9

Chapter 9: Pendulum 0-1

Pendulum 0.1

[I announce.]

+453:39:47

The abandoned warehouse I'd found was located deep in the Docks, way, way, way into the Azn Bad Boys' territory. Normally, I might have been concerned by that, but it was in such bad shape that even the Merchants would've thought twice about trying to hole up in it. It had four walls and a roof, though, even if it looked like a stiff breeze might do it in, so it suited my purposes just fine.

That didn't mean that no one had watched me come in, though, and it'd be more trouble than it was worth to deal with a couple of gangers who thought they could — urgh, just the idea was sickening — have a little fun, so once the door had closed behind me, I waited a few minutes and glanced around outside the dirty, dusty windows a few times (those that weren't boarded up, at any rate). When I was absolutely sure that no one was going to disturb me and that Lung or Kaiser or Skidmark wasn't about to bust through to door and try to beat me up for whatever reason, I calmed myself down and prepared to get started.

"Okay. Alright, then."

I set my backpack down on the dirty floor — ugh, I was going to have to do some serious washing to get it clean, later — unzipped it, and I pulled out the cheap video camera and tripod I'd bought with my meager savings. Dad hadn't been able to afford to give me much of an allowance in quite a while, but since I wasn't going out with Emma anymore (because she was a total bitch, of course), I hadn't had anything else to really spend what he did give me on.

"And this goes here, like this, and that goes there, and I just push this button like so…"

It took me a few minutes, mostly because I'd never done anything like it before, but eventually, I'd managed to set the cheap video camera atop the tripod and had it aimed out at the largest clear spot on the warehouse floor. I didn't turn it on just yet, though. On the off chance someone managed to get ahold of this thing, I didn't want them to see my real face or my normal, everyday clothes.

"Okay."

I walked out into the clearing and squared my shoulders, taking deep breaths to calm my fluttering stomach. This was the first time I'd be using my powers since I woke up in the hospital, and I really didn't have any idea what to expect.

Vaguely, I could remember the feeling of that first time, in the Locker, of something huge and foreign trying to shove itself into my tiny, human body. I could remember it trying to force me into its shape, could remember the fear and the horror of my self being overwritten by something that was me and yet not me…

In the intervening time, I'd tried to forget what I'd learned, there, the knowledge that had been crammed into my head, and to some degree, I'd been successful. I'd even managed to get excited about my powers and how I had figured they probably worked, because holy shit, this was basically the power of a hero. Heroes. Sure, Alexandria and the Triumvirate were still awesome, but when your power was essentially "all the heroes," it was hard to call a flying brick more awe-inspiring.

It just, well, didn't really come with a manual.

That was one of the things I was here to experiment with.

"Ready. Set up."

The words weren't really necessary, and I could have done it without them just as easily, but they helped me focus, a little. Once I'd finished saying them, a brief golden light flashed over my body, and my clothes vanished.

For a moment, I panicked, but when I reached up to preserve my modesty, it was to discover my hands covered in some kind of fabric, and a scant moment after that, my eyes covered by golden lenses. Curiously enough, I could see out of them as though they were clear glass, and it was only later, once I watched the video to see what everything had looked like, that I even realized they were a different color at all.

I saved the inspecting of my costume for later, though — and how cool was it that my power even came with its own costume? — and walked back over to the camera to turn it on. I had to fiddle with it a little to start it recording, but after it was all set up and ready, I walked back over into the clearing on the floor and stared into it.

The knowledge had sat in the back of my head, almost unnoticed, since I woke up in the hospital. My power had two modes: one, which I'd taken to calling Installs, was the power to take on the form and abilities of people from myths and legends, down to their equipment and physical traits, and the second, which I'd decided to call Includes, only called upon some signature item or ability.

If I Installed Hercules, for example, (or, as was the proper Greek version, Herakles) I'd shoot up to about seven feet tall, gain about a hundred-and-fifty pounds of muscle, my skin would turn a lead gray color, and I'd find myself dressed in ancient Greek armor, complete with a hardened leather cuirass and that characteristic skirt thing. I'd also get a bow and a sword and a couple of other pieces of equipment.

"Set. Include."

If I Included, on the other hand, I only got a piece of equipment or two. Usually, it was that hero's most famous armament or ability — Noble Phantasm was the term my powers supplied me, a device or technique embodying a hero's deeds and accomplishments. If I Included King Arthur, I'd get Excalibur. If I Included Herakles, I'd get the Shooting Hundred Heads — the skill that embodied the killing of the Lernaean Hydra.

Those were combat based Noble Phantasms, though, and that wasn't what I wanted to test.

Once the Include had finished, I looked down at myself. Nothing had changed. No new piece of equipment, no new weapon or anything like that. At first glance, it must have seemed like it failed.

