-Just another average day-
Well, not really. Celeste was ill.
Well, mildly ill. She had a nasty headache, one that was keeping her ‘bedridden’. She seemingly had a system; she would sleep for an hour, and then she would play checkers (or, if no one was available at the time, solo card games in the vein of solitaire) for another hour, then sleep another hour, then have some soup and read for another hour, then sleep, checkers, sleep, and so on. She said it worked, and did her best to assuage the girls that she’d be fine, she’d had it before and this had worked.
But, it had hit her when no one else was at the house. Christopher had left for a tri-monthly supply run, needing to get even more supplies as Celeste and Patty looked to be heading back to the lands of the Kobbers soon, and Patty was off with Sunny training with her over the latest ‘gift’ Sunny had been given (some piece of tech, was all the dragon girls knew). Left to their own devices otherwise, Vimmy and Venny had the run of the property and no assignments besides checking in on their mother.
Keeping themselves intermittently occupied wasn’t as hard as it could have been, the two having plenty of things to get into and distract themselves with. Either together or apart, they’d managed to fiddle with their own devices or just wile away the hours, Vimmy mostly focussing on fine tuning her drones a little more and Venny reading or sketching whatever she happened to decide to draw. Drifting in between when Celeste was awake or asleep, they’d stood watch a little uneasily. Her system did seem to be working for her, but they didn’t like seeing the effects of the headache on her when there wasn’t much they could do to help with it beyond just being around.
They’d eventually ended up at the library in the lower levels of the house, quietly reading in between small snippets of conversation. Their time in Weav had deepened their already tight bond, enough they could almost guess what the other was thinking just based on surface clues. Venny had dug into a couple of books on the surrounding areas and their flora and fauna, while Vimmy had found a few accounts of things the Ravenskys had taken part in in the past and settled down to read through them. Oh, here was an account of the Hinagon, Celeste had mentioned that before. And Dawn had video of the event, which is mainly how Vimmy knew about it. She’d only done one move at said event, one hell of a kick to the enemy, but it had been…well, one hell of a kick. Against a Harrower, everything counted. She’d broken most of the bones in her leg doing it, according to her, so she sure as heck hoped it had counted.
Vimmy had been returning some of the books she’d taken to their places on the shelves when she’d found another one that looked interesting, but when she’d gone to take it there had been some resistance to being removed, causing muffled sounds she couldn’t immediately place; A few seconds later the shelf seemed to dip and then silently parted from the wall like a door, she stepping back and making a surprised sound. Venny had looked up at her then stared as Vimmy examined the parting, pausing and turning to her with big eyes. “Uh…”
“Yeah, I see it. What’s that, do you think?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I dunno, a secret room? Maybe a passage or something?” She said hesitantly. “Come here, let’s… Let’s check it out!”
“Eh… I don’t know. Secrets are secrets for a reason, you don’t think it’s a little like snooping?” Venny asked; despite saying that, she was still rising and walking over to join her.
“I think if it were like that, there’d be no chance anybody could find it. This is probably more like a normal secret, not a life or death one.” She pointed out. Venny nodded, seeing what she meant. “Well- oh, okay. Just a peek, though.”
They held their breath as Vimmy slowly opened the bookshelf, both noticing it didn’t creak or make a real noise when she did; That probably meant the hinges weren’t old or rusty. The sight of many crates and boxes greeted their low light vision, the two of them hesitating at the entrance before walking towards them all. It seemed the room was being used for storage more than anything, from what they could tell.
“...Huh! It’s not what I was expecting.”
“What did you think it was going to be?” Venny said, smiling a little. Once she’d seen the crates stacked neatly she’d been reminded of holiday decorations bundled away in a garage, even though she knew that wasn’t the case here.
“Well, I don’t know! Some big thing you wouldn’t want people to just stumble across, I guess.” She pointed out. Venny shrugged. “I think these count. I wouldn’t want a bunch of boxes all over my house either, tripping people up and taking up space.”
“What do you think is in them?”
