Adamant Blood 417

“Starting with the basics,” Mark told himself, and also Quark.

They were in a bunker below the house, and an illusion of Mark was up above, reading books by a window. It was a good illusion, courtesy of Addavein and a few tricks with the Castellan inside of the house.

Mark couldn’t fuck off and practice magic whenever he wanted anymore, so he had to make the ti, and so it was important for Mark to still appear to be ‘active’, if soone were to peer in at him, at his activities. The first defense of Mark’s experinting ti were the wards around the house. The second defense was the illusion of Mark sitting at the table, and with an adamantium core that could be wealth sensor’d if soone got through the wards. The third defense was Mark’s real being located about 30 ters below the illusionary version upstairs.

No one had made any attempts on Mark’s life so far, but Addavein was rather certain that anyone looking to make such an attempt was also looking for an opportunity, and so they’d study how Mark moved, and where he stopped, and when he was vulnerable.

‘Sitting at a table and reading books’ was probably the best opportunity that anyone watching was going to get for a long while.

And so, the misdirection.

Quark said, “Misdirections are active. I’ll remain mostly out here, monitoring, unless called upon specifically.”

Mark nodded, and then, in the dim room, he dove into himself.

Mark stood upon the porch of his house, and everything about his house was more refined than before. He hadn’t gotten a chance to work on it, but he had made so slight improvents here and there, as he digested his orichalcum.

The house was a simple 2.5 room shack in the middle of a field of black grass, under a sourceless light. The field of grass was actually a whole bunch of early warning systems, mainly indicating if anyone was there, looking in or not. And nope! Mark didn’t see any bent grass anywhere. The porch was wrap-around, and empty, with stairwells leading off into the grass and beyond. The front door was normal, and the glass in the door and the windows were all Mark’s ‘fragnt of a divine mirror’, allowing him to see a lot further and better, and as far as Mark saw…

The dream beyond his house was empty.

Mark walked into his house, and his really nice bed was still there, along with his fully stocked kitchen. The posters on the wall indicated his major influences and connections, from Glorious Man to his talzarki, Addavein, to his Mage Society Understanding. That all looked normal, though the one with Addavein on it, with Mark grabbing his hand like they were rivals, was looking a lot less angry these days. The Mage Society Understanding had gotten a whole lot of new sigils and ribbons and wax seals, too. Glorious Man was still glorious. Mostly static, too.

Mark hadn’t called the guy up, and Glorious Man hadn’t called him; Mark felt fine about that, considering all the heroes he ever t all had skeletons in their closets. Mark did not need to know about Glorious Man’s skeletons.

The bathroom was normal, and working properly.

And so…

Mark stepped to the center of his house, and he did sothing that hadn’t worked properly since Elf Land.

“System Call, Status!”

There was so sort of tug to the side. Which side? Mark had no idea. But the tug went out, and then failed to connect, or sothing. Mark wasn’t sure what was happening there. It usually took a few tries to get it to work right, and it only ever worked when Mark was inside his house, focusing on System Pri.

“System Pri Call, Status Update!”

Another tug, another failure.

“No signal?” Quark asked.

“Well it worked here last ti… Maybe over here?”

Mark walked over to the window and Called, “System Call, Status!”

Nothing.

He went to the porch and Called out, and then he stepped out under the sourceless light and Called. He went to the back of the house and Called. He Called from the roof and he Called from the porch again, and then he went back into the house and tried from his original position.

“Okay, so…” Mark put his hands on his hips in the middle of his house, and looked around, asking, “I could start blind, I guess?”

Quark said, “You could try the parabolic antenna again.”

Mark made a small annoyed noise… and then he crafted a parabolic antenna again, like he had done before and which didn’t work at all, so he had removed it. With a thought, Mark stepped onto the roof of his house and he put the antenna on the back end, making it a pair to the weather vane he had already installed on the central ridge of the house.

Standing tall beside the antenna, Mark Called out, “System Call! Status!”

… Nothing.

