by Mills, H. C.
Alec pales.
Dave frowns. “Is that wise? From our experience with the chief, I have a feeling Alec’s Lightning Manipulation could come in pretty handy under-Hydrum. Waiting to use the pearl optimally might not be worth the risk of having a smaller Qi Pool during the next Trial.”
Alec stares at Dave as if he’s the second coming.
But I’m not so easily defeated. “Actually, as you may recall from my explanation before, the pearls are also used to restore Qi. So if Alec keeps it, he can swallow it in the midst of battle as an emergency supply. Therefore, swallowing it now is the riskier thing to do.”
Dave blinks a few times and then nods in agreement. “You’re right. Might as well save it then.”
Alec wails dramatically. “You too, son?”
Dave turns to look at him amusedly.
What’s up with calling him son? Probably an inside joke. Weirdos.
As the two of them bicker nonsensically—Alec’s accusing Dave of betraying him and thereby violating ‘The Bro Code’—Jacob sits down next to me.
“Hey, ehm,” he starts hesitantly, “I was wondering if you could teach me that breathing Skill now, maybe. I woke up breathing Hydrum and it freaked me out pretty badly. It also netted me only about 3 Onkh of Lavi per minute—which is like half of what Aether gets me—so if it hadn’t been for the Lavi Crystal, I would’ve been toast.”
“Of course,” I say, only for my smile to falter. “Wait, that’s half of the amount of Lavi you absorb from Aether?”
He blinks at me. “Ehm, yeah, nearly. 6.5 Onkh is what I’m getting right now.”
I stare at him in disbelief. Is that normal? I turn to look at Kaitlynn on my other side.
“I believe I absorbed 7.5 when I just arrived,” she says with a shrug. “Since gaining the first level of Respiration, I’ve reached 9 Onkh per minute.”
Jacob looks impressed. “That Skill’s better than I thought. As for why my base levels are so low...” He scratches his neck, and confesses in his raspy voice, “It’s probably ’cause I used to smoke.”
Ah. That explains a lot. But not everything.
“How the hell did you get through the Third Trial?” I ask in disbelief. “With the low level of atmospheric Lavi in the desert?”
“Barely,” he grunts, looking down and smiling self-deprecatingly. “I could only absorb like 3.5 Onkh per minute by breathing out there. Combined with the Lavi supplement of the jicca nuts I had eaten, that was enough only until the Heat started eating away at my Lavi. Thankfully I bought and brewed a lot of tea that served as a Lavi-supplement, and my Heat resistance climbed quickly. I managed to reach the exit shortly before the second yam’s effect ran out. In hindsight, I should’ve just spent some more time in the preparation room, so I could’ve walked a large part of the Trial at night.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Kaitlynn comforts him.
“Should’ve known smoking might kill me someday, at least,” he grumbles, trying and failing to rub a stain of green blood off his combat boots.
“Well,” I say, “I’d be happy to instruct you if it’ll help postpone that day. Let’s see, where to begin...”
I finish instructing Jacob in the basics of proper breathing, and the results are pretty immediate.
“Oh, 7! It says 7!” he calls excitedly.
“Well done, Jacob,” I tell him amiably. “Just keep practising till you get the first level of Respiration. It becomes a little easier when you do, more automatic.” Positive feedback is important in teaching, I’ve heard.
Meanwhile, Dave and Alec are sparring. Dave’s using my spear to help Alec get used to his when Alec tries to quickly step back only to trip over his own feet. He goes down in a heap next to me, his spear landing on my lap in the process.
“Ugh, Alec!” I huff. “If you don’t learn to pay more attention to your surroundings, you’re gonna end up on the sharp end of one of these someday.” I whip the offending weapon back up at him after he rises to his feet.
“Ehehe, sorry Emma,” he laughs awkwardly.
I shake my head. What was I thinking about again? Right, the importance of positive feedback.
Hmm. Whoops?
Jacob takes in another deep breath but ends up erupting in a coughing fit.
I scratch my neck. “Ah yeah, that’s probably the Toxic Energy. You’ll be taking in a bit more than you’re used to, so you’ll have to adjust. Though, maybe we can postpone that particular issue for a little while.”
