Emma hated the ship. She hated every horrible fucking thing about it, from the torturous labour to the smell, to the constant rocking, to everything else. She woke up tired, she worked until she was exhausted. She had brief periods to recuperate, feel her blisters grow and split, and then she was back to more work. Each day she had, being generous, a handful of hours' free time.

Aexilica had more, of course. As did Vari the Idiot, both of them were doing work at quite literally ten times her own rate. Not for the first time Emma decided she hated being small, and something had to change. If only to finally silence Larry's constant laughter.

Her magic held the answer. It must have done, it held the answer to everything. It was the power to warp reality. Emma was still, according to Larry, a young and weak Untethered, and that fact bothered her. He'd suggested that however talented she was, it would be years before her powers developed to anything beyond the magic common in other worlds, more likely to even be decades.

But as far as Emma was concerned, that didn't matter right now. She wasn't looking to split mountains and prolapse volcanos, not yet. She just needed to do a few fucking chores. How hard could that be?

As it happened, pretty hard. Emma could think of a great many ways she might make things like scrubbing the decks easier with magic, mechanically. What she could not come up with was a way of letting her save time. Less blisters was nice, but the real issue here was that she couldn't just scrape her hands across the wood three times per second and shuffle around faster than a man could speed-walk on both knees.

Fucking Aexilica.

Try as she might, her experimentations led to nothing like that. Emma turned her thoughts to other Fundaments, too, and though that direction did not yield a solution the other hadn't, it did let her think of a way to potentially sidestep her issue.

"What do you mean you can catch rats?" The captain frowned, looking more confused than sceptical. That was promising.

"Exactly what I said." Emma pressed. "I can catch rats for you, they've gotta be on the ship right?"

It occurred to her, then, that there may not be any rats on the damn thing. Fortunately the captain looked intrigued.

"How?" He asked.

"With powerful wizard magic, don't ask stupid questions. Rat-catching as my job, yes or no?"

He gave it some thought, the bastard, but Emma could see his decision being made long before the man actually gave a voice to it.

"I want you to get no less than five rats a day." He said at last. "You do one fifth of your normal work for each one you fall short of that by, deal?"

"Deal." Emma grinned, and then promptly caught less than four rats on every single day she tried.

It wasn't that she had a hard time finding the little shits, her Mind Fundament made the doing of that almost trivial. Save for some early hitches. Early in the endeavour, Emma had reached out to sense the cognitions surrounding her. She'd found familiar patterns, deep and complex palaces of thought dotting the ship and moving around. The vessel was quite large, as far as sailing ships went, and she'd been told it weighed a full sixty tonnes. It was no surprise to find dozens of people around it. What was a surprise were the simpler minds.

The bottom of the ship had been carpeted with them. Emma had assumed she'd found some jackpot— a giant nest. When she rushed to pilfer her prize she got nothing. Not at the floor at the bottom, not underneath the walkway as she discovered by pulling up a plank. Asking around, she soon got an explanation for the phenomena.

"Shipworm." Explained one of the crew.

"I beg your pardon?" Emma asked, calmly.

That led to an illuminating discussion about an apparently real species of molusck which habitually bored its way into the wood of sailing ships' hulls, fucking ate it, and then promptly died. Emma didn't sleep very well for a few nights after that.

She did get a lot of rat-snatching done, though. Once she'd properly sat down with her Cognition Fundament and started practicing how to differentiate from more finer gradations of mental capacity.

Human and shipworm was, obviously, quite simple. The differences between them were big enough for one to cross oceans by cutting down a few trees, and the other to die of old age eating halfway into the product of a few cut-down trees. Separating the rats from humans was more or less as effortless. The real challenge came in separating the rats from the shipworm.

But even that didn't take too long. Emma had been neglecting her Cognition, she had to admit, but the flip-side to that neglect was that throwing herself into learning it in earnest gave one hell of a learning curve. Within an hour she was noticing differences between the two animals, and in a few more she was on the hunt.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The problem, then, was never finding rats at all. It was catching the fucking things. Turned out rats were really fast, especially when you were a big, clumsy human trying to run on a rocking ship's underdecks while your head bounced off the walls.

Emma did ask around to see if there was a cat somewhere, which there wasn't. Which left her and her stupid, clumsy body to do all the catching instead. She ended up coming up with a few new tricks to help at least.

She walled off corridors unexpectedly with energy barriers, fired fragile, low-velocity bullets to try and hit the things without risking a hull breach. Even tried just blasting a corridor with hot wind in the hope of hitting something.

And she got them, eventually, slowly. But she never got enough to keep from working entirely.

Fortunately, Emma was given her pick of what to do as her remaining work.