“Fuck.” Mark muttered, “Maybe System Pri is completely beyond us now. Fucking per—”

A bruise pushed out of the world just beyond the edge of the roof. It was a purple blush at first, and then the purple beca blue, and then brighter blue, then fully blue. White lines traced down the sides of the blue spot, and then words began to manifest. It was wonky. It was misshapen.

It was enough to understand.

Mark Careed, Age 19, human (Elf, as per System) [Inheritor]

Physicality set to: Weak, [Variable], Full

Mana Type: True Adamantium

House: Several Bricks

Extra Lives: Secure

Utilized: 10/46

Cohort: 0/1

Bindings: Full.

Body, Adamantine Immortal: 099

Shaper, Adamantium: 099

Mind: 99 (Unusable; Familiar Detected)

Natural, Union: 099

Soul: 99 (Empty)

Arch: 99 (Empty)

Archived Abilities: None

(Warning! House is too full to hold extra abilities.)

Mark grinned. “Okay! Here we go. Quark. Record: Still above the ‘Single Brick’ threshold, but still at ‘Several Bricks’ for the last 4 absorbed orbs. I started at ‘pebble’, with no open space at all and with a vastly reduced range. I got my ‘first brick’ and went up to 10/11 Utilized, and most of my range returned. I went down to 8/11 through organizing things and simplifying so things, thanks to Eliot and Tartu’s suggestions, and then I went back up to 10/15 due to putting in so expansions to the house when I got more orichalcum. I’m at 10/46 today. I am still down about 20% of my range; I am not sure how to get that back, or if I even can. I feel like that range might be permanently lost, but maybe Sally can make it bigger, though I have not asked her about that.”

“Noted, sir,” Quark said, filing away everything Mark reported on.

Later, Mark would share the day’s experints with people who have been working with the System for a very, very long ti, to see if they had suggestions for him to try. Right now the only person he was sharing any of this stuff with was Elaria Valen, Walaria Aluatha, and Addavein; the first because Mark trusted Aurora’s mother, the second because Walaria was his ‘master’ in Mage Society and also because he kinda had to, and Addavein because of course Addavein. He also shared this stuff with Eliot and Tartu because both of them were suprely interested in the entire concept of the house and ‘new magic’.

Mark added, “I’ve consud a total of 13 Orichalcum orbs over 18 days, each weighing 5 kilos, which seems to be the ‘brick’ asurent. The first brick got from ‘pebble’ to 11 open slots. Each 5 kilo orb past that seems to have given about 2 or 3 open slots.

“The adamantium that I wrapped around the orbs to absorb the orbs was also absorbed, and I have no idea where it went. I can manifest functionally infinite adamantium with my body, though, so… canI store adamantium? Am I storing adamantium when I take it inside? What is happening there?

“I don’t know.

“Which is why today’s first experint is adamantium storage, AKA mana storage.”

Mark considered, first, what ‘mana storage’ even was.

The first instinct was to make a safe that held money; sowhere you stuffed valuable stuff when you weren’t using it. But while that thought had so rit, it was instantly discounted because Mark didn’t want to store his adamantium for another day. He wanted to carry it around with him without having it out there all the ti.

So maybe sothing more like a wallet would be good, rather than a safe. Safes were places you stored stuff you didn’t want to touch. Wallets were for every-day activity.

But Mark hadn’t used a wallet in a long while.

Quark had all of Mark’s technical information and Mark used him as a debit card when he needed to pay for sothing. But Quark couldn’t hold all of Mark’s adamantium… could he? Probably not. Mark wasn’t even going to ss with Quark in that way, he decided.

But adamantium was rather valuable, and Mark liked the ‘card’ thought.

So maybe Mark could make a ‘debit card’ out of adamantium and then spawn endless adamantium through the card?

Except what was the end point of such a thodology?

If that worked, would Mark need to carry around a credit card of adamantium with him wherever he went to store his mana? Well… So people did use external reservoirs for their mana. A ring with a jewel on it might actually be manifested mana. An amulet. A wand. So people even manifested their mana and turned it into magical items so that they could use it and alsohave it manifested. The options for storage and use were pretty much endless; Mark just had to figure out his desires.