He frowns at me. “What do you mean?”
“I’m pretty sure Hydrum doesn’t hold Toxic Energy as well as Aether does,” I explain, eyeing the other people in the room mischievously. “Oh Suuriiii... could you do me a favour and fill this room with Hydrum?”
[Sure thing, Emma.]
Dave’s eyes go wide and he turns from where he’s sparring with Alec. “Wuh? No no no NO WAIT!”
“Ah? Hold on please, Suri,” I say, right as a deluge of Hydrum falls from the grate directly above Dave, drowning out his protests.
[Tch. Fine,] Suri chimes and the flow cuts off as abruptly as it started, the Hydrum quickly draining away through the grating in the floor.
Dave, dripping wet, looks at me with an unamused expression. Alec is hitting the floor, cheeks puffed up, trying his hardest not to lose our competition.
“Ehm,” I say, thinking quickly, fluttering my eyes at Dave innocuously. “I was thinking we should all practise breathing Hydrum? And, ehm, moving under-Hydrum?”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Dave responds dryly, or, well, wetly really. “But maybe we should store our stuff in our rooms first then, so nothing else gets flushed away or ruined somehow by prolonged contact with Hydrum.”
That’s a good point.
And so we do.
A little later, we are swimming in the living room. Dave and Alec have resumed their spar, Jacob is floating cross-legged over the couch, working on his breathing the way I taught him, and I’m upside down next to Kaitlynn, making faces at her. Currently, I’m imitating a fish.
She laughs soundlessly, and waves at me to stop so she can go back to trying to throw knives. She’s actually succeeding... kind of. It’s harder to make the kind of fast motion necessary in the Hydrum, but we are all quite a bit stronger than your average human. Still, the starting speed of her knives is less, and the drag slows them down to the point where they grow harmless quite quickly.
Dave’s arrows fared a little better from what I remember, probably because they’re more streamlined.
Alec fires off an arc of lightning and hits his target—a stereotypical archery target mounted on the wall—dead-on from twenty feet away, blasting off some of the dried vines. Watching another knife bounce off her own target, Kaitlynn shakes her head dejectedly, before looking wistfully at the crystal tied around her wrist.
My heart sinks a little as it hits me that, out of all of us, Kaitlynn is probably least equipped to fight under-Hydrum. Well, there’s time to fix that still. For now, I just want to cheer her up.
I blow out a jet of Hydrum to the side, using the thrust I generate to flip myself the right way up. Took me some practice to adapt, but like Respiration, Breath Control still works under-Hydrum. I can control the Hydrum by controlling the Lavi it contains, the same way I do Aether.
Now the right way up, I reach out and touch her shoulder, smiling comfortingly.
She heaves out some Hydrum in frustration, before smiling back at me.
Unable to communicate anything meaningful, I instead blow a jet of Hydrum into her face, catching her off guard before I take off. She immediately grasps the challenge and sets off to chase me.
We kick off the floor, ceilings, walls, and even the boys at one point. I teasingly stay just out of her reach, by using jets of Hydrum to speed up in crucial moments. I can’t build up quite the volume and pressure as I can with Aether, but the Hydrum is much heavier, so I can at least use it to supplement my swimming like this.
Eventually, I let her catch me, however. She clutches onto me, hugging me from behind, and playfully bites me in the shoulder.
‘Suri, how long have we been swimming?’ I subvocalise.
[1 hour, 2 minutes and 13 seconds.]
‘I see. Could you drain the room please?’
Aether fills the room, and we sink down onto the thankfully Hydrumproof couch as the Hydrum drains away around us, leaving us in a pile of limbs, coughing and hacking to get the remaining fluid out of our lungs.
Kaitlynn sprays a final jet of Hydrum onto my face and dissolves into laughter at my perturbed expression.
Jacob snorts from his spot nearby on the couch.
I turn to him and ask, “And?”
He shakes his head. “Haven’t got the Skill yet. But I did get up to 4 Onkh of Lavi per minute breathing Hydrum, and right now in Aether...” he trails off to take a deep breath, glancing at a window I can’t see. “7.5 Onkh per minute.”