“I’d say it doesn’t matter, that’s a step too far. They’re in here for a reason even if it’s totally benign. I don’t want to poke around in them, we’d have been told if it was something we should have looked at in the first place.” Venny decided, Vimmy hesitating before she nodded in agreement. “Well… Huh. I wonder how many secret rooms and passages and things there are here in the house.”
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands!” Venny said, before she laughed a little. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Think you can figure out how to close it back up?”
“I sure hope so.” Vimmy said, taking a look over her shoulder at the crates as they walked back out. Despite herself, she couldn’t help but wonder…
As it turned out, closing the secret passage was just down to pulling on the false book again. The two girls resumed perusing the shelves.
It was Venny who noticed the lone book on top of said shelves, having been out of sight before the hidden door being opened had adjusted its position, apparently having been right on the ‘hinge’ between two bookshelves, and being ‘left behind’ when the door was closed again. Hovering up a bit, she pulled it down. This one was a bit dusty, but the title was clear.
THE FOUR BIDDEN LESSERS.
The book was also locked. As in, it had a lock keeping it closed, like a diary.
“Hey- look at this.” She said, after wiping the front off with her palm. “It was up top there, sort of tucked away.”
“The four bidden- the forbidden?” Vimmy asked, leaning in and squinting at the lock. “What’s that mean?”
“I think it’s actually four, or a play on words or something. It’d just say forbidden if it was forbidden. Though I guess that could be why it’s locked shut like this.” Venny said, looking down at it too.
“Huh! We’re finding all kinds of things in here. What do you think it says?”
“I have no idea. I don’t remember anybody saying anything about Lessers, four bidden or not. Do you?” Venny asked, Vimmy shaking her head. “Maybe it’s something we’re not- No, that makes it sound intentional. Maybe it’s just something that has no bearing on us, you know? Like how I wouldn’t expect Julia to know about, I dunno, ancient Roman culture or something. It’s just not something that would come up for her.”
“I get what you’re saying. Well… Let’s show it to mom, maybe she’ll tell us. Or at least, take it back and hide it better. If we weren’t supposed to see this either it probably should’ve been put somewhere we wouldn’t just run across it. At all. ” Venny suggested. Vimmy nodded before looking back down at the lock on the front. “...Why do you think it’s bound like that?”
“Probably not meant to be read by just anybody at their leisure, would be my guess. Who knows why? But that’s the only reason I could think of. That or it’s a private matter, but it comes to the same thing.” Venny pointed out. “We’ve got a few minutes before she wakes up again, let’s clean up and then we can get to the bottom of this.”
—
The fact that Celeste, who had woken up for her ‘soup and book’, looked a touch alarmed when the two girls showed her the book they’d found was worrisome.
“...you certainly know how to keep me on my toes. This is not the kind of reading material I should peruse at this time. For relaxation, anyway. You were down in the lower libraries?”
Yes.
“Curious little cats. Well, at least you didn’t try to open it. This keyhole is a fake. Attempting to force the book open or insert a key into it will trigger spells that would destroy it. If we don’t want it opened, it stays closed, and if someone tries to get it open anyway, well…some things are better lost. No no, it’s not an EVIL or cursed book or anything.” Celeste said as the girls looked worried in turn. “It just has…things we like to have recorded…but not things we’d like to have known.
“...but you did stumble over it, which might be an indication from the universe. I do think you girls can handle the knowledge of what’s in here. Maybe not in EXECUTION, but just so you know what it is, and why it’s hidden. All right, the actual way to open this is…hook my finger on this corner…there’s a very tiny button…the code is…three presses…” A very faint series of clicks. “Then one…then five….and then four.”
Click-clickclickclickclickclick-clickclickclickclick. The lock part on the front of the book popped off, allowing the book to be opened.
Within…was what appeared at first glance to be an anatomy book, with handwritten pages and all sorts of instructions and theorems.
“We’ve told you about the subset of Stream-based uses for combat and general use on the body and mind. T.A.N.G.L.E, thaumaturgy, and the basic techniques for using it for attack and defense. Which neither of you can use because you can’t tap the Stream, but we did still show you said basics.” One might not be able to repair an engine themselves, but they could still look at and understand the blueprints. “The Fray and the Aegis arts. Like martial arts, there are ranks to them. Various things let you do more, more power, more variety, and so on.
