The disciple a gamelit p.., p.14
The Disciple: A GameLit Progression Fantasy, page 14
‘It’s not like you’re thinking! It’s dirt. There won’t be anything organic in it. And when it’s all disintegrated into atoms, all bacteria and viruses are destroyed. It’s 100% sterile.’
‘Isn’t there bacteria in my intestines?’
‘Not anymore. Humans need gut bacteria to process nutrients that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to process. You don’t have that issue anymore, so I got rid of them.’
Zed still didn’t like the thought, but when he looked at it logically he couldn’t find a reason to object.
‘Alright,’ Zed thought with a sigh. ‘River pooping it is.’
**
Zed found in the next few hours that you can get used to almost anything eventually. Even eating dirt.
‘You really should try this, Iris. You don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Hmm, you’re right. I don’t know, and I plan on keeping it that way.’
‘Mmm. So good…’ he thought, as he swallowed down some black mud.
‘Yeah, not gonna work, so you might as well stop trying. I do have some good news though!’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘The silt has chromium in it! That means we can make stainless steel, which will be even stronger, non-magnetic, and corrosion resistant.’
‘Wait, so my bones would have rusted if we hadn’t found chromium?’
‘No, I wouldn’t have let that happen, but this way I don’t have to use mana to keep them from rusting.’
‘Well, that’s good, I guess.’ Zed was still weirded out by the thought of his bones rusting.
Zed saw that Silwan was trying to contact him, so he rose to the surface of the river and activated the communicator.
“Hey, Silwan.”
“I’ve got a new mission for you. Come over right away.”
“Okay. See you soon.”
‘No rest for the wicked, Zed.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Zed got back to his room, dried off and changed clothes. He then made his way to the inn’s back room. He was surprised to see Silwan getting harangued by a young álfar woman who bore a resemblance to him, both in her looks and her temperament.
“What makes you think you have the right to tie me down, Silwan? You aren’t my boss.”
“No, I’m your brother. Your elder brother who father will kill if something happens to you. So yes, I’m going to see that you’re protected. Deal with it.”
The woman made a snort of disgust and then turned away, causing Zed to come into her field of view. Her eyes narrowed. “A human? You’re giving me a human as a bodyguard? It’s more likely that he’ll consume me in my sleep than save me.”
“Don’t worry, madam,” Zed said. “You will be savored.”
Silwan looked caught between exasperation and amusement, but his sister had no such ambivalence. She was angry. She ran towards him fast enough to be a blur, so Zed slowed down subjective time. As she wound up for a punch to his head, Zed stepped in, grabbed her arm, and performed a hip throw.
In Zed’s previous life, the result of a hip throw would be falling down to the ground. At the speeds that the two of them were moving, gravity was too slow to be much of a factor. Zed was kind enough to throw her in such a way that she would hit the wall on the flat of her back rather than her head. He thought that was rather gentlemanly of himself. Knowing that he would be the next to die if he killed her was good motivation too.
Alain started to rush over while Constance flew through the air, but SIlwan stopped him with a gesture.
The building shook when she impacted, and she fell down to the floor, gasping for breath. Zed walked over to her and crouched down.
“I’m not a beast. And even if I was, I wouldn’t eat you. Too skinny.”
This time Silwan did laugh. He waited while his sister coughed and recovered her breath. “You’ll be perfectly fine with Zed. He is under contract to me.”
Leilani rushed into the room, ready for a fight. Silwan gestured to her. “I’ll also have Leilani watching you. Leilani, you’ll be in charge of Zed for this task.”
“What task is that?”
“Guarding my sister, Constance, while she is in Harlond.”
Constance got up, disheveled and still breathing irregularly. “No! (cough) I will be in charge of them both. If they are going to be my bodyguards, they’re going to answer to me.”
Silwan closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Fine. You are in charge of them, but you are not permitted to interfere with their role as your guards. Other than that, do what you want with them.”
“Fine.” Constance turned to Leilani. “You watch me at night.” She side-eyed Zed. “And you watch me during the day, where I can keep an eye on you.”
Zed nodded. “We should all have code names when we talk through the communicator. I’ll be ‘Beast’. Leilani will be ‘Beauty’, and Constance will be ‘Icarus’.”
Leilani sputtered angrily about her code name. Even if Zed hadn’t teased her in the past about her looks, she was self-aware enough to know that no one would unironically call her “Beauty”.
Constance, on the other hand, looked suspicious. “What does ‘Icarus’ mean?”
“He’s a man in one of my people’s tales that figured out how to fly, and then hit the ground really hard.”
Zed looked around. Constance and Leilani were pissed, and Silwan shook his head while smiling.
‘I’ll call that a win.’
‘You have very odd ways of measuring these things, Zed.’
‘You just have to know who your real boss is, Iris. That, and I just don’t like her and Leilani.’
‘Yeah, but remember what Silwan said. It’s not smart to tick someone off who can kill you without breaking a sweat.’
‘With the transcendent body we’re working on, I think that I could maybe take her.’
‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea to spar with her to find out.’
‘Agreed.’
