Summoner - Chapter 7 - SomeoneYouWontRemember - Parahumans Series
Chapter 7
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Were she to have more inspiration, or rather, the energy to put such inspiration into play, the room she was in might have been something more than just a fifty by fifty foot square with a ceiling just barely over twelve feet.
But she had definitely overtaxed the mana core by a lot judging by the slight yet insistent migraine, so simple would be the name of the game for now. She felt like if she tried to make even a vague shape in the stone she'd kickstart that migraine up to eleven within seconds.
Being a little dizzy also did not help her confidence.
She knew it would get better as her body and soul adjusted and improved, but still, it was a bit vexing, even if it made sense.
It sounded simple, but what she did here required power that was utterly absurd. The amount of weight pressing down on the stone she was moving and compressing, its density, the humidity that made it even harder to fuse dirt to stone, the various mix of elements down here…
One would probably need six factories to make a square foot of the stone she'd made around her entire bunker room, and hundreds of hours. So yes, the exhaustion, combined with the mental fuckery she put onto Sile, would justify the migraine.
She was still vaguely annoyed though.
And proud.
It might just be a flat square-shaped room at the end of a hundred foot-long horizontal tunnel hallway, bereft of even the most basic amenities like light or electricity or a fucking oxygen supply at the moment, but it was hers, and all its issues would be easy to fix, relatively.
It was also probably sturdy enough to compare to an Endbringer shelter. No, definitely sturdier.
She had idly wondered how tightly Taliyah could take stone and dirt and compress it, and the answer to that was 'yes', she found out when she really got to work.
She hadn't dug this place out, obviously. Throwing dirt out of here would be a complete pain in the ass. She just compressed stone and dirt over and over again, shuffling it around and fixing it in natural formations that would provide a lot of protection from cracking and splintering, a sort of internal lattice similar to a wood's grain, but thicker and more layered.
Taliyah was also a complete stone nerd, which was what had given her very detailed ideas of how minerals and stones and different stone grains and types all worked, how they formed, et cetera. Which was a bit of an odd interest, but also very cute.
It was a bit of a shame she couldn't meet these legends, or at least, some of them, but regardless, she was left with a room that was surrounded by about seven feet of highly compressed, grain-latticed stone that was both harder than reinforced concrete and also would refuse to crack as a singular piece, as it was comprised of countless plate-like shards tightly compressed against one another.
Sort of like security glass that just fractured and fractured and fractured instead of breaking into shards.
Despite the pounding pain on the back of her eyes, she still had some work to do to make this room livable, and most importantly, capable of being a versatile, safe location that would support anything and everything she chose to do.
The first step to that was picking another legend, so she quickly pulled Taliyah off, and draped Zyra, Rise of Thorns over herself.
Born in an ancient, sorcerous catastrophe, Zyra was the wrath of nature in the form of an eldritch nightmare plant. Then some poor sorceress found her, and she took over her body and began wandering Runeterra as a walking catastrophe of a particularly murderous version of nature. Her form was an alluring hybrid of plant and human.
Thankfully, Zyra had a fairly short and uncaring memory, or else ninety percent of Taylor's memories would be being a murderous walking plant lady.
In short, Zyra was absurdly powerful. She was essentially wearing an eldritch god predator plant.
Her abilities were about as vast and fucking insane as they sounded, and if they weren't in her hands, she was pretty sure she could make Nilbog look like a fucking sparrow next to a dragonshark. She could feel every reed and tree and houseplant in the entirety of the city. Probably move them too because she had something like… plant-kinesis? Was that a word? She could control plants.
Which made sense, because Zyra used to command entire jungles before she got put down by that group of assho-. No, heroes, not assholes. Great guys.
Anyway, she just needed something simple from Zyra.
Harmless plants.
She couldn't see anything without Taliyah's stone sensing powers, so she chose the obvious first option, and quickly shuffled through options until she settled on a particular version of magical luminous moss that feasted on mana to survive, and would simply hibernate and grow inert when it began getting hungry, losing its glow.
How long would it survive in hibernation?
A couple centuries, apparently. And even if something went to eat it, it had a poisonous secretion when hurt that could kill an elephant with a few drops, which she removed for safety's sake.
Zyra was such bullshit.
In short, she would use Zyra's plants to make a lighting system that used mana, which was in very plentiful supply so long as she picked any legend that could use said mana. She could just put her fist into one part of the network, pump mana into it, and bam, a lit up base, at least for a day or two. It wouldn't be good lighting, not like an actual lightbulb or anything, but it would be enough to see in her normal body.
