"Test! Test! Is the mic working?" I asked, tapping a couple of times on the microphone.
"It's just an old voice recorder. Are you sure we should use this? Can't we just use… I don't know a normal phone. Speaking of phones, what do people use up here? I was so busy I never really bothered to ask that, and my other classmates certainly didn't ask for my number."
"One question at a time." Leo responded to me as he was setting up the maid, putting many chains around her body.
"The recorder, can't we use something else? This feels a bit… I mean, it's embarrassing; how else am I supposed to say it?" I asked again.
"My father uses this kind of thing all the time, even the scientist back at the containment zone, so if they use it, why can't we? Doesn't it make you feel like you're doing actual research?" Leo explained with a smile that went from one ear to the other.
He was so excited he was barely able to keep a hold of himself. I had to double-check everything he did because of how fast he was rushing things.
"Are you sure it's okay to just do it for you and me? An expert here could easily allow us to cut the time in half."
"And where's the fun in that?" He shut down that argument more quickly than I expected.
I already expected a bit of a pushback… I underestimated his obsession with everything related to demons… And how the hell did my mother get ahold of such strange and unique power? Is it something she picked up on the fifth level?
The whole room had its walls repainted, from its yellowish colors to a pure white, a white so pure I needed a special set of goggles just to not hurt my eyesight. In the past week we didn't make much progress; we were fooling around trying to act like scientists while testing how dangerous the weapon was.
We learned that the ability grows stronger when the bullets are used in rapid succession; the window lasts for about an hour, then its effect rapidly decreases in power, returning back to its usual strength.
The stronger the effect, the easier the subject notices them. Still, I can't quite point out why the maid used the word "alien" to describe them.
"Tadaaa!" Leo suddenly shouted as he opened the door to let Ilay in.
He still seemed incredibly sad, but after seeing Leo's bright smile, he cheered up a little, only to be blinded by the pain of the walls along with that of the floor.
"What have you done to the guest room?" he complained.
"Dad said I could use it and paint it as I please." He responded as he handed him a pair of the special goggles. They resembled the goggles we used to protect our eyes from the water; however, the lenses were a little darker than that.
Oh, did Leo invite him to cheer him up? How kind of him…
"Can you let me in on the progress you've made so far?" He began to look around in search of Leo's notebook.
Once he got ahold of it, he sat in a corner of the room while we were preparing for yet another test. After chaining the maid to a chair, we ordered some servants to bring over a list of items. We had a plant, a rat, a toy, and even a demonic artifact.
"What's this?" Leo asked.
"I'm reading; give me a minute." Ilay responded.
Huh? Did he see something we didn't, but the last time he checked on us was like… maybe a month ago? It was a hell of a long time. Did he figure out something in the meantime? Or did he figure it out the moment he read the notebook?
I put on the plastic gloves and quickly summoned the weapon before Leo interrupted me.
"The recorder!" He said, pouting with an old recorder in his hands.
Uh!
"It's embarrassing; can't we skip it today?" I tried to be polite about it, but Leo shook his head.
"Fine, but I'm not tra–" Before I could finish the sentence, I was lightly struck on the back of my head.
"Laziness is the poison that kills innovation; if you want to stay rich, you must keep moving forward no matter what." Ilay commented that he had already finished reading through the large notebook and had walked up to me without me noticing.
Impossible! It's been, like, just a few seconds since you got that notebook. How can you already have read it all?
"So? How was I?" Leo was enthusiastically running circles around his oldest brother.
"It's all over the place; you keep wasting time trying to solve pointless questions. Who cares if memories change? You've got to look at the body. You should've asked Father for a testing kit to see if the changes also affected her health!"
It was fascinating seeing how, in both times, he could immediately pinpoint the errors in our methods.
"That's why today we're going to test out a lot more things. You've focused too much of your time on the maid; you completely lost focus on the original goal, figuring out the scope of your ability." He explained it to us.
"It's important to measure what changes, but if you don't even know what you're looking for, then you're just wasting time, so today we'll test other kinds of objects and their interaction with one another; that way we can know for sure what the bullets are truly changing." He said as he pushed one of the nightstands the servant brought in front of me.
On it was a toy car.
Mmh, I guess I can see the point. Wait a minute, I've got a brilliant idea.
"Okay, test one, toy car, just a regular toy car. I don't know what else to add here." I spoke to the recorder before firing the shot.
The first five shot, but after the sixth, the plastic began to melt; after the seventh, the plastic turned into some sort of goop; and after the eighth, what was once a car toy turned into a superhero toy with pieces of glass stuck to it.
Judging by Ilay's nods, he kept telling me to go even further, but I didn't know what the point of it was.
Well then, let's get this going.
After fifteen shots, the plastic toy had once again returned to being a car, but it had different colors; instead of being yellow, it had turned green.
I recorded each change, and then we transferred to one of the many plants. This is where the result changed drastically from what I expected. I thought the plant would change entirely, turning into a different kind of plant with each bullet shot at it; instead, only the stages of the plant changed.
Sometimes it was blooming with flowers, brimming with vitality and pollen; sometimes it was wilting; sometimes it had small berries growing on it; sometimes it was small; sometimes it was far bigger than we expected it to grow.
"So it doesn't outright change the species, it has to be the same plant… Will it change the—" Ilay made a strange comment as he ordered Leo to note down the changes.
He took the rat and gently put it over the plant and then ordered me to fire the next bullet.
Once the bullet hit the plant, the rat was also affected, as he was in direct contact with the plant. The rat didn't suffer many changes; he grew a little bigger, and that was it.
Ilay, with a whistle, called the rat to his side, and with a click of its tongue, was able to order it to flip and show its belly to him. Ilay then rewarded him with some snacks he was carrying in his pocket.
"This one has been affected by roughly 20 bullets worth of power; his personality has essentially been destroyed, and a new one took his place, yet it knew the commands I trained for him to remember. The individual has not changed." He spoke to the recorder, and then he gave me a little punch on the back of the head.
"Consider yourself lucky! Stop using it to cheat at school!" He whispered to me so that Leo couldn't hear us.
How does he…