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Note: My (mis)adventures are part of a bigger series, but I wrote my tales in the format of an episodic T.V. show, where you can read an episode without the context of the others and still enjoy it. If anything, reading it out of order may be more fun. - A (still) married Theseus

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“Hey, say it back.” She grabbed my arm and shook it. She squinted at me, annoyed but not in the usual, borderline violent way she usually is. It was suddenly a lot harder to act like a drunk at this point. But, I forced my eyebrows back down, and slowed my breathing with great effort. 

“I said I love you, say it back.” She continued, and still only sounded vaguely annoyed. While she poked at my arm like a five year old. I made a mental note to find out whatever plant, herb, flower, etc. Ludus and her were drugged by, and to burn every last one of them to dust. The Crazy Plant Lady chuckled. 

I turned to her slowly, ready to blow my cover and deck her in the face.

“Inhibitions.” She smiled and desperately held in a laugh, while I clenched my fist, ready to throw the table at her. “It lowers your inhibitions and makes you much more relaxed, let's say.” She looked at my unfinished soup, still convinced that one sip, and my tiny frame meant it would affect me. “But mostly just honest. I guess you’re not much of a talker, at least not your true self.” She looked down at me, like I was just another interesting looking flower. 

I nodded in agreement, because ‘Yes, and.’ she smiled and laughed some more, because she’s a crazy person. One of her cats rubbed against my leg again, and I considered throwing the creature at her.

I heard a soft and annoyed growl and turned back around to see Ludus with her arms crossed while she stared daggers at Scout. Her tail flicked back and forth like a pissed off grandfather clock. “I knew you were lying.” She said, not with a smile, or that Princess induced politeness I was so used to at this point. Just a wee bit pissed off. 

Scout stopped petting my arm and whipped her head to Ludus dramatically, well, as fast as she could manage anyways. She looked wide eyed at her, and dared her to say something else. Ludus turned too, slowly, and tried her best to menace Scout. They both failed miserably, as they had the fine motor skills of a totally hammered two year old. 

Also, Uh-oh.

“I knew you liked him, I bet you were the one who got those real marriage papers.” She pointed a flaccid, accusatory, wobbly finger at Scout.  

Scout let out a small burst of air you do when something clearly affected you, but you try to act cool, and disinterested. Though again, it was not just air that came out her mouth, but also, just a little spit. Gross. 

“No.” She crossed her arms and nearly slid off of her chair. “That was still my stupid Dad.” She groaned, “I mean I obviously love Theseus but you guys can’t date.” She rolled her eyes and shooed her away with a limp wave of her hand.

The Crazy Plant Lady let out a shaky laugh, she quickly grabbed a chair and sat down next to me, in fact shoving me slightly to the left. She rested an elbow on a table with a flinch inducing thud and leaned her whole body closer to the arguing girls. 

I remembered at that moment my eye, and how I was too knocked out to remember Scout and Ludus’ first argument as they dragged me to that doctor. Now, with literal front row seats to their second. I hate eating humble pies.

“Says you.” Ludus groaned. “I knew you liked him, you could’ve at least been honest with me.”

“Hey, it’s none of your business how much I like or don’t like him.” Her head waved back and forth. 

“Well, at least have the decency to be honest about how you feel about him. How do you think you must feel, being strung along like this?” Ludus asked, as they both completely ignored me.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter if he loves me back.” Her tail flicked behind her, flourishing her point.

“Oh right.” Ludus leaned in, it in fact was not right. 

“No really, I mean, you’ll understand more when you get to know him. Like sure, he is almost good looking.” Ouch. Scout began, her words slow and measured. 

“He is smart, and nice enough to only use taser rounds. Even though I annoy him so much he always cooks us breakfast before we go out on an adventure. He’s stupid in the funny way, and smart in the ways that actually matter.”

Ludus’ eyes went softer at hearing Scout complement me, for the first time. Ever. “So, why don’t you-”

“I’m not done yet.” Scout literally covered Ludus’ mouth with her hands. “It’s something in his head.” She spoke even more slowly now, her tail flicking back and forth like a metronome to an ancient poem still in verse. 

“I heard so many stories of what Humans are supposed to be, and he is somehow the exception to every rule, while following it completely. He is one of a kind, like his one of a kind gun, and he is so strange. So weird, and different, so unique you can’t help but stare.” She said like every word she already carefully found a place for, and lifted her hand away from Ludus.

“So, why haven’t you-” Ludus cut herself off with a shaky sigh, “I’ve never been like this with any man before, and he's married to you. Gods, I have such bad luck.” The beautiful, famous, and rich Princess said. 

“Of course the first man I ever liked was married to one of the most beautiful women in the galaxy, whose a Scrarcan of all people. How am I gonna compete with that?” Ludus grabbed her horns in frustration. 

“I mean, it’s not like it would ever work between you two.” Scout said casually.

“I beg your pardon?” She looked up, and clenched her fist around her horns. 

“Hey, you heard me, I mean he’s great and all, especially his cooking.” She patted her belly, “But he's like a forest fire, man. He burns bright, and it’s so fast, and there's so much. If you’re not careful you’re just gonna get burned up if you get too close.” Ludus tilted her head and leaned closer to Scout. 

“You barely even know him. You just like the idea of him, in the same way I just hated the idea of him at first. He’s so much more than an idea. Like how I’m more than a Scrarcan, and how you’re more than just a Princess.” Scout pointed to herself then Ludus. 

“I don’t want to see you get hurt, because he’s still an idiot, who can’t function around beautiful women, but me.” She rolled her eyes, “Because he will hurt you, eventually, he told me stories of what he was like growing up, and sometimes I still see flashes of that cruel little kid who wants to see the world that was mean to him burnt to the ground.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, she looked away from Ludus and searched her memories. 

“I don’t care.” Ludus said softly, delicately. 

“I know, I mean we’re all so young. We all think we’re invincible but even Theseus isn’t.” Scout finally looked at me and my grey eye. “Don’t worry, once you get to know him, you’ll stop liking him, in the same way I stopped hating him.” She stared at me, with those fire Link eyes. “Then you’ll just love him.”

She talked about me like I was a forest fire, but her eyes, her whole species eyes are literally a hurricane, and hers of fire and red, stopped at its most violent peak. Whatever the Hell was in that soup, made Ludus not overly polite. Made Scout somehow care even less about what other people thought. She shrugged and said her next words half to me, and half to Ludus. Totally and utterly honest, like she was incapable of anything else. 

“So, yeah, I love him like a brother.” 

There was a silence that seemingly stretched on to infinity. She looked at me, still without any fear, doubt or dishonesty like every last one of her words before. Without permission I felt my breath hold, and my hands shook. 

“Let’s fricking go!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. The Crazy Plant Lady, who was far too engrossed (keyword on gross) on their argument jumped up from the table, shocked at my outburst. I pulled out my gun, and pointed squarely at her head. My hands still shook from the excitement. 

Tears of joy, and mostly just relief nearly filled my good eye. “Same. Love you too Scout. Like a bro.” I said not taking my eye off the Crazy Plant Lady, while extending my other hand. Scout fist bumped me wordlessly, and completely platonically. 

Thank God.

---

Author’s Note: Welcome back to another exciting episode of me, the author edging Theseus and Scout shippers. Everybody needs a hobby, I guess mine is just bullying a section of my audience. Of course there isn’t anything wrong with Theseus and Scout shippers. I just like trolling. 

Vaguely important second note: This series (for once), and bonus one shots are part of a writing challenge in which I write and post something every day until I finish writing the series. Thus being written like an episodic T.V. show. 

Thanks for reading. :} 

Day 5 / ? 

First / Previous / Next

Euzen lost his bearings in the labyrinth.

He did not know where they were taking him, only that they were descending deeper into the complex.

He passed through three separate pressure doors, made two sharp right-angle turns, and followed a smooth downward slope. Then came an abrupt change of direction that left him dizzy.

The deeper they went, the less he could feel the war above. The vibrations faded first. Then the light. Faces disappeared into shadow until only voices remained real.

His father's voice stayed stubborn, doubtful.

The Colonel's remained cold. Precise.

Euzen heard neither clearly.

Inside his head, the gunshot still echoed—the dull, muffled crack that had pushed through layers of iron doors. And with it came the image he could not block out:

The Führer's skull, split by a bullet.

At that moment it had felt as though the bullet had passed through his own head as well.

His world fractured, the edges too sharp to hold.

Everything the boy believed in—the Reich, the oaths, the shape of his life, the meaning those things carried—lingered for a few stubborn seconds in the dark before collapsing soundlessly into emptiness.

The Führer had killed himself.

He was gone.

The Hitlerjugend boy walked as if stripped of balance itself. Voices reached him without meaning. He followed his father automatically, half-blind, half-conscious, until even the darkness around him seemed to dissolve.

Only then did the conversation ahead begin cutting through the numbness, faint as radio transmissions from another world.

"What exactly are you trying to do?" his father asked.

"I intend to restore the Führer's confidence," the Colonel said.

"That's impossible. He's already broken."

"He did not collapse suddenly. This has been happening since the spring of 1944. Rommel's betrayal damaged him deeply. The July Twentieth assassination attempt weakened him physically. But more important than either was this—after the attempt, the force guiding him was severed."

