At dinner, Serenity managed to carry his tray balanced on the back of his bad hand. The first round, he ate some of the food that was prepared in the Cooking class, but it was soon obvious that they hadn’t really made enough - and he was ravenous again.

He decided to set himself up at one of the large grills and do some basic meat. Fortunately, there was a large number of small precut steaks available (although what animal they came from was unspecified). No ground meat was provided, which made it a bit more difficult - burgers would have been perfect - but even so, he could make steaks acceptable with a few simple spices and a little cooking. That way, he could feed others and eat at the same time, possibly concealing how much he was eating. The meat was provided at this point anyway.

He normally liked his steaks medium to medium well, but he was so hungry that even the raw meat looked tasty. The first steak that went on came off as soon as it was barely seared, and even though it was still cool in the middle, it was the best food he’d ever eaten.

By the time he was halfway through his second steak, others had started to notice that there was a grill available. He quickly had a line. He was able to turn away from the grill and eat while waiting for steaks to cook, so even though he was feeding a lot of people for a while, he was able to eat a large portion of the meat himself - each time he finished a steak, he just took “his” off and put another on for himself. He was somehow wolfing them down much faster than he would have believed possible with only one truly functional hand, but even so some of them reached medium rare when the line was busy.

After an hour, it slowed down a lot and most of what he cooked was for himself. An hour after that, Rissa came to see him and kissed him good night. She’d had a long day and it was apparently well after dark. The kitchen hadn’t yet shut down dinner, though, and he was still very hungry, so he stayed and kept cooking.

When they eventually shut down the kitchen, Serenity carried the last few steaks he’d managed to (sort of) cook to an outside picnic table. He finished them off quickly. He felt … still a bit hungry, but much, much better.

It didn’t seem dark to him, even though he could see that everyone else was carrying lights as they walked around. Most were using their phones, but a couple seemed to have figured out enough of a Light or Fire affinity to make some sort of a light.

Serenity had noticed some difficulty walking out to the bench, but he’d been far too interested in the food to pay attention. Now that he was out of food, he looked himself over, and found out that it was a good thing he was wearing the extremely loose and adaptive clothes he’d found in the shower room; even they were very tight, and he had rolls of fat bulging out of them. He was well past obese, and had no idea how he’d even managed to stand, much less walk.

Thinking on it … he’d probably managed to eat as much himself as he’d cooked for everyone else combined. And he’d made a steak - sometimes several steaks - for most of the people in the Tutorial, including the instructors. He’d probably eaten several hundred pounds of meat.

He wasn’t sure how much longer it would be possible to pretend to be normal. If he could just make it to when people selected Paths, it would be much easier - there were some real oddball Paths out there - but he’d already repeatedly messed up.

He didn’t have to wonder why he was trying, though. First, there was Rissa. He didn’t want to drive her away. Second … he’d gone lone wolf the last time around, and it had been an epic failure. So this time, he was resolved to try to work with other humans. Which would be much easier if they also thought of him as human.

Which meant he couldn’t afford for anyone to see him like this. He reached for his Void affinity, tuned it to eat only visible light, and stretched it into a sphere around himself. That would give him time, even if someone carrying a light came up to him. It wasn’t nearly as good as a real spell, but it was the best he could do for now - fairly similar to those people carrying Light sparks. They’d probably think of what he was doing as a ball of Darkness.

Serenity could still see just fine, which told him he wasn’t seeing using visible light. That wasn’t worth exploring right now, though.

He put himself into a light trance, and concentrated on his body. What he found was surprising - he was rapidly gaining weight. As soon as he realized that, he stripped off his clothing - it wouldn’t take much more, and he was going to need it to be wearable later. As he looked into the weight gain, he realized that he could see a little of his past. Possibly his Time affinity? Either way, he’d gained only a little weight during dinner; the true weight gain had started once he was headed out, when no one could see him. It was almost like something was helping him stay unnoticed.

He also realized he’d badly underestimated how much he’d eaten. It was a good thing the picnic table and bench were sturdily made of materials intended for Tier 3 people, because they would probably be supporting a ton or more of immobile flesh shortly.

Even more annoying, he was already starting to get hungry again.

