Chương 69: Phrasing

"Afternoon Tiviti."

"Afternoon Natalie," she said back. She did not have that taut wiry edge that she had yesterday. Today she was relaxed.

"I thank you again."

"No worries. Again tonight?"

"No, I do not need it tonight," she said.

"I got the edge off. If I push too hard I shall surely burn out and then I won't be able to get there when I need to."

"I didn't know it worked that way," I said.

"Well, for me it does," she said. I looked over to my right, where some guy was staring at the two of us and listening in.

"What?" I said. He turned away and put his head down and said something about "phrasing", but I ignored him. The Huntress, love interest. I was a lot more comfortable with her than with most of the other romance options. For one thing, her age was so impossible to pin down. She was probably fifteen like most of the rest of the first-year students, but that was no guarantee. And while I don't know much about the feral magic at the edge of the kingdom, there are legends.

Time moving sluggishly or too fast by half, people preserved like amber for years at a time, curses that could age someone before their time, tragedies that just made them feel like it had happened. Tiviti was sometimes a cool and easygoing fellow student, and sometimes she was something wild and mysterious that could barely pretend to be like the rest of us. It was hard to judge her based on conventional standards. And of all the people around me, it felt like she cared about my age the least.

If I was fifteen or fifty, no difference to her. And that helped it make no difference to me. Also, of all of the people in my circuit, she was the one that I really felt I understood what she wanted from me. Tiviti needs things to kill. She can be my backup when I kill things. Easy. It's a transaction that does not cost me anything or have any hidden traps. Everyone else has agendas they're hiding from me. Even Yheta, who's utterly transparent in a lot of ways, is still- Hmm. Hang on. Having a revelatory moment.

I really value transparency and openness in others, a lack of hidden motivations. And how that reflects on my own self-imposed compulsory honesty. Which, if I'm going to be uncharacteristically self-aware, I do play up quite a bit. I rattle on about how bad I am at lying but it's not like I ever try to do better. I don't mind being called out on it and getting caught at it.

And I've had every chance to level up my deception skills and instead I've got two skill points that just sit there waiting for me to allocate them. This is not something I brought over from Earth. I would casually lie about an aunt's funeral to get out of a day of work, or cheat on my taxes if it ever would have mattered. And yet.. it's so much a part of me now. It's one of the things that makes me Natalie, and that makes Natalie me.

"You're doing it again," Tiviti said.

"You zone out a lot, don't you?"

"The downside of having such a big brain is that sometimes it starts doing its own thing," I joked.

"How long until you need me to take you out again?" She considered.

"At least a few days. Call it Oneday or Twoday, after the weekend. It's been several weeks since I got the taste in my teeth, so I may have some catching up to do, but after that it'll slow down a lot."

"That's a shame," I chuckled.

"You make a good partner."

"Gods' sakes, phrasing!" the weird guy on my right blurted out.

"What's his problem?" Tiviti asked me. By the time I got to Developing Theories, I had almost forgotten about the new developments, the changes from the Rival status. We were nearly caught up with the innovations that the staff here had been putting on my inventions - by which obviously I mean "whatever I remembered from my high school science classes". And here were these people who were genuinely innovative and brilliant who took these borrowed scraps and were creating new ideas.

They had taken my ramblings about formulas dictating physical movements and finished mapping it all out, writing entire books of Newtonian physics. They had gotten my half-remembered periodic table and started extrapolating precise numbers and methods for combining ingredients for specific compounds. I spun magnets in a copper coil, and they were halfway to rechargeable batteries. One of them had happily referred to them as "standing on the shoulders of a giant to reach higher", and the irony almost destroyed me.

They were talking about me as the giant. I was easily the dumbest person in this room, if I didn't have the game system feeding me easy answers to complex calculations. And the part that killed me the most was when one of them would ask me for a suggestion and all I could do was hash some idea from the 21st century. Like "hmm, I'll bet you could cool a room with that", or "oh, like for dispensing hand soap", or "this could replace a screwdriver, couldn't it?"

I feel like I'm stifling the ideas they would have had on their own by spoon-feeding them the stuff I've already seen. And they're so grateful for all my little hints and nudges, as if I wasn't actually holding them back. Look, I've done some shitty things since I came to this world, but depriving them of the unique ideas they might have had without me is one of the ones that sits the worst. This crap is exactly why we need a prime directive.

"Only a few more ideas to show off, and then we can start working on new concepts," the head of the program said, grinning widely. She shoved her hands in her pockets to keep from tugging her lapels proudly. And then someone came dragging in. Tall, thin, and in restraints. Giggling. He was being held tightly by two large burly men wearing the robes of trainee healers, and when his feet did not hold him up they let his feet drag until he righted himself.

The giggling guy had his head hung low, I could not see his face. But I still had a very bad feeling.