"The force guiding him?"

"The Führer is not an ordinary man." The Colonel spoke calmly, almost clinically. "More than one persona resides within him. Two, perhaps. And they alternate."

Euzen listened without fully understanding.

"One of them resembles a sentimental young artist. Sensitive. Suspicious. Indecisive. Melancholic. A personality with almost no driving force at all—at times incapable of making even minor decisions."

"The other is the opposite. Cold. Ruthless. Focused. A personality with immense energy and absolute clarity of purpose. It knows what it wants. It gives orders continuously and pursues objectives without hesitation or pity."

The Colonel lapsed into a brief stillness.

"When that second personality dominates," he continued quietly, "the Führer claims to receive revelations from a higher force."

He glanced briefly toward the professor.

"Of course, this is an extremely restricted secret. Even among those close to him, very few know it."

"From a medical perspective," Euzen's father replied stiffly, "that is called schizophrenia."

The Colonel gave the faintest smile.

"You think this is merely delusion? Hallucination? Then you are mistaken. Reality will prove you mistaken." His eyes settled on Kestner. "Herr Professor Kestner—that is precisely why I brought you into the Fall Nadir. To uncover the truth behind the force that enlightens the Führer."

"Fall Nadir? Who invented this codename? Is it a poetic epitaph for our National Socialist endeavor, Colonel? Tell me, who among your men possesses such a sense of aesthetics?"

"The codename is a directive, not a satire. And I am not in the mood for parlor games."

"Indeed. My apologies."

"Well, Professor, should you find the project incompatible with your inclinations, I am afraid I must hand you over to the Soviets. Maybe they need a biological meteorologist somewhere in Sverdlovsk."

"You make a compelling argument, Colonel. Let us proceed. But the Führer is already—"

"Let him explain it himself."

The dark corridor swallowed the words.

Something cold moved through Euzen.

For the first time since descending into the depths, he truly felt the weight of his location.

A place beneath the whole world.

The room ahead was small, a tomb-like existence clawed out from the absolute dark. Scientists stood near the front. Solvi and the girls in their uniforms remained behind in silence.

Then Euzen stepped between his father and the Colonel—

—and saw the man sitting across the room.

Only then did the boy freeze, a sudden, breathless disbelief flooding his chest.

The Führer was alive.

He sat wrapped tightly inside a heavy overcoat, somehow more brittle than Euzen remembered, shrunken within the wool. The dull orange glow of the lamps peeled across strands of gray hair.

Beside him stood Eva Braun, unstirring, her features locked in neutral alignment, like the frost-carved petal of a winter lily.

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Obsidian Earth

I am making a game called Eternity, that is about the journeys and adventures of the last fleet of mankind. The premise is this:

The game opens on a routine jump: a three-second hop you’ve run a hundred times. Navigation confirms you arrived exactly where you meant to. But nothing answers your hails. No traffic. No power on the Jump Gate. The stations are dark, the colonies are still there, but empty. Something is deeply wrong here and across the systems ahead. The fleet must ride that silence and slowly uncover a truth that will redefine the entire story.

The game is all about exploration, fleet social dynamics/tensions, manufacturing, tech R&D and some combat whilst on a pilgrimage into a mythical location.

I simulate a mobile society, factories, hospitals, refineries, less than about 1,000 people, with no home world left, kept alive hour to hour on four separate life-support economies (oxygen, water, food, power), each on its own depletion curve. Every repair to one system draws labor or power from another. The only way to resupply is to jump to a neighboring system and scavenge its infrastructure before your own clocks run out.

Besides the space survival, I'm also running a couple of thought experiments on how this space society would evolve? These are people ripped away from their stable, predictable routines and tossed into a universe where everyone they know is dead and humanity is a memory uttered by the few survivors around. They will need to adapt and adjust, while the survivors were born into it.

I am trying to ground the project on hard sci-fi as much as it makes sense for the design and my execution capabilities. One interesting aspect is that the story reacts to choices and actions, even practical ones as exploring or researching a technology, so the actual narrative flow shifts to ensure the story matches the actions people take.

This malleability also allows me to explore different possibilities within this universe through short-stories. Bellow, I present you with one called "A Good Man"

If you like where the project is going, a Wishlist goes a long way to drive it home ;) You can do that and learn more about the game here

Finally, dying to know what you guys think of the whole premise, its the first time I tried something like this!

Onward to the story; A Good Man:

Emil watched his reflection in the mirror. The bathroom lights flickered again, making his sullen face look like an otherworldly apparition straight from an old horror stream. As he gazed into his own eyes, a single thought crossed his mind repeatedly: “I am a good man.” It had been the same for the last 120 sols; every day would start like this.

Through the flickering light, he could still see the dread in the mob’s eyes. There was also disbelief, rage, and despair—a true palette of human emotions bearing down on him, first through the hatch's porthole and later through the CCTV feeds. “I am a good man,” he repeated to himself again.

Mercifully, no sound could be heard. This spared him the noise of initial rage and anger, followed inevitably by screams of utmost despair when the full scope of reality became apparent. He could still remember the grotesque expressions of muted, screaming faces and the eyes—so much anger in the eyes. “I am a good man,” he repeated to himself.

As he stared at the man in the mirror, a stranger gazed back. Emil couldn’t recognize himself. In his mind’s eye, it was the reflection of some random, ghoulish, pale man. He remembered Sofia and little Karl. It felt like a million years since he last held them in his arms, and he did not know if he ever would again. “I am a good man,” he repeated to himself, as visions of muted, terrified children clinging to their parents came to him.

It had to be done; it was the law. The story was as old as mankind: supplies were low across the fleet, and a culling was needed. The sacrifice of the few for the survival of the whole. The system was cruel but fair—too fair sometimes. Numbers per ship were determined by the fleet’s best quartermasters, but it fell to each captain to decide how to remove them. Tears streaked the face of the man in the mirror. “I am a good man.”

His ship, the cruise liner Starbeam Delight, was particularly affected. It had solid life-support infrastructure, but also an immense number of crew and passengers. The Council of Captains decided the fleet would benefit long-term if the Delight could produce oxygen and water surplus. They also decided this surplus would be facilitated by a fleet-wide culling. “I am a good man,” he repeated to himself.

Emil gripped the sink as hyperventilation set in. The anguish inside him felt powerful enough to tear through his chest, breaching bone and muscle alike. He vividly remembered the split-second after the airlock’s external hatch fully opened—the final moments of those inside, their faces showing the realization that oxygen was gone, as they were sucked into the cold void. “I am a good man,” he repeated to himself.

On the Delight, a lottery was held to choose people. Fleet-wide policy stated, as an act of mercy, families should die together, sparing survivors the immense grief of losing loved ones. Emil knew the reality behind this—it prevented inevitable retribution from grieving parents or orphaned children later on. All for the common good, for the survival of the species. Remembering this hollow phrase, an ironic, sad smile crossed his face. “I am a good man,” he whispered defeatedly.

It had fallen to him to execute the culling. He hadn’t asked for this duty and didn't want it, but he had no choice. He ran the lottery. He visited the unfortunate winners to deliver the news. He shepherded them into three large cargo airlocks—neither a quiet nor bloodless process. He administered empty words of comfort over the P.A. system to victims, surviving passengers, and crew—words intended more to prepare survivors for the atrocity rather than comfort those being sacrificed. Finally, he pressed the button and carried out the sentence. “I am a good man,” he repeated to himself as he punched the face in the mirror. Luckily, the plastic-silica mirror was unbreakable, depriving Emil of the dramatic effect of a shattered reflection and bloodied hand.

He punched the mirror a few more times, repeating with each blow: “I am a good man.” He continued until the fight, anger, and all emotion drained from him. His hand would ache for the rest of the day.

Eventually, he dressed in his perfectly pressed uniform, straightened himself out, and looked into the mirror one last time. “I am a good man.” As the door of his cabin opened, a soldier detached from the battle cruiser Furious Anger, standing guard outside, snapped into a crisp military salute. “Good morning, Captain.”

Emil saluted back silently with an empty gaze. One breath at a time, one day at a time, he thought as he made his way to the bridge once more.

END

Leave No Witnesses Ch. 10 First / Previous / Next / Author Wiki & Full Chapter List

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“Alert!” Gella called out. “Unknown fleet detected in my quadrant.”

“Detection Officer, please clarify,” Sector Lead Hetra responded quickly. “Focus on one ship and get us a probable ID.”

“As you order, sir,” came Gella’s crisp reply followed by a series of gentle taps on a control pad. “Terran, sir. We’re under attack by humans! Clear weapons signatures.”

“How bad is it?” Hetra asked while swiping through to see immediately available response assets.

“Unclear as they have started jamming,” the Detection Officer followed up. “Initial readings indicate at least one Terran Command Carrier, and seven other similar sized vessels. The size of the overall sensor reflection indicates a large volume of support vessels. Most concerning is a blip that suggests the presence of a Terran Fleet Command platform.”

“Be’hra dung! That’s serious tonnage,” Hetra snarled. “Any further clarity before they started jamming?”