“Well…these are techniques off the end of the map. For combat, the Fray, that is. Stuff we personally developed because…well, we’re strong and…kind of prone to excess.” That was one way of putting it. “Techniques we’ve determined are…somewhat workable, but not feasible. Even for us, especially with extended use. Hence the name. There’s four of them, it’s wordplay…as for Lessers, it’s our naming convention. Now, as said…these are techniques we personally developed, but overall, we’ve decided that the risks and long term detriments mean we don’t want the knowledge being wide spread.We haven’t even taught any of our children these techniques. We don’t want to risk it. For the most part…every now and then, somewhere in the world, someone who’s a good person starts figuring out one of said techniques in their own way…and we, if we found them, would combine our knowledge with theirs so they could learn it in a more safe way. And do our best to make sure that knowledge stays with them. There’s been like…seven people like that, over the years. And some bad people, but we just made sure they couldn’t do anything. We haven’t even shown this book to our friends and family, the 44, any of them. But between your devotion to us, and your unique bodies meaning none of these would likely work for you, I think I can tell you. I assume, like the secret history of our world, you’ll keep it to yourselves.” Well, yes. That went without saying. The two girls would have kept very BAD secrets for their mother; ‘good’ secrets like this they’d likely die before revealing. Unless they determined it was best otherwise of course. They were still learning the finer details of that possibility; hopefully they’d never have to use that knowledge. Sort of like what was in the book, actually.
“The first one, you wouldn’t even need if you COULD use the Stream. You already sort of have it, based on your altered semi-artificial muscle fibers, the ‘merged twitch’ muscle fibers and all that. But for us normal flesh and bloods, we call the technique Heedless. It’s using the Stream to invoke full use of uninhibited muscle power at will. What makes it different than say, a panicking mother, is that it is executed across the entire body. All the muscles, in sync. Which just means more ways it can go wrong. Tear your body up horribly, break your own bones…but, it does provide a considerable strength boost. But, as said, your muscles just sort of do that naturally, so it probably wouldn’t work for you at all. Same way the Glorious didn’t affect you.” Now that they had some context, they could see how the anatomy drawings tied to what Celeste had said, the specific instructions on Stream control, the results, and the downsides. It did seem to cause severe muscle swelling, like your body was actually getting extra mass added directly to it when the technique worked…and the damage that could happen during it or if you didn’t ‘cool down’ properly.
After the book was opened they’d taken their standard formation of one dragon on each side, Vimmy and Venny blinking down at the diagrams and written notes with a little surprise. Neither one had quite expected the reality, but the gist made sense to them; There was always something new to learn in any arena, and Stream-based applications would fit right into that… especially with other people likewise working on their own understanding of it all. Still, the title being both four bidden and forbidden made a little more sense. While initially disappointed that the sum of their own Stream capabilities were and always would be a true option of last resort, it hadn’t made them any less interested or curious in a world beyond their own.
The Heedless technique sort of exemplified that, and the other takeaway; They already had so much going for them there was no reason to be greedy. The drawings and notations were a little clearer from the first, but even the obvious side effects or ways it could go wrong pointed out pretty clearly why it wasn’t something to be messed around with idly.
“...Huh. So this would sort of be, the next logical step from using the Stream to boost your own movements and capabilities, I guess…” Venny muttered, narrowing her eyes. “No wonder it’s off the edge of the map.”
“...It really does come down to anatomy to a pretty big part, doesn’t it? Even before we really knew exactly why some of the things we’ve seen and been in didn’t quite take on us, that was sort of our guess.” Vimmy said, not quite going pale but a little preoccupied by imaging the use of uninhibited muscle strength. She knew the body had locks on it, both physical and mental, to prevent just that, because of the danger and trauma, but in a pinch… She could see why it would be forbidden off the rip.
