Divine Artifact in a Scientific World-Chapter 92: A nasty rose

All the girls had stopped to watch as Madison tried and failed to hit her training dummy. But when Jack managed to hit the dummy, Nora had said, "Oh, neat. So that’s how it teaches you."

Nora and Rina had immediately begun conferring while Miranda said, "Hey, what did you see? I don’t get it."

Ignoring the three girls, Jack pulled Madison from the training room out into the white room. Then he said, "Do you know if your cellmate has any family?"

"What? Why would you care if she has family?!"

"Leverage," he replied in a steely tone.

"Oh, um, I’m not sure. Maybe?"

"Well, let’s find out," he said in a darkly cheerful tone.

He took a snapshot large enough to include the jail where Madison was being held, then, with her help, navigated to her cell. There, he found Madison and her cellmate asleep in their bunk beds. Madison was in the top bunk, her cellmate in the bottom bunk.

Without delay, Jack made a sapient template of Madison’s cellmate, then immediately created an instance.

The sleeping woman appeared laying on the floor in front of them, laying on her side, head resting on her left arm.

The moment she appeared, Jack modified her so she would be unable to harm him and would obey him. He went with unconscious obedience because he was curious how she would behave without a conscious desire to obey or urge to be loyal.

"What’s her name?" asked Jack.

At the same time, the woman bolted upright, clearly a light sleeper.

While the woman looked around in surprise, Madison said, "Rosalia, but most people call her Rose or Rosy."

"Stand up Rose," commanded Jack.

The woman was wearing a t-shirt and shorts and had a muscular build, with dark tanned skin, straight black hair, and brown eyes. It was hard to tell if she was approaching middle age, or if she was younger and just had a hard life.

As the woman stood, she covered her mouth, eyes wide in fear, and said, "¡Dios mío! ¿Estoy muerto? ¿Es esto el cielo?"

He knew ’muerto’ meant dead, so he said, "No, you are not dead."

"Is this heaven?" she asked.

With both Gefen and Miranda, when he told them they were copies, they didn’t question him and seemed to just accept it was the truth. So he tried the same with Rose.

"No, it’s not heaven either. You are a copy. Your original self is still asleep in jail and will never learn about you, the copy." Then he pointed at Madison and said, "You have been harassing my friend. What can she do to get you to leave her alone?"

Rose smiled slyly, liked her lips, and said, "Oh, that’s easy. All she has to do is get on her-"

"Stop!" He could see where that was going.

He tried a different question "What could someone do that would compel you to not merely leave Madison alone, but encourage you to help her in any way you could?" frёeweɓηovel_coɱ

She stared at him like he’d just asked her to shit gold and piss champagne.

"Ha! Like hell-"

"Stop."

Much as he’d expected, she would not cooperate without a little encouragement. So, he maxed out her loyalty and conscious obedience.

As soon as he did, she dropped to her knees, hands clasped together, and said, "My lord! How may I serve you? Please command me!"

When he’d done this with Gefen, the old rat had acted like a docile butler, possibly viewing him the same way a loyal household servant would view their manor lord.

But Rose apparently had more of a religious streak or had been influenced by her initial impression that she was dead and had maybe gone to heaven.

"I’ll repeat my previous question. What could someone do that would compel your original self to not merely leave Madison alone, but encourage her to help Madison in any way she could?"

"My lord, I’m not sure that’s possible. What could a child just out of high school possible be able to do that would influence a cynical adult such as my...original self?"

Just because he could make her loyal to him, and want to obey him, didn’t magically make her wise or knowledgeable. She was still limited by her own knowledge.

"Assume that Madison has the backing of a rich and powerful person with access to the very best lawyers." This wasn’t far from the truth.

"Oh. Um, if a lawyer from one of those big law firms showed up and told me he would represent me if I was nice to Madison, then I’d leave her alone."

It was an option, but he felt it would leave a bad taste in his mouth.

"Do you have any family that you care about?"

"No, all those bastards can rot in hell."

Damn.

"Enemies that want you dead?"

She snorted, "No, thank god. I’m just a small-time thief."

No family to use against her, and no enemies she feared. So what did that leave him?

"What would you do if Madison threatened you with black magic? Like say, turn your toothpaste into ass cream?"

Her eyes widened. "You could do that?"

"Yes, that would be easy."

