THIRTY-TWO: Chaining

Over the next few days, Alden grew more comfortable with his new routine.

The sleeping capsule woke him up with a false sunrise each morning, and his interface gave him his task list for the day. He always had around an hour and a half of personal time before he had to be at the lab for the first exam session.

He hid out in his pod until the last minute, taking advantage of the privacy and the temperature control. He ate whatever snack he’d stashed the night before, thought over the lesson he’d had with Joe the previous evening, and got in touch with his friends.

Their time was out of synch, so for the past two mornings his call had reached them when they were in class. Only they never were in class. Somehow they always both managed to be standing out in the faculty parking lot when he called, even though he’d suggested that they just let him text them an update.

He thought it was only half to assuage Jeremy’s nerves. Boe just enjoyed seeing how often he could manipulate teachers into letting him do whatever he liked.

Everything seemed to be going well at home. Aunt Connie wasn’t wise to his absence. The school thought he had a severe case of mono. And his friends were busy planning out Alden’s future for him.

They were spending way too much time researching high schools and personal trainers on Anesidora considering the fact that they themselves would never be taking advantage of those things.

He started to tell them not to do it. He was really looking forward to figuring it all out for himself as soon as he got home. But it wasn’t like they were taking something away from him, and they were having fun. Boe was particularly interested in finding ways to spend every single dime of Alden’s money.

He’d begun by suggesting fairly normal purchases, but now he’d moved on to more creative things.

“I’m not ready to try experimental gene editing on myself, thanks,” said Alden on his fifth morning at LeafSong. They were using voice-only today. While they talked, he was making an effort to stretch in the confined space of the capsule.

“Where’s your sense of adventure? You could be a super superhuman if you just paid this guy to inject you with the stuff he made in his attic.”

“Uh-huh. I like Jeremy’s suggestion better this morning.”

“Right?!” Jeremy said. “It’s almost a million per year, but you get customized meals, healer access, and a chauffeur.”

He was talking about the amenities at a fancy, all-inclusive apartment complex in F-city.

“He should cook for himself and walk. On legs with genetically superior musculature.”

Alden laughed. “I’m going to go broke just making these phone calls every day. You two go back to class. Talk to you again tomorrow.”

“Wait a minute,” said Boe. “I have info about the sailor Rabbit.”

It took Alden a second to realize he meant Manon. They hadn’t spoken about the boater in a couple of days.

Considering the fact that he lived with the other humans, he really didn’t have that much contact with them. As Manon had promised, they were all decent in passing, and they didn’t bother him during lunch breaks. Everyone seemed to want him to stay out of their way, and in return they stayed out of his.

It wasn’t what he’d expected or hoped for, but it was working.

“What is it?”

“I think she might be one of the first people who ever selected the Tailor Environment skill.”

“It’s a popular one for Rabbits, though.”

“Yeah. Now. But thirty-something years ago when Manon first became an Avowed it wasn’t. I can’t find anyone else from her generation that has it. It only became well known about fifteen years later, when a guy from India chose it and turned himself into a successful television personality with it.”

“That’s interesting,” said Alden. “But I don’t really get why it matters.”

“Well, you were saying the other day that you thought your own skill had a lot of unexplored depth to it. And that maybe, with practice, it could be developed into something more flexible.”

“Right.” Alden wasn’t able to share the fact that he was learning from Joe or the details of their conversations, but he could give his friends a rough idea of the more obvious things they’d discussed by implying he’d come to the realizations on his own.

“I was just thinking that after spending three and a half decades with her skill, Manon can probably do more with it than rearrange furniture. I have no clue what, though. I followed all her social media accounts. She presents as all open and friendly to her followers. But I think it’s bullshit.”

“Why do you say that? The others have kind of been jerks, but Manon took care of it for me. She’s cooler than I thought.”

Boe paused. “Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Alden. “I was really suspicious about her, but she hasn’t done anything wrong. And she helped me out with the Pineda thing.”

“That’s great!” Jeremy spoke up in a chipper voice. “You didn’t like her at all the last time you mentioned her.”

“I was probably paranoid for no reason. She’s fine.”

“She is?” Boe’s tone was strange. “She’s the one who told her little fan club that you had lots of money the second you arrived, remember? So isn’t it her fault if they thought the clueless new kid could be bullied out of tens of thousands of dollars?”

Alden frowned up at the smooth white ceiling of the capsule. That was right. Manon had told them all about his overpriced lab coat the morning he arrived. He’d almost forgotten.

“I mean…I guess it’s normal?” he said. “Like if someone walked up wearing a giant diamond necklace I might comment on how much it costs.”

