Chapter 59: Life-risk Rewards
At half past nine, having carried an array down a staircase and a comatose woman after it, Theolyne Chadwick had come up out of the sublevel, washed his hands to the elbow, opened a cardboard box marked KITCHEN — FIRST NIGHT in his own handwriting, and begun making dinner for eleven people, of whom nine were Association staff who had not been offered dinner by a civilian at any point in their professional lives.
He had brought a chicken from the city. It had ridden in a cool bag in the middle vehicle for the entire engagement, wedged between a crate of bottled water and a folded blanket, and it had come through the day in better condition than the vehicle had.
It had gone into the forest and come out of the forest and it was now in a pan.
"Aide Lance." The boy leaned out of the kitchen door with a wooden spoon. "Do your people eat pepper?"
"...Some of them."
"Which ones?"
"I don’t know which ones."
"I’ll do two pots," Theo said, and went back in.
Lance stood on the porch of the house, and for a moment he felt very weird just standing out there after that question. The lake went on turning over under the boards below him, and nobody in the house had told him to do anything, and there was no paper in front of him for the first time in a long while. So he took the initiative to go inside.
And asked Theo.
"What can I help with?"
Theo chuckled.
"Helping me bring Thall and my wives home in one piece, is plenty for me. Please rest and let me serve you dinner."
The Aide scratched the back of his neck oddly, as he had nothing else to do with his hands.
"Perhaps, I shall help with the unpacking."
"No!"
Theo’s response came out like an aggressive mother, and his next words further reinforced the tone.
"Please do not touch anything. It will be difficult for me when looking for them later."
The agents were already moving the boxes in from the vehicles and setting them down all over the sitting room, in a low wall along the skirting and a second wall around the couch, every one of them labelled on two sides in the same square handwriting. Theo felt plenty grateful for that already.
He smiled at the Aide.
"Please just have a sit and wait for food, you must be very hungry."
After that Lance did as he was asked. He sat in the parlor first, between a box marked BATHROOM and a box marked THALL — DO NOT STACK, and sometime later he moved out to the porch to make a series of phone calls and confirm the state of events.
First, an investigation into the day’s discordance. Second, the progress of the measurement.
The apparatus for the measurement of an SS-rank had far more to do with the Tower than anyone outside it would ever guess. Thus the president himself had been busy trying to pull it off without putting it on anybody’s radar.
For the Tower, SS-rank meant far more than it did to those outside the Tower, and if those outside the Tower could react to it like this, it was unfathomable what those inside the Tower would do. They were a powerhouse that could even eradicate his entire existence if they came to consider him a problem rather than a solution.
Lance said very little into the phone, and wrote nothing down, and watched the black water the whole time he was talking.
Then Theo finished cooking, and two pots came out and were set down on top of the boxes because there was nowhere else to put them, and eleven people ate off their knees in a room with no curtains yet. The pepper pot went first. Nobody said very much, and nobody left anything.
At two in the morning Theo was alone on his own porch with his feet hanging off the edge of it and the whole black lake in front of him, and everybody in his house was asleep, and the system finally stopped being polite about it.
The panels came up gold in the dark and stacked themselves one over the next until they were the brightest thing on the shore. The light of them lay out flat across the water and reached most of the way to the trees.
[A LIFE-RISK Investment has been Detected]
[Transporting your wives to a new house, is great, but encountering the danger of migratory birds, and knowing when to prioritize running over fighting is something not quite expected of you. You preserved their lives by making an unexpected decision, and managed to bring Thall home safe and sound]
[Effect on Sesan: HIGH]
[Effect on Estea: MODERATE]
[Effect on Thalleria: NIL]
He sat with that for a moment, and it did not get better, and then he read the rest.
[You have received a Manager-class Skill: Directive(A)]
[Directive]
[Rank: A
Type: Manager/Active
Description: When you give an instruction to one who has cause to trust you, your meaning arrives whole. It crosses panic, distance and noise and it arrives as you meant it. It does not compel. It does not persuade. It makes you impossible to misunderstand.
Mastery: 0.0%]
’That’s... not a power.’
’That’s just being clear at people.’
[Your Genesis Eyes have processed a sustained multi-target engagement]
[Genesis Eyes mastery: 0.1% → 3.9%]
[Sub-function unlocked: Threat Ledger]
[Threat Ledger: You may hold and track the intent of multiple hostiles across a field. What has chosen what, and how hard.]
[Your Constitution has adapted to a decision rather than an impact. This is irregular] [Limitless Body - Adaptive Evolution: 61% → 64%]
[Chiropractor(B) has received an upgrade]
[Chiropractor has become: Attendant’s Hands(A)]
[Attendant’s Hands]
[Rank: A Type: Utility Description: Your hands know the aftermath. Tremor, seizure recovery, the circulation of a body that cannot move itself, the specific pains of the long-bedridden. You will not heal anyone. You will make the hours afterwards survivable.
Mastery: 0.4%]
[You have received a Recipe: Draught of the Quiet Hour]
[Eases post-reversion tremors. Requires: Frost Lotus, clean water, twelve hours, patience]
Theo sat on the edge of his own porch with all of it hanging in front of him in the dark. The gold went out one panel at a time when he was done with it, and the shore came back, and the lake was only a lake again, and his feet were cold.
Then he went inside and boiled water, and carried it down the stairs to the sublevel where the array kept up its low steady note in the concrete, and sat with Thall for an hour with a cloth, and worked along the backs of her calves and the flats of her hands and the small of her back, and did the thing his hands now knew how to do.