“Especially for the next technique. This is one I’ve used. I’d used. Heartless.” Ah, hence the ‘Lessers’ name. Were all of them going to be named Something-Less? “We’ve shown how Stream use acts as a growth agent for our bodies. Allows us to be more than human. This is generally a sort of all around strengthening and toughening as you learn its ways, but it CAN be targeted. The Heartless technique, we’ve basically determined that specialized training to apply an extra amount of that process to the cardiovascular system is needed. Without that, things go bad real fast. Not impossible, but…well, real bad. But, if you improve your body the right way, like I have…Heartless overclocks the cardiovascular system. Which in turn rapidly boosts the metabolic rate of the body. We also called it Hummingbirding, because when done…it sounds like a hummingbird’s wings. Made very loud. You can hear the person’s heartbeat like a muted drum even when it’s just ‘warming up’...and when it’s going, well, the average person’s heart goes at 180 or so beats a minute or so when exerting themselves…Heartless can double that, even get it close to triple that rate. It almost sounds like a buzzing low roar at that point.” From Celeste’s tone, she definitely sounded like she was speaking from experience there.
“The technique also requires a sort of ‘skin breathing’, because the lungs can’t provide enough oxygen for the blood to get the effective ‘supercharge’, you need more air. Done right, it mainly increases your capacity to utilize acceleration and torque to make your blows stronger. And it can, and pretty much will, cause blood vessel damage, cerebral hemorrhaging, damage to the brain from how fast the blood is being run through the body, we’ve noted memory loss, and hallucinations, both visual and audial. I had those, the audial ones. And of course, overdo it or go past even your extended limit, and you get heart failure and death. Or in two cases we’ve recorded…literal heart explosion, the organ just going too fast and hard and breaking completely.”
It also apparently caused skin darkening and intense vascularity, there being a drawing of Celeste with her body a mass of superficial veins bulging across her whole drawn form, including eyes stained red with burst blood vessels, which, from how it was drawn, made her look like her eyes were a midnight black.
“Patty started figuring this one out on her own…we’ve asked her to stop working on it until she turns 21. If she still wants to consider it as an option, we’ll consider teaching her the technique as we’ve designed it. I hope she changes her mind. I’m pretty sure the reason I react so badly to the cold when I’ve sealed myself is because I damaged myself using it. But…doing so saved lives. So, a worthwhile sacrifice.”
“...Oh, my god.” Vimmy said quietly. The How made sense, it followed one thing after the other… but the full reality of it still made her swallow and put a hand over her mouth. It was a specific sort of targeting, the kind of thing that would obviously be an ace held back in reserve, but the consequences were- Despite herself she could imagine it, a heart beating so hard and fast other people could hear the motion and blood pressurized beyond what anything could normally have and survive. Even though they were entirely different, she couldn’t help but wonder how a mechanically assisted heart like hers or Venny’s would compare just down to the numbers.
“Huh. So this is- Yeah, it would be the next entailment. I’m not going to pretend the implications aren’t a little terrifying, but it does make sense as progression.” Venny nodded. “You definitely weren’t kidding about the more than human part. I honestly can’t imagine anyone who wasn’t trained, ready, and prepared trying something like this and living through the next ten minutes of their life.”
Vimmy looked back down at the annotations and the drawing itself, not able to keep from it. As cut and dried as it was, and despite the scientific sort of way it was presented… the sketch of Celeste still looked like she was in pain to her, and Vimmy could just barely imagine the totality of the feeling. She leaned a little bit back and then made herself look again, because it was important.
“If it helps, Patricia’s unique ‘Bones’ technique where she can somewhat ‘rubberize’ her form might make it safer for her to use…maybe. We’ll see. And even so…Stream healing, and specialized healing like the chrono-manipulation my sister in law Christine uses can repair heart damage. And there ARE heart transplants. In THEORY, you can handle the damage the first two of these techniques can, and will, cause. The last one we’ve actually…worked out, though? Not so much. We alternately call it Timeless, or Mindless. There’s training we do that allows us various kinds of altered perception, but those are, if you can manage them, safe…well, safe-ish. Think of them like when you were growing your seeds. Correct use of the soil, water, plant food, light, all combining to make a better whole.