“You’ll get there,” I promise. I managed to get up to 6.5 Onkh per minute breathing Hydrum myself. There actually seems to be more Lavi in Hydrum than in Aether, but since it’s much harder to compress, I ultimately still can’t take in close to as much Lavi as I can from Aether. Or maybe it’s just that we’re not designed to be breathing Hydrum. I imagine having gills or being able to take it in through your skin would make the process much easier.
Alec flops down on the couch next to us. “Oh man, Lightning Manipulation works so much better under-Hydrum! It’s, like, smoother, easier to control, if maybe a bit slower.”
Kaitlynn takes the disruption as her cue to untangle herself from me and start wringing Hydrum from her hair.
I frown at Alec. He looks bemused.
“Under-Hydrum archery seems viable as well,” Dave adds, sitting down on the floor in front of the couch. “You should really check your Increase Momentum too, Jacob, but I imagine it will still have some functionality.”
“Yeah, I’ll get around to that,” Jacob replies dryly. “As soon as I can breathe well enough to actually survive at all under-Hydrum without the presence of a Lavi Crystal.”
Dave just nods, unperturbed. “We’ll have to think carefully about what Skills to add to our arsenal this time to improve our under-Hydrum combat potential.”
“Agreed,” I say, “but before we get to that, we need to fix another problem.”
I pause for dramatic effect, even though what I’m about to say isn’t all that dramatic. For some reason, this feels like the right timing for that kind of thing.
“We need a way to communicate under-Hydrum,” I finally say. “Because I don’t think relying on Dave being able to connect and speak to us one at a time, while we can’t even say anything back, is going to cut it.”
CHAPTER 16
Who’s on first
“SO, THE MOST OBVIOUS and useful solution to our under-Hydrum communication issues would be for you to teach us Telepathy,” I say, shooting Dave an expectant look.
He hesitates for a second and then nods. “I’ll try. I have to say though, it’s not as straightforward a Skill as Respiration or Meditation. It requires a little more active manipulation of Lavi.”
Mmm, more like Boost Physical then. But still, it’s a low-grade Skill, so it can’t be that hard.
“To begin with, you can break the Skill up in three steps,” Dave explains. “The first part is forming a tether of sorts, a strand of Lavi that you push out of your forehead. Once you can form that and keep it stable outside of your body, you have to learn to kind of whip it towards someone else until it sticks—you can think of it as a fisherman casting a line. The third part is sending your message along the established connection.”
Interesting.
“Does that mean you need line of sight to connect to someone?” Jacob asks, intrigued.
Dave nods.
Alec blinks rapidly. “But you were able to send us messages through the trees and everything!”
“Yes, but I did that through an already established tether,” Dave explains. “Though there is a maximum distance you can move apart before the tether snaps. Not sure what it depends on, perhaps how good you are at manipulating Lavi or how high your Max Lavi is. Anyway, the hardest step to learn is the second one. Took me quite a bit of effort to get that whipping motion down.”
“Okay, that step does sound tricky,” I admit, “but what I’m really having trouble with imagining is that third step. How do you convey your words to someone? Is it like sound waves travelling through a wire to a tin can telephone?”
Dave sucks his teeth and looks up for a bit before answering. “Kinda. You indeed communicate by sending waves over the tether, but they’re not really sound waves. From what I can remember from the Skilldream, I’m pretty sure I should be able to convey other things too, like feelings, perhaps even sights and smells, I just haven’t figured out how yet.”
Hmm.
“Brainwaves, then?” Kaitlynn offers.
“That was my guess too,” Dave says, shooting her a wry smile, “but I asked about it, and they’re not.” He frowns. “It shouldn’t work like that anyway. You can’t just take an EEG and read someone’s thoughts off that. Our brain is a super complex 3D structure and it’s not simple to translate thought processes into something 2D like waves, or to translate them back.”
Makes sense. If stuff like that was possible there would’ve been more than just conspiracy theories about mind control. Then again, we’re not in the Entropic Realm anymore.
