Analyzes Glory Girl's power

"Well, I'm possessing a slime to use this body," I said. "I expect that it'll go back to normal so make sure it doesn't eat anybody. Try not to kill it, because I'll be using it to get a look across the Veil at it, and from what I've heard, it's like looking at Cthulhu."

"It drives you crazy?"

"Really, really inhuman, and big. It'll be like I'm trying to figure out a piece of Tinkertech the size of the Empire state building, filled with a trillion moving parts all working at the same time, and I don't have any instructions. I'll be trying to replicate that, but better in my own head."

"How long will this take?"

"I don't know. I suspect that not all of the parasites are the same size. Some powers are probably a lot harder to manage than others. The only thing I know is that it'll get easier the more I do it. I'll probably figure out the underpinnings behind the biological tech which will make things a lot less complicated, or something. Just try not to let anybody know that I'm a slime girl, and don't let Amy shape me into weird shapes and put hats on me while I'm out, because that's not cool."

***

Ignoring her, I stared at Vicky, and then I was following a trail to something that was bigger and more complicated than I ever could have thought. It really didn't make any sense; it was like a universe full of monkeys had banged blocks together until they'd accidentally found something that kind of worked, and then they'd just given up.

I could feel myself falling as the enormity of what I was seeing overwhelmed me… not just me, but all of me everywhere. I dropped body after body as I tried to use more and more brainpower to comprehend what I was seeing.

Eventually there was only me and the darkness.

***

The things I'd learned from the parasite had been astounding. I had a feeling that Gabe was right, though. It would have been a lot faster and easier to crack the thing open, and if I had, I might have had access to a lot more of the abilities it could provide. As it was, I was limited to the powers it was choosing to provide Vicky, powers that were both more and less limited than I has suspected.

It could have given her a lot more, and while that could have just been for purposes of energy conservation, I suspected that it was more to challenge Vicky to get creative. Was it an experiment in how creative humanity could get? Or were the parasites simply starved for entertainment to the point that they saw us as ants in an ant farm, and they occasionally stirred things up just to see how we would respond?

I'd barely scratched the surface of what it could do, but assuming the parasites were all of the same species and used the same basic biological programming language, the next time should be easier. Gabe's comments suggested that was the case, and also suggested that the more of them I took the easier it would get to assimilate the powers.

***

Cthulhu