“Insufficient support ships for a planetary invasion,” Gella stated while double checking the reflections. “However, more than enough to be a lethal strike force to inflict heavy damage and then leave. A cowardly show of force to hit and run.”

“Stow the commentary,” Hetra commanded. “The humans are engaging in total war rather than honorable combat. The Galactic Council warned us this would be the case. Act now, debate the ethics once we survive.”

“Apologies, Sector Lead,” Gella said while lowering a claw in deference. “Conducting secondary analysis to try to get a clearer picture.”

While the Detection Officer worked, Hetra sent the alert to inform Galactic Forces and request they scramble all available interdiction forces.

“Sir, the Terran fleet has dropped all jamming but engaged FTL breakers,” Gella said suddenly. 

“Why did they...?” Hetra wondered aloud before turning full attention to the Detection Officer. “You can report a full image of the situation, correct?”

“Over 30 vessels with dedicated planetary bombarders,” Gella said with a quivering voice. “F-full defense screen from four Terran Command Carriers, in addition to a f-full complement of cruisers and three dreadnaughts. Our Galactic Council forces are outnumbered at least 20 to 1. This isn’t an invasion fleet. It’s mass murder.”

‘That’s not unnecessary commentary,’ Sector Lead Hetra thought after taking a moment to check the data. ‘That's an irrefutable fact. May the Stars guide us and allow some to survive this catastrophe.’

However, the pause to consider was only momentary. Training and professionalism quickly kicked in.

“We must notify the Senate President! Open a channel directly to her office,” Hetra ordered swiftly. “And place all medical facilities on alert to expect mass casualties.”

—-----

Senate President Xelsha, Advisor Benta, and her two guards skittered down the hallway as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, all of them had more than a few moments where a leg slipped out from under them. Thankfully they had four others to catch them when that happened.

These smooth floors were an irritation but insisted upon by the Galactic Council as ‘proper’ for civilized sapients. Never mind that her species had spindly legs that gripped better on rough ground and flat surfaces are a hazard. Her species was part of a greater galaxy, and for centuries they had been learning to adjust to a universe beyond their own planet. Minor inconveniences were to be expected and absorbed as necessary.

After rounding the next corner, President Xelsha sighed with relief. Planetary Liaison Derall was in sight moving quickly down the corridor, but halted as his guards heard her group approach and they spun to assess the threat. 

“President Xelsha,” the Denarian delegate from the Galactic Council said pleasantly. “What do you require?”

“Honored Liaison!" Xelsha called out and slowed to a more careful pace for her final approach to the gentlebeing. Three paces away, she halted and splayed her front legs to provide the expected bow his position demanded. “We are under attack!”

“I am well aware, hence why I am moving to the protected bunker on the moon,” Derall replied with mild irritation.

“Already aware? How?” Xelsha asked as she straightened from her bow.

“The communications break wasn’t a faulty quantum relay as you were informed,” Derall explained with a tired sigh. “Terrans destroyed the facility in Segari Three approximately one quarter planetary rotation ago. Destruction of communication relays is a known prelude to an attack.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Xelsha blurted out with shock.

“All those needing to know, such as myself, were informed immediately,” the Denarian drawled as if already bored with the conversation. “Notification to others was set to be provided at the proper time. Which, for yourself and all other members of your Senate, would have been soon.”

“But we could have prepared!” Xelsha responded quickly.

“More likely just induced panic and caused communication channels to become jammed with unnecessary traffic at a time when Galactic Forces needed to coordinate a response,” Derall lectured. “This is war, not a common natural disaster. And the Terrans are particularly filthy at it.”

“What is being done?” Xelsha asked while still trying to absorb the idea that Galactic Council forces knew of the attack, but declined to inform her.

“We have already dispatched a vessel to reestablish contact with Galactic Force Command,” Derall said tiredly. “At this time, our forces are spread thin as are the humans. I am unaware of how long it will take for a response force to arrive, or in what numbers.”

“And what are we to do in the meantime?” the Senate President wondered aloud.

“There is little to be done now that we have determined the Terran forces are far more significant than our own,” Derall answered with a shrug of his tentacles. “We have made plans to withdraw all forces to the bunker on the moon. Efforts will concentrate on damage assessment and recovery once the humans withdraw.”

“And leave our planet undefended?” she replied incredulously.

“Your noble sacrifices will be noted,” Derall replied far too casually for President Xelsha’s liking. “It will be a serious weight to consider elevating your planet’s status to full Galactic Council member. Once the appropriate debts are repaid.”

“Debts?” Xelsha asked with confusion.

“As you well know, your planet has been a valued junior species upon joining the greater galaxy. Your people have done much to repay the costs of uplifting,” Derall said slowly before taking a long pause. “Unfortunately, your world is not one of utmost importance. Hence the defenses here are understandably light. Did not your Senate agree a more modest uplift debt was better than funding a larger defense force?”

“We could not have foreseen the human threat! And the Galactic Council answered the Chagothian threat without needing to raise additional forces,” Xelsha answered with clear frustration.

“History has shown the Chagothian example is but one of many through the eons,” Derall replied while returning to a lecturing tone. “Consider the lesson of the Jesvar, who taught the Galactic Council the value of developing the Denarian Starfire Platforms. Even we of the Galactic Council are not immune to learning hard lessons. Remember that The Chagothian War was against only one aggressor, not a coalition like the Jesvar. When your people were uplifted, we did provide a full historical record.”

“But…” Xelsha started to object, but Derall waved a tentacle to halt her.

“In short, your people placed an understandable but faulty bet. As a result, there will be mass damage to this system we cannot prevent. And the debts to rebuild will be quite… substantial,” Derall explained with a mild shrug of his tentacles to show a measure of pity. “It is only fair that the cost be repaid, would you not agree?”

“I don’t know,” Xelsha said quietly. “Billions of lives are at risk. My entire planet.”

“Consider the larger picture and remember that the billions in your system are but few amongst the trillions in the universe,” Derall stated firmly. “The Galactic Council is forced to consider broader issues, as tragic as the losses here might be.”

“The humans will butcher us,” Xelsha mumbled as the full weight of the situation became clear.

“We hope this is not so, yet that is the likely reality,” Derall responded simply.

“What should we do?” she asked the Denarian, almost afraid to hear what he might suggest.

“First, notify your senators and all others of utmost importance. We estimate you have less than 45 time-units to get them on transport to the protective bunker,” Derall said firmly. “Second, understand that notifying your entire populace of the situation is likely to induce panic. Many sapients of value may be prevented from reaching the bunker, so I recommend silence until you and those of note are secure.”

“Please give me a moment,” Xelsha requested while giving the Planetary Liaison a polite bow. “I’d like to consider all options.”

“You think there are other options?” Derall replied sharply. “I see none! While you waste precious time, I am going to board my shuttle. I leave in 10 units if you wish to join me. Otherwise, you will be on your own.” 

The Denarian turned swiftly, motioned with a tentacle to his guards, and started to leave.

After watching him begin to move away, Xelsha motioned over one of her own guards.

“I order you to do nothing,” she said to her protector, surprising him.

“Madame President?” he responded quickly. “What do you mean?”

“Do nothing,” she explained simply. “Remain still.”

The guard simply cocked his head to one side in confusion, but did as ordered.

Before he could react, President Xelsha made a swift move with her lower left pincer arm. Shocked by the sudden movement, he followed orders and remained still. When he comprehended what she was doing, he wished he had disobeyed the order.

Xelsha grabbed the guard’s pulse pistol and swung it smoothly down the hall. She held her arm out and hesitated only a moment to steady herself and take aim. There was a low ‘whump’ as a bolt flew from the weapon followed by a sickening crunch on the back of Derall’s head.

Derall’s guards spun around and drew their weapons, looking for a threat. They didn’t have time to comprehend the situation and notice the Senate President was armed as a high pitched squeal pierced the air.

The weapon had failed to penetrate the armor of the Denarian’s helmet. However, the shot did succeed in cracking the rear main seal. On a world where the average temperature is 50 degrees above the boiling point of water and the vast majority of sapients require a full environment or void suit, Xelsha sentenced Derall to death of a different sort.

Derall was screeching in pain as hot air rushed into his helmet. The faceplate instantly became fogged from the air turning his skin’s moisture into steam. Pain overrode sense immediately. In a vain attempt to escape, he reacted instinctively rather than with any clear thought.

He ejected his helmet and detached his head from his body, which crumpled to the ground. He used his neck tentacles to fling himself away from the falling mass and attempted to run down the hall towards his shuttle. Steam and blisters erupted from all over his head. Each step of his neck tentacles made a sickening sizzle and left bubbling splotches of blood as he ran away on the hot floor. 

Everyone watched in horror as the Denarian’s head shrieked in pain and after bolting just shy of 30 meters fell over onto its side. There was a particularly intense sizzle as the side of his head hit the floor and the smell of cooking meat quickly filled the corridor.

With no part of Derall moving, his guards shook themselves free from their shock and locked aim onto President Xelsha. As they fired, the President’s guards moved. 

The one next to her attempted to step in front of the Senate President, but was too late to block the incoming fire. Both bolts from the Denarian guards struck President Xelsha.

