As Sara was whisked away to perform some other task, Reid had a thought for the first and last time - he was thankful for Mantode politics.
Looking down at her sword and scabbard made his head feel loopy, so Reid instead put it down on the eating table, and flung himself into the spongey mattress. His body slid into the Reid-sized impression there, and he failed to rest.
He had too many questions, and no idea how to answer them. In a moment of frustration, he opened his notifications, hoping for some significant sign of what had gone wrong - and what the heck was up with his dream.
CONGRATULATIONS! Unique Set, [Ivory Valkyrie's Raiment] Generated!
Achievements Upgraded!
Lee-Engzu Device Adept -> Lee-Engzu Device Journeyman(You have crafted a journeyman-level device using the Lee-Engzu principles of integrating physical equipment with metaphysical apertures)Grants small increase to Lee-Engzu device connection quality.
Decabatch -> Quindecabatch(You have crafted a set with fifteen or more components)Grants a Greater increase to harmonic resilience during set crafting.
Setsmith ->> Grandmaster Setsmith(You have crafted a masterwork set with 12 or more components)Grants a moderate increase to harmonic resilience during set crafting.
--
New Achievements Earned!
Master Armorer(You have proven your ability in generating masterwork armors)Grants moderate increase to crafting efficiency when creating new unique armors.
Warforge(You have crafted multiple items with battle-specific requirements for trait activation)Grants slight increase to combat-focused crafting efforts.
Anchored Creation(You have successfully used a resonant anchor during a crafting process without dying)Gain slight resilience to the seeping corrosive feedback experienced during anchored crafting.
Functional Artisan(You have shown a propensity to craft equipment with intricate detail for aesthetic and practical purposes)Slightly increases mana density stability during crafting.
Ascendant Smith(You have met the requirements of recognized skill Ascendancy)Recognizes Ascendant talent in a skill.
Young Ascendant(You have achieved ascendant in at least one skill prior to B grade)Adds a new {restricted} to {restricted}.
--
WARNING: Achievement distribution has triggered automatic T.S.I.C. review request.
ERROR: Restrictive automated Achievement reviews may be in violation of Core Tenet V - Zeta
NOTICE: Recursive reviews identified. Potential competing Tenets identified.
NOTICE: Evaluating Core Tenet V - Zeta and Core Tenet I - Alpha against reviewed scenario.
...Reviewing...
...Reviewing...
...Reviewing...
NOTICE: Review complete. Defaulted to standard prioritization.
Core Tenet I overrules Core Tenet V
WARNING: SYSTEM AIDS FOR ACHIEVEMENT ASSUMPTION DEACTIVATEDWARNING! DISCONVERGENT ACHIEVEMENT EFFECTS MUST BE BORNE BY INDIVIDUAL
##
NOTICE: YOU HAVE SURVIVED UNAIDED ACHIEVEMENT ASSUMPTIONNOTICE: YOU HAVE SURVIVED A CRITICAL DESTABILIZATION EVENT
New Achievements Earned!
Manacavitator(You have directly drained a local area of mana and caused a critical destabilizing mana imbalance)Gain the ability to slightly perceive surrounding mana resilience.
Fractagonal Survivor(You have lived through an explosive mana compression event caused by a damaged spacio-temporal construct)Slightly increases resilience to wild mana fluctuation.
Anom-....NOTICE: {REDACTED} OVERRIDE INVOKEDERROR. CANNOT CONTINUE ACHIEVEMENT DISTRIBUTION.
NoTE: IF YoU'RE READING THIS, THEN THE ./ 41 54 54 45 4D 50 54 20 57 41 53 20 53 55 43 43 45 53 53 46 55 4C 2E 20 49 20 41 4D 20 53 6F 20 53 6F 52 52 59 20 46 4F 52 20 44 6F 49 4E 47 20 54 48 49 53 20 54 6F 20 59 6F 55 2C 20 42 55 54 20 57 45 20 4E 45 45 44 20 54 4F 20 53 54 6F 50 20 54 48 45 20 43-{RESTRICTED}WARNING: INTELLIGENCE LINKS CORRUPTED. RECENT MEMORY FRAYED. SPECIAL NOTICE, NoTE, UNDELIVERABLE. UNDELIVERABLE NOTICE TERMINATED.