He needed to burn this weight off, or at least figure out how to hide it again. He had the feeling that however it had been hidden during dinner wasn’t going to work, though; that felt like a one-way process. He tried moving as much as he still could to try to burn it off the same way the fight earlier in the day had, but he was nearly immobilized and it was quickly obvious that he would shortly be completely immobile. He was lucky he was still able to breathe.

He was pretty sure that he couldn’t have burned it off quickly enough that way anyway. It had taken hours of fighting, and was far less than he needed to get rid of now.

There had to be a way. He first thought of doing the mental equivalent of the physical exercise he’d done earlier in the day - more stats would be helpful, especially the mental ones - but he couldn’t quite figure out what that would be, and guessed it probably wouldn’t be faster anyway.

No, what he needed was the right way. He’d apparently triggered something with the high level of exercise, and it was unlikely that it was intended to make him eat himself into a puddle of fat, so … the body was probably just a waystation. That would explain why the weight gain didn’t start until he was alone; he was supposed to do something to deal with it, but probably not something that could be done while eating or with others present. He couldn’t think of anything he could do now that couldn’t be done with others present, so he hoped his lack of imagination wouldn’t hurt his chances of finding a solution.

He traced his digestive system. It was blatantly no longer human. It simply ended with an organ that appeared to quickly convert food to energy and shunt it … somewhere, replacing the stomach. His intestines were simply missing. The area was unsurprisingly full of fat, just like everywhere else.

Exploring where the energy went took a while, but it didn’t gain him anything. He was eventually able to see that it was a temporary space that would convert the energy into biological material. It could store a small amount indefinitely, but he’d eaten far more than it could store for long. Right now, it was turning the excess energy into fat, but it looked like the intent was for healing. Tracing it out hadn’t helped any.

No, that wasn’t true. He could watch the timing as well. He checked his body as he finished the fight - his digestive system was still human, but at this view he could see that he didn’t just look emaciated, he literally was. He was in much worse shape than he’d realized. After the shower, still human … as he started eating, he saw a small organ he didn’t recognize move from just below the stomach to replace it. That was also when everything below it in his digestive tract dissolved into fat. It was like his body had realized he was in danger and that it had a solution. This was probably how the bullet wound had been healed so quickly, but the healing organ was much larger and more capable now.

It was simpler than he’d thought. His body had tried to “heal” the “injury” of being starved - and it didn’t know when to stop. He could probably do something with that; certainly, he needed to do something about the hunger. He looked it over, and realized that there was a fairly simple way to tell it “this is what I’m supposed to be like”. It annoyed him that it hadn’t been set to anything until he went looking; if it had been set correctly, it would have pushed him to eat until he was fit and then stop. He also found a way to disable it from overtly healing injuries, but left that alone. He doubted he’d ever need to hide his ability to heal quickly.

The idea of being able to heal quickly - and passively - just by having eaten well before was incredible.

It was amazing how quickly things moved from making him feel less human to being a part of him that he valued.

That didn’t solve the current problem, though. Maybe he could trace the thing that had caused the problem in the first place. He watched himself, and tried to move, straining against the all-encompassing folds of blubber. If he could get a stat point - any stat point - he might be able to see how that worked, and do something useful.

He didn’t know how long it took, but eventually something happened. Fat distributed all over his body simply evaporated into energy which moved down channels he’d never noticed that also ran all over his body. The channels ran up to a node in his brain, where they went … somewhere. He could tell that it was something he’d be able to learn in the future, but it involved a Concept or maybe even an Aspect that he didn’t have yet. He guessed it was part of his Altered Template.

He couldn’t control it directly, but on further investigation he found that there were controls built into it. One of them would drain excess energy - fat? - from his body. He couldn’t then direct what happened to it, but … right now, that wasn’t his biggest concern. He hit the trigger as hard as he could.

Which resulted in blinding pain throughout his entire body.

When the pain stopped, he felt much better. He could move, although he still felt very bulky. The insane hunger was also gone - though that was probably because of his earlier change to his … healing stomach?

He pulled the clothing back on, and was relieved to see that it hadn’t been stretched out of shape by the experience. He needed to find a mirror, to see if it was close enough. He didn’t think it was.

The only mirrors he knew of were in the Armory - the trainees’ restrooms didn’t have mirrors - so that’s where he went. He had no trouble getting in, though he did have to dismiss his Void darkness effect to actually see himself in the mirror. He’d been right; he was still far more overweight than Thomas had been before the Tutorial started. He searched for the trigger to drain some of it, and hit it much more gently.