But it hadn't. What I wanted to test was whether or not I could use Includes to increase my own body's abilities, so that they stayed when I wasn't using my powers directly. I couldn't do that with Installs, and I'd come to that conclusion with simple logic — if I was borrowing the powers and even the physical traits of heroes, then I was obviously borrowing their skills with their weapons, as well (however that actually worked). It wouldn't make sense for me to keep those when my body went back to being boring, regular Taylor Hebert.

That meant, of course, that I couldn't use an Install to teach myself martial arts. I probably couldn't use an Include like that, either; if I was borrowing a piece of equipment like a sword or a spear, I could only imagine that the skill to wield it would come, too, but I'd have to test that later.

However, there were heroes who had made their mark as tutors and teachers, as scholars and learners. If I could Include a hero whose Noble Phantasm was to learn other skills…

I closed my eyes and reached for the power I had borrowed with this Include.

Mentoring Great Heroes

"Aite Láechrad."

Instantly, I felt the world open up. A myriad of possibilities stretched out before me like a great tree, and upon each branch was a skill that I could make mine, if only I tried. Mathematics, divination, precognition, swordsmanship — which, itself, had so many variants that they seemed uncountable — archery, meditation, surgery, how to conceal one's presence… Endlessly, continuing on out into some grand level that seemed infinite, there existed skills I could learn, if only I tried.

Some, however, would be harder for me. I could feel that I would struggle with an assassin's skills, like how to sneak up on a target, or with medical techniques, or just generally with things that weren't related to direct combat. Even with combat abilities, I knew instinctively that Eastern martial arts, like kung fu or karate, would be harder to learn than their Western counterparts.

In the end, I'd only found a handful of heroes that might fit my criteria. Chiron might have worked, but he was limited — when I'd reached out for him, I'd had the sense that he could only learn skills contemporary to Ancient Greece, which wasn't entirely useless but also wasn't what I'd been looking for. The internet, however, was incredibly useful and had some fairly obscure knowledge, so when Chiron hadn't panned out and I'd gone looking for more teachers in mythology, I'd eventually stumbled onto the Ulster Cycle.

Let me tell you, the ancient Irish were pretty fucked up. So were a lot of the older cultures — did you know that the warriors of Classical Greece slept with their friends and comrades at least as often as their spouses? Don't even get me started on pederasty — but the passages I'd read from The Wooing of Emer online had contained an awful lot of waxing philosophic about how manly Cúchulainn was and how many women he'd fooled around with while he was training to win Emer's love.

Fucking Celts.

Anyway, after Chiron fell through, I'd gotten onto the Ulster Cycle, where I found two more legendary teachers: Scáthach and Aífe. Either one of them probably would have fit the bill, but when I read Aífe's passage in the myth, she'd just stood out so much more. A hero who had beaten the protagonist in strength and skill and been defeated only by a cheap trick…

This was the Noble Phantasm I'd chosen to Include. As a warrior and a teacher, Aífe's Noble Phantasm allowed her to learn nearly any skill — with limitations, as I'd just found out — and teach them to others. I wasn't going to be a neurosurgeon anytime soon, but at the very least, I could learn to defend myself outside of my Installs.

I reached out with mental hands and grasped at the skill I wanted: Ancient Celtic Martial Arts. There were other Western skills of similar bent, martial disciplines from all over Europe, including the grappling techniques taught to Greek warriors like the Spartans and different schools of swordsmanship that I'd vaguely heard of, like Liechtenauer, but Aífe was Irish and the Celtic martial arts were the ones she knew best, and so the ones I would learn fastest. Maybe if I needed to, I could branch out later on, but for now, I wanted something I could learn relatively quickly that would also be useful outside of my cape life.

As Aite Láechrad locked in my chosen skill, it provided me with a kind of mental progress bar. I was currently at a flat zero, denoting that I knew absolutely nothing about it, and it went all the way up to…about seven, although there were some strange "halfway" points where it felt like I could specialize and be really good at one aspect while being average at the rest. I didn't want that, though. I wanted to completely master this skill.

So, the first thing I needed to learn was…

The Apple Feat.

Right, and that was…juggling, basically, plus throwing. Aite Láechrad showed me — although "show" wasn't exactly the right term; it was more like it just dumped the information directly into my head — that the objective was to develop hand-eye coordination and train your ability to aim properly.

I looked around the warehouse, but it was an old, abandoned warehouse; of course it didn't have any fresh apples sitting around, just waiting for me to use, so I had to make do with bits of rubble and concrete that were scattered all over the floor. I found three good-sized chunks that were about as big as an apple, walked back into the center of the clearing, and, feeling a bit stupid and clownish, I started juggling.

