright yellowish-white and of uncommonly intense luminosity, the edges of the corona shining with occasional greenish, iridescent hues.

John and Pilar had both been ecstatic at the very idea of the aspect.

As funny as it was, Alex often found himself forgetting that they’d both been chemists before all this.

When they’d first come across the listing as a potential destination in the ship’s starmap, John had actually barked a laugh. “What, is this like magical chlorine trifluoride? I hope the aspect version doesn't also produce lethal HF clouds…”

Pilar had quickly looked up specifics in the ship's databases. She’d grunted and replied almost absently, “Devouring magic fire? I'd swear that's just fluorine chemistry with better marketing and fewer safety data sheets.”

John had leaned over her shoulder, taking a closer look before giving a low whistle. “That’s an oxidizer that doesn’t know when to quit.”

Pilar had nodded, her smile growing. “That’s the purest expression of oxidation without limits that I’ve even conceived of.”

Grant had cleared his throat. “Care to explain to the class?”

That had earned him some humored looks, but John had grunted and nodded. “At a basic level, what you need to know is that ‘burning’ or ‘fire’ is really just exothermic oxidization, at least the mundane variety is. As such, compounds with higher oxidizing power—fluorine and its compounds have enormous electron affinity and form extremely strong bonds, for example—have the ability to attack already-oxidized materials. By that I mean that they can actually continue to generate reactions from things that are ‘burned out’. Famously even ash can be consumed in such burns.”

Juba had interjected then. “I’m not familiar with the scientific side of this, but the devouring flame aspect is widely used in siege weaponry.”

Pilar chuckled. “I’ll bet it is. If this matches the info that I’m finding, the self-sustaining heat release would be so high that even refractory materials—”

John interjected there. “That’s things like ceramic or concrete.”

Pilar gave him a raised eyebrow.

“Sorry.” He looked mildly abashed for interrupting.

“Anyway.” She took a slow breath before continuing. “Even refractory materials can soften, melt, or otherwise chemically disintegrate.”

John was nodding excitedly. “I’m not sure if this aspect enables a catalytic cycle that regenerates the oxidizer, or a plasma-state reaction that keeps the energy density high enough to continue after the initial oxidizer is spent, but…” He shook his head. “This is intense stuff.”

Pilar’s eyes were sparkling. “I don’t much care if this allows for the magical creation of metastable high-energy density materials, fluorine-based hypergolics, or engineered radical-chain processes that somehow recycle the oxidant, but I want it.”

There was a pregnant pause before she cleared her throat, seeming suddenly uncertain.

“Ahh… Apologies. I’d appreciate going to that system, if it is all right with all of you?”

It hadn’t taken long from there to agree.

Alex had no clue what most of their babbling had meant, but if it could potentially help Pilar, that was a good enough reason. But it was more than that. Just as Juba had implied, the devouring flame aspect was apparently a very sought after aspect for the creation of weapons of war, given its long-burning, more destructive nature.

They’d had to have their shields running at full power for the entire harvest, and the system was utterly devoid of anything save the star, making it a little dull, but they’d gotten a good haul before they’d needed to spin up the drive and move on.

The second jump had been to come to the assistance of a stranded ship—crewed by non-Initiates—that they’d taken only a few hours to fix up to the point that it could jump to a nearby repair-yard under its own power.

Finally, the system that they were currently in was another aspected star with what Alex felt like was yet another obvious flavor of magic, despite its apparent rarity.

Daylight.

Yes. This star sent off magic with the daylight aspect.

As Alex had dug down that rabbit hole, it seemed that almost all local starlight—planetside at least—had a bit of this aspect within it. It was seemingly something to do with the interaction between worldspirits and their star’s light.

Many malevolent magical beings were negatively affected by the daylight aspect, and non-hostile worldspirits used that fact to help cleanse their surfaces of such beings.

Once more, there were so many rabbit holes within that, that Alex had to pull back before he got too off the rails.

Regardless, the magical aspect of daylight was incredibly useful for making weaponry and defenses against such beings.

It was technically harvestable on any world with this interaction, but the density was never very high, to the point that getting even a dozen daylight aspect crystals in a day would be considered an amazing haul.

The Innominate had raked in nearly two thousand an hour.

The more he dug into such things, the more Alex realized that he really wanted as much aspect as he could get his hands on.

It was one of the missing pieces for his magical creations, once he got back to that.

As an example, if he wanted to create an item that shot out fire, he would need to aspect the thing with fire. Since he didn’t have any access to fire spells—through the System or via any other means—he couldn’t otherwise create things tapping into that type of magic.

It was as if magic had different parts, and only the parts he had a connection to would listen to him or that which he created. If he wanted to ‘hire out’ magic to do things he wasn’t linked to already, aspect acted as a professional connection, allowing him to make the request.

He almost decided then and there to pick up as many spells as he could of various types to make his life easy, but he put that idea where it belonged, right out of his head.

Doing that would cripple his advancement if he understood correctly, and aspect would do what he needed in that regard anyway.

Yeah… I need a collector and as much of the various aspects as I can get my hands on…

That made him remember the bones he had within his Inventory, those from all the Flesh Golems of the Plague Guard, and he almost whimpered at how many had been left behind.

Maybe some of the others brought some… He frowned. Natasha was gathering up all the ash of the undead I killed. His eyes widened. What aspect would that have?

He then realized that the room had gone silent, and he looked up, seeing everyone looking his way.

Grant was grinning, and John was shaking his head.

Natasha had a humored look, and Kaylee was tapping her elbow with one finger. “There he is. Good of you to join us again, Alex.”

He gave a sheepish smile. “My apologies."

Natasha chuckled. “You’re as bad as my husband, absorbed in his latest project.” There was a wistful affection in the tone as her focus clearly began to drift to her memories before snapping back. “Let’s focus and let me get back to him with as much power as possible, yes?”

Alex chuckled, understanding her humor better of late. “Right, right. I really am sorry.”

Kaylee’s stern expression broke, and she smiled. “It’s fine. We’re all wandering a bit here. What do you think?”

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