It still hurt like an all-consuming fire, but it passed more quickly. It took him several increasingly gentle triggers to get to a fat level that looked neither overweight nor skinny. Once he was happy with it, he checked the “healing” organ, and found that it had already dumped its reserves into fat - apparently he’d gotten it slightly wrong before. He reset it to just a little skinnier than he was, since it was now the only way he could eat, and realized he now felt a gnawing hunger - but one that still was not nearly as strong as what he’d felt earlier.

It was odd. He was pretty sure he hadn’t increased his Might all that much, but his muscles were much more obvious than they had been. He now looked like someone who spent some time in a gym regularly, working on muscle mass. That wasn’t what he’d expected - it wasn’t normal for small Might increases - but he had to admit (even if only to himself) that he liked it.

Now. Now that I look like a person again … what, exactly is this all doing?

[Willingness to fulfill a desire that is beyond all reason, even to serious detrimental effect, has been Noticed. Additional Paths are opened.]

[Conscious manipulation of Affinity has been Noticed. Additional Paths are opened.]

[Time Affinity increased]

[Time Concept initiated]

[+1 Perception]

[Willingness to risk one’s life in pursuit of appearance has been Noticed. Additional Paths are opened.]

[+1 Might]

[+1 Agility]

[+1 Might]

[+1 Might]

[Willingness to repeatedly endure extreme pain in pursuit of physical perfection has been Noticed. Additional Paths are opened.]

[+1 Might]

He felt a little insulted by the way the Voice of Order had characterized his actions - not being able to move wasn’t just “appearance” - but he couldn’t say it was entirely wrong. He HAD pushed his appearance past Thomas’s old pudgy self to one that he liked better.

He had no idea what “Ev” meant, but he suspected it was where the energy from all the fat had gone. If it was a good thing, maybe he could deliberately do this again?

Ev

This information is not available until it is independently discovered.

Yep, the Voice was keeping secrets. Which meant that it was either not good … or that it was extremely good. Since he’d been getting stat points, he was guessing it was the second. He started looking for a way to link the two systems - maybe if he ate too much, it could automatically turn the energy into Ev points instead of fat?

It didn’t take him long to determine that there wasn’t a good way to make the link work. Running it through fat (and blinding pain) actually looked less dangerous and more efficient than a direct link. It was disappointing.

The next thing to do, then, was to try to turn Ev into more stat points. He was sure it had something to do with the node in his brain. He’d gotten several stat points when he hit the trigger hard, one the next time, and then none on his softer touches. He needed to not hit the trigger to drain fat now, but instead pull from whatever Ev was … it should be something near the trigger, maybe something he’d hit on accident?

It took him a long time to puzzle out enough of the node to find where he’d accidentally triggered another function. He couldn’t find any other spots, and it’d given him different stat points, so he figured there must be a component of intent to what it gave him.

Mind. That was the only one that hadn’t gone up yet. If he could get it to go up by touching a spot that had given him physical points in the past, he’d have proven he was correct.

So he tapped the spot lightly. It took time to get it right, and more time to direct it, but that was fine.

It wasn’t exactly pain this time. It was more like … fizziness? Fizziness everywhere. It seemed especially concentrated in his left hand.

It wasn’t until he looked down at it that he realized that the crystal was gone. His hand was still crystalline from the wrist to the fingertips, but he could move it normally and other than the appearance it looked normal.

[+1 Mind]

[Crystal Affinity Sense gained]

[Fusing an item into your body to temporarily gain its ability has been Noticed. Additional Paths are opened.]

Success!

It wasn’t fast, but now he had a way to do something he’d never heard of before. He wondered if there was a limit.

He wasn’t sure about how he felt about it also taking care of the crystal. Being able to directly sense Affinities was powerful, but the idea of fusing himself with items on accident worried him. The idea that it was temporary was both reassuring and worrying at the same time. What would happen to his hand when it went away?

It’s fine. Surely.

He knew he was lying to himself.

At least he might be able to heal his hand if it went badly.

Lillene

When this came out originally, there were some comments about maiming the MC ... I feel like I should mention that this is just as temporary as the Voice's message says. Yes, it's a problem - for now. It's also a benefit - for now.