The next two weeks passed with Tess tracking the duo through the streets and into houses, watching through windows and blending with the crowd during their evening gatherings. His horcruxes, as Ed and Zavier had called them, were never off his body and seemed to fade from the mind the instant you stopped concentrating on them.
Idiotic name for them, she thought as she practiced remembering the items while focusing on something else. When you were looking at them they appeared mundane and boring, like the most forgettable items one had ever seen, but the longer she concentrated on them the more she could recognize the power pulsing out of them. Then they'd fade from her mind the minute she looked away, until she couldn't remember what she was supposed to be concentrating on in the first place.
And how did I not notice how ugly he is before? With that stringy, dirty hair, long jagged nails, and skin that always looked to be covered in a layer of grease? Her brain whipped back around to the items. Damn it! She thought. It had only taken a few thoughts for her mind to once again ignore the items and start focusing on distractions. She chanted a mantra in her head until it became an earworm of a song, a line of a movie that wouldn't leave, or an important task that you just couldn't get out of your head.
Get the book. Get the rosary. Get them far away from him.
Get the book. Get the rosary. Get them far away from him.
Get the book. Get the rosary. Get them far away from him.
Get the book. Get the rosary…
"Why are you drawing it like that?" Ed took his pen back and cleared out the symbols in the air, laughing at the look on Zavier's face.
"Because that's what you did!" Zavier had been using his Sonic Screwdriver to draw the emotion blocking symbol that Ed used, but couldn't make the connections. With his high Intelligence he was able to perfectly mimic every motion Ed used but it never ended with the pen taking on the new skill.
"What do you see when you look at the skill I'm using?"
"I can see every line you draw, every motion of your hand - all of it!" Zavier threw up his hands in frustration. "I'm doing it exactly like you do!"
"And that's your problem." Ed had the look of satisfaction he got when he realized something that Zavier hadn't yet. "You're drawing it like I do it, but that is my interpretation of The System and the skill. You're not using your own interpretation."
"But I don't have access to The System, I can't see the inner workings of the skill. I can't see the code."
"Those were just tools that The System provided you, and you're letting them become your crutch. You're relying on seeing how something is made instead of trying to figure it out yourself. It's the difference between recreating a recipe from taste or needing the ingredient list. Or playing music by ear instead of requiring the score."
Zavier nodded in understanding. "Stick with the recipe one, that one speaks to me," he smiled. "But knowing that doesn't help me understand how to copy it. If I can't see how you're making it then how am I supposed to learn it?"
"We need to go back to fundamentals," Ed said. "Ignore your team chat skill, or whatever it's called. It seems like The System gave you that as a freebie, or maybe as an example. What skills were you able to learn successfully on your own?"
Zavier thought of that and remembered his first night with the pen. His eyes shone with the fond memory of having all The System in front of him, ready to bend to his will. "The Path of the Polyglot is the first one I learned. I could see the patterns, read what they were intended to do, and then followed the pattern set out by The System and copied it with the pen."
"Do you think you could have done it without the pen?"
Zavier considered and realized he'd been missing something. "Well yeah, actually. The pen didn't actually store that skill, it stored one from a creature I fought after. It just helped me draw out the skill."
"So it's like my brush then," Ed considered. "It's the tool that gives you access. But a tool is still a tool even if you can't see the instructions on how to use it. What happened when you tried to learn other skills?"
Zavier's face went dark with the memory of him inside the bathtub. "It… didn't go well," he said. He detailed the account, leaving nothing out. It was one of the greatest shames of his life, but this was too important to hold anything back for something as silly as pride.
As Zavier finished his recounting of the events Ed reached over and squeezed his shoulder. "That's tough man, I'm sorry." The two shared a companionable nod then Ed continued. "I see what your line of reasoning was - learn your body well enough to know how to heal it. But that's not how skills work. You can learn the effects well enough to impact them, sometimes, like with my emotional sunscreen, but that isn't going to tell you how the original spell works. You need something to build off of. A template to start with. Did you study any healing spells before starting your experiment? Talk with your neighbors about how the healing potions worked?"
Zavier's face went red in embarrassment. "No, I charged ahead with the immutable confidence of an idiot who hasn't considered the possibility that he might not know everything."
Ed laughed. "It's cool, I've been there. Anyway, that's the problem. You weren't studying how to heal a body, you were studying how a body is structured and how it works. That might help if you were trying to build golems or modify the human body, but it doesn't tell you shit-all about how to heal one."
"No, what your skill needs is something to work off of, then you can build from there. I'm sure that if you'd seen a healing skill in action a few times, and studied how it worked, you would have been able to apply that knowledge to building a better, deeper, possibly weirder version of a healing spell. Once you understand how something is made you can run with it from there. Once you know how a meal is made you can adjust the recipe to your needs all you want. Sometimes you can even come up with something better, or more flexible, than the original."
"Here, look at this," Ed pulled out the brush and it morphed into a simple ink pen. He drew a few quick lines in the air and a cartoon of a human man appeared in the air before him. It blinked, looked around, and then started walking in a small circle in the air between them as if inspecting the garage. "Don't worry, it's not actually alive, it's just a projection from my mind."
"When I'm drawing I have to start by knowing what a human figure looks like. Once I know that well enough I can do this," a few quick movements and the man's skin color changed, then his hair grew out, then disappeared altogether, then it became a woman, then a child. "And if I want to get even crazier I can do this," a few more strokes and the cartoon turned into a hybrid human-rabbit woman.
"Dude, you make your own anime furries? You're a freak."
Ed laughed and wiped the creation away. A few more strokes and an outline of a human hand was in front of him. "I can keep it an outline, or learn to color it in. I can shade it in different colors. With enough practice I can learn to do this," his pen moved and the hand took on a realistic, 3D appearance that looked so close to a real hand that it may have been a person reaching out of the ether into Zavier's garage.
"You are crazy talented man, that looks really real."
"And once I understand what I'm doing so fully that the drawings become instinctive I can impose my will and intent on it." The hand turned to a fist and flew towards Zavier, thumping him on the forehead before flying back again.
"Ow, that hurt!" Zavier said, rubbing his forehead.
"No it didn't, you baby," and Zavier laughed when he realized it didn't. "I can affect the real world with my drawings, lift things, move things - all to a limited extent, but they're all too ephemeral to actually do any damage. That's not the point, though."
"So what is? I get what you're saying - I need to see a skill and understand it so that I can learn it and improve upon it. How does that help us at all?"
"In the short term, that means that you can learn my skill by truly, truly understanding how I do it. You don't need access to The System - I don't have access to it like that. I can't see the code behind spells, I just learn them so well that I make them my own. There's no reason you can't do the same."
"In the long term, you're going to get your access to The System back at some point. When you do you'll only be limited by the things you understand. Not what you SEE. Not what you copy. Not what you mimic. What you UNDERSTAND. You may have access to the skill seeds, as you call them, but I wouldn't rely on that. You're still going to be placing yourself at the mercy of The System and what it reveals to you. Don't assume that just because you can see the inner codes that you're seeing everything."
This hit Zavier like a shock to his brain. It had never occurred to him that The System may be deceiving him - that it had only shown him enough to keep him satisfied with the scraps it had tossed under the table. What don't I know, and how will I know that I don't know it?