Leaves on her arms unwound, mana forming and gathering and birthing her selection underneath a thousand little leaves, in a body that was more filled with the core of a sentient plant god than actual flesh. Seeds quickly formed in her chest, crafted through essence and mana, then crawled through her not-quite veins to bunch under her leaf armour. With a wide swing of her arm and a flare of her leaves, imperceptibly tiny seeds spread through the air.
Then she began walking along the walls and repeating the process.
With a few lazy swings of her arms and a couple minutes, along with some mental flexing, she had covered the entire room in magical moss seeds.
Of course, this species was nothing like its actual counterpart. All of Zyra's plants were fucking ridiculous. The vines she used as her personal weapons, the limbs of her core, were covered in magical crystal thorns that could shred through steel like it was wet paper, and the vines themselves were made of wood that was more like twined steel fibre.
If she covered a car and twisted, she was pretty sure it would just be a small arm-sized pretzel of steel in mere seconds, if the thorns didn't shred it like paper bits.
Additionally, her plants had the strange property of being goddamn impossible to put down. She supposed having bullshit instinctual powers over nature itself had its perks.
Which was why she made sure to neuter her moss and any other plant she would be using down here, obviously. She didn't want any of these somehow getting out of here and reproducing or giving anyone some bright, ruinous ideas. Imagine what Blasto, that biotinker from Boston, could make with her stuff. Horrifying.
She reached out to the surrounding plants, the seeds, and with a low breath, pushed mana into each and every one.
Like watching some kind of timelapse that condensed months into mere seconds, seeds grew into tiny roots that feebly clung to the purposefully not marble-smooth walls and ceiling, growing moss leaves, covering the room in a soft, soothing yellow-green glow, lighting up everything except the center of the floor, where a single thick pillar of stone supported the ceiling.
The migraine intensified, but she still had a bit of work to do.
The moss would certainly help a bit with oxygen production too, but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough for a base she planned to have completely enclosed in stone and inaccessible to anyone but her and whoever she brought with her, for whatever reason.
So she pulled some of the bigger plants out, the plants Zyra used when she tried to make the fumes of her forest burning fuck off and be replaced with life-giving oxygen.
They were honestly kind of grotesque, like giant vaguely rose-shaped open lungs, but regardless, she grasped them, changed their design a little to be less disgusting and a bit more pleasant-smelling, and let their lemon-sized seeds tumble out of her shoulderpads to the floor.
Then she lightly kicked them to the center of the room, and grasped them with her mind, pumping them full of mana.
The migraine got worse, sharply so, but she just grimaced with a hiss of pain and continued.
In a second, as if sentient, the seeds expanded and grew roots.
Then they dug through her fucking floor like it was barely there, their tips covered in the same steel-like wood her core's vines were made of it, moving like drills, spinning then pushing down, repeating, regardless of the deafening cracking racket they made.
The top half of the seeds more or less exploded outwards, growing spongy tissue, then plant tissue, then swirling all over with different textures and colors, before settling on a pink-rose color with a strangely grotesque shuffling sound, growing a dozen different imitations of human lungs with a reverse function around the base, each like an inflated rose's petal with venus flytrap mouths to breathe through.
The seed's centers rose like tree trunks, brown-green and moving towards her ceiling in less than five seconds, towering twice her height as they finally reached the moss on the ceiling and devoured it, only to attach to the ceiling and burrow roots there as well.
For a moment, she wondered if that was safe, before discarding the idea.
A few large holes in the ceiling wouldn't compromise something like this structure. Taliyah knew enough about it to make her know this with certainty.
The odd, lumpy tree-trunks twined around each other and the pillar at her command, then expanded, bulged in a circular spiral pattern of hive-line protrusions. From each, a red-rose colored petal grew, covered in contracting roots which expanded them a lung. A half dozen spiked mouths quickly formed on each, gaping open to consume any insect that thought their insides would be nice to burrow into, a mere defence mechanism that made her feel like she was some kind of evil fantasy god because fuck this thing looked evil.
The petals rapidly burst as the plant finished growing, then slowly, synchronized, they began to breathe, each inhale a raspy gasp. Then they would pause for about thirty seconds, closing their mouths tightly, and exhale a wispy sigh that seemed to come from a thousand tiny mouths.