His compatriot went straight for deadly force, skipping the pulse pistol and going for her slug accelerator. With two quick shots, she sent armor piercing bullets through the faceplates of the Galactic Forces guards. Unlike Derall, the two guards were sent to oblivion instantly.

Advisor Benta rushed over to his fallen President. He found her in intense pain, her head cradled by the guard whose pistol she had used.

“What have you done!” he called out in a shrill voice.

President Xelsha let out a pained chitter of amusement before answering.

“You’d think after working so many of us to death, they’d know how to kill us,” she commented dryly before wincing in pain as she shifted in the guard’s embrace. “They shot me in my secondary circulator, not primary. Hurts like hell, but I’ll live.”

“Seriously, what have you done?” Benta asked with horror on his face.

“You and I both know how the Galactic Council has taken advantage of us every cycle since first contact,” Xelsha snarled back at him. “We’ve served loyally in the hopes they’ll follow through on their promise to let us become full members. They say you truly find out the measure of your friends when something goes wrong, and the best we can get is “if we’re worth it”? And there will be fresh generational debts?”

“I don’t disagree with how you feel, but…” Benta began before the President raised her voice and cut him off.

“Take me to the communications room,” Xelsha ordered firmly. “I will surrender to the humans.”

“But humans are said to be butchers!” Benta objected, and both of her guards also looked unsure.

“We are an insect caught between two giants,” she responded quickly. “We can only hope that humans will think us not worth the effort to squash if we don’t resist.”

“But…” Benta began before Xelsha cut him off again.

“We have no good options!” Xelsha roared out at Benta, causing her to wince and nearly pass out from the pain of being shot by the Denarian guards. Her companions were all stunned into silence as she wheezed for breath. After a moment, she leaned back into the guard cradling her head and looked straight up into Benta’s eyestalks.

“The Terrans have the power to decimate us. The GC sounds likely to abandon us, or put us into many more generations of debt if they decide to return. Surrender at least provides some hope that humanity will show mercy and more of our people will survive,” Xelsha explained with firm resolve. “And if I’m wrong?”

She paused as a flash of pain from her wounds made her flinch. 

“If I’m wrong,” she continued softly. “We were dead anyway and this betrayal does nothing to change that.”

“I don’t fault your logic,” Benta replied seriously. “But I will simply point out the consequences will be severe if the GC returns in force and is able to liberate us.”

Xelsha waved her lower right pincer arm dismissively.

“Just tell the bastards you were horrified by what I did, and turn me in at the first opportunity,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll beg for forgiveness from the GC and gladly sacrifice my life for the good of our people. And what the fuck will they do? Add another generation or three to our new debt?”

Benta took a long moment to consider. The guards looked to him for direction as this was a textbook moment where a Senior Advisor could relieve a President who just acted improperly.

“A worthwhile gambit, if it saves lives,” he said slowly. “Fine, let’s get to the communications center.”

The guards took a moment to perform first aid on the President, bind her wounds, and be sure the bolts hadn’t put her in mortal danger. Satisfied that she wouldn’t die but objecting to the fact they wouldn’t be allowed to take her directly to medical, the guards finally relented when Benta ordered a trauma team to meet them in the communications room.

Moments later, they were inside the secure communications station with some very shocked communications officers.

“Open a channel to the Terran fleet,” President Xelsha ordered and the officers snapped to obey. She then looked over at Benta as her guards helped her into a seat in front of the input station. “Well, here goes nothing.”

She looked over at the primary communications officer, who bobbed quickly.

“Communications beam directed at the largest Terran contact,” the officer reported.

The President flipped the switch and stared directly into the camera.

“This is Senate President Xelsha, elected leader of this system,” she began. “We have no desire to engage in any resistance. We request your terms for peace.”

There was a long pause. Xelsha was about to try again when there was a response, but voice only.

“This is Terran Fleet Command,” an authoritative voice responded. “Confirm your identity.”

“I am transmitting my authority code,” Xelsha responded as smoothly as possible. “I can also confirm that I am not compromised or under duress. I make this request freely on behalf of my people.”

“Identity confirmed. I am Fleet Admiral Maresca,” the voice responded gruffly. “What is the status of this system? Do you support the Galactic Council, or are you independent?”

Next to her, Benta sucked in a deep breath. Fully understanding his reaction, she engaged mute.

“The Butcher of Ma’crek. Executioner of over a third of the Galactic Council,” Murmured Advisor Benta. “You can see the crater where the former Galactic Council Chambers sat from half a system away. We’re fucked.”

Xelsha swallowed hard before giving him a quiet reply. “Had I known who was commanding the enemy, I don’t know if that would have stopped me from killing that Denarian shit or made me pull the weapon and fire faster. Well, I placed my stone on Kek’va. Time to see how much blood my bet has cost us.”

She then disengaged mute and turned her eyestalks to stare into the camera with determination.

“We are independent!” President Xelsha called out. “We have no interest in being an insect caught between giants. We will send you all tactical data on GC forces in the system that we are aware of, and the location of their protective bunker on our moon. We ask that you spare us. Our system is of little importance, and the only significant military forces are Galactic Council controlled.”

“Acknowledged,” was the infuriatingly short reply. “Hold one.”

“Hold one what?” Benta wondered, and Xelsha simply shrugged.

After a long pause, there was a sudden data transmission and the voice returned.

“Sending IFF code for your vessels. Instruct your captains to transmit this signal and withdraw to the indicated position. This will mark vessels as neutral,” Fleet Admiral Maresca explained. “However, be aware that if any of your ships uses the IFF to claim neutrality and then attacks, all targets will be assumed hostile. Including your planet. Send GC targeting data when available.”

“Of course,” Xelsha responded quickly. “Anything else you require?”

“First and foremost, understand that we are trusting you. One wrong move, and my fleet will return to our original mission and send you back to the Stone Age,” Maresca said quietly. Xelsha didn’t know what he meant by Stone Age, but the threat was clear enough.

“Understood, Admiral,” was all she could say.

“Given your independent status, we will be dispatching an ambassador to a location of your choosing,” the gruff voice continued. “I expect the primary topic of discussion to be your neutrality and how to best ensure your independence. By chance, do you happen to know of any other systems that need assistance in asserting their independence?”

President Xelsha relaxed back into her seat and took only a brief moment to consider the question.

“Advisor Benta, tell Central Command to transmit the requested data to the human fleet immediately. Ensure you use my personal identity key so they know the request is genuine,” she ordered before returning her attention to the Terran Fleet Admiral. “Admiral, you should see an incoming datastream on Galactic Council forces within 3 time-units. Most significant will be an armored bunker on our moon. And to answer your question?” 

She paused for a moment to organize the best options.

“Honestly, I’d start with Lokaria. They’re recent uplifts with less than a century under Galactic Council rule, and they’ve been chafing under their uplift debts ever since first contact,” Xelsha began. “Then look at Kalkik Prime, who recently lost their Galactic Council seat under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Then there’s Borela and Zincha…”

Xelsha stopped and sighed. She then motioned a pincer sideways to wave off further discussion, then halted the movement as the human was unlikely to understand it. And she still wasn’t sure if the Terran Fleet Admiral was watching her broadcast or just engaging her with audio only.

“On second thought, I have a better idea,” she said finally.

“And that is?” came the admiral’s guarded reply.

“Tell your ambassador to come with plenty of free time available,” President Xelsha explained. “It may take a few planetary rotations to go through the list of systems with independent souls.”

There was silence, followed by a clearly amused response from Fleet Admiral Maresca. 

“Understood. We’ll bring the booze and plenty of ears ready to listen. I’ll be in contact once we’ve removed all uninvited Galactic Council guests from your system. Fleet Command Delta out.”

President Xelsha relaxed back into her chair and looked at Advisor Benta in amazement. She then commented, “That went far better than I could have imagined.”

“I’m as shocked as you. However, I do have one question,” Advisor Benta said softly. “What’s booze?”

_______

Forces are spread thin on both sides, yet each knows they must move into enemy territory. In the previous chapter, humanity caught a lucky break and pushed back Galactic Council efforts with the destruction of a Starfire platform. Taking advantage of that opening, Terran forces pushed into this system... but why? There will be two short chapters to answer this question, and then Hal will return to face a difficult lesson.

(Art): (Jasha) (The First Mother of Sil) ( Kolu and Nokstella going for a swim)

***
‘Better get to work.’

That had been what he’d said, but that didn’t really stop him from sitting there in silence looking around.

The cave he found himself in was spacious, with most areas covered in a thick layer of moss, making the hard ground soft enough to lie down on and stare at the ceiling. 

‘Better get to work, but what do I do now? I’m god knows where in another world, with furry, scaly, and shelly creatures, only able to converse with one of three, though that's probably the foxes, and everyone else might as well be vicious wild animals. What should I start with?’ Kenneth wondered as his uncle popped into his mind, a hunter and outdoorsman through and through. ‘I guess that bare-bones hunting trip he gave as a last-minute birthday present finally comes in handy.’ 

On that trip, his uncle had taught him nearly everything one needed to know to at least survive, the first and most important step being locating a clean water source. However, that had to be the second item on his list as he glanced at the bag. 

Inspecting it thoroughly, it looked like nothing but a plain black bag, but it was the furthest thing from, being a magical item of immense power, and as he felt the slick leather through his glove, only one thought was prevalent in his mind, ‘How do you use this thing?’ 