Zed looked at the still fuming Constance and smiled. “So, what do you want to do first?”
Chapter 18
As it turned out, Constance liked books. Zed was highly annoyed at how much time he would lose to watching this brat, but at least he could enjoy the time in bookstores. He didn’t have a lot of time to browse—he was taking his bodyguard duties seriously because his life clearly depended on it—but he still managed to look them over.
Zed was surprised to find out that he and Constance both enjoyed poetry. She looked at and bought a few thin books of the collected works of álfar poets. She also bought stories of adventure and romance. Zed smiled when he saw her slightly embarrassed expression when she purchased them. He pretended to not notice.
Constance, for her part, ignored him most of the time. She kept an eye on him initially, perhaps afraid that he would turn into a wolf in the middle of the street, but as days turned into weeks her vigilance relaxed. Now he was a part of the background to her, which he figured was probably for the best.
‘It beats being treated like a dangerous animal, anyway.’
Zed maintained a sensor field while on duty. It was a headache to keep it on all day, as processing the sensory input was mentally tiring, but he became more used to it over time. Between that and watching for danger, he was always exhausted by the end of his shift.
Still, he forced himself to continue working with Phineas on tattoos at night. He had no idea how long he would have to watch Constance, so stopping the work was not an option.
They designed and tested three versions of the magnetic field tattoo: a low-mana version, a high-mana version, and an expandable version. The expandable version was based on the high-mana design, except the lines were narrower, creating room for growth.
Once Zed was satisfied with the magnetic field tattoos, they moved on to protein creation. Lasers were arguably more critical, but Zed was pretty sure it would be the most difficult tattoo. Before tackling lasers, he wanted to build up his understanding through the other designs. Thus, Zed decided to start on the amino acid generation tattoos. Unfortunately, that meant trying to explain to Phineas what an amino acid was.
After an hour of trying to explain molecules to a man that thought everything was made of earth, water, air, fire, and spirit, Zed was ready to bang his head on the table.
‘So is this what teaching me is like, Iris?’
She chuckled. ‘More or less.’
Zed knew it was unfair to be annoyed at Phineas. The man wasn’t dumb. He was, in fact, smarter than Zed himself. He just didn’t have the education to understand what Zed was talking about. So, Zed decided that he would just have to give him that foundation. Or at least enough to get the general idea.
Giving Phineas a crash course in chemistry was actually helpful for Zed. It made him realize that his foundation was a little shaky, with a lot of holes in his understanding. Teaching Phineas forced him to think about not just the pieces of information he had, but how they all fit together too. He achieved a deeper understanding of the topic as a result.
Phineas had initially been skeptical about the whole thing, but after Zed got a bag of coal and started producing edible amino acids, he started taking it more seriously. He still looked askance at the white powder that Zed created, but after Zed ate some he tried it. He found it distasteful, and Zed certainly wasn’t going to argue the point with him. The point wasn’t to eat well, it was to survive.
Zed had only made one kind of amino acid. The human body needs 20 different types, but it can make 11 of them. Humans have to eat the other nine to survive. Zed either needed to make one tattoo that could produce all nine, or nine separate tattoos to create each type.
‘It would be better to have one that does them all, Zed.’
‘Why?’
‘To balance out the numbers for each. If your body tries to make a protein but it’s missing one of the required amino acid types, it can’t make it. The least available amino acid is the determining factor of how much protein you can make.’
‘Okay, I get it. Balanced amino acids. By the way, do álfar have the same issue with having to eat some amino acids?’
‘Yes. They have five essential amino acids compared to humans’ nine, and four of them we have in common. Serine is an amino acid that humans can produce, but álfar cannot.’
‘So we need to produce ten amino acid types?’
‘Well…’
Zed sighed. ‘What is it, Iris?’
‘If you include ogrums, dwarves, and gnomes, there are fifteen.’
‘Are you sure there aren’t a few more for those acidic slime things, Iris?’ Zed asked sarcastically.
‘Don’t be silly, Zed. Agars don’t need amino acids at all. They are a silicon-based lifeform.’
That sounded interesting enough that Zed was tempted to ask more about it, but he shook his head and focused on the task at hand.
For the moment, Zed and Phineas concentrated on creating the simplest amino acid, glycine. Its “side-chain”, the part of the molecule that distinguished it from all of the other amino acids, was just a hydrogen atom. It wasn’t one of the essential amino acids, but its simplicity made it a good prototype.
Once Phineas sort of understood what Zed was trying to make, he was helpful in figuring out a design for the tattoo. The breakthrough was when Phineas realized what they were trying to do was a more complicated version of a hand tattoo that could sort small items.
They made a tattoo based on that design and inked Zed with it. He excitedly activated the tattoo and waited to see the results. And waited. And waited.
‘I don’t think it’s doing anything, Zed.’
‘You can feel as well as I can that it’s doing something.’
‘Well, whatever that “something” is, it doesn’t seem to include making anything.’