“Let’s start with the actual problem: Carrying around all this adamantium all the ti,” Mark said, looking down at the 170 kilos he had set on the wooden table in the small work room, “So the solution to the problem needs to be de-manifesting adamantium back into the astral body. Sticking it into a pocket? Like an astral pocket? Like picking up money and putting it into a wallet in my pants?”

Mark manifested a wallet in his house and he set it beside a little table he created and then manifested beside the door… No. Not beside the door. Mark moved the dresser to the other side of the bed, away from the door. There. That felt safer. Don’t want to have your wallet right by the door! That just seed like asking for trouble.

Mark ca out of his soul, to stand in the small room below the team headquarters.

With a maybe-working-motion, Mark grabbed so adamantium from the pile in front of him, and then he pulled open his pants pocket and slipped the adamantium into the pocket… And it remained in his pocket.

“Okay, that was an obvious misstep sowhere,” Mark said to himself, and then he said to Quark, “I made a wallet and now I’m trying to put the adamantium into the wallet in my soul, but maybe also in my pants? I’m figuring it out.”

Mark took the adamantium out of his pocket and then put it back in several tis, without any success.

… And then he took the adamantium and put it into his belly button, right into his body. There was very little blood because Mark simply opened up his guts, painlessly. Why was there any blood at all? Maybe because Mark expected blood, therefore: Blood.

The adamantium kinda just stayed there, in his guts, not doing anything at all.

“Leaving it there to see if it worked. Trying to distract myself with Shaping exercises to see if not-thinking-about-it makes it ‘digest’. That’s how it worked with the orichalcum.”

Mark did so shaping exercises, because he needed to do those, too, of course. A Shaper was only as good as their tools they made with their elent, and Mark was pretty good, but he could be better. You could always be better.

His chosen practice today, thanks to Addavein’s suggestion, was swans flying on their own, without any Shaping holding them up. Just the force of the wings flapping and the thinness of the tal. It was rather difficult practice because adamantium was rather darn dense. Good practice, though.

Mark only mostly distracted himself, though; he still rembered the adamantium buried in his adamantium guts.

When he finished with the swan-work he kinda still felt the adamantium in his guts, but he also easily removed it, and he guessed that it was mostly still there.

“This part of the experint seems like a failure. Even if it is working, the rate of intake/output is too low to be useful.” Mark got to thinking. “What I need is to just… swipe my astral body through whatever adamantium and expel/ingest whatever I want.”

“A word of caution, sir. It sounds like you could expel/ingest your own Adamantine Body. You don’t want to ‘store’ your body, yes?”

“… That could be bad, yeah— Ah. I can just designate my actual body as separate from free-floating adamantium? Maybe?” Mark felt like that would get really complicated, real fast, so he turned back to the wallet-idea… And also the debit card idea? Yeah. Mark crafted an adamantium rectangle that was nothing special except for the shape and size of it, and he put it into his wallet in his house, saying, “Maybe this will work?”

Mark had pre-made certain things out of adamantium and stored them in his house, because doing that made it incredibly easy to manifest the pre-Shaped adamantium in the real world. It was like the adamantium wanted to be the shapes Mark had made for it in his house, and this was probably the reason why he had sported scales and claws months ago. His talzarki connection had caused that sort of ‘contamination’.

Mark blinked, and he was back in the real world.

He easily Shaped the exact sa adamantium ‘debit card’ that he had put into his wallet in his house, and then he… he swiped the card through the air, at the pile of adamantium sitting on the ground.

The card plinked away.

“Okay. I’m probably doing it wrong, though. So…”

Mark concentrated and he slapped the card onto the adamantium pile again. It plinked away, again.

… Hmm.

Mark… Shaped the adamantium pile and held the card at the sa ti, and he sort of made the pile twist toward the card, as though it was a whirlpool of tal falling into—

For a single mont, the swirl of Shaped adamantium struck the card and went inside, and then it stopped.