It smelled like fresh morning dew and air cleaner than she'd ever smelled.
A grin mixed with a pained grimace split her face, resisting the urge to bounce in place.
The sight and sound was probably absurdly fucking creepy for a normal person, she'd wager, but to her it was kind of soothing.
And she felt oddly proud.
These two unnamed shitheads would breathe in all the air down here, and convert everything unnecessary they inhaled, no matter how toxic and terrible, into energy for themselves, then exhaling behind a mixture that was basically perfect, clean oxygen for a human.
A small tweak, because they used to make a mixture a bit more suited to Zyra's plants, but it was an easy enough thing to change.
The roots extended out of the bottom and top of her shelter about twenty feet each in vaguely conical shapes, and despite wanting to just stop and rest, she quickly grasped the plants again and pushed at their roots with mana, manually controlling them to grow and grow and grow, covering the room from outside with their roots, both to provide additional cover, protection, and gather more water and minerals out of the soil, and to reinforce the ground outside her shelter in case she needed to dig the room out.
Then she extended the roots upward to break through the concrete above.
Not severely, barely at all, actually. But she just wanted them to be just exposed enough to better gather water to lessen the load of mana she'd need to keep them fed and going otherwise, as their breathing function was not quite enough for self-sufficiency, especially when all the air left in the room would already be purified as could be.
Roots quickly began punching through artificial stone, cracking concrete and hiding in the tiny cracks, hiding under discarded metal piles. She wasn't worried about bugs at all, these things were made to survive Runeterra's jungles, where mosquitoes the size of one's fist were not at all uncommon. Earth Bet's life wouldn't even scratch her stuff.
Then, she added eight seeds of venomous Thorn-Spitters in each corner of the room, floor and ceiling, allowing some of their vines to creep towards the center of the room so she could power them with a touch.
They did exactly what it sounded like.
And to ensure they wouldn't immediately rise and turn anything not wreathed in the 'ally' tagged pheromones her plants all covered themselves with into a very dead pin-cushion, including herself, she quickly grew them with a deafening rustle of cracking, squelching, and grotesque ripping sounds, before setting them to be idle, and making a bunch of olfactory organs cover the walls, snaking through the glowing moss.
Basically plant noses that would program her Spitters to not attack anything that smelled like whatever smell she inputted. Magical biological programming.
Zyra was such bullshit.
She quickly set them up, a bunch of vein-like vines with little holes all over them quickly covering the walls amongst the moss, and told them to 'sniff' in five seconds. Then she turned into herself, ignoring the pain and dizziness she felt to rush over to them and rest her upper body against the vines.
She felt silly.
A tiny, tiny contraction that she felt against her neck as the vines inhaled, and now for the scariest part of all.
Testing.
She swapped to the Rune of Resolve, a green crystal that was focused on mental and physical resilience. She was relying on one of its effects that was called 'Bone Plating', a thing that covered her entire body in phantom green bone plates that would shield her from blows like segmented armor, each breaking after a single strike until it reset.
Then she briefly turned to Zyra, quickly made the four-foot tall murder spitters activate, their long necks and flower-like heads digging themselves out of their ball-like cocoon and swerving around idly, looking for enemies.
The information processed, accepted. She could feel it.
She took a deep breath, turned back to herself.
Nothing happened.
They simply swerved to her lazily for about a moment as their senses zeroed in on her, before the tension bled out of their forms and they slowly dug their necks back into their little ball of leaves, looking like particularly pretty gigantic pink flowers that were not capable of killing pretty much anything biological within a couple seconds.
Of course, were she to enter here as anything that wasn't Zyra or herself, she'd immediately get eviscerated, but that was the point. She could add the other legends' scents in later if she started doing some enchanting or whatnot. Maybe later she could figure out a way to keep them active and self-sufficient indefinitely as a proper defence system, but right now she was not really capable of anything more than a long recovery sleep.
Finally, finally considering herself done, she quickly put a Teleport waypoint in the corner of the room, and swapped back to Taliyah, hissing in pain as she massaged her temples and crept back down the tunnel that led to her base.
The tunnel slowly closed behind her, reinforced stone creeping back to close the entrance she'd left through, and after ascending up the long pit she'd made with Taliyah, she closed that too.
Then she immediately turned into Evelynn and beelined for her house as an invisible smoke cloud, feeling like someone was trying to drill a hole into her brain.
Notes:
Taylor makes Da Crib(TM)