“This technique, however, it’s akin to feeding raw Stream energy into the seeds to induce immediate, explosive growth. Specifically, Timeless involves directly manipulating your brain’s bio-electrical signals via Stream technique to induce a condition called tachyphysia. Your brain actually enters, or more accurately, is forcibly warped into an altered state where its perception of time gets slowed down, directly. Beyond hand-eye coordination, or reflexes, or Stream empowering of those, or Christine directly fiddling with local time itself…in this state, fast movements, actions, events, they all go at a crawl, and those who are ludicrously fast, even they seem to move slow. I’ve seen Christopher catch bullets between his fingers using the technique, and someone else we helped figure it out repeatedly dodged lightning AFTER it had been fired. That is something of extreme note; if you want to dodge lightning, even if you’re as good as us with potential and training and Stream use and all that, we, and you, do it by assessing it’s coming and moving BEFORE the bolt is fired. Because lightning goes at 3,700 miles a second. Once it’s out, no amount of reflexes can help you. Unless, in our world anyway, you use Timeless. Well, and have an incredibly well honed body and reflexes, but no one who could figure out and use Timeless WOULDN’T have that.
“I’m sure you can hazard a guess on why this sort of thing is bad. But altering your brain’s own natural electrical signals is just part of the danger. It also forces your brain to process information much faster than a brain is meant to. Christopher only used it because his brain’s been altered, and he can shunt some of the danger onto the computers inside his head, interconnected with his actual brain. I…wasn’t so changed, so…I made minimal use and quickly abandoned it. And tachyphysia can go the other way: you see things happening faster than they are, instead of slower, which doesn’t help you at all, so you have to not only induce it, but induce it the right way, which adds more strain and consequence. The brain is the one part of the body that doesn’t naturally heal and get restored if it’s damaged, and that holds true with our special healing techniques as well. Christine can do more with her unique one of a kind powers, but she’s one woman. Timeless causes death, brain damage, paralysis, insanity…or well, our studies indicate that it would do that. We don’t have a lot of real world data to draw on. Even using it ‘right’, it rapidly becomes akin to basically doing one of those colored block puzzles that you have to twist around to try and make all the colors the same on each side…with one hand. On a time limit. And if you fail, you get badly electrocuted. And honestly, electrocution and death is a kindness to some ways that it could go wrong. At least, that’s what we theorize.”
Those ‘theories’ had drawings, of course. People whose heads were literally smoking, their hair on end from static electrical ‘sidecharge’, their pupils so small that they were more or less gone, inducing a sort of ‘blank madness’ in their gaze. There were also considerably less notes than the first two: the Heedless technique could have been learned out of the book, and the Heartless could probably have been put together if you had other knowledge learned from Stream technique use. But the Timeless? Only a few solid details, and otherwise a lot of theorizing and in some ways, catastrophizing.
Listening quietly, the two had nodded along as the picture of Timeless made itself clear to them; More than just a garden variety Haste effect or something like that, it was a totality of speed and reaction that made it much more. Even early on in Celeste’s explanation they were able to grasp the particulars of why it wasn’t something to be trifled with or the sort of thing that could be flippantly experimented with; Any other organ for the most part could be healed, or fixed to a degree, or something along those lines, but brains were a different matter entirely. It was partly why their own hadn’t been replaced or slotted with machines, only the outputs and inputs enhanced.
“...sounds about right. To go back to something, the whole thing of dodging lightning- Once it’s coming it’s too late, but with something along these lines, I could see that making the difference. You’re barely measuring a space between seconds, you’d be, well, the whole rate of everything would just stretch, I’d think.” Venny nodded, raising her eyebrows. The fact that Christopher and her mother had managed to utilize it surprised her on the surface level, but not much beyond that. IF anyone would have the ability to do so and live…
“I can see why this one is a lot of conjecture and thought but not a lot of practical experience. After it’s said and done I don’t think anyone would be in a state to get much information you couldn’t already guess from.” Vimmy said, once again taken by the drawings and sketches of the potential aftereffects. She’d immediately grasped why there weren’t as many notes… In their own ways, both the dragons were a little morbidly curious; If this was the third of the Lessers, what was the fourth? And their mother, after all, was a mind reader.