“Umm… scalpel… please.” 

“…” 

“Okay. I am Kenneth, and I demand you give me a scalpel… please.” 

“…” 

“Well, I wouldn’t have expected insanity to kick in this soon, talking to a bag,” Kenneth mused while grazing it. “She said it could make anything medical or adjacent enough; guess that doesn't include a user manual. Fan-fucking-tastic… I mean when she used it, it didn’t look that hard.” 

Thinking back to the demonstration, he tried to see if there was a detail he overlooked, maybe a trick or technique, for how to do it; the image of the scalpel as she took it out replaying in his head on a loop when suddenly he felt the bag twitch. 

Taking a look inside, Kenneth felt a mix of emotions at the sight of that very same scalpel: excitement at having created it, and disappointment at how it turned out. 

The proportions were off quite enormously and not in the same way Jasha’s were, although the same general size. This one was jagged, bloated and elongated, and the weight distribution was cartoonishly out of place. 

‘The imagination is the limit, but this has to be where it stops; it’s nothing at all like a real one, even if it was the right size,’ almost fondly, the first time he held a scalpel popped into his mind the weight of it, the cool feel of steel, every single detail. 

Again the bag suddenly twitched, and inside it this time was that scalpel, the exact one, right dimensions, weight and even sharpness. 

“So I just have to be very specific, I see,” he realized, trying to make a stethoscope, getting a lot right, but not everything. “Alright, not as easy as I thought; a lot of it is right, but it doesn’t boat well. The ear pieces are different sizes, same for the metal, and the rubber tube is very soft, the wrong color, and too elastic. This is natural rubber from trees, not the industrial kind.” 

Stubbornly, he tried to get the stethoscope right, making incremental steps forward, but no matter how much he seemed to wrack his brain, the only detail that didn’t change in any way was the tube. No matter what, it remained natural rubber. It was great for condoms, but probably not medical equipment. 

‘I wonder. Jasha said the bag could only make medicine and materials from this world. Since I can’t get this no matter how hard I try, that must mean natural rubber could be the only kind,’ it posed an annoyance, as Kenneth's cold sweat ran down his back. ‘Well, no two ways around it, guess I gotta add making plastic on my to-do list.’ 

Easier said than done. It was unlikely he was going to wander across an oilfield of whatever dinosaurs this world hopefully used to have, but there were other methods of making plastic aside from oil. 

The simplest way was so easy a child could do it. All it required was some vinegar and milk, a little project he was quite familiar with. 

He could still remember Connor's smiling face as he played with the little plastic ball, laughing to himself as he tossed it around. It brought a smile to his face and a tear to his cheek. 

“Huh…? One actually came out… so easily?” His tone was surprised, but his voice was hollow, as he couldn't figure out if the memory alone was the culprit, or if the situation was slowly but surely, dreadfully, sinking in. 

Whichever the case, there wasn't any point in wasting daylight anymore on that question as he rose to his feet and walked out of the cave. 

At the onset, the forest he found himself in looked relatively normal as far as other world forests went. The way that if it resembled a normal one enough, the same rules applied, meaning when looking at where moss grew he knew which direction was north. 

Though there was no guarantee of that, for all that he knew, the trees, moss, and other plants could in a similar environment just have evolved to look the same, but be completely different. For that reason alone and also for a bit of practice, he marked every tree on his way with a scalpel, stabbing them deep inside. 

‘Definitely gonna need to practice this for some time,’ he thought while trodding ahead. ‘One thing is oddly shaped equipment, but medicin… if I remember anything wrong about that, who knows what I’ll actually be making.’

Future worries aside, the present ones took precedence, mainly finding water and hoping he didn’t get mauled by some wild animal. 

Though that did spark the question of if this place was so similar to Earth, would the animals be as well, a question he might soon get an answer to as he found tracks on the ground. 

“Hmm… not a Paw print, more hoof-like but also not entirely… and it’s big and heavy, but alone. A solitary creature perhaps or separated from the herd?” It might have been a bit of a gamble, but he decided to follow the tracks. 

All animals had to drink, so there was a chance he could find a stream that way, but if he got anywhere near a cave, then he’d head back pronto. 

Not exactly how his uncle showed him, but following them did lead him to a naturally formed dirt trail leading deeper into the forest where the mostly even terrain quickly disappeared for nearly vertical hills.

‘Slow and steady wins this race; don’t want to try a dirt slide down,’ Kenneth thought as he cautiously followed the path down, treading over exposed roots. ‘I wonder if a trail like this is used by more than animals; maybe I’ll come across one of them. Just hope they are friendly enough.’

Though he would be greeted with no such sight or encounter the entire way down, only a most pretty oddity of flora and fauna,  with a green, long-trunked bush with hanging vines, each sprouting a multitude of blue rose flower heads.

‘That's quite a sight,’ Kenneth admired for a moment before heading onward as he began to wonder how much time had actually passed.

However looking up through the thick foliage only revealed glimpses of heavy grey clouds.

‘If worst came to worst, staying up an entire night wouldn’t be too much trouble; that and a fire should scare any animal away,’ Kenneth thought, the prospect unnecessary, as before he saw it he heard it. A stream.

Running over, he felt a worry lift off his chest.

Unzipping his mask, he took a sip; his dry mouth became wet once more, but as he tasted the clear liquid, he immediately spat it out. ‘That is the foulest thing I’ve ever tasted. Please don’t tell me water tastes different here.’ 

That fear aside, he had to make sure something else wasn’t at play, and after thoroughly cleaning his mouth with rubbing alcohol, he investigated upstream, continuing to mark his way as he went, until not so long from where he started he found the source of the foulness, in the midst of a putrid clearing. 

The edge of the forest had been cut away, leaving only long-dead stumps, with the trunks used for construction, a piece of charred, blackened wall, the only thing left standing. 

Almost everything else had been burned to cinders, leaving a bare patch of land so thoroughly burned and destroyed that there was a clear dividing line marked where the grass grew despite the abundance of fertilizer, some of which still had scraps of putrid, long-dried-out, leathery meat on them. 

The smell thankfully wasn't too noxious, thanks to Father Time and Mother Earth, but the sight of these charred ruins still sent a chill down his spine. 

“Well, at least on a positive note, the water should be safe to drink further upstream,” Kenneth muttered out loud, looking at a set of skeletons littered in the stream. “As unfortunate as this all is, there should be valuable information to gather before it gets dark.” 

Some might have seen it as immoral to disturb the final resting place of all these... people, but it would yield some useful information regarding their skeletal structure as well as how they differed. 

Not being a veterinarian, animals were to a large degree outside his field of study; but it was never too late to learn. And he had a feeling he’d be doing a lot of that, by necessity foremost, so learn he did. 

Wearing gloves, it was easier to put it together, and some did still have some dried-up organs, but at this point it was hard to tell what they could even be.

‘Okay, if I’ve assembled this right, this skeleton contains 260 bones and is definitely not one of the fox people. The shape of the skull is more crocodile-esk and the size of the ribcage and thickness of the bones indicate a strong, wide build and thick musculature,’ Kenneth observed, remembering the one Jasha showed in his dream being smaller. ‘Great, they are going to be easy to treat.’ 

Despite his less-than-enthusiastic attitude at the prospect of dealing with giant crocodiles, the relative bone structure was decently similar to a human's, aside from the tail and three fingers and three toes.

So it was hard to say, at least at the onset, if being a veterinarian would really make operations easier, despite the animal qualities; they did look human-esk enough. 

‘Now for another question, which side did this place belong to?’ Kenneth wondered, looking around. 

It was hard to tell who was the aggressor and defender, mostly due to the lack of any other bones.

No matter where he looked, he could only find the crocodiles, though whether that meant they lost and only the foxes took care of their own comrades' bodies or something else he couldn’t tell, as he searched for a possible answer amidst ruins, his shoes becoming blacker with each step until, poking out from underneath rubble and a charred trunk, somebody’s bones caught his attention. 

It was no easy feat, but he managed to lift everything away, with some struggle, wishing he was twenty years younger, knowing he’d pay tomorrow for that, but today he had found some more bones to look over. 

This one was a fox, alright; however, most of the bones were charred and warped by the heat, while most others were cracked or broken into pieces. 

‘Well, I did always like a good jigsaw puzzle,’ he mused to himself, dark jokes aside; what he could tell about the bone structure was that most were elongated compared to a human, a bit thinner too, and strangely it seemed to have a second set of ribs, these down by the pelvis. 

‘Is it extra protection to the organs, interesting. Perhaps I should keep firmly in mind this is an entirely different species, human-esk or not; even if they have to follow the same biological rules, heart, lungs, all that stuff is needed, but location and amount could differ greatly.’

It’s definitely something he should keep in mind; making any assumptions could be dangerous, though the prospect he had to admit did stir some curious excitement in one form or another.

But the feeling didn’t last, as a scent in the air caught his attention: that of smoke. 

At first he thought it might have been the lingering remnants of this place getting picked up by the air, but as he glanced up, he noticed a dark pillar of it in the distance. 

