Museum Core Chapter 81: Interlude Foster

There were many kinds of loopholes. 

Technicalities that let you get away with chicanery without legal repercussions, but nevertheless caused chaos and were decidedly amoral. 

Shortcuts that let you do things more easily while maintaining the quality of the final product. Those, she really liked and likely wouldn’t have been able to do her job without. After all, the Director of Operations of the BPA was a hefty job which still nevertheless provided her with minimal support staff because, well, it was in a transitional period. 

But Nicole Foster’s absolute favorite trick was taking something that worked fine in its intended way, using it in a way no one had ever thought of before, and achieving something amazing. Pulling off that sort of thing … it made her really happy. 

The current “meta” for bureaucrats was taking the Logos Mage Class and splitting the points between Mind and Spirit, enhancing mental power while empowering the Class’ F-Rank ability to split one’s train of thought. And then you threw a few extra points into Magic to gain some offensive power so you could keep levelling. Perfectly serviceable all-round, and it certainly worked for Frye. 

However, she’d figured out a way to gain true multitasking at Level 1, using one simple trick. 

Anima Monk, Octopus bond. 

Octopi didn’t just have an extremely high degree of intelligence for an animal, something almost comparable to a human’s, that alone wouldn’t have made them a good bond. In fact, it wasn’t even clear if the “normal” kind of animal intelligence would impact the power at all. 

No, they actually had nine brains, one main one and eight more to control their arms, and it had been easy to upgrade Mind until she had eight additional trains of thought more than capable of doing paperwork.

Which, in turn, could be further exploited. 

Normally, the human brain had a certain degree of … “synchronicity,” for lack of a better word. Trying to do two entirely separate things at the same time ended badly. 

Like when you were trying to put in an earbud while dropping a sugar cube into your coffee, only to wind up having to fill out the world’s most embarrassing “reason for needing replacement” report for said earbud because, well, both had gone into the hot beverage. 

Although there was a much easier example. You couldn’t simultaneously pat your head while rubbing your stomach in a circular motion, you’d soon start to adjust one motion to mirror the other. This was a trick that could be learned, with time, but it went against how your brain was supposed to work normally. 

Her power, on the other hand, separated out those processes in a highly effective way, allowing her to, in essense, set each of her limbs onto a separate “command and control” loop, and pull off such things as typing into two separate documents using two distinct keyboards, and that had been using just her hands. She’d found a keyboard meant to be used with her feet and attached that to a third computer. 

And, even with all that going on, she could devote her attention to something else, such as an educational video or monitoring radio feeds, should she go into the field. 

Though right now, it was the ability to study and learn on top of everything else she valued, as it allowed her to vacuum up all sorts of information due to her phone’s handy text-to-speech function. 

Yet that was just her F-Rank power; when she’d added Spiritual Manifestation at E-Rank, her ability to affect the world using her multitasking had taken another giant leap forward. 

Levelling without fighting had been difficult, but constantly leaning on one aspect of her power and thus “fulfilling her Class’ purpose” had given her some increases in level, and exploring the other abilities it gave her did much the same, albeit at a tremendously slow rate. 

Using the flexibility to twist herself into pretzels that were likely downright nauseating to look at from the outside, or covering her skin in interesting patterns by adjusting its color. All in the privacy of her own home, of course, usually alongside her work. 

At E-Rank, being able to manifest spectral copies of her “Bond’s” body parts allowed her to do even more things at the same time. Of course, she was still limited to eight extra trains of thought, which generally left her with one separate keyboard and monitor for each of her arms, a third one for her feet, and four ethereal octopus arms in supporting roles, such as making coffee,  fetching files, and grabbing her cat before it spilled the aforementioned coffee all over her computers. 

As for what to pick when she hit D-Rank … her knee-jerk reaction had been to choose a dolphin, since they had the ability to literally only sleep with one half of their brain, an ability that would have allowed her to always stay awake, albeit at a reduced capacity, but she’d decided against it. 

For one, the need for sleep was naturally reduced as you grew in power. But she also needed at least some combat tricks. Flexibility, a massive reach for her punches and being able to easily trip up enemies with ethereal octopus arms was all well and good, but a dolphin bond would have given her very little that she did not already possess. 

Her new favorite, on the other hand … flight, incredible vision, and likely significant bonuses to hunting to boot. 

An apex predator in its weight class, a lethal killer that boasted the highest success rate of all hunters, and if she managed to unlock the Ancient Bond as an option at D-Rank, then she’d be able to pick its gigantic prehistoric cousin to her roster instead. 

Yeah, people might not think much about dragonflies, but that was just because humans were way outside their weight class. If they’d been the size of insects instead … 

Anyway, point was, vision, maneuverability and some kind of hunter’s instincts would actually make her useful out in the field even if she didn’t expect to wind up there much. 

Foster rolled her shoulders as she stood up, trying to loosen muscles that had gotten sore from a good eighteen hours of sitting in her chair with very little movement, then rubbed at her eyes. 

Crikey, that had taken a long time. 

But things were done, completely and finally. The new BPA building in the new capital, Bristol, had been a prison before. One which had already been reinforced to the nines in expectation for some spectacular (and unrealistic) prison breaks that had, surprise, surprise, never wound up occurring. Slapping on supernatural reinforcements on top of that was surprisingly easy, at least based on what she’d been told about. 

To be honest, the biggest headache had been making sure the construction crew didn’t bother the orcs and crafting focussed members of the BPA while they were busy upgrading everything.

Turning most of the building into an administrative center would be simple, and keeping a couple of cell blocks, likewise upgraded to the nines, for any actual prisoners. 

Of course, a prison would normally be a separate structure, and setting things up like that was risky, but no one had the spare, high Level manpower to man an entirely separate building containing superpowered criminals. For now, simply having regular BPA officers nearby would have to do the trick. 

That being said, the prison had been isolated enough for there to be plenty of space for future expansion and construction, so later setting up a set of cells or a separate administrative center right next to it would be easy. 

She’d also made sure that there weren’t just temporary apartments ready for people who had to move for their new job, but also new accommodations for those who’d lost their homes in the merge. She’d also done much the same for the new setup at the edge of the London transformation zone, though that would, most likely, have to all be repeated once she managed to find the BPA a more permanent home there as well. 

As for right now, however, she was done. Back to her normal job as a director of logistics, or, more likely, fixing all the things that had fallen by the wayside while she’d been in Bristol. 

Not that she blamed Frye for any of that, he’d been doing his job, her job, and wearing half a dozen other hats as well for the better part of a month. Expecting small issues to have cropped up wasn’t being disparaging, it was being realistic. 

But they could all use more help, help they weren’t likely to get anytime soon. They were creating a government agency from scratch, to cover a need that had not existed a scant few months ago. 

There had been two ways to go about that. 

The first was simple: grab a bunch of people, tell them they worked for the BPA now, and approach every situation with a “throw bodies at the problem until it’s fixed.” It might even have worked, but would have also created a bloated, needlessly complex bureaucracy that would require constant fixing and tweaking. 

So they’d taken the second option, of actually building it bit by bit, starting with a lean organization and adding more people and resources as they were needed. It’d create an overall far simpler and more efficient agency overall, but it also meant that growth was slow, and things would be, well, lean for a long time. 

Which just left one question: would plastering over the cracks using superpowers bite them in the ass eventually?