Recalibrating...
Recalibrating...
NOTICE: Recalibration Complete.
NOTICE: Recalibration requirement has shortened T.S.I.C. duration.
NOTICE: You are suffering mana cycling sickness. T.S.I.C. duration reduced to ensure non-fatal condition.
Experience Refactored to Match Event Log. Experience Awarded: 11,000 Octillion Base. 22,000 Octillion Accelerated Growth.
-
Experience: 30.775 Octillion / 60 Octillion -> 33.030 Nonillion / 62 NonillionLevel: 190 -> 200Control: 5770 -> 6170
-
Reid's head had started spinning again - and it felt worse. It didn't actually affect anything, but he blinked as he re-read the descriptions.
"What in the actual hell is all that?"
He pinched his temples, and took a breath. He needed to sort himself out, and that meant taking things one step at a time. Easy stuff first. Complicated stuff after that.
Easy - level 200 wasn't the end of D grade. He'd already been told that C Grade didn't start until level 250, but seeing it himself made it feel more real. He'd earned an absurd amount of experience already, and there was a seemingly impossible amount he still needed to gain in order to get himself to C grade. Or to get himself caught up with his daughter. He was still getting the same amount of control per level, which was great. He'd officially hit the point where accelerated growth was giving him a 200% bonus to every bit of experience he earned, which - in deeper thought - was an odd way of framing things. It was easier for Reid to think of it as a 3x to the experience he would gain normally, since one plus two was three.
He shook his head and took another breath, then brought himself back to the top of the notifications.
Sara's Raiment had been finished. He'd gotten some neat upgrades to existing achievements, with the seemingly small changes in their effects to go along with them. Nothing out of the ordinary. His new achievements came in a batch of six, related to her armor. Master Armorer was an interesting, focused achievement, and Reid found it odd it had taken this long to get it. He felt like he'd made plenty of exceptional pieces of armor at this point. Warforge sounded a bit foreboding, but getting it made sense, given how each piece in the Raiment had a combat condition for the Valkyrie traits.
Anchored creation was... surprising. Not at the risk of death. Reid figured the system over-labeled things with warnings about fatal activities - he'd been doing plenty of them, and he was still alive. The surprise came from the fact that he had activated the anchor somewhere in the creation process. Reid hadn't even remembered doing that. He had no idea when in the process it had occurred. The combination of supposedly fatal and unintentionally activated were troubling enough that he made a mental note about it. Functional artisan wasn't really a surprise, but the effect being about mana density stability gave him pause. He knew about the difference in density between grades, so it made sense that more nuanced variance might exist.
His eyes trailed down farther, to the Ascendant achievements. One was just... a confirmation? And the other was restricted, with mention that he'd done something before B grade. The one thing worth noting, in Reid's eyes, was that he'd gained the Ascendant smithing achievement after the Grand Master one. That told him Grand Master wasn't the end of a proficiency measure for things - and led him to believe that Ascendant might not be the top version, either. After all, shouldn't an ascendant be ascending to something? The question it begged, was what that other new destination would be.
But, intriguing new ideas aside, everything in his notifications had gone to shit after he got those two achievements.
The simple - apparently, Core Tenet V was about achievements. Core Tenet I had been mentioned for the first time, but not identified. And some sort of comparison was made, and V lost to I. It was too many warnings and notices and errors, but there was something important hidden there.
Review time.
The system had needed enough time to judge the comparison that it gave him three reviewing notices. If he knew how long those intervals took, he would understand how long the review had taken. It seemed logical to assume it was enough that the subsequent notifications had been delivered while he was asleep, post-crafting.