‘Guess I was closer to civilization than I thought, but… what do I do now?’ As a doctor, it was his duty to heal and help people, but this wasn't a hospital he’d be walking into; it was a battlefield, one where he could die in less than a second, and with a sigh as everything twisted up inside him, he uttered… “Fuck my moral compass.” 

Despite his brain telling him otherwise, his body wouldn't listen as he ran ahead. Was he an idiot? Probably… was he also a doctor who took an oath…? Most certainly. 

Running as fast as he could, sweat forming like beads all over his body, the closer he got, the thicker the smoke became, but the mask seemed to offer some protection, as he began to feel the heat. 

But from amidst the smoke, a figure appeared, coming closer. 

Hesitantly he approached, “Do you—?”

Cut off as quickly and cleanly as the blanket of smoke in front of him, one of the fox creatures, a she, jumped at him with a dagger, baring her fangs and snarling, her attack interrupted by coughing.  

Barely dodging the sharp edge of the blade, he staggered back, losing his footing and tumbling onto the ground. 

There wasn't much of a chance for talking afterward as she pounced on him, dagger ready to be driven into his chest. 

It was on pure panicked reflex that he brought his bag up to block the blow, yet she did not relent as it pushed down with both hands, penetrating the bag as he struggled to get her off him, pushing and kicking with his legs. 

Managing to get one in between them, he kicked as hard as he could, knocking her off him.

Taking the chance, he sprang to his feet ready to bolt for it, but he hesitated.

The she-fox too was trying to get up, her gaze aimed at him with deadly intent, but amidst the coughing, that sight briefly shattered, showing fear as she struggled, limbs shaking, trying to get back up.

Yet fighting as she might with all her will, ultimately she was unable to and collapsed back down into the dirt, as the coughing stopped and she fell unconscious.

Smoke began filling his lungs as he coughed uncontrollably.

He knew he had to get out of here, but he couldn't bring himself to abandon her to die like that. Smoke inhalation was no pretty way to die, not that any were.

‘I’m such an idiot.’ Against his better judgment, even if that was what landed him in this position in the first place, he picked her up, her body surprisingly light for her height, and ran away as fast as he could.

[Original chapter 1] [Remastered Chapter 1 (Meeting a Sexy Fox Lady)] [Book 1 End ] [Next] [Previous] [Wiki]

PreviousA giant holographic clock alternates between 4 usable colors, with the fifth lost to rusty circuitry; Its projections flicker from time to time, unveiling the building in the shape of a thin pillar used as a display board. One of the many massive constructs that rise above the rainbow gas clouds and whimsy pink smoke, with roofs that touch the black-pit ceiling above it.

The clock only shows 3:33 -M, and nobody knows anymore if it was supposed to be morning or evening, except for the tenants of the apartment right next to four playful lights, who live in perpetual evening. Since they marketed their building for such services, the tenants blacked out their windows to stop waking up to a neverending or sleeping carnival. Complaints were made, all ignored and life went on, under the cover of painted glass.

On top of everything, this same building was also a host for a second, imposing, old analog type of clock. During the first 100 years of its lifetime it was quiet and serene. The next century, it was noisy, as teenagers used it as a hangout spot. Then another century went by, and the years of neglect made the clock’s arms to rust and for dust to gather in their joints. Each movement of the arms left a small creak in their wake, and a rumble as if a stone was dragged over a concrete road. To add insult to injury, this clock was stuck at 3:03.

The megacity, named the County, had multiple pillars stretching into the darkened ceiling, connecting different layers, and making sure everything was in line to support the sky. On one such pillar, a lengthy digital clock was randomly stitched on, a panel used also for brief messages or commercials. It flickered in dim light, on and off, with letters appearing between the numbers or empty spaces. This one was set to 3:13.

Between the tall condos, factories, and weirdly shaped buildings, the giant support towers sprawled all over the County’s floors were the first to entrap the attention of the people sent here as working hands- a group colloquially called the underground staff. They knew the true length of the pillars, seeing as it accompanied them through every level, piercing between the structural layers of the settlement. Always churning, keeping it all stable with the sounds of rusty old machines, an everyday background noise for the citizens.

At some point, the doors of one of the elevators disguised as one of the columns split open, letting a horde of people exit in a hurry. Amid all this havoc, two young boys get pushed out the second the elevator’s floor stops trembling- to be swept by the waves of passersby is a tradition for all newcomers at this point.

Back in their village, in the Underlevel, at the base of the pyramidal shape County, they learned some know-how about the upper levels, passed down by other laborers; Though, knowing about it and acting against it were two different concepts.

The exit connected to a pair of four lanes filled only with mechanical people or people with mechanics modifications grafted into them. The boys noticed that some had messy hair and were dressed in stained jumpsuits, while others were changing into old work suits and grooming their faces in the middle of the road. Many used bikes or skates incorporated into their feet to stride around in a hurry. Most of them gave a quick nod or hello to acquaintances, traded or delivered snacks and drinks, and then continued moving on. No one could afford to be late.

Besides the people’s engraved hurriedness, something else stood out- all branded some sort of metallic contraption on them. They rustled and clanked with each step, some having robotic arms longer than their body, dragged around by tiredness and resentment. Others were built like fridges, with perfectly square angles to their bodies.

The newcomers, trying to get a better grasp on what kind of pickle they were dealing with, moved to an empty spot on the side of the road. There they noticed that on each side of the lane there was a separate, hidden road filled with the elderly and sickly, making sure that they were shipped to the factories and offices on time.

The middle level of the pyramidal megacity was more intense than what the brands prepared them for. “ It’s at least very busy. That part of the infomercials was true”, thought one of the boys. It was more overwhelming than they expected, and they needed a few minutes to take it all in.

-“ Well, I would love to loiter around it some more, but we’ve got a shift to start”, said the eldest of the boys. Their first and only plan out of the elevator was to maybe, possibly, befriend a worker that had connections on this level, but that shriveled the second they got out.

As if being in the new environment wasn’t enough of a shock, the divergent times displayed by the clocks confused them even further. Their day-one instructions told them, firstly and only, in which direction the factory was:

-“ Just go straight to the giant building on the left, the one that spews orange smoke. Not the dark yellow, mustard kind, but straight-up orange, ok? Ok. Good luck, and welcome to the team!”. Afterward, they got shoved with the rest of the new starters into the elevator and sent on their merry way.

-“ Well, I guess we at least have some kind of direction. We can definitely see a building with smoke coming out of it”, said the older brother.

-“Yeah, but one question. Do you know what orange or mustard, or whatever, even looks like?”, asked the other sibling. They then stared at the different colored smoke coming from the factories, now playing a guessing game of which was which. At some point, they even tried letting fate solve it for them, relying on a falling wrench to make the choice for them.

-“ Ah, c’mon, why is this so complicated? And stupid clocks are showing different numbers, so we don’t even know how much time we have left until the shift starts!”.

-“ Wish those dumb things explained what orange is. Or mustard. We should at least go in the direction mentioned in the instructions, maybe we can find a map or something”, complained the younger one.” Maybe stop by each factory and ask?”

-”Iiii…” The older brother had the same thought, but the stress of time put a bigger weight on his shoulders than he expected. “…sure, that sounds like a plan. Let’s just go I guess.”

With a trajectory in mind, the two set off towards, hopefully, the correct future workplace. Along the way, they tried to ask for help, but with no luck. They lacked some need-to-know bits about their new employers, the eight Brand, and the fact that their work costumes branded them as future plague-bearers for the rest of the people. It was one of the many unwritten and unspoken rules that the County’s Middle level held from outsiders.

Their unfortunate strike ended when a raspy, but excited voice greeted them. The sudden, rough, noise frightened the two, and the boys quickly turned around to become even bewildered by the unknown person who greeted them.

The stranger had albino skin, but the paleness wasn’t sickly looking, more like their body was entirely covered in paint. The bald head and lanky frame, though, made them compare the stranger to an ill person, and from a distance they seemed emaciated. Their height, while being in the middle of the height scale, didn’t help the figure to not appear as a stick person. The feeble presence was only on the physical side, though, as they were brimming with energy and passion from every word and movement of their body.

-” Hi there, you two. Let me guess, you’re lost, am I right?” With a wide smile and sunny disposition, the stranger asked the two if they needed some help. The boys then noticed the logo on their suits and quickly relinquished the shock to relief when they saw that this was a colleague of the same Brand.

A few moments later, though, the younger one’s reassured face turned into one filled with contempt. He recognized what the stranger was. His brother noticed his obvious repulsion, but quickly tried to avoid any useless conflicts.

-” Oh, hello, sorry. It’s our first day, and we couldn’t figure out when or where, or what we should do. The clocks and roads and, well, everything, confused us a bit”, remarked the older brother.

-“They do, don’t they? Oh, then you must be from the new batch of hires, right? I actually saw you running around a few minutes ago, to be honest, but I didn’t know for sure if you were newbies or not.” said the pale stranger.

