“I am so tired of people manipulating me!”

Quince was having a difficult time reconciling the angry Emma he saw in front of him with the girl he’d been talking to the last few days. He’d invited her over to his desktop when she’d messaged him, but the person who’d greeted him was not the one who he was expecting. She was… for lack of a better word, sharper, than she had been in the past, much quicker to move and speak.

It was interesting, at least. Though it seemed to be coming from how angry she was– probably at Doug, given what she’d said about the manipulation. He wasn’t exactly a fan himself, but seeing Emma finally properly angry about it was a relief. He hadn’t expected it this quickly, honestly.

He’d thought that he would have been spending a couple months convincing her to actually get angry about it, given the way that she’d given him beaten down vibes.

Maybe she was just faster about it that his experience had led him to expect, then. It wasn’t as though he had more than three data points to draw from, and most of those were from people who had spent much longer with the people–

Not a road to go down.

“Looking for something distracting, then?” he said. He didn’t really have much of a plan, but…

“Yes! Please. Anything, at this point.”

He was grasping at straws internally, but that didn’t mean he was showing it on the outside, he knew. Most people couldn’t tell his half-baked ideas from the ones he’d actually thought about. “Well, you remember that project you were working on your first time in here?”

The brought her up short, and she seemed to think about it for a moment. “I um. Well, mostly. It’s not, like, my best work ever…”

He laughed at that. “Then at least we know it doesn’t need to be your best work to be leagues ahead of anything I could manage. ‘Cause I can’t finish it.”

She tilted her head at him. “Wait, really? I was just working on the operations section, and that’s all pretty formulaic…”

Quince shook his head, caught between amazement and disbelief. The project she’d started, an organ in the steampunk-ish style he had going on here that was more a building than a room, wasn’t exactly simple. She’d barely left any room for the automatic playing system she’d set up within it, and his first thought was that she would have needed to expand it over time to cover what she needed to build into without compromising the aesthetics on the inside somewhat.

Those thoughts were dashed when he’d found the reader, with the ridiculously intricate mechanics that he’d found inside. It wasn’t enough to run the organ, exactly, but it was certainly enough that only minor things would need to be done before they reached the point where things were actually run.

“I don’t know who exactly gave you that impression of that being pretty formulaic, but I need help with it. I thought you’d have to double the size of the connecting room for the organ to manage what it needed to before I looked at the inside of the reader!”

Her nose scrunched up in distaste for a second, and she gave him a look that could only be described as ‘reassessing’ before all traces of the moment were wiped from her expression. “It’s not really an organ.”

That wasn’t exactly the response he’d been expecting, and it showed. “It… what?”

She shook her head, then held her hand out. “If you’ll pass it over–” He did, and she grabbed onto it for a second, rotating it, before she pulled it out, expanding the frame to a size larger than the final version would be, then pointed at the feeds for the tubes. “It’s a bit like a combination of an organ and a calliope, because you’ve got the whole steam thing going on. It has different volumes, though, because of the varying pressure that is in this section–” she pointed to an input section that he’d barely been able to guess at what it did. It turned out that the guess was correct, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

Before she went on though, he cut in. “Can the player control the volume, or is that on the automatic only?”

She paused. “Well, it’s mostly just built for the automatic? I built the manual section more to remind me of what each stop and note was… I guess it would be possible to add player volume, but… hmm…”

He was able to keep from staring at her, though he managed it by staring at her work instead. He was proud of his own designs here, but having Emma involved was making him feel a bit inadequate.

“You know, I know our Calculation rounds to the same five, but what’s your actual number? It feels like you’re just smarter than me.”

She made quite the face at that. It went through annoyance, embarrassment, and resignation before landing on something more neutral. “You lasted quite a while before asking me.”

Quince smiled at that, though it was a bit strained. It was true that he’d been wanting to ask that question for a while, but it felt inappropriate. “Yeah, sorry. I know that pretty much everyone with the higher-than-one-thirty calculation is obsessed with the numbers…”

She shook her head at that, conflicted. “No, not really. Just the ones who hit the Con/Calc ratio limiter.” She paused. “Not that most of them are aware that it exists.”

That took a moment to take in. There was some sort of limiter? “What… What do you mean limiter?” he asked, his voice quiet.

“My calculation score is one-seventy-two. And I’m assuming yours is… one seventy exactly?” Emma said, giving him a sidelong look. It was almost… pitying, and as soon as he heard her speak he knew why.

“Yeah, it is,” he tried to keep his voice from breaking, and was… mostly successful. “But limiter?”

“Yeah, you’ve definitely hit it, then. Most people who know about it won’t say anything about it, since they’re almost all on the concentration side.” She paused, closing down the display and gesturing for him to sit down. When he did, she followed suit. “Your concentration and calculation scores… I assume you’ve been trying to crack that barrier for ages based on that response…. Neither can be more than double the other. Just like strength and agility can’t be more than double stamina, and concentration and calculation can’t be more than double energy. It applies in reverse for the endurance ones, too, though that takes the higher option. On top of that, energy and stamina can’t be more than a time and a half apart. It comes up sometimes on support and ranger boards, but usually–”

Another face, this one somewhere between amusement and anger, with a bit of amazement in it too. “Well, usually they all decide to keep it to themselves, since none of the carries notice on their own.”

That…

It made sense.

Son of a bitch, that made sense.

“Now that it’s pointed out to me,” Quince tried to joke, some of his anger and relief creeping into his voice, “I’m wondering why the fuck I didn’t notice it before.”

Other people had had his issue, when he’d looked it up. All of the ones he’d researched had been looking at capped calculation scores, all of them at some multiple of two, and almost all on different numbers.

Nobody had asked for their full stat sheets, instead mostly being made fun of.

There were, of course, training regimens for the other stats, but he’d never bothered…

That would need to change. Especially because his energy, at one-twenty-seven, was about to be limited by his stamina…

When he pushed his mind off of that revelation for the moment, telling Emma to bring back up the design so that she could teach him how it worked, his actual thoughts were basically entirely preoccupied by a new thought.

He really owed her for this. More than he could probably repay any time soon, not that she’d think about it as such.

There was one thing he could do, though.

He started making plans for tomorrow.

He’d been planning to do something about Doug anyways, but that had just changed from something he was going to go about carefully to something he was willing to blow that bridge up entirely over.