A Jaded Life

After sending off the fivesome to make themselves comfortable in their new accommodations, I decided to start checking out the group we had captured. There was quite a bit I wanted to know before focusing my efforts on teaching Daniel how to do magic so I had to start somewhere. Especially as I wanted to see how much I could push my Mind Magic into the territory of mind reading, as depicted in popular fiction. I doubted I’d ever be able to simply scan somebody’s memories as if I was reading a book, but pushing them into thinking about something and possibly observing their mental processes in real-time. That sounded a lot more possible and plausible, both in regards to the cognitive processing speed required and from a purely logical point of view.

Though I would have to be cautious about changing their memories, I vaguely remembered reading some articles, long before the change, about how memories were overwritten every time they were recalled, which was part of the reason why eyewitness testimony was so unreliable, or something like that. But it had been a long time since reading that particular tidbit and I hadn’t been that interested, back then. Now, I would love to read some of those articles, even if I doubted they’d actually remain current with the system and the sheer breadth of influence it had on people’s minds.

The old question, was naming something and thus making people cognisant of that condition enough to alter their perception or could the system only name what the person had already been cognisant of? It was said that recognition of a problem was the first step to solving it, which made sense, but how about a mental condition, and not in the medical sense? My Ruthless trait for once, could be seen as a problematic condition, though maybe only by people who were not ruthless in the first place and thus didn’t have the trait. I certainly didn’t think that my ruthlessness was inherently problematic, I only thought that other people knowing about it could be problematic as it would make them biased. To me, ruthlessness on my part was sometimes a simple necessity, especially now that I wanted to keep the people around me safe and sound. Which, once again, made me wonder about other traits, even if I was fairly certain that the system was even more complex and complicated than I assumed it to be, simply because I lacked information on its sheer scope. But, for now, I had some proper ruthlessness to demonstrate, all in the name of keeping my little family safe. And in the same of science, but that was an entirely different angle.

And so, I found myself on top of the smooth stone floor hiding the cells I had put my prisoners into. If there was one simple way to keep a lock from being picked or an enchantment from being broken, it was to make fiddling with it difficult. In this case, the cells were designed to open at the top, with the inmates some four metres below the ceiling, making it seriously difficult to get to the stone sealing them in. The walls around them, and the floor below, were inscribed with the same magic-devouring formation I had placed on some of the key structures before we left to scout the anomaly that turned out to be a dungeon, making it nigh impossible to affect them with magic unless one had some serious skills, especially in Darkness Magic, something these people didn’t have.

All in all, the cells were as secure as I could make them and I was already trying to make them even better, as soon as I found ways to do so. But for now, a complete and utter lack of an entrance for normal people was an excellent way, which also added a certain intimidation factor. Plus, there was a certain powerplay in the fact that their interrogator would always be above them, forcing them to crane their neck if they wanted to see them, which just added to it all.

“Help…” the first prisoner started to moan, the moment I opened the ceiling up, allowing some light into their small cell. It looked as if the guy had not been happy in his captivity, not that I could blame him, the cells were sparse and unpleasant, exactly as designed.

“I could help you, yes,” I spoke, my voice calm, cold and measured, as I floated in the air above him. For a moment, I wished I had access to light magic, simply to give myself some backlighting, making me appear to be some angelic, illuminated figure, as that would likely add some serious mental pressure. Maybe I could come up with something suitably dramatic using Fire Magic, but for now, having him in my shadow had to suffice.

“But why would I want to do so? You and your companions came into my home, acting as if you owned the place, trying to intimidate and encircle me, like some pack of wolves,” I continued, noticing him flinching as if struck at the insinuation, especially when I mentioned his companions.

“Sit down,” I ordered him, cutting through his attempts at talking back. Not that the strange mixture of pleading, threatening, begging and pure snivelling would have accomplished a lot but even listening to his whining was annoying me. So, instead, I created a seat of Ice and gave him that order, watching as he immediately sat down, even if the chair couldn’t be all that comfortable for somebody not immune to essentially all levels of environmental cold. I might have to actually test how far down I could push things now before getting uncomfortable, it might be quite interesting.

Once the guy was in his chair, I had the chair sprout solid bindings, tying him down without a whole lot of wiggle room, making sure that he wouldn’t try anything silly like attacking me. Then, I lowered myself into the room, noticing that the runes in the walls actually reduced the amount of Astral Power I was regenerating and measurably drained the power I put into the Ice to make the chair, making me realise that I had accidentally created a cell that drained Astral Power within. An excellent way to hold all manner of spellcasters, though I had a feeling it would give people inside a literal headache due to the drain. Nothing lethal, just a lot of pain, making me wonder if I should consider that a bug or a feature.

“Now, you will tell me what I want to know or I might have to rip the information from your mind. You would not like that,” I warned the guy, before giving him a chance to tell me what I wanted to know about him and his buddies.

He couldn’t wait to answer all my questions, though I sadly couldn’t ascertain that he was truthful. Sure, I could use Mind Magic to get a vague idea but the strongest emotion I could feel within his mind was desperation, almost overshadowing everything else. But was it desperation because he feared getting caught or because he was trapped in a fairly comprehensive cell? Or even because he was afraid I wouldn’t believe him and the torture would start? There was some underlying duplicity but I just couldn’t tell if he was trying to hold something back or deceive me outright, making the deluge of information spewing from his mouth relatively worthless. Well, unless I put his buddies through the same treatment and compared their stories, as one had to do when unable to read minds.

After thinking about it for a moment, I decided that a gentle attempt at getting into the guy’s mind wouldn’t do any serious harm. I would have to be careful and somewhat subtle but it was worth the hassle.

Looking into the guy’s mind, I used a similar approach to the one I employed when pulling people into the Astral River. However, the difference was that instead of trying to pull us both into the Astral River, I sought to push us both into his mind. Or what I could conceptualise as such, while I could feel something with my Mind Magic and my Extrasensory Perception: Mind, it wasn’t as if I had a proper image of where I was seeking to go. Just those pinpricks of sensation coming from my extra senses but it seemed to be good enough and I arrived… somewhere.

There was no proper structure I could recognise, just countless flashes of colour in all sorts of tastes, scents and sounds overlapping in maddening intensity, flaring to life before dying down moments later. Nothing I could readily interpret, no order or reason. Focusing on one of those flashes, I was briefly inundated with a whirling mix of emotion, foreign and far too muddled for me to decipher at the moment, though I would try later.

For a moment, I tried to come up with a way to push his mind in the direction I wanted it to go but even if I managed, I doubted I would be able to interpret what I got. So, I decided to pull back and study the strange sensations I had managed to glean, at least after talking to his friends and seeing if they had something more interesting to tell me. So far, these guys were quite boring and, sadly, fairly dumb.