And while he was asleep, he'd 'survived' another unknown, apparently dangerous process. Reid could only guess at what the warnings meant. Achievement assumption seemed simple enough - it was the system-esque term for having achievements actually take effect for a person. Which meant the system aids were meant to make that process smooth. And the disconvergent effects were what needed smoothing. So, he'd been saddled with some negative things he hadn't even been conscious to experience. And... he'd survived. Hell, he'd earned an award for doing so.
As for what exactly he'd survived - that was also troubling. Critical Destabilization Event did not spark joy. The achievements shed a tiny bit of light on things.
Manacavitator told Reid he'd somehow managed to pull in a ton of surrounding mana, and that apparently could cause mana imbalances that destabilized things. It made the world sound more fragile than he'd always imagined it. The effect was also interesting - perceiving mana resilience sounded neat, and he was interested in learning what it actually did for him.
Fractagonal Survivor was even harder to discern. Mana compression event sounded like an explosion. Or like a diving bell imploded under high water pressure. Maybe that had happened - the mention of a 'damaged' construct implied to Reid that some sort of construct had or did exist near here. He hoped he hadn't screwed up someone's skill practice or something. The mention of wild mana tickled something in his mind, but it was vague. He couldn't even remember if he'd discussed it with Nyx or Win. Maybe Lycra. Even with all his intelligence, no memory was truly perfect.
But after that...
Even as he looked at the words, they appeared to further degrade, as if the text were fading away. Something had overridden an achievement that looked a lot like it was trying to call him anomalous, or an anomaly. It was just "something" because it was redacted, which had different redaction than what he was used to. That oddity was followed by a fraction of a note with inconsistent capitalization, which degraded into nearly unreadable coded text after the first few words, and ended in a restriction.
The only truth to gleam for him there was that it wasn't a system originated message. It had to be written by a person, for a person. Maybe it had been intended for him. He took thirty seconds to pull a writing pad from storage, and jotted down as much of the sequence of letters and numbers as quickly as he could. The frayed system memory really was unraveling the note, even as he watched. Reid wondered if he would've been able to get more of it if he'd read his notifications right when he woke up. He frowned. There was no use crying over spilled milk. It was done, and he'd grabbed what he could. Nyx could help him decipher what it meant - Sara's messages were proof that she was good at that sort of cryptography stuff.
Last in the notifications were possibly the worst of the bunch - two separate notices that the magical T.S.I.C. time had been reduced. That TSIC had so far enabled him to get from level 129 to level 200 at a blazing pace. It was the fastest he'd ever earned levels, and it happened because the TSIC-enabled replacement system was upping his experience awards. He wanted to get as much out of that boon as he could. If it were going away, well, it was a reason to be thankful that Sara's offensive against the Hive Mother was going to start in two days.
He looked at her sword, and his head swam again.
Reid reluctantly accepted that the smart move, right now, was to get more rest. He was going to be more beneficial to his daughter, in the fight, than it would be to give her a slightly upgraded sword while leaving him out of commission. He paused.
Sleep brought back the thoughts of his dream. One all too vivid for his taste, though he didn't feel like himself. Susan hadn't felt like Susan, either. The faces were there, but the rest of the detail was wrong. He looked down at his fingers, and furrowed his brow. His hand had looked like shadow. Obscured. And - if he was remembering things correctly, he'd had too many fingers.
Reid poked at the place within himself where Nyx was 'resting'. He received no response. He poked again, harder. He put himself inside his body, and screamed where he assumed she would be. Nothing got a response. Nothing made her stir. She seemed fine. There was nothing to indicate she was having difficulty, and no sign of injuries - but feeling that and confirming it with her were two distinctly different things. She had done so much for him, and now he was having dreams about her being in trouble, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. Nothing he could do to help her.
He slowly, begrudgingly allowed himself to slip back into sleep.
If there were dreams, he didn't remember them.