“You’re comparing a luxury good with a piece of functional equipment , but I see your point. Just don’t be too forgiving. I think your first impression was right, and something’s off about her. When people ask her what she can do with her power, she only talks about arranging throw pillows and organizing offices for her clients. But she did a ‘Meet Your Senior’ interview with her college newspaper years ago—don’t even ask me how long it took me to find that—and she made it sound like her skill was for something else.”

“What?”

“She was pretty cagey even then. I guess that’s normal. Especially for a C-rank. If you’ve got a good thing, you don’t want other people catching on and competing with you. She wouldn’t say what the skill was called, but she said it was ideal for working in human resources. Which is an incredibly dull thing to want to do with your superpower on the surface, but I’m sure you see—”

Alden sat up straight. “Text me the full skill description for Tailor Environment.”

“Sure,” said Boe.

“Because that’s way different than arranging furniture.”

“Right? And she did have a couple of small jobs along those lines before her skill became a known quantity. Almost as soon as it started getting popular, she hard pivoted into interior decorating, and now she acts like it was always her dream career.”

Alden checked the time. He was suddenly way more interested in figuring this out, but he only had a few minutes to get dressed and head over to the lab.

“Thanks, Boe.”

“I only spent so much time on it because I like digging up dirt on people. Have fun disposing of bombs.”

“Ah, there’s not so much of that lately. The gifted students were in the first sessions. These are the normal ones. They get less dangerous stuff to play with.”

Jeremy spoke for the first time in a couple of minutes. “Why do you sound disappointed?”

“I’m not. It’s just boring. I only got to use my skill on one project yesterday. I spent the rest of the time cleaning up ordinary trash.”

“Poor baby Avowed,” said Boe. “Living a life so lacking in drama.”

“I want practice. Not drama. Now let me go. I’m going to be late.”

As usual, by the time he emerged from his sleeping capsule Alden was the last person left in the dorm.

He grabbed some clothes from his locker and used one of the empty showers to change. The turtlenecks weren’t as bad as he had initially feared. They were warmer than he would have liked, but whatever fabric they were made of wicked moisture much better than his cotton t-shirt did.

“All right,” he said quietly after he’d pulled one on over his head. “It’s time for your desensitization training.”

He felt a sudden tension in his mind, and he tried not to be bothered by the fact that he wasn’t sure if it was his own. Was the gremlin a foreign passenger or just a foreign-feeling part of him?

Either way, it was about to get its daily dose of medicine.

After he finished dressing, he stood still with his eyes closed and carefully recited the requester’s half of the wordchain for peace of mind. It was the one he’d been learning at the consulate before he’d become a universe traveller, and he’d decided to make it step one of his new gremlin-improvement regimen.

Finalizing the contract with Joe had been eye-opening. On the one hand, Gorgon’s gift was clearly valuable. The System had told Alden it was exerting a stabilizing effect on his existence, which sounded like a plus. And Joe had said it was “fussy” about “contract alignment.”

The professor had been sorting out inconsistencies and doing all the magical labor for the tattoo on his end of things. Alden thought maybe the reason he’d had so much trouble was because the gremlin was a perfectionist about the very part of such contracts that would be the most dangerous to the weaker party—misunderstandings created by misaligned intentions.

Since Alden would most likely always be the weaker party when he was contracting with wizards, this was a wonderful feature. It would be especially useful if he could figure out how to understand what parts of such an agreement were causing the disconnect.

The gremlin was a genius.

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In some ways.

Unfortunately, in others, it seemed to be simple minded.

Wordchains were the main example of the problem. Ranting about the unevenness of the Velras was one thing. Members of that family would always be getting a little more than they gave when it came to chains. It was one of the perks of their class. But the fact that the gremlin went around hissing about other peoples’ imbalances so often was more concerning.

A wordchain had a natural time delay. In theory, you said the requester’s half, got whatever perk you’d asked for, and then paid it back in the near future by reciting the portion for sacrifice.

Or, if you were irresponsible, you just waited for it to snap back on you on its own terms.

The gremlin’s whining served zero purpose if it was just detecting a state of karmic flux that would eventually be put to rights by the chain itself. And after its passionate freak-out during the tattoo session, Alden had started to worry about what was going to happen if he dared to become uneven himself for a brief time.

So, on his second day at the university, he’d given it a try.

The first thing he’d realized was that he was awful at wordchains. He’d been right to wonder about it after watching Lute Velra cast one on all those other musicians at Hannah’s funeral. Chains were way more demanding than anyone had ever told him.

Alden knew his pronunciation of the words was above average, and he’d thought he was at least semi-decent at focusing his mind. His hand signs looked like the ones he’d seen in video demonstrations.

He’d worked hard.

But when he cast a couple of the ones he was most familiar with, the gremlin had remained silent. And Alden highly doubted it was taking a nap.

He’d kept at it, making tiny tweaks to the peace of mind chain, until after a few dozen tries, he’d finally hit on a combination that made the gremlin start grumbling at him.