The three of them discussed the problem. Phineas didn’t know about Iris—Zed wasn’t sure he ever would unless they had a mana contract in place—so Zed had to manage two simultaneous conversations. It was a headache for him as they came up with theories about what had happened for hours. It was worth it, though, when they figured it out.
The tattoo was building amino acid molecules, but only one atom at a time. After a few years they might have had something that was visible.
Iris came up with a possible solution to the problem.
‘We need to have it build the protein on a massive scale, ideally doing millions or billions of atoms at a time, but the rules have to be simple enough that the mana can handle the execution, rather than forcing the user to oversee everything.’
‘Okay. So how do we do that?’
‘Parallel processing. We need to make millions, or even billions of amino acid molecules at the same time.’
‘Sounds good, but again, how do we do that? I assume it’s something smarter than “Ink a billion copies of the tattoo on Zed’s arm”.’
‘Hopefully. We have to go up one layer of abstraction and, instead of making amino acids, make mana constructs that make amino acids.’
‘So the production will go faster and faster as you make more of them?’
‘Right. And it will naturally fit anyone’s mana capacity, because you just stop making more of the constructs when you run out of mana.’
‘Hmm. I like it. It sounds more complicated though.’
‘It is.’
‘Well, I guess that means we’re back to the drawing board,’ Zed thought as he turned to Phineas to talk about the new wrinkle.
Chapter 19
After a week of not hearing from Mrs. Reynolds, Zed decided to check on her. He couldn’t go during normal working hours because of his bodyguard duty, but he knew Mrs. Reynolds lived at the orphanage.
When he knocked on the door, an older álfar woman answered.
“Yes? How may I help you?”
“I’m here to see Mrs. Reynolds.”
“What, may I ask, did you want to talk with her about?”
“I’ve been working with her on securing more funds for the orphanage.”
“Oh! Well, I’m very sorry to say that we haven’t seen her for five days. To be honest, we’re worried about her.”
The pit of Zed’s stomach dropped and a feeling of doom fell upon him. “Does she normally leave for days at a time?”
“No, never. I mean, she took trips on rare occasions, but never without telling us first.”
“I see. Thank you.”
As Zed turned away, he cursed himself as a fool for not anticipating this.
‘What did you think was going to happen, Zed?’ he berated himself. ‘You saw how afraid that asshole was. Did you really think he wasn’t going to do anything?’
As Zed thought about it he realized the ugly truth. The reason he hadn’t anticipated it was because he wasn’t really invested in the mission. It was an obstacle to his real goals, so he did enough to move it forward and then concentrated on what he really wanted to do.
That was fine, until it came to innocent bystanders like Mrs. Reynolds.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s not much, but I will get justice for you.’
**
Zed was tired of breaking into peoples’ homes. He didn’t like doing it, and eventually the odds would catch up with him. He preferred to have Fawkes come to him. Zed didn’t know everything about the man, but he knew two things he was motivated by: money and sex.
It was time to get some bait.
When Zed walked up to the brothel, he was somewhat nervous. He found it funny that he had faced monsters and deadly fighters without flinching, but this was making him sweat.
‘It’s not exactly in keeping with your whole “nice Catholic boy” vibe, Zed.’
‘I’m afraid I left that vibe behind a year and 20 murders ago,’ he thought with more than a little guilt.
‘Not to me, you haven’t.’
He appreciated the thought, but didn’t believe it. As honest as Iris was, she was not exactly unbiased. Squaring his shoulders, he shook off the nervousness and pushed through the door.
He had intentionally picked an establishment that was, from the little research he had done, reputed to be classy. It was partly for his own sake, but also because he needed someone who could play the role he had in mind. That role, of course, was a “honey pot”. He needed a woman who didn’t look like a prostitute, and could be charming and flirtatious when needed.
The inside of the building was not what Zed had expected. It was called “The Garden of Delights” and, as one might expect, had a floral motif. The decor was tasteful and elegant, like a nice hotel. He noted that some of the paintings would not be considered appropriate in a hotel, but even they were not lewd like he had been expecting.
Zed used his mana to scan the room and was surprised to detect an álfar man to the side that was armed with a sword and had about a third of the mana that Zed did.
‘Whoa. I wonder what he did to keep me from noticing him? That’s a good trick.’ Zed felt a little threatened by the man, but it appeared that he was just guarding the place in an unobtrusive way. Knowing that Zed had detected him, that guard nodded respectfully.
Zed considered saying something to him, but was distracted by a beautiful álfar woman that walked into the room. She was noticeably older, but had aged very well, with fine crow’s feet that did not detract from her confident charm.
“Hello, handsome sir. Can I show you some of the delicacies you can enjoy in The Garden of Delights?”
Calling Zed “handsome” was pure flattery. While he did not consider himself to be particularly handsome, he at least enjoyed an air of mystery and exoticness as a human and had the healthy aura that comes from excellent fitness. In his corpulent álfar guise though, he had none of that.
“I’m afraid not. I would like to hire one of your “delights” to do a small job for me. One that is not of a sexual nature, but will not take much time. At most a few hours.”
The woman’s air of carefree charm dissipated as her eyes narrowed and she looked at him suspiciously.