"Ah," said the head of Magnetic Induction, waving the new guy in.

"I've got an idea that needs to be studied, Lady Harigold. I should press you for your advice first before experimenting, for ethical reasons. This gentleman has recently had a very bad shock to his system. It has left his mind in a rather damaged state.

My thought on the matter is that since the human nervous system is largely based on electrical impulses mixed with neurotransmitters, that we could run a corrective current to try to realign broken channels and-""Electroconvulsive therapy," I said, and a chill ran down my back. God dammit I gave them a generator just a few years ago and they've already gone to Victorian torture-medicine. I take it back, I need to meddle in their development a lot more. The scientist paused, staring my way.

He considered the name, sounding it out for himself. He seemed to like the sound of it.

"The principle, is it sound?" he asked. I sighed.

"There will be cases where it can work veritable miracles. And many, many more cases where it will make things worse. But its promise of an easy answer, to flip a switch and fix a person, is a seduction that will prove dangerous. This technology will hurt many more people than it will ever heal, if it is put into production. Well-meaning healers and helpers will feed patients into the torture machine because people crave an easy answer." The scientist looked disappointed, and nodded.

"That is a danger I had not thought to consider, Lady Harigold. I had thought the worst it could do would be to hurt this man's brain, and disprove my theory. But to work just well enough to encourage vast harm.. that is a different sort of danger. I had not thought to look for the forest in those trees." The giggling man had stopped, and was looking at the table covered in straps, electrodes, batteries and regulators.

"My goodness," he tittered dreamily.

"Some people would pay good money for a torture machine like that." The head of the science tour made a disgusted face.

"You were quite right. This man's mind is dangerously damaged. Orderlies, do kindly remove him from this place."

"No no," said a new voice from behind me.

"He's got a point. Let's see what this new perspective has to say. Lady Harigold has often been... stingy with new ideas." I looked back, and I could feel the disbelief pulling my face. The door was swinging shut behind the swaggering, sweaty man in the pompous little suit.

"Dean Corder," I said, and was not able to stop myself sneering. The blustering fool from House Pailser who had tried to hold my enrollment hostage for predictions of the future. He and Dean Skiff had turned a mutually-beneficial relationship with the most intellectual of the Houses, into a vindictive pissing match that was still causing headaches. Dean Corder looked around.

"It is true that torture has been an industry that lagged behind the times," he said.

"Hammers and knives only go so far. If we can modernize it with a sanitary new device? Why, the benefits to law enforcement alone would be vast. And the potential profit to the Academy, just as vast."

"You can't use it like that," I protested.

"To deliberately cause trauma and pain? That's beyond immoral, it's inhuman!" Dean Corder sighed deeply and inauthentically.

"Oh, young lady, I think you'll find that using the fruits of great minds to hurt, kill and exploit people is the opposite of inhuman. Until further notice, this man is to be assigned to the staff here at Developing Theories. He is not yet a full partner, but I will be evaluating him as we go. His mind, before his injury, was nearly strong enough to land him in this class as it was, and I believe that maybe the loss of intellectual restraints may vault him high enough to earn a spot in this training session.

Always one of the finest minds in this year's crop, as it was, but now he's also... interesting." I glanced back at the giggling lunatic who had just casually spurred the idea of weaponizing Victorian electroshock therapy. I looked at him closer. The first thing that shocked me was the birthmark on the side of his face. I had seen this guy just yesterday. In the cafeteria, with the other two Byeview Boys. But there was something else that was dismaying me even more.

[Nux Gysmo][Love Interest][Antagonist][The Madman]"No fucking way," I gasped.

"Yes, Lady Harigold, as this is my department I do have final say over this matter," Dean Corder said, sounding very pleased with himself. He had quite misinterpreted my exclamation, but that's all right.

"And he will serve a valuable post here, finding ways to make these new technologies useful to the kingdom, I am quite sure." Nux Gysmo glanced over at the prototype electric screwdriver.

"With the right attachment, a peerless close-quarters weapon," he chuckled.

"When you're too close for knives, you can either bite, grapple, or drill." His orderlies tensed up when he mentioned biting. They firmed up their grip as if they were expecting a sudden movement. Dean Corder was beaming. We had a mad scientist now. And I was preemptively being shipped with him. Yesterday he had been on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing from yours truly. Today, his friends were missing and he was a giggling lunatic fixated on weapons and torture.

I need to find out what happened in the past twenty-four hours.

"Mother fucker," I snarled, stalking across the grass verge. I wanted to punch something, but busting up my hand is just gonna get me in more trouble with Healer Licard, and that thought just makes me more annoyed because these love-interest notifications keep pissing me off. Punching would be satisfying but painful. And using sorcery to rip stuff up and break things is just not the same, there's not that same primal satisfaction and release of tension.

