GoldFinger
patreon
Ch. 242 - Correction
🕑 Added 2022-05-19 05:38:39 +0000 UTCOnce Eliot and Margo were asleep and blackout drunk, I knew it was time to erase their memory of me and the portal.
Now, I couldn't well make a memory eraser helmet this fast, mostly because I didn't have the equipment or materials yet.
I also couldn't cast the memory wiping spell Strange used in No Way Home on them. Not only was it overkill, and they also had their personal enchantments on their bodies that I knew nothing about. If I cast the spell wrong I could end up killing them, which would be bad, to say the least. Especially since Eliot was destined to be High King of Fillory, a position I could use to my benefit.
So no. My magic couldn't be used.
But what I did have was nen.
Nen.
The power to control your aura, your life force energy to craft various parapsychological abilities that border on reality warping.
It's a very dangerous and very powerful skill that is kept hidden from the general public in it's original world of Hunter X Hunter, which I visited in my grand chase across the multiverse.
It has six natures, each allowing the creation of a corresponding type of ability.
The nen natures were in order enhancement, transmutation, conjuration, specialization, manipulation and emission.
Enhancement was the simplest. It strengthens the user.
Transmutation allows the user to transmute their nen into different things, like sticky bubble gum or electricity.
Conjuration allows for the creation of objects made from nen, like a living vacuum cleaner that can suck up all non living things, or chains that cancel out nen, or a pocket dimension only the user can access.
Specialization was the rarest and the weirdest. It had no set type of ability. All specialist abilities were unique to their users.
Emission allowed for its user to shoot energy beams or emit soundwaves that made everyone sleepy or other auch applications. It gave range to it's users over everything else.
Lastly there was manipulation, which as it's name suggests allows the user the manipulate stuff and people.
Place each at the tips of a hexagon, in the mentioned order, and you could determine what nature went well with the others.
You could use your own nature with a 100 percent efficiency, but for the rest, your nen use efficiency went down depending on the distance of a particular nature from your own on the hexagon.
The natures closest to your own, you could use with a 80 percent efficiency.
Those one step farther, with 60 percent.
and the farthest one, with 40 percent.
To determine your nen nature there was a simple method.
Water Divination.
By pouring your nen into a cup of water with a leaf floating on top, you could observe the effect it had and use that to learn of your nature.
I did this by pouring my nen into the rice fields in Monogatari during my chase, and the stalks of rice swirled around me.
When the leaf on the water moves on it's own with your nen poured into it, that means only one thing.
My nature was manipulation, allowing me to use manipulate mundane objects or even apply supernatural properties to them.
I used it last time alongside conjuration to create an ability I call Chains Of Heaven, that created ethereal chains that can suppress the anomalous properties of objects, turning enchanted things into their regular mundane version.
Like the 1:1 setting on SCP-914 but only a temporary one.
Once the chains are removed the objects turn back into their enchanted versions.
I used this ability to chain the True Longinus and The Darkness to my will, allowing me to control them.
It was intensely costly ability and consumed my nen in droves. Just keeping it on for a few minutes had left me breathless and exhausted.
But that was because it was a poorly made, hastily put together ability, that went against my nen nature. That's just what happens when you do that.
But this time, I had a better idea for an ability.
One I was going to make anyways but now could serve another purpose.
One that lined up with my nen nature of manipulation.
I picked out a pack of UNO cards from the pile of materials in the corner of the room, and began to shuffle through them, imbuing them with my nen, slowly getting used to them.
Manipulation nen was best used on objects the user is personally familiar with.
Most manipulation users in the world of Hunter X Hunter just used threads or needles to puppeteer and manipulate others.
Which to be honest is the main advantage to manipulation nen.
They can be especially poweful in fights because of this, since a fight can essentially be won instantly once the conditions of the nen ability are met.
Of course, the conditions themselves aren't easy. The more dangerous the condition, the higher the risk there is to the user in fulfillment of the conditions, the better the control they have over their targets, even at range.