A manic grin split Mark’s face, as he cackled, “Ah hahaha! It worked! … Not well. But… Hmm.” Mark concentrated again, shaping the tal again, and the tal splashed off of the card. It wasn’t going in anymore. “The fuck… Hmm… How much even went inside? Maybe… Maybe I have a much lower limit to mana containnt than a mithrilkinetic? Hmmm... Maybe… Maybe I need a counter? A asuring bit. So numbers that can go up and down?”

Mark went back into his house and—

There were splashes of black tal all over the bedside table where the credit card was, and the wallet had exploded.

“Well isn’t that a bit of interesting taphysical action,” Mark said to himself.

Mark fixed up the wallet and used the drops of adamantium in his soul to make a counter on the wall, by the wallet that held his card. The counter was a big thing with lots of rotating wheels with numbers on them, and the numbers were set to 0 right now. With one final touch, Mark put a little piggybank beside the wallet, filled it with 1-kilo coins made of the splashed adamantium, and he ntally linked all of it to the ticker on the wall.

Mark opened his eyes in the real world and he swiped his card through the pile of tal, and the card plinked off of the pile.

“Ah, right. I have to kinda do… this…”

Mark Shaped the adamantium pile into a swirl that he directed throughand intothe Shaped card, into the piggy bank in the dreamhouse—

The tal swirled into the card, into Mark’s soul again, and it was like an electric chill running up his spine and through his arms. Mark started laughing. It tickled for so reason, and he didn’t stop until all of the pile of adamantium in front of him was 99% gone. All he was left with was a debit-card-shaped square of adamantium that he easily put into his pocket.

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“It worked!”

“Very good, sir!” Quark said. “What did you do?”

Mark explained himself better after the fact, and then he added, “Now for the questionable part: Taking it back out.”

Mark took the card out of his pocket, and then… he… shook it? Nothing happened. Mark tried Shaping the card into sothing bigger than it was, but all he managed to do was deform the card.

… He went into his house and looked at his card, at the piggy bank, and at the ticker on the wall. It was all functioning normally, he guessed? The ticker read 170, and the piggy bank was still just a few coins full, because this wasn’t physics at all; this was dream reality functionality.

Mark ca back to the real world and he pulled off an arm, healed himself to full, and then he deposited the arm into the card.

Back in the dream house, the ticker read 275. So that ant he had put a little over a hundred kilos of arm in there.

… Mark changed the shape of the card, putting a swirling design on the front and back, making a little portal-like space.

Back in the real world, Mark tried to reach into the hole in the card—

He caught on sothing.

Mark grinned, and then he ripped 275 kilos of adamantium out of the card, grinning wildly, laughing probably a bit too much. But he had just solved an intractable problem!

Everyone ‘knew’ that adamantium couldn’t go back into the astral soul once manifested, but Mark had done… it.

His card was gone?

Mark went back into his soul, and the ticker indicated all zeroes while the piggy bank was cracked and broken and the card was cut up into little pieces, like soone had taken a pair of scissors to it.

“Weird.”

Mark turned the piggy bank into a simple glass jar so it would be easy to fill and empty, and instead of a debit card, he made himself a coin of adamantium with a small hole in the center.

In the real world once again, Mark made the very sa coin he had created in his house, and then he sucked all of the adamantium into the coin.

With a deft astral body reaching into Elsewhere, Mark reached into the coin and pulled out a strear of adamantium that rapidly beca a torrent that broke the coin wide open.

… He had broken it again.

Mark went back inside and he made a coin that was stretchy.

In the real world, Mark opened the coin wide like it was the lip of a bag, and he funneled adamantium into Elsewhere, into his house. He took the adamantium back out. He shoved it in and out a few tis, widening and tightening the coin several tis, and then he took the coin, in the real world, and he broke it.

He remade the coin in the real world, and it worked just fine as the first coin.

Mark explained all of this to Quark, wondering if he was going to revolutionize adamantium transport or if this was sothing only he could do.

Quark said, “It is highly likely that this is non-repeatable, sir.”

“Still gotta let other people try.”

For a mont, Mark just smiled.