All I could really do was shove all this way down to let out during camogie practice, and vent it out verbally while I stomped along.

"God dammit all!"

"Afternoon. Pray tell, something is the matter?" Okay, in the game when people could just pop into a conversation with you it was kind of funny and felt very natural, but when it actually does happen it's startling and annoying and distracting. I glanced over.

"Hey, Trazom. I'm just pissed, but it'll get better."

"You're angry over something at the... natural philosophy building?" he said skeptically, glancing back the way I had come from to check this information was correct. I had stayed over there for an extra hour, skipping the walk to the student center and dining hall to get more time with the scientists so I could try to control the narrative of future technological development. We had had food delivered to our work stations while the less-scientific staff went to their cozy faculty cafe.

Dean Corder took Nux the lunatic with him when he left, along with adequate security should Nux start "getting bitey again". I had to bring the inventors around to my side, taking a hard principled stand against letting our work be weaponized against other people. I already had plans to weaponize some of these devices, but not against other humans. So that was why I was coming from the Natural building instead of the dining facility like everyone else. I chuckled.

"I know what that sounds like, yes. And yes, I am. It's the Developing Theories program. People there are taking my work and my information and doing terrible things with it, and I seem to be helpless to do anything about it. This is out of my hands and I hate that."

"Of course you do," said Enefiat Trazom, the Famous, the greatest musician of our age.

"I understand entirely, of course, being in such a similar position." Well that made me do a double-take.

"Really? I don't think I'd been aware of anything like that. Can you elaborate?" He waved a hand.

"Music. Every year it gets... different. I loved music because I could count on it. I could depend on it. I could look at my life and know that when I was sixty years old I would be doing something I recognize. Many of the same songs, or similar. I began studying music early and it promised me a straight road ahead of me. I was the best at it, and people... it was good. I was the musician. Any instrument, any conditions, any piece. People would talk about me as if I was music entirely.

And now, every year the whole thing is twisting further away from me. I never know what's going to come up next. Instrumental solos! Tools and weapons used as instruments! Key changes, counterpoints, marching bands! And this quarter, it's mashups!" He looked like he wanted to punch something. Punch it with his hands. Maybe even his fretboard hand.

"Music is going to a disrespectful place," he grumbled.

"It's all turning strange and dark, I never know what's coming at me next. And the audiences are eating it up, I'm actually starting to have to turn down work because I don't want any innovations! We've had the same music with minor refinements for the past thousand years. I will not endorse these aberrations! And when I get to this school, this school of all things, and I find out that their entire catalog at the top-level music class was dedicated to modern music?!"

he shook a fist, clearly getting more worked up.

"You know that I'd done some composing of my own, right?" I hazarded gently.

"I had a whole concert about it." The path turned now, leading a wending path to the front door of the music hall. He brightened again.

"Ah yes! Those were fun. I went through the pages for that music, and I could see how the modern innovations have influenced your work. And you did keep it to a respectful minimum. Well, except that "Mountain King" piece, that was - I shan't say, milady, but on the balance it was wonderfully done for someone of your age and training."

"You're the same age as me!" I huffed.

"And training," he repeated gently. But firmly. He held the front door of the music hall for me, and I tipped my head as we walked inside.

"I was rather glad to hear that you had put those pursuits away eventually. I suppose you had more painful things to deal with, ah, after that time. And I was doubly glad to see that you were not continuing to write music in the environment that has produced since then. The modern state of composition is a terrible influence. I find I am very glad that you are in this third-string class with all the original music selections. When I've thought of you it was fondly, and I'd prefer to continue on in that fashion."

Okay, it's not just me right? That's actually really condescending? Like there was "sure kid you're a real composer whatever" blowoff, but now there's "I have barely ever thought about you but my memories about you are a reason you should live your life by my standards". Oh, and assuming that I gave up music because I had a teensy-weensy little indulgence in revenge spree killing. Fuck it. I'm not going to tell him that I'm ghostwriting all nine of his least favorite composers.

Well, time to say the same thing I always say when some patronizing chud starts condescending me to my face.

"Well, I do appreciate your concern for me, and you've given me much to think about," I said, pausing outside our classroom. He took the door again and waved me inside with an indulgent smile. I juked left to the flute section, and he went to pick out his custom-made cello. I had been pissed off because Dean Corder and his accomplices are going to mass-produced prisoner torture to induce confessions and brain damage.

And when he found out that I'm angry, Trazom had derailed to bitching about the fact that people are allowed to write music he doesn't like. Mourning that the road before him isn't straight anymore. Gods, is that what I sound like when I start bitching about losing the ability to predict the future? In any case, it's getting more and more obvious that I need to simplify things. The game doesn't force you to start dropping love interests for a few months or years, but I'm not sure I can last two weeks at this pace.

This is getting too complicated and I need to push back against it.