“Isn’t that basically what language and speech are for, though?” Kaitlynn asks.
“Well, in a way, yes,” Dave admits, “but language isn’t exactly a flawless system either. Words reference concepts, so explaining something only works well if the person you’re explaining to has a similar understanding of the concepts you’re referring to.”
I blink a few times. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ve seen that show yet, no spoilers please.”
Alec frowns at me. “Huh?”
“Emma’s saying she didn’t get the reference,” Dave tells him kindly. “Let me see if I can explain this more clearly... imagine having to describe something to someone who has never seen that thing before, and lacks the proper concepts to use to explain it to themselves.”
His statement is followed by a beat of silence, as we attempt to process what he’s saying.
“Like trying to explain a kind of fruit to someone that they’ve never seen before?” Kaitlynn tries.
“More like trying to describe an apple to someone who’s never heard of ‘fruit,’ ” Dave says. “Or vegetables. Or plants. Or the colour ‘red.’ That would be hard, right? You could spend minutes describing something, and the other person might still only have a vague idea in their head. But all I have to do is say ‘apple,’ and all of you know exactly what I mean because you have internalised the concept.”
“Okaaay,” I drawl, “I think I get what you’re saying. Words themselves don’t have meaning, but they call on ideas—concepts—that we already know, and that’s how we communicate.”
“Yes, but here’s the thing,” Dave says excitedly, “I believe telepathy can impart meaning! I could send not only an image of an apple, and things like an impression of its flavour, its crunch, but also the concept of an apple! It’s like the waves have objective meaning somehow, but that should be impossible! Unless...”
“Unless it’s a characteristic of this crazy Realm we’re in,” Jacob concludes.
“Yes! I think it might be,” Dave finishes, nodding at him appreciatively.
Objective meaning. Wouldn’t that be something. Perhaps...
“Well, why don’t we try and test that?” I ask chipperly. “Alec, you seem like the type to know at least some Japanese.”
“Hey!” he cries indignantly.
“Do you?” I ask, prodding him with my foot.
“Well, yes, but I don’t like the way you—stop kicking me!”
Pssh, exaggerate much. I retract my foot, saying,
“Okay, good. Say something in Japanese.”
Alec rolls his eyes at me. “What?”
“Doesn’t matter. Anything.”
He gives me this weird look. “Like... what?”
Ugh. Just like Alec to be deliberately obtuse. “Just say anything!”
“Geeze, fine, ehm.” He squints up at the ceiling for a second before smugly announcing, “Anything.”
“In Japanese, Alec.”
He gapes at me.
“Oh my god, do I need to—look, can you say ‘yes’ in Japanese?”
“Yes?” he squeaks in bewilderment.
“Well, say it!”
“I just did!”
“NO, SAY IT IN JAPANESE!” I yell at him. “I swear, if the next word out of your mouth doesn’t make me crave sushi, I will lose my—”
“All right, that’s enough of the Abbott and Costello act,” Dave interrupts. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re already speaking Japanese, aren’t you Alec?”
“Duh!” he exclaims.
Shocked, I glance at Dave.
“You’re shitting me,” I finally manage.
“No?” Alec says, frowning at me. “I started by saying ‘what’ in Japanese! Like this: What.”
I blink at him. “It sounds to me like you’re saying ‘what’.”
“I am saying what!” Alec exclaims.
“NO YOU FRIGGIN’ ” I take a deep breath and rub my temple. My fingers accidentally bump into my fledgeling horn before I continue. “I mean, it sounds like English to me.”
“What?”
I squint at him. “What language did you just—you know what? Never mind. Doesn’t matter.” My eyes widen as the penny finally drops. “It genuinely doesn’t matter. Why the hell doesn’t it matter what language we speak to each other?”
Jacob swallows. “Maybe because All Are One?”
“You think maybe all languages are One?” I ask in surprise.
“Maybe...” Dave muses, “or maybe all communication is One, or all meaning is One, or something like that. This explains a lot, actually, like why the few Hoig who spoke seemed to do so in English, while they were also clearly making croaking sounds.”