Rigging-work was her least favourite thing to do; exhausting, miserable, humiliating. It exposed Emma's physical frailties and weaknesses in a way nothing else quite managed. Being literally hauled into the air by a stray line tended to make the basic facts of her body somewhat indistinguishable, and of course those crewmen who remained on deck to see her flailing got no shortage of amusement from it all.

Clearly, such a state of affairs was unacceptable. Emma got to thinking about how she might fix it.

One issue was that she simply lacked the mass to hold the necessary lines where they needed holding. Force didn't fix that entirely, but it helped. Emma could only apply acceleration in a single, limited direction. Good for anchoring something for brief moments if, for instance, she kept the end of a line pinned down against the deck. Not good for drawing it back, not unless she was lucky enough to have a near-straight line she could pull it.

The sad fact was that applying a multi-tonne Force effect to shipboard rigging without the ability to tweak its direction on the fly was just asking for trouble. Emma had gotten a lot of utility out of it in transportation, long distance movement and sustained power. But now she was seeing the limits. For instant, quickly-adjusted effects she'd need to rely more on Energy.

Unlike Force, though, Energy couldn't be continuously focused on a target once it was beyond Emma's physical touch. As fun as it would've been to telekinetically snatch the ropes one way and another, she just couldn't. Not easily at least.

Emma played around with several ideas before landing on one which finally worked. It wasn't particularly sophisticated, mind, which, in fairness, was probably why it proved so effective. She conjured long, reasonably thick poles of hardened energy capped with half-circular hooks at the tips. With these poles—each measuring about three metres or so in length—Emma was able to reach out and twist the ropes into them from afar. This let her stay clear of any whipping ends on the lines, manipulate the materials from afar and, most importantly, keep from having her hands flayed by the motion of everything against her skin.

With the physicality of everything taken care of, all that she needed to rely on now was her magic. It was a decent exercise.

The ropes moved inconsistently, and unexpectedly. Normally they were kept tightly tied and, when not, held more tightly still by the strong hands of crew. Now, Emma's were allowed to remain loose at all times. This was deliberate on her part, because it meant that as tension rose and fell in the greater rigging around them, they'd be jerked one way or another with incredible speed.

A movement in the mast measured by centimetres and degrees might drag the rope to one side fast enough to rip an arm out of its socket, and Emma did, in fact, find her joints strained. There was some physical investment to her work, after all, but directing it through her pole meant that the bulk of the strain was taken by that energy instrument instead. Most of the exertion on her part came through will and magic. Which was fine by her, it was training after all

The first day was worse than the ones before it. Then the next, and the third was more or less even. By then Emma's efforts had started to yield fruit. Hours at a time of wrestling the jerking, rapid ropes left her mastery of Energy heightened even further, and hours more of thundering after rats saw similar gains.

Fundaments:

Energy 3, Matter 2, Force 2, Entropy 1, Cognition 3, Space 1, Time 1

Crafts:

Alchemy 1, Talismans 2, Enchanting 1, Animacy 1,

Cores:

Attunement 16, Mastery 9

After weeks, Emma's statline had changed again and changed much for the better. She would've noticed the differences even without actively looking for them, her power felt improved enough to be obvious anyway.

Cognition was the most clear-cut point of improvement. Emma's ability to sense minds expanded so much that she needed to actually tone it down deliberately to avoid getting blasted by false-positives from sea life beneath the waves. On top of that, she gained the entirely new power to actually influence the simpler creatures. That brought a new bout of experimentation.

She couldn't make them do things more complicated than single or, maybe, double-step commands, which Emma suspected was a limit of the rats themselves. Additionally, trying to control people was beyond her entirely. A shame, that, but this still changed a lot. It took about a day for Emma to basically eradicate the ship's entire rat population. That earned her a lot of clout with the captain, but also removed her main source of time off.

Fortunately, she still used the remaining time with the rigging to continue practicing her other developments. Because her most useful new Cognition power wasn't even her control over animals; it was the meta-magical implications.

Emma wasn't certain how it worked, perhaps by providing some influence over the "will" that was apparently so important to her powers, but she found herself able to provide conditional triggers to applications of her magic.

After a while, she stopped getting any practice from the rigging at all. If only because it stopped being an exertion. Hold X in Y position, if suddenly jerked one way, apply Energy to resist. Draw back over a brief period to keep from snapping the ropes with tension. The instructions were never as direct as spoken language, but after a while Emma started to get the hang of turning conditional activations into, essentially, orders she could expect the ropes to obey. Only in the most unpredictable, violent storms did she end up having to involve herself directly.

Which was also fine by her, because it left more time to experiment with new abilities.

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