Work Text:
Zeta casually popped another chocolate into her mouth as she leaned against the wall of Trish's office. Trish herself was working through a pile of paperwork, filling out everything from customs forms to janitorial reports, with Zeta's paycheck somewhere in the pile. While Zeta appreciated the convenience of the Knickknack Shack's new banking system, it did take a bit of the beauty out of being handed a giant pile of gold for her work. In the end, she was fine with waiting, though - Trish always stocked the good chocolates on her desk snack bowl, and Zeta had nothing better to do.
Her eyes scanned over Trish's office, taking in all the memorabilia that decorated the workspace. A picture of her, Lyria, and Catura enjoying a picnic together on the desk, a landscape of Zinkenstill on the wall, a trophy sword mounted behind her, and on the wall opposite Zeta... a chalkboard with a bunch of tally marks on it?
Zeta wandered over, curious. On the top of the board was written the single word "MEDS", and below it a table drawn with six rows and three columns, each with a set of tallymarks inscribed in them. Seven here, eight there, one with ten and a sad face drawn next to it... she couldn't make heads or tails of it, even as she chewed on her caramel intently. To finish it all off at the bottom was a number - 153.
"Hey Trish," Zeta asked after swallowing, turning to her. "What the heck's this supposed to represent, anyways? Tracking your prescriptions or something?"
"Oh, have I never told you about the MEDS project?" Trish said, looking up from the last few papers to sign. "It's been my pet project for the last year or so, trying to formalize just how strong we are as a crew and identify weak points to improve on."
"Standard quality assurance stuff, yeah, we had a bunch of drills like that in the Society too." Zeta popped another chocolate in her mouth. "What are these numbers, though? Seems hard to quantify combat capabilities that directly."
"That," Trish said with a grin, "is the ingenious part. Are you familiar with the concept of 'turns'?"
Zeta stared. "... like, when you're playing Candyland and go one after the other?"
"Closer than you'd think! Let me explain-"
"Is this gonna take a while?" Zeta asked, interrupting. "Because I have plans to go shopping with Bea in a few hours."
Trish paused and thought. "Okay, let me simplify. You're familiar with the theory of aether, right?"
Zeta nodded. "The elemental forces are transmitted by aether, which are magical particles that can be manipulated by people with magical talent and attuned to any of the six elements and given additional properties based on the magic done on them," she rattled off, reciting a flash card she burned in her brain. "Standard theory that came up in contractor training."
"Exactly, that's standard stuff that skydweller scientists figured out ages ago. But one of the questions that hasn't been answered is why people can't use certain spells repeatedly, or only in certain situations."
"Yeah, like I can only use Arvess Fermare and Rhapsody about every three minutes or so."
"That is where things get interesting!" Trish continued, excited. "Have you ever noticed how your abilities seem to be reusable on a random pace when you're doing your own operations, but when you're fighting with us they always seem to line up with specific abilities other people use every single time?"
"Yeah, but I figured that was just you timing things well. You telling me there's a magical reason?"
"Yes! I was talking with the archangels at one point," Trish said casually, as if that was normal, "and they helped me research that phenomenon some more. It turns out that all aether particles have a slight 'spin' to them, and all naturally spin at a certain rate that's the default 'power level' for the person or area. When someone uses magic, it slows down the spin rate of the particle. However, by either some cosmic coincidence or some law of physics, these particles can only be used for magic when they're 'pointing' a certain direction, which slows them down. Then, after a certain number of complete spins after being used, they resume their original speed. Since this is like the turning of a clock, I dubbed the spins 'turns', and tracked the number of 'turns' that it took for the aether to recover."
"You did, like, publish all this, right?" Zeta asked. "Because I feel like dumping all this on me is a waste."
"Oh yeah it's currently causing a revolution in academies across all the skydoms yada yada not the point," Trish dismissed with a wave. "What's interesting is twofold: that certain magics always slow down the aether for a certain number of turns. Your Rhapsody and Thousand Flames, for instance, always take six turns, no more, no less, to recover. Meanwhile, my No More Doubt attack that speeds me up takes a full seven turns to be useable again."
"That's interesting, but you kinda said that it's an arbitrary spin rate based on the person or area, right? That seems like unless you know the exact spin rate, you can't know how long it's actually gonna take."
"That's where part two comes in!" Trish says, clearly delighting in sharing her research. Zeta sometimes wondered if Trish missed her calling of being an experimenter buried in some secret lab. "This part I haven't published, due to being private, but something fascinating has happened with me and Lyria after our soul bond - our aether is rotating at the exact same rate!"
Zeta chewed silently. "That's rare, right?"
"Extremely! Most people have different rates, even if just barely. But on top of that, whenever Lyria links someone else in the group to the weapon grid, as I explained to you previously," Trish continued.
Zeta nodded, pretending she remembered that explanation.
"It turns out that that, too, temporarily syncs up their aether, so that everyone in the group has turns happen at the exact same rate! So if I have an ability that recovers in six turns, it will always perfectly sync up with your abilities."
"Huh!" Zeta replied, mildly impressed. "That must make your planning either easier or a total nightmare."
"Both!" Trish exclaimed, with a titch of pain. "But it lets me create a metric for tracking how efficient we are with our combat abilities. Since all of our main attacks take exactly one turn to recover, we always defeat primals exactly on a multiple of turns, and that lets us track how many turns it took to defeat each primal!"
"And that," Zeta gestured at the chalkboard, "is what this is tracking."
"Exactly! Each cell corresponds to a different primal we regularly train with. These six," Trish said, gesturing to the left column, "are the Disciples: Alexiel, Europa, et al. These six are the Ennead, Bennu, Tefnut, etc. And these six are the Six Dragons."
"And MEDS stands for..."
"Might against Ennead, Disciples, and Six dragons, obviously!"
"It is a backronym, though, right?"
Trish scratched her head embarrasedly. "I mean yeah, obviously, but I feel like it still does a decent job of incorporating the actual meaning."
"And those eighteen are because they're willing to actually train with us, right?"
Trish nodded. "Well, except for Avatar, we just happen to have a really accurate recreation of him stored in a volcano on Merkmal."
"Huh. Not gonna lie, this is an impressive amount of work to track a metric only you know about or bother to optimize."
Trish sighed. "Yeah, I do wish I could convince more people to take their self improvement so seriously. It's still been really useful for me to identify places we're weaker, and make sure we're prepared for anything that could possibly go wrong in the future where we're needed. I feel like it's my responsibility as the Singularity as the angels call me to take it this seriously."
Zeta nodded. "So this number, 153. That's the total, right?"
"Yep!"
"Is that like... good?"
"Very! When I got the first numbers a year ago, it was 280, so we've shaved off nearly half of our initial turns."
Zeta whistled. "You've been really powering up, huh."
"For sure! The hardest point was around the 230 total - at that point, we had to stop leaning on Qilin, Lyria's strongest summon. It takes her 12 turns to charge it up after the start of a battle, and around 230 there just aren't enough turns in the fight for Qilin to happen."
"Makes sense. Well, as much sense as it can with your 'reduced' explanation."
"I tried my best," Trish apologized with an embarrassed grin. "But it's something I spend a lot of time on, so it means a lot to me."
"I can clearly tell," Zeta replied, smiling back at her. "So, my paycheck?"
"Right, right," Trish answered, going back to her desk. "Almost have it."