“The last one, well…it’s more or less just theory. It’s taking all these and combining them. Using them all at the same time. We just, for lack of a better term, call it Nevertheless.”
This was just a few small notes and sketches, mostly what looked like math equations that showed the process was essentially impossible under virtually all circumstances.
“From what we’ve learned, as we have no practical experience at all…this wouldn’t work. It can’t. The strain of it, the pain it would cause, the DAMAGE it would do to you even if you somehow got it ALL perfectly synced…well, maybe you could use it as fuel for a suicide attack, but there’s easier methods for similar results. So you’re probably wondering why we have it at all. Well…there’s a reason.
“We’ve basically come to realize that if you wanted to use this…you’d need more than a Stream hardened body, or something like your bodies. You’d need a healing factor. One of very high strength. Convert energy directly to mass strength. And…well, you’d need to basically enjoy the pain. Blocking it wouldn’t work; it would interfere with the Timeless technique. You’d need to be so warped physically and mentally that the pain of Nevertheless would be like a drug high, sheer ecstasy, all lines broken in pure SENSATION and power. And there was only one…thing we knew that fit that description.”
Over the page went as Celeste turned it, to that lone possibility, the drawing of her. They’d never seen her, but they knew her. The story fragments of her had forged a very, very firm and dark picture.
“Patricia Delhart. Agony. In her prime. She…could go on a level that might still exceed anyone else on this planet. My husband in his prime, him and his friends, him and me operating in perfect sync…she could match it and go past it. If she wasn’t so damn crazy and in need to HURT, she would have been unbeatable. We think that in terms of actual execution, she used the Nevertheless theory technique we’ve puzzled on to just keep going past even the limits we have, because she loved the pain and her body healed from everything. So, by that fact, no one else will ever be able to figure out this Nevertheless technique. To make it work, anyway. It would, will just kill anyone else. But we have it recorded, as something that might exist. What little details we think are most accurate. And the hope that if it DID exist it’s now lost and forgotten. Nothing in here is going to teach you it. It will just lead you to a horrible demise. But…while we think that such knowledge SHOULD be recorded…it needs to otherwise be locked away. Because too many would seek it anyway. And well, we can’t say with 100 percent certainty that absolutely NO ONE could figure it out, especially if there’s even the slightest hint of how.
“So, as we wrote it down, as wordplay. The Forbidden Lesses, Four Bidden Lessers. Commanding yourself to find the edge, and then go past it, draw a new line…and then, if you dare, step past THAT. To make all else before you a lesser. Hence we have it locked up as you found it.
“That is that, more or…less. I’m sure your questions are well answered. With that all said, I’m going to re-lock it. Just leave it by the bedside for now: I’ll replace it downstairs when I’m feeling better.”
Vimmy and Venny had been a little surprised by the picture of Agony more than anything; Not because of who it was, because in all the things they’d heard, and the stories they’d been told, their mental picture had been pretty close to the reality. Not a perfect one to one, but close enough that despite it just being lines on a page they were still taken aback. Any one of the individual techniques was essentially flirting with death, but all of them in one person- especially a creature that lived and breathed pain and atrocity- was a horrible thing to imagine. They understood why it all should have been recorded, but both silently agreed with locking it away.
“...Yeah. Yeah, I’d say they are. Thanks for telling us and not just glossing over it all, I don’t think either of us really grasped how far things could go if they were pushed. Even with our enhancements and what’s been done to us, it’s still… I guess there’s always going to be a line of some kind, and maybe that’s a good thing.” Venny slowly nodded.
“We’ll leave it right here.” Vimmy said, before she hugged Celeste from the side. “...Thanks, mom. We’ll be back soon.”
As they left, both in their own private thoughts over what they’d learned, Vimmy couldn’t help but look behind her at Celeste. The picture from the Heartless technique had stuck with her, and even though she knew she was made of pretty tough stuff, it was still a little worrying to her. She’d move past it soon enough, but… It was a reminder that some things were beyond the pair for a reason and to be grateful for what they had instead of what they couldn’t.
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