Chapter 39: Answers and Progress
"So, how long will it take for you two to get here?"
"I do not know. From what I can see she has regained some life and color on her skin. Though I am not completely sure how many days it will take until she wakes up." Gut said to his phone while touching his head, not knowing what to do with the girl, Charlotte.
"Haa, really, to fall sick like that. You know, I contacted Kent to bring me some things and thought you noticed it, and that it was the reason you took his yacht to Lurian." The man on the other side of the phone sounded annoyed.
"I am sorry, James. I had no idea he was working for you..." Gut apologized again for that little mistake of his.
Had he known Kent was working for him, he would have told him about Charlotte. That way she could have been without worries, without exhausting herself and then fainting while doing something dangerous for her body.
What she had wanted to do, Gut wasn't sure. But he was certain that something had happened on the yacht regarding that gem of hers. And to make things better, she spent herself in that monstrous way.
"If she doesn't wake up in another week, bring her here without wasting more time. The war is going to start at any moment between this and next week. If you stay there for too long, you'll be dragged in unnecessary conflict."
"I know. But, can you not make it stop?" James had told Gut he instigated this war during this last week.
"Nope, even though I can't do the experiment without that girl. Seeing as she fell sick like that, there's no way to do anything. There are countries that still have some kind of weapon to test, so they want this happening anyway." James said without hurry. His plan didn't go as he expected but it wasn't that bad for the governing powers of the world.
"I see... Then, I will be going." Gut said, finishing the call.
He was on the rooftop of the hotel where Charlotte fainted. He had told the staff that there was no need to clean their room and that the food would be reduced to a single person's portion until he said otherwise. He had bought the required kit to keep her body hydrated and nurtured. He wasn't sure what was happening to her, but the rate of her body being restored to her former self was astonishing. If only one took out the fact that she had become like a woman dying of malnourishment in less than half a day.
He sighed as he arrived at their room's door. Opening it, he saw how she was still on bed, with the serum and other cords beside her and the blanket on herself. He sat beside her bed and looked worriedly at her now much better-looking body, though it still had signs of malnourishment, at least she wasn't only bones like a week ago.
He had grown fond of the girl, not like a lover but like a daughter. After getting to his house in Gercy with her, he started to think of how his long dead baby would look like, and at some point he started overlapping she to Charlotte. Her daughter would have only been fifteen years old, so there was no way of she could have been like Charlotte. It was just that Charlotte's attitude in life was too childish most of the time.
Charlotte always had that mischievous personality and wanted to be happy even though she knew that her happiness was on a nail's head. Gut knew that she wanted company and warmth. That she wanted someone who could share her joy and her sadness. That it was the only reason she had tried to tempt him into doing something she was going to regret. And that he almost fell for it in a moment of drunkenness.
All he could do for the next few days before the war broke out was to wait for her to open her eyes. Or else, he would need to make a decision for her: to take her to Paversia or to flee somewhere with her unconscious body. He placed his elbows over his legs and his chin on his interlocked hands, and kept staring at her, praying for her to finally wake up.
*****
"I can't do it anymore..." Charlotte 'said' as she finished trying to gather some ambient water.
She had been trying different things this last week. The only time she was gone were the first three or four first hours after fainting in front of Gut. After she recovered her awareness, she entered the Crystal's Space to inquire Prism what the heck had happened.
Apparently, the tiredness she normally experienced were her cells being squeezed out of their internal energy. So it didn't matter if she ate a lot, if that food wasn't distributed to the cells, then it didn't matter. Though Prism had tried to circulate the energy faster, it would take a bigger toll on her mind if it was accelerated too much.
She stayed there at first so Prism could work on her body and make her healthy, again, learning what Prism was doing in the process. She kept on getting ideas of things to try while doing it.
Once she understood how the nutrients were being issued throughout her body, she asked Prism if she could understand the state of her entire body, receiving a positive answer. To make Prism tell her that, she continued to teach her words for two days straight until Prism could communicate in an acceptable way. She tried to understand what Prism wanted to convey again but it was all for naught, there was too much information about her body she couldn't pick out the important parts: every cell had its own diagnosis, being listed in an unknown way and had no relation to what she knew of the human body.
She started to reduce the scope of the information being provided, until the point where she could see a general description of her organs, viscera, muscles and bones. She understood that except for her extremely malnourished body, she had no sickness of any sort. She was as healthy as someone her age could be.
Following that, she tried to reduce even more the scope, to get a general description of her whole body. Which she was able to get.
WHOLE BODY | MALNOURISHED - WEAK - HEALTHY
It was the format she created after struggling to communicate with Prism. Even thought there was almost no color in the projection, that didn't mean there wasn't any color at all. After all, her scorches had that now gone brown spots before. Brown. She asked Prism if she could imitate that color, not the properties it had, but only the color. She then took the base of a table's image and modified it, like a panel. On it was to be written the words Prism was taught.
She tried to do the same with Gut, but Prism couldn't do it. Apparently, there wasn't enough data to see if his body was okay or not. But once their two bodies were compared, she received an unexpected diagnosis.