Most users of manipulation nen have a condition of touch or attaching something to the target in order to manipulate their opponents.
Though a laxer condition can also work, just not as well.
The harder to fulfill the condition, the stronger the ability.
One user in the story of Hunter X Hunter could remote control people by attaching an antenna to them, while another could manipulate his own body via acupuncture.
Yet another one used a massive smoke pipe to create minions out of smoke and manipulated them.
The ability I was making, was simple.
It didn't require complete control of the body.
I just need them to not to like one thing. Scratch at the missing memories.
So I just needed the ability to plant a suggestion in their minds.
And hence came my ability.
UNO.
I would pull out a card from a shuffled deck and depending on what card came out an effect would be applied to the intended target.
To make the ability stronger, I placed two activation conditions on the ability.
Condition number one.
The ability only works via contact. The card had to touch the target at least once to activate the ability.
Condition number two.
I could only pull out one card at a time.
If I didn't like it, I had to put the card back into the deck, shuffle it again and then pull out another card.
This much work in the middle of a fight was a costly choice. A risk to me.
Thus, it should boost the power of my ability up a notch.
Then, I assigned an effect to each UNO card in the pack.
The normal cards would do nothing.
Basically useless.
Another condition.
The draw from the shuffle was true random. So I could very well end up with one of the useless cards.
In a UNO pack of 112 cards, 76 of them were normal number cards.
This was another risk to me, boostung the power of my ability further.
Finally came the juicy bits.
The special cards.
To them I assigned the special abilities.
For the 8 UNO reverse cards, I assigned the ability to reflect any attack thrown at me once, back at the caster.
So they could either reflect a single bullet or they could reflect a horrific curse cast by a god depending on how I played it.
For the 8 UNO skip cards, I assigned the ability to stop anyone in their tracks.
For the draw 2 cards, I assigned the ability to force two people to see each other as the enemy and fight each other to the death.
For the 4 wild cards, I assigned the ability to control someone like puppet and change their allegiance to me.
The catch was that the card had to be on the target at all times for me to keep control of them.
For the wild draw 4 cards, I assigned the ability to see through the eyes of four affected people.
And for 4 blank cards I assigned them the ability most important to me.
The ability to snip away and store the memories of the targets and display them on the blank cards.
The target would be left with a pleasant feeling about the memories lost and would have a deep urge to not scratch at or question the event.
But of course that wouldn't be enough. I needed to be able to remove specific memories. So, I placed another condition on just the blank cards.
They could only take away the memories of up to 9 hours in the immediate past, corresponding to the nine numbers the blank card could have on it since it was made to replace damaged cards in the deck.
With that, I began to shuffle the deck, pulling out card after card until I naturally got a blank card twice, wiping the past nine hours of Eliot and Margo's memories.
Tucking the cards away in my pocket, I sighed in relief.
Finally.
Almost made the same mistake as that other clone.
Now, time to get some sleep myself-
Ding!
My phone rang with a notification.
A message from Julia.
"I can't make the battery. Need help."
I rolled my eyes and groaned.
I was exhausted.
4 hours of drinking and another 5 hours of shuffling the cards till I got two blank cards.
Yes, I have shit luck of the draw. A byproduct of my quantum skewing mechanism.
Protects me from the manipulations of destiny and fate, cripples my luck stat by a point or two.
Nothing too extreme or dangerous, just I tend to get stuck in traffic a little more often or get a bad hand at cards or get a burger without the pickles I ordered.
Or get homeless crackhead dribble on my pants.
Harmless stuff, just a little annoying and easily corrected.
Usually that's not a problem because my godly domain is quantum probability manipulation, which basically gives me beyond godly luck because I control probability itself.
But that's in my true body.
In a clone body, it's r/mildlyinfuriating galore.
Like this, for example.
Julia messaging me just when I'm exhausted and need my beauty sleep.
I checked the time.
4:20 am.
Yeah no.
Fuck it and fuck her. I'm sleeping.
She can wait.