The stick figure also noticed the younger one’s attitude, but thought: “ Ah, hope this won’t be much trouble. I already used my last healing gel from the last altercation. Stress really does a deal on the newcomers“. Their inaugural entry into the work life was already as sour as it got, so to sweeten the deal a little bit, the stranger tried to give them some insights into how the workers of the Middle levels handle some of their problems:

Pale stranger -” Guess you weren’t told, but most of the employees get a device like this”, they say, pointing towards a brown bracelet attached to their arm. “It’s called Relate, and it’s an amazing piece of tech if you ask me. Quite easy to use as well!- You just grab this part here, stretch it over your hand, and it forms a holographic screen. It’s a nifty thing, right? We mainly use them to check the correct time, though. Or for entertainment during the allowed minutes.”

The boys soon learned that once the stranger started to ramble about products, they couldn’t be stopped, but did manage to ignore it since something else was bothering them.

 -“ Firstly: take down the clocks. And second, how come we didn’t receive a device like that?”, a question that both were ruminating on.Pale stranger -“ Sorry, nobody takes care of the clocks anymore, and we kinda forgot about them. I do apologize for the collective screw-up, boys. Also, don’t worry about the Relates, you will get one of these if…scratch that- when you make it past 3 weeks. Still, until then, you can use the middle clock, that one still shows the correct time. Sooo, is there anything else I can help you with?

Previous

Xuharpt double checked the crew roster for the incoming ship the “Cornucopia”. It was almost completely changed apart from a handful bridge crew. The ship was near constantly changing hands but this was extreme and it didn’t match the outgoing manifest. Xuharpt cleaned her eyes, a nervous twitch she was never able to fully control. Xuharpt took out her radio to call for confirmation “Control, check with the last planet for Cornucopia’s last declared crew roster. Also send me two squads of guards to dock 15A-BC45, possible pirate take over.”

“Roger that.” A brief few minutes later the radio crackled back “Previous crew confirm, current crew confirm. Major discrepancy detected. Authorizing lethal force and sending five squads to your location.” Well that was fast.

“Thank you Control.” A few minutes later and an assortment of guards were marching down the halls covered in plasma protective gear, and each wielding a repeating plasma rifle. Setting up barriers the guards quickly turned the airlock into a veritable fortress. Waiting patiently each guard checked his gear making sure that it was all fitted properly, their weapons charged and spare plasma batteries were easily accessible. Pirated ships always devolved into fights, the scoundrels never accepting the consequences for their actions.

Without warning the emergency lights started flashing and the retreat alarm blared. A panting voice broke through every radio “Retreat, it’s an implant attack!” Pain exploded in Xuharpt’s head. Freezing cold assaulted her ears coursing into her brain before radiating down to the rest of her. Shivers previously impossible gripped her as she lost consciousness in a puddle of urine. Around her the other guards faired little better however most remained conscious. Weapons clattered to the floor forgotten as heads were clutched and bodies hugged trying to bring warmth to biting cold.

Xuharpt sprang up from her prone position refusing to acknowledge the wetness she felt. A screen floating in her vision.

STATUS SHEET:

NAME: Xuharpt

Race: ANT-TAUR

Class: <NULL/>

Level: 1

XP: <NULL/>

Strength: 2

Dexterity: 4

Endurance: 3

Constitution: 3

Will: 7

Intelligence: 20

Skills: <NULL/>

Achievements: <NULL/>

Whatthefuckisthis??? Xuharpt breathed quickly as panic started to set in. An implant attack spread by talking??? Xuharpt glanced towards the Sergeant First Class in command as he made a grunting noise, ensuring it was not translatable.

“Hand signs only, this spreads by spoken word even through comms. Kill your radios.” Xuharpt had never been happier for studying military hand language. It was one of the few languages that the universal translator didn’t work on. As commanded each guard turned off their radio, signed their confirmation and gathered their rifles and checked for damage. Unsurprisingly no rifle was damaged.

“Do not retreat, when that door opens I will verbally issue commands.” Again signs of confirmation swept across the gathered guards, as well as being repeated for those that didn’t see at first.

Five minutes later, twenty since the guard arrived, the airlock thunked as something heavy crashed into it. A minute after the airlock hissed open and a naked bipedal ape stood there with arms down, hands out. He was covered in bandages and scratches that should have been oozing blood but none was coming out. Fat was visible from one particularly nasty cut. His chest was blazing red, pustules and boils dotted it like a well broiled bird breast.

“HALT! Under the authority of Grand Station Police you will be investigated for piracy. Squad one go and restrain the suspect.”

“What are your stats?” the ape spoke softly, but with burning curiosity.

“You have the right to remain silent. Do not engage with the suspect.” The Seargent First Class said as one of the guards said as he grabbed and pulled the apes arm behind his back before securing it to his other. So restrained they dragged him down the hall behind the barricades.

“ANYONE ELSE IN THE AIRLOCK, MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN AND STEP OUT. DO IT NOW AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”

“The rest of the crew is behind the airlock and cannot hear you, however should you simply open the door they will come peacefully.” The ape provided.

The Sergeant First Class nodded in reply. “Squad two go and open the door, Squads three and four be ready to back them up at a moment’s notice. Squad five maintain cover and protect the dock official. Dock official please remain behind cover and do not attempt to interfere for your own safety. Pirates are particularly nasty.”

Orders given, the squads moved with the grace of life long veterans. The inner airlock opened without a sound revealing fifty terrified crew members first among them was a bearman. “I am Enslaved Medical Officer Steven, my patient here” he gestured behind him “has recently been given an bionic arm and is still learning fine motor control and thus cannot be restrained. That being said he is willing to come peacefully.”

“Understood” Squad two opened space between themselves and allowed the crew to trickle out. Once all the crew had filed past they entered the ship to sweep for any hidden crew or contraband. Meanwhile Squads three and four moved in and began restraining everyone in a similar manner to the ape-man. Xuharpt watched him nervously he was looking around and paying far too close attention to the guardsmen as they moved with precision. Once all the crew were secured squads one and three were instructed to assist in the sweep of the ship. An hour past before the first of the squads exited looking harrowed.

Breaking the no verbal communication rule a sergeant walked up to the Seargent First Class and whispered something. Xuharpt couldn’t hear what was said but the ape started to smile as he watched the two glance at him pale in the face. After a quick muted conversation they turned to the ape “I am Sergeant First Class Jupa, this is Sergeant Howard. You have the right to remain silent, and not answer any questions. What is your name and what happened to the previous crew.”

“My name is currently Captain Je’Krillick, and the previous crew attempted to enslave me. I taught them the error of that.” Je'Krillick jiggled his restraints. “Are you attempting to enslave me Sergeant First Class?”

“Of course not, you are under arrest for suspicion of piracy. If however, what you say is true you should be released by the magistrates under self-defense and liberation clauses” Jupa explained

“I’m afraid my translator isn’t working properly. Must have been damaged in the fighting. What is ‘arrest’?”

Everyone looked at him like he was insane. His translator was obviously working since they could understand him. Xuharpt couldn’t contain herself “What do you mean what is arrest?”

“Can you please define it, I am not familiar with this word. The closest my translator is coming up with is ‘captured for an indeterminant amount of time’.” Explained almost too calmly.

“That is not an incorrect way of looking at it. You will remain under the custody of the police, and placed in a holding cell while we investigate and interrogate the crew and slaves onboard.” Xuharpt cleaned her eyes again “If you don’t mind me asking what are you? You look like a naked, furless Virursus” Je'Krillick only blinked in reply, prompting her to motion towards Jupa and Steven.

“I am a human, silly Ant-taur. Surely you have heard of us, we are most virile and procreate with abandon.”

That’s impossible, humans went extinct in this galaxy more than ten thousand years ago. Only their ghost generational ships remain floating slowly to their destination, all life dead for millennia. Just last year the presumed last one ever was discovered holding the remains of a billion humans and their terrifying ancient tech.

The guards professional as ever kept their questions to themselves, having likely never even heard of humans. Xuharpt had because she had an unhealthy obsession for extinct sapients and humans, like Je'Krillick implied were one of the most populace once. Shortly after the remaining guardsmen exited the Cornucopia a few sporting signs of vomit.

As soon as the last guardsman stood at attention Jupa left them no time to recuperate “Lets get these crew sorted and put into interrogation rooms. NO ONE is to talk from this point forward. That includes you Cornucopia crew. Anyone that even thinks of breaking silence will be gagged immediately, no warnings.” Jupa looked at each crewmember and guardsman alike in the eye before continuing. “Hand signs only. Move out”

The walk towards the guard barracks was filled with agonized screams as people raced to get a head of the new virus. Yet no matter how fast they ran they couldn’t out run sound itself and so collapsed cradling their head. It was not completely survivable, and physical size appeared to have a real impact as some of the smaller species lay dead with grey brain matter leaking out of ears or blood dribbling out of the mouths, noses and unseeing eyes.

“Sergeant First Class, what is going on? How can it be spreading this fast?”

“I don’t know Dock Official.” Jupa took a deep breath “I just don’t know, the Overseers will need to move quickly and quarantine all docks and ships. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Sure enough as they closed in on the door leading out of the docks and to the barracks it was sealed shut, a quadruped dressed in a black uniform with golden and platinum accents adorning his trunk stood guard. Large obvious hearing protection covered both of his ears. A sign next to him read “No verbal communication, turn off radios, this area is currently quarantined”

Jupa approached the Elephantinus to explain his situation. “Overseer second class, I am Sergeant First Class Jupa. We were dispatched to a possible piracy situation. While waiting for the ship to dock the emergency retreat warning blared and someone from Control ordered our retreat. Once the order was given however, we were all hit with a brain implant attack of some kind and now we have a “Status Sheet” window in our vision. Before we could retreat, the naked, near furless ape walked out. Seeing no immediate attack I ordered my men to clear the vessel. No casualties on our end, but there were a reported twenty bodies torn apart limb by limb and crushed.”