He had solved a seemingly intractable problem! Woo! All it took was ancient magics never seen or even considered possible in the modern era, a bit of thought and so ti to enact those thoughts, and a whole lot of willpower. Mark could already tell that he was straining the functionality of his house.

Mark stepped onto the lip of his roof, near the parabolic antenna, and, with an adamantium storage readout of 500 down below, which would maybe tell him if he had fucked up or if he had lots of room left, he Called out, “System Call! Status!”

Nothing.

7 Calls later, and Mark got another readout.

“12 out of 46 Utilized, huh,” Mark said to himself. “So 500 kilos of adamantium stored does eat into my house’s available space… Well that’s fine. Expected, really. 250 kilos per 1 unit of ‘utilized’. Not a bad rate at all!”

Mark got down from the roof and he went inside, thinking of what to do next, and he knew just the thing.

“Ti to figure out Tactile Telekinesis!”

Addavein had told Mark so stuff that wasn’t in any books, not really, and so when Mark went back to the books, to look at recorded Brawny Bindings, he saw all of them a lot differently.

The basis for Tactile Telekinesis was an ‘inherent’ protective asure of Body-aspected Powers.

Shapers inherently protected themselves from their own material. Naturals inherently protected themselves from whatever Power they had, shutting off their Power if their Power was going to injure them. Minders had inherent resistance to fucking up their own minds with their own powers. Etcetera.

‘Inherent’ was in quotations for Tactile Telekinesis because Tactile Telekinesis wasn’t inherent at all. It was a nuance of a sub-Power that worked based on the strength of the main Power.

In this case, Tactile Telekinesis, and all other variations of that protective magic, like the one speedsters got, was only as strong as the person using it. Glorious Man with his Supre Body had a rating of 250 Strength. Isoko, with her Platinum Body, had an 8X Strength/Speed, when she was really pushing herself, though 4X Strength was more common for her. Sally, on the other hand, had a wildly variable Strength score and TT-field, going from a 1-ter-wide 1.5X Strength when she was 10 centiters tall, to 10-kiloters-wide, 10X Strength, when she was standing at full kiloter tall. 10X Strength didn’t seem much, but her size was already doing a lot. Realistically, she was at 10,000X Strength when compared to a normal person. When compared to a plain kaiju of her own size? Maybe only 10X.

It was hard to asure TT-fields at those sizes, but they could still do it with a typical scan, like the one they used for Power Scanning. They just aid it at the TT-field and the scan read out a Strength score in the 10X range when she was at a kiloter-tall.

What TT was actually for, was to allow the user to act with their Strength against the world without breaking themselves, because the TT-field was first enacted on the body, to keep the body whole and complete. In other words, the capability of one’s Body was counterbalanced by the strength of one’s TT field, allowing them to move without ripping apart.

So the reason Mark had never developed a TT-field was because he could move without ripping apart just fine, and if he did rip apart, then he just put himself back together. A lot of Elental Body people had the exact sa capability as Mark, for the exact sa reasons; they didn’t need the TT, so they didn’t get it.

The System never gave out anything extraneous; it only ever gave you what you needed to function… Mostly.

Sally still hurt herself routinely when she pushed too far, but that was normal. She only had issues because her pushing herself resulting in problems that were impossible for normal healers to manage. Healers could only fix things within their range of power or expertise, and Sally’s range was way, way larger than a healer was normally capable of reaching.

Mark… had no idea what he was doing when it ca to giving himself a Strength score, or a Speed factor, or TT, because looking at the known Bindings for various Brawnies didn’t help. The actual effect that caused TT was so sort of Protect effect, but it was also laced through the entire Brawny Binding in a holistic sort of way that kinda defied expectations. It was like how the first programr made True AI back in the Reveal; it happenedand they had no idea howit happened, but there was definitely magic involved.

“But I can still try so stuff!”

Mark made a grabber hand in his house, with levers to pull and a head could pick up and move other stuff around.

This let him rapidly create an adamantium grabber hand in the real world that extended to whatever length he wanted and which was surprisingly dexterous, but then Mark realized he had made himself a literal grabby hand, as in, it was his own hand, but at the end of an appliance. Failure.

Mark tried ‘turning the air in a portion of the house into sothing he controlled with his mind’, which was a truly taphysical act of creation. Mark designated a part of the air as ‘movable’ and it moved at his whim.

In the real world, Mark burped, and he wouldn’t stop burping.

He dove back into himself before the air started coming out the other direction.

For his next attempt, which he felt good about, Mark turned to the walls of his house, which were already hexagon-Protect-shaped.

Mark extended those protection shapes into the soil, replicating the structure of it all in the ‘natural’ furrows he caused in the ground, and then in the space beyond. He made the protective nature of it all extend into the air, too, and into the sky, making his reach far exceeding that of his actual house-space. He was actually making his house larger doing that, but that seed like the proper way to do this.

Feeling good about all of that, Mark opened his eyes into the real world…

“Everything feels kinda stiff,” Mark said, moving his hands through the air, watching as sothing weird happened just beyond his skin. “The air is kinda… crackly?”

Mark almost heard little crunches as he moved, as the air crackled and bent…

And his range dropped precipitously. It continued to drop and drop. He stopped feeling the neighbors, their vectors vanishing. The vectors of the plants in the yard and the flows of slis about 30 ters down, deep under the surface, disappeared. The world beyond Mark’s little experintal box gradually faded, as Mark’s astral body condensed, sohow, and he started to feel out the air, and the ground underfoot, and, with a feeling of this is right, Mark Tactile Telekinesis’d with the floor.

It was weak. It was nothing compared to how he usually did things. But Mark tapped the floor with his feet, and he touched the walls with his hands, and he figured out how to stop touching the air so much and instead touch his clothes. Was this Tactile Telekinesis?

Or was this the old issue with using the Protect spell, manifesting in a different way? That old issue was one where Mark built up a Protect so strong that he cut himself off from the rest of the world, and yeah, as Mark picked up a rock of adamantium using his actual hands instead of his kinesis, Mark was pretty sure he had done exactly that. He had locked himself into his own body, but his body also had a bit of reach, too, so…

Was this TT?

Mark went over to the wooden table in the room, and he touched the corner of the table. It was just a touch, and all Mark could do was push the table around with his normal strength. But he felt sothing there. So internal grasping action, linking him to the table.

Mark gently tried to touch the corner of the table, and then pull backward, and drag the table back with him. That’s what TT could do, after all. It allowed the wielder a modicum of control over other objects near them, primarily so that the user didn’t break what they didn’t want to break, but to also give leverage where there was none.

A brawny with TT was capable of lifting boulders by gripping their flat surfaces, so that they could lift the boulder and throw it off of the person it was crushing, or so they could throw the boulder at the enemy. Leverage was not a problem for a brawny, and leverage could be —and often was!— everything in a fight.

Mark touched the surface of the table near him, and he could notpull it toward him.

So… Not a strong TT field, then.

But then Mark grabbed the table’s corner, and with a whole lot of concentration, Mark planted his feet, locking his whatever-this-was nascent Power to the floor, as well as locking his sa whatever to the corner of the wood. And he lifted. He did not lift well. But Mark managed to grip all maybe-100 kilos of the table and wrench it about 10 centiters off of the ground, using just a few fingers on the corner of the table.

And better yet, he didn’t destroy the table to do it! He wasn’t gripping with a whole lot of strength at all—

And then Mark’s astral body failed; strained too much.

The table clattered to the floor and Mark smiled brightly.

Mark Quark, “A vast decrease of capability, but I think I got the workings of a TT-field! Now to undo it all.”

Mark rapidly went back into his house, undid the TT-field, and then he turned the entire concept into a blueprint —because that felt right— and he put the blueprint into a freshly-made bookshelf, setting it on the bottom.

Back in the real world, Mark’s Astral body was strained and small, but a Union of Good and Bad fixed that right quick.

Once again back in the dream, and with a concentration of thought, Mark reappeared on his roof, at the parabolic dish, and he Called, “System Call! Status!”

Eventually, his Status reappeared.

Mark Careed, Age 19, human (Elf, as per System) [Inheritor]

Physicality set to: Weak, [Variable], Full

Mana Type: True Adamantium

House: Several Bricks

Extra Lives: Secure

Utilized: 11/46

Cohort: 0/1

Bindings: Full.

Body, Adamantine Immortal: 099

Shaper, Adamantium: 099

Mind: 99 (Unusable; Familiar Detected)

Natural, Union: 099

Soul: 99 (Empty)

Arch: 99 (Empty)

Archived Abilities: Strong Body (Incomplete).

(Warning! House is too full to hold extra abilities.)

Mark laughed brightly. “Strong Body archived! Ha! Holy shit… That’s…” And then Mark realized what he had done to himself by going after this Ability. Mark said, “The one I neverwanted.”

Strong Body was a mundane horror from years ago. A ‘terrible’ fate, where you were stuck inside the city walls and all of your choices were made for you, because you were too weak to make your own choices in life. ‘Basic Brawny’ had been his fate until he had gone looking for more, until he had found Addashield and Lola. In that new-perspective mont, Mark kinda hated TT… But Mark still needed every bit of power he could get, and maybe… Well. This shit was weak as fuck right now, but maybe so day it would be useful. That ‘(Incomplete)’ was worrying, but also full of hope.

Mark called out, “System Call! What does ‘Incomplete’ an when it’s by an Archived Ability?”

Mark Called several tis before he got an answer.

Archived Abilities that are Incomplete can be used, but you forgo all other Abilities while using the Archived Ability. The functionality of such Abilities will be greatly hampered until they are complete.

The easiest and most common way to turn an Incomplete Ability into a Finished Ability is to slot the Incomplete Ability into your Binding in the appropriate category and to live with the Incomplete Ability for a while, until such ti as the Ability Completes itself. Death is a common side effect of attempting to use Incomplete Abilities.

“Huh…” Mark said, “That’s neat.”

“What does it say, sir?” Quark asked.

“I think my attempt at TT gave one of the weakest Brawny Powers at Strong Body, but it’s also ‘Incomplete’. Apparently, I could switch it out with Adamantine Immortal —which is the category for Body— and use it for a while and develop it into a real Power. I could also use it and forgo all other Powers without switching out anything at all, which is weird, but… okay.” Mark added, “I’m probably not switching it out or using it at all. Seems like a strict downgrade, and this thing is warning that using ‘Incomplete Abilities’ often results in death.”

“I wish I could help you with this, sir, but your Binding doesn’t match any of the records I have ever seen or that I know how to interact with. I will say that death doesn’t seem to affect you much anymore, so it seems like you could develop a vast variety of Powers if you wished and then use them as needed, sir.”

There were a hundred issues with that sort of outlook, from the fact that death still felt horrible to the uncertainty that Mark would remain intact after every death, for there were reasons that elves had cohorts. In a cohort of a few elves, like what they had back in the Elven Lands, everyone supported the existence of each other because there were still ways to kill the unkillable.

But for standard deaths?

Mark’s ‘Extra Lives’ were ‘Secured’; it even said so on his Status sheet. Maybe a few deaths wouldn’t be such a bad thing to trade for a whole lot of variable power. What kind of powers would Mark want, though?

Maybe…

All of them?

He was going to get everything and he’d make the world a better place, no matter how many kaiju he had to slay or empires he needed to topple. And hey! Maybe Dominant had so really cool magics hidden deep in his bunkers. Addavein had suggested that Mark dive into all the dangerous shit and see what he liked, what worked, what was needed, and Mark was feeling, in that mont, that Addavein had made a lot of sense with that suggestion.

“And there’s that whole HVP Worship-to-divinity pipeline that everyone was worried I was going to tap into. I wonder what I could do with that? Anything useful?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Quark replied.

Mark humd in thought as he sat on the edge of his roof on his dream house, staring out into the darklight, kicking his legs on the edge, dreaming of the possibilities.