WHOLE BODY (GUT) | MISSING PARTS - STRONG - SICK
The missing parts she understood, he had modified all his extremities, as well as his eyes. She decided that the sick part was going to be asked when she woke up. She then asked Prism to do an internal search of him and compare it to her. She received worrying news, some of his organs were partially destroyed or as she deducted, partly modified, others were fully fine and functional, and two were completely gone, with some structure replacing its function.
"He... Was that badly injured? What caused it...?"
She made a mental note to ask him what happened to his body after going out. Four days have passed at this point. Her body was still weak, so she needed more time. Her belly was already flat, meaning all the food she had eaten before was digested already. She had cords connected giving her nutrients so there wasn't much worry of dying.
She asked Prism if there were any ways of avoiding this kind of thing. After receiving a positive answer, she wanted to try it out only to have her wishes turned down immediately.
She could evade it by making a storing device, Prism somehow knew it was possible but she didn't know how to make it. She thought about the meaning for a while before realizing that one of the seven machines she had had the blueprints of somehow served that purpose. If her memories were not wrong, that machine could store and throw out the fifth force she wasn't sure it even existed at that time. It was akin to a battery.
Charlotte then thought that Prism was similar, and asked her hypothesis. Prism then tried to explain what she did, it took almost all of the fifth day as she didn't know that many words and Charlotte had to teach her what she wanted to say.
Basically, what Prism could do was take the energy from somewhere and help other things achieve their objectives. Moving things, holding them up, throwing it and understanding things. They all were things that could be done without her help, but receiving her help reduced the burden of doing it themselves. Anyone could do what she had helped them do, but everyone had some kind of limiter on their body, or so she said. Coming to the Crystal's Space allowed that limiter to be bypassed. But only when in here. When on the outside and without any help of White Prism, the energy required for someone who had their limiter on was around a billion times more.
Being asked if those limiters could be erased, Prism answered yes but it would need a pretty big amount of energy. If compared to what Charlotte had done that other day, she would need a hundred more days to get the energy required. And that energy was to be exhausted in an instant for it to be effective, if she was to do it slowly, she would need to wait for around ten years as that limiter was always reconstructing itself.
"So it needs to be destroyed altogether or it would continue being there... Hey, why am I getting less tired when doing things?"
BODY USING ENERGY | BODY STORE LITTLE MORE ENERGY
Was what she said after some time. Charlotte thought about it, thinking that maybe she was becoming that storing machine, only to receive a negative.
She was now able to keep more energy on herself but it would disperse with time, becoming normal again if enough time went by without it being used.
It was on the middle of the sixth day that Charlotte asked if White Prism remembered everything she had 'seen'. Getting a positive answer, she started showing all the times Charlotte had invoked the External Projection, and some other places she couldn't remember where it was. White Prism could even reproduce the movement of the particles on those memories.
Charlotte saw the warehouse where it all started, though only the soil as there was nothing else except for the wave made when Prism was born; her house before the fire, Jean's room and her burned body, when she was in various hotel rooms, in the train, in the yacht, on the beach and on the current room; these were the places she could recognize.
The ones she couldn't pinpoint were streets, parks and cafeterias of various kind. Asking Prism about it, she answered that she wanted to see how everything was doing on the outside, she was also curious about the world!
"Really, what a kid, hehe~" Charlotte laughed at her 'daughter's' curiosity.
She then decided to play with those memories, getting an affirmative with a warning. She could also exhaust while toying with it, albeit at a tenth of the normal expenditure. Though invoking them didn't tire her at all.
She mused at that kind of thing, if she was to get tired, then that meant that she was 'moving' something, after some minutes of wondering, she got an answer: she was moving White Prism's memories.
She forgo doing anything that could expend her tired self more, she was physically weak and anything more could endanger her life, again.
At the end of the sixth day and over all the seventh one she tried things she had abstained before, though she did so in an image of the external world. She used a water cup Gut had left beside her bed for unknown purposes and manipulated it, telling Prism to calculate the required energy she would use to move it in reality, she called the action of getting it together and make it float, Lesser Water Gathering. Moving it to a desired place, Water Movement, and throwing it, Water Throwing.
At the end of the day, she realized Gut was sitting next to her, having in his face a worried expression, making her grasp that a week had gone by and she hadn't told him anything. Feeling a little stupid about forgetting something so important, she decided that the next morning she would stop being on the Crystal's Space and continue their travel to Paversia.
The last thing she did during that night was to try to gather water without it around, meaning that she would need to search for water molecules floating in the air and gather enough to form a droplet in some point.
She had also wanted to try and invoke fire and electricity but she needed the External Projection to do that.
The next day, she woke up first thing in the morning, she had not 'been' in her body all week long and now she finally felt how truly weak she was, just lifting an arm was tiring for her, she didn't know if she could even walk.
Her mind was fully awake, though. Even though she had been all the time on the Crystal's Space, she hadn't done anything overly taxing. Just playing with the images, teaching White Prism things and getting answers about various things.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
Vespertian
Vespertian Now the true protagonist's voice has been heard! Heh.
I hope you are liking where this' going!
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