I must have gone at it for an hour or two, just tossing them around and juggling like an idiot. Sometimes, I dropped them — especially within the first few minutes; if my power hadn't given me some kind of energy shield, my toes would've been broken a dozen times over — because I'd never juggled before in my life, but I just picked them back up when that happened and kept going. In my head, that progress bar slowly began to fill, and as it did, I thought that it was getting easier to juggle and easier to keep track of the bits of rubble.

It might just have been my imagination, though.

After those two hours, however, it started to get boring. Well, okay, it was basically boring from the beginning, but I managed to force myself to do it for the whole two hours, and I had to stop because my fingers were starting to go numb. So, making sure to catch those bits of rubble, I set them down out of the way; next time, if this actually worked, I'd bring a few apples to use.

"Okay. What else, then?"

I examined that progress bar to find that I was still basically a novice, I was just a slightly better novice. I wouldn't be punching out Lung anytime soon, but I was in somewhat better shape than when I'd started.

Next, however, was something called the Salmon Leap. I could remember vaguely the description of it in The Wooing of Emer, and the impression I'd gotten then and now was of something similar to what you saw in some of the more intense break dancing (Emma had always enjoyed that sort of thing more than I had). The idea was to leap straight up into the air; the higher you got, the better you were at it, and when you could do a full flip in midair, you'd mastered it.

I hoped that this would be worth it, in the end, because right now, it seemed like my power was conspiring to embarrass me as much as possible.

My first jump was pathetic, and it served to show me exactly how pudgy and out of shape I was. A gradeschooler probably would have done better than I did. My second jump wasn't much better, and to be quite frank, to realize exactly where I was, and then to have it reinforced by how slowly that mental progress bar was filling, was really disheartening.

Sophia could probably have done it with ease.

That thought was what wound up motivating me. Sophia was infinitely better at this than I was? Then I was going to sur-fucking-pass her, even if it killed me.

My next several jumps weren't much less anemic than the first few, but they were much, much more motivated. I refused to give up. I refused to let myself be outpaced in regards to my own power by one of the girls who was making my life miserable. There was nothing that was going to keep me from going until I mastered this.

Except, it turned out, exhaustion. About an hour later, with several breaks interspersed in between, I finally had to stop jumping — my legs felt like they were on fire, and everything below my waist had started to go numb. My lungs, meanwhile, burned for oxygen, and even my arms, which had flailed about, were starting to feel the strain.

As I collapsed to the floor, however, panting like a dog in the middle of summer, and I turned my attention to my progress, I felt my heart skip a beat: one third. It wasn't exactly halfway, nor was it one of those milestones that marked my proficiency, but it was good enough. At this rate, I was going to reach that first marker in three days — maybe less, as my fitness improved and my body became even more used to the stress I was putting it under.

Every weekend, I decided right then. Every weekend, I was going to come out here and practice these Ancient Celtic Martial Arts, and I was going to keep going until I mastered them. Every Saturday and Sunday, without fail, I was going to come out to this abandoned warehouse, and I was going to go through these exercises, and nothing was going to stop me.

No, actually, forget about just that. I wasn't just going to come out on the weekends and practice, I was going to start running, get in shape. I'd have to start slow and careful, but eventually, I was going to be going for a run every weekday morning. If it worked out the way I thought it would, it would make it easier and faster for me to master the skills of this martial arts school. If it didn't, then at least I'd be in better shape, which would hopefully mean getting rid of that little paunch I had on my belly.

I had to laugh. Splayed out there in the dirt and the grime, sweaty and dusty and out of breath, I had to laugh a deep, echoing laugh. I felt giddy and happy and excited, and even though I had pushed myself almost to exhaustion, I wanted to get up and keep going, and I felt like I could take on the whole world.

My stomach rumbled.

Eh…maybe after I'd had lunch, first?

After I'd cooled down a little and my legs didn't feel like they would collapse out from under me if I tried to stand, I pulled myself to my feet, took a moment to concentrate, and let go of Aífe's Noble Phantasm. The progress bar sitting in the back of my head vanished, but I could still remember clearly how the Apple Feat and the Salmon Leap were performed. It seemed, in my base Breaker form, at least, the skills had stayed behind.

"Release."

Another moment of focus was all it took to drop out of my base Breaker form and become regular, ordinary Taylor Hebert once again. I looked down at my hands — they didn't look any different, any stronger, any more dexterous than they'd been when I woke up that morning.

I walked over to where I'd set those pieces of rubble down, then I hefted them up and started juggling. Effortlessly, as though I'd been born to do it, I handled them, tossing them up into the air, catching them, swapping them between my hands. Yesterday, I would have fumbled like a newborn.

For the rest of the day, I wore a smile, and nothing could bring me down.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —