Draft: 49 Quilt Work

Well, she had sunk her time into getting better at manipulating the mana outside her body. She was far from good at the exercise since it still took intense concentration, but at least she could semi-reliably do it. Now James turned her focus to the grey and beige covering herself. Could she move it? Was it even a good idea to?

Being a scientist, she tried to establish a baseline with which she could compare any experimental result to. Estimating her beige mana coverage at 98%, she went through the ABCs in her head while counting how long it took her. It was an interesting mental exercise and she figured that either her time would get slower if she lost her cognitive abilities or she would be unable to do it altogether. At that point she’d need to try and get more beige and grey mana on herself and try a new method to get out of this weird place.

First, she tried to move the mana covering her around to see if she could control it and how different it was from the external mana. She was glad to know that this was possible and that her time going through the ABCs was identical to her trial. Well, she hoped it would be faster, but that was neither here nor there. She couldn’t expect results instantaneously.

Next, she tried to move all the mana to one spot. Here, she started to run into some trouble. Although mana of the same color accepted some overlap, she was only able to have it overlap if it was the same color, making the color more saturated there. James had a feeling that she would have been able to mix the different mana colors if she had more experience. If she could find no other solution, she would try to get to that level of proficiency. She sincerely hoped that wasn’t necessary, that same feeling told her it would take a lot of time to get there. And she wanted out. Now.

Doing her test, there was a slight increase in her time, and she found it harder to count everything out. Hurriedly she put all the mana where it was before and tried her little ABCs singing check again, mentally sighing when her time returned to normal. It seemed that concentrating the mana all together was not the way to go.

Her following trial was a bit scarier since she knew what the initial results would be before she attempted it. Mentally preparing herself, she tried to remove a small bit of the beige mana from herself. Excited that that was possible, she sang the ABC in here head again and was relieved to find out that her time hadn’t worsened. Next, she took out a small amount of grey mana, but could instantly feel the difference now that she was really paying attention. It looked like the grey mana was the one altering her mind.

Debating on what to do next, she tried to attach a different mana color to herself. Choosing her tried and true fuchsia pink, she tried to tug it onto her. Feeling a small tingle if she corporeal she would have clapped at the success. She could even feel her cognitive abilities were back to what they were before the grey’s removal. This was the first time that she felt an improvement aside from being covered in the grey mana.

Setting herself on her task to change out all the grey mana, and even the beige if it was necessary, James started in small increments. She needed all her brainpower to move the mana at all, so she couldn’t go in bigger steps.

And it was tedious. Moving the mana around with any sort of control was tedious. You did one thing and forgot to think about the other. In many ways it reminded James of programming with C.

She had been forced to program with the language in an intro to programming class early on in college, and she still had nightmares. James had hoped this experience wouldn’t be too similar. C, unlike other languages, had a weird way of dealing with memory. As opposed to python, or even C++, which did the natural thing and freed up space as required, you had to program that in with C. It was an unnatural thing to remember to do. Right now, she felt like she was in a similar but opposite situation.

Every time she did one thing, she forgot another. Every time she remembered the other detail, she neglected the first.

Eventually, though, she was a beautiful quilt work of colors. She had initially tried to stick only with the pink, but it had become harder and harder to find in this weird world. Finally, she had tried another color and experienced the same results and had stopped discriminating.

A good portion of her body was still beige, and she moved onto replacing that color now that she was assured of her mental acuity. The world around her slowly started to transform, fading away in a manner which should have scared her since she was becoming increasingly transparent too.

But she remembered that first day in the Tutorial, stepping out from her apartment onto a foreign forest floor. She had wondered if science was at all worth it anymore. She hadn’t continued to think about it too much, but if this stay in this mana-filled dimension showed her anything was that science was warped. The same principles could be applied, the same process, but intuition had to be considered much more readily. There were rules nobody knew about yet. And gut feelings accounted for that.

So when James’s gut told her that fading away into nothingness was a good thing, she didn’t stop what she was doing. Until it was hard to find mana to replace her beige with it was so transparent. Until she couldn’t even see her own weird patches of mana covering her. Until her very thoughts disappeared too.