"That would make me piss my panties."

"Okay, but would you decide you needed to kill her, or just decide you really wanted to avoid making her angry? And would you tell anyone?"

"Oh, I could never kill her. I don’t hate her or anything, I just want her to lick my-"

"Stop. I don’t want to hear what you want her to do to you."

"Ah! I’m sorry, my lord. I’ll never mention it again."

"Answer my other questions."

"Oh, um, if she threatened to turn my toothpaste into ass cream and it happened, I’d be terrified of her. But if she wanted me to stay silent about it, she’d have to demand it. Otherwise, I’d go blabbing to anyone that would listen."

Finally, a solution!

He and Madison spent the next hour grilling Rose, learning all her superstitions and fears and asking how she would respond if various inexplicable things happened. They then came up with a plan to terrorize the inmate into leaving Madison alone.

As he had learned at the mall, Madison couldn’t act for shit. Sure, she was great at hiding her true feelings, but terrible at feigning feelings she didn’t have. So he and Miranda, who had joined the fun, had Madison practice delivering lines in a dead, emotionless voice.

"...trouble me again and I shall curse you to taste the fires of hell no matter what you eat," said Madison in an almost disbelieving tone.

Then complained, "Seriously?! Do I really need to say this? It’s so stupidly over the top, she’ll never believe me."

"Not if you say it like that. She won’t," replied Miranda.

Even a dead, emotionless voice was initially beyond Madison because she had trouble believing that her cellmate would believe anything she said.

They were trying to get Madison ready for her debut performance later that morning.

They had worked out what they would do, and Jack had already made templates and then linked and modified them.

All he needed to do was push the changes out to the original items when Madison gave the signal.

While Miranda helped Madison practice her lines, Jack returned to the training room to find that Nora and Rina were both still training. There were taking turns trying to hit, or kick, Madison’s training dummy, the only one that was configured to defend itself.

He examined the interfaces of the dummies and, after some searching, finally figured out how to give the girls permission to alter the settings on a dummy.

So, he made a generic male dummy for each of the girls and assigned one to each of them. He also created a new matched dummy for Madison.

After assigning all the dummies and answering some questions, he returned to training.

The first thing he did was to have two dummies hit each so he could try to see how they were hitting. Eventually, he realized they were striking in a way that focused the force on just the first two knuckles of their fists.

With this new revelation he tried hitting the defend-only dummy again. This time he aimed for its chest, hoping to avoid hitting bone.

When his fist connected, it didn’t hurt as much. It was still jarring, and his knuckles stung, but it didn’t feel like he was at risk of breaking something.

Finally, understanding that there was more to look for than just overall stance and movement, he went back to watching the two dummies go through the first sequence, this time trying to pay attention to smaller details.

When Miranda and Madison returned, he explained to them how to make use of their assigned training dummies.

He also shared what he had learned about how to strike with his fist and how he was noticing smaller details that he had missed before.

Madison immediately began watching her dummies demonstrate the basic move sequence, occasionally mimicking what she saw.

Miranda, on the other hand, wrapped her arms around him and, while looking up at him with doe eyes, said, "You know, I have some moves of my own I’d like to show you."

He chuckled, knowing exactly what kind of moves she had in mind.

"I wonder if you will ever be satisfied?" he asked teasingly.

Taking his question more seriously than he expected, she replied, "I don’t think I will ever be satisfied. But I think I’m okay with that. Watching those two girls dance with you, flirt with you, having to wait all night and into the morning. It just made it even better when I could finally get you inside me. I...I think I like it when you make me wait."

"Ohhh, how interesting," he said, while gently pushing her away. "I could really use a good solid eight hours of sleep. Maybe I’ll lock my door tonight."

He really was tired, physically from the martial arts practice, and emotionally from worrying about Madison.

"Noooo, why did I have to open my big mouth?!" She feigned dismay, but from their connection, he could tell she was excited to see how long he would make her wait.

Smiling, he gave her a quick kiss, smacked her ass hard, then walked away, headed for his room.

He was looking forward to tomorrow.

First thing in the morning, after returning the time ratio to 1:1, his parallel self would work with Madison to carry out their plan to terrorize and subdue Rose.

And in the physical world, he was looking forward to having lunch with Analise. He hoped she would be as open to sharing as Robin.

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