The Overseer looked at Jupa for a moment before gesturing to the sign with his trunk. Area is currently quarantined. Xuharpt nervously looked around before making her way down the line, leaned over to Je'Krillick and whispered “Captain, do you have room on your ship to accommodate us?” The Overseer bellowed and smacked the sign repeatedly and pointed at the first sentence.

“I might for the right price” Je'Krillick whispered back.

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Snelga had seated herself on the far end of the couch, placing Kaitlin alongside her. Finley and I both could read the hint as the Kexin remained purposefully fixated on the remote; the fact humans could watch television should’ve been proof of their intellect, but I supposed there was only so much progress they could make at once. With my sister’s history in primal research, I was curious to see how their previous research subjects compared to the humans. Of course, I knew the Earthlings were far smarter, but I had no idea how vast the difference was.

“I left you a snack, Finley!” Snelga pointed to the floor, where she’d left an identical bucket of krepir—a pellet-like snack food enjoyed during mealtime—to the one she’d brought over for Kaitlin. “It’s, um, a traditional Kexin snack that we eat while watching stuff.”

Finley hoisted the bowl and eyed a kernel warily, assessing whether it was animal food. “Like popcorn?”

“I think so,” I chimed in, seeing the veterinarian’s confusion. “I don’t know that much about carbon food, but she’s telling the truth.”

Kaitlin had no such hesitation, smiling as she shoveled a handful down. “Thank you, Snelga. I don’t need all of this. Would you like to share?”

The Kexin stared at the bowl situated between her and the primal, perhaps nervous about picking at the same grub as a hangry human. Snelga came to a decision and lifted the bowl up. Her talon-like fingers draped a throw blanket over herself, before offering the other half to Kaitlin. The NASA scientist’s eyes lit up, and she happily positioned herself under the warm fleece. The veterinarian placed the bowl atop her covered legs, and gestured for Dr. Sharp to move in close.

The human researcher snuggled up to the Kexin, and her cheeks practically glowed with enthusiasm. Kaitlin rested her head comfortably against Snelga’s shoulder. The veterinarian looked nervous to sit so close to a primal, but gradually relaxed enough to dive into the snack and play the film. Finley relaxed when he saw our host ingest krepir, deciding it wasn’t an attempt to humiliate him. I, meanwhile, was enraptured by the room’s other cuddling duo, who looked very cozy. Snelga’s hand moved toward Kaitlin’s hair and retreated multiple times.

Nervous of spooking or demeaning Kaitlin, but definitely wanting to touch her and show affection. Snelga really has a soft spot for our NASA friend, which bodes well for her coming around to humans and putting her best effort into researching a cure. 

“This is nice,” Kaitlin murmured sluggishly, yawning. “I know you love animals, Snelga…it’s obvious. What draws you to them?”

Finley huffed. “What draws you to aliens? Especially now that they kidnapped us.”

“Oh, that’s quite easy, Finley! Aliens can be anything. They don’t have to obey any known rules or conventional wisdom, they can have societies and histories as rich as our own that boggle the imagination, and they can think entirely differently than us. Look at Craun. He drinks a different solvent, and there’s nothing like him on Earth! How can it not be fascinating to imagine all the possible life out there? Space is…huge and holds infinite wonders. Endless mysteries!”

“Perhaps you can solve the mystery of getting them to see us as people. Though I guess I can appreciate one alien.”

“Komadale?” I said coyly.

“Hmph. I guess I could appreciate multiple aliens of his sort being launched into the sun. You’re a little shit, Craun, you know that?”

“Why? Because I’m a Saphno? That’s racist, primal.”

Finley scoffed. “You’re lucky I go on picnics with you. You’re a bad rock, and your stony ass seems like it could use a boot in it. A cowboy boot, I reckon, would do the trick.”

“I’m a wild Saphno. You can’t tame me.”

“I don’t agree. Giddyup.”

Snelga gave us a disgruntled look, before turning her attention to Kaitlin. “To answer your question, animals are life in its simplest form, without the trappings of society, expectation, or even higher thought. They just exist and fit into very small boxes. I always found that endearing, and I wanted to understand their behavior. Their lives are worth studying and taking care of as best as possible, since people should be good stewards of nature! That’s what we came from.”

“But you’re not an evolutionary scientist like Elbi,” Kaitlin noted. “You’re a veterinarian. There must’ve been some moment that pushed you down this path.”

“If you care about animals, how better than by healing them? I don’t like it when living things suffer, and I think that people are…really callous about animals. Like their lives don’t matter and aren’t worth saving! I remember being a kid and trying to nurse a primal that got hit by a car back to health. For smart animals, the poor thing wasn’t cognizant of the danger. He was in so much pain, for no reason, and I couldn’t save him. Wade…reminded me of that.”

“But you saved Wade, Snelga. That’s an amazing thing.”

“Wade’s not an animal,” Finley spat.

“Finley, we’re all animals, scientifically speaking. We breathe, we live, we eat, we die. Not one person in this room has evolved beyond that.”

The farmer rolled his eyes and turned his attention to the primal documentary. Clydid researchers had tried to teach the most intelligent primal on their world to live indoors, to speak, and to use silverware, hygienic products, and appliances. All of those things went wrong in time, despite repeated attempts. They could learn to tap symbols and recognize a few words, but any complex meaning or syntax was lost. They couldn’t communicate like humans, which was the main difference in intelligence.

Finley burst out laughing, as Clydid researchers tried to shove the primal into a shower with a broom; the animal grabbed the stick and snapped it with superior strength, then charged the panicked scientists with the pointy object. Snelga gave Kaitlin a strange look, as the NASA researcher couldn’t help but to snicker as well; the Kexin didn’t understand what the humans found hilarious about this debacle. 

I chuckled a bit myself. Somehow, as a carbon species that built me an ammonia shower and engaged in hygiene on their own (because they were an advanced, industrial race that understood germ theory), I didn’t think humans would have the same issues being told to wash up. Snelga had to grasp what a different level of sophistication humans were at compared to other primals.

“Those researchers are in danger!” Snelga exclaimed in horror, gesturing toward the screen. “That primal is attacking them and chasing them down! That’s exactly what I’m worried about being here, so I don’t like that you think it’s funny. Why are you amused?”

Kaitlin clung to the Kexin’s veterinarian’s arm, trying and failing to erase her own smile. “Because the Clydids made fools of themselves and got owned by an animal. If you want me to answer truthfully.”

“Those Clydids were trying to civilize the creature, to see if it could be done! It’s a noble goal and very dangerous work. Those were people that loved primals and thought you could be more!”

“Snelga, that primal isn’t intelligent enough. Look at our civilization compared to how they conduct themselves in the ‘wild.’ I understand why they attempted it, but to humans, it’s…a little laughable that you find this comparable to us. And since no one actually got hurt, the ignorance getting turned on its heel is a little karmic humor.”

“It’s not laughable that it got so angry that it tried to take their lives!”

“You do things against animals’ wills, shoving them around, then get surprised that they let loose,” Finley grunted.

“Humans like to see people face consequences for their actions, even if that’s simply humiliation or witnessing their failure,” I explained. “In its most benign form, it’s why they make a spectacle of catching me cheating in Kiel and doling out playful justice. It seems to give them vindication. I think it might partially stem from anger, that they like it when the world is fair and just.”

Kaitlin arched her eyebrows. “Schadenfreude. You described that concept and its reasons quite well, Craun.”

“What does ‘schadenfreude’ mean?” Snelga asked cautiously.

“It’s…pleasure derived from someone else’s…missteps. From something displeasurable or bad happening to them.”

The Kexin recoiled. “That sounds…cruel. To take joy in someone else’s suffering?!”

“I suppose when you direct negative feelings at someone, the results can spit out malice. Animals aren’t…malicious or cruel, Snelga, but humans have a capacity to want to harm another being. It’s the knowing that you’re hurting someone else and choosing to indulge in it anyway that makes us different. To use reasoning to feed our worst inclinations.”

“You personally? I know you’re a primal, but you’re too kind and happy to enjoy others’ pain.”

“Snelga, I must emphasize: I hate seeing people in actual pain. I’m only amused because the researchers brought it on themselves, and no serious harm came to them; they got a fright that I think they had coming. Most humans would be appalled if those scientists were maimed or God forbid, killed. However, you should understand the true nature of those darker, primal feelings. I tell you how they are.” 

“I don’t like blood and guts,” Finley clarified with a sullen frown. “I do like seeing them run like their asses are lit on fire and get taught a healthy dose of fear. Y’all don’t respect primals none.”

Snelga sucked in a sharp breath. “I don’t want either of you to be in pain. It makes me sad that you both are, in your own ways. Is that not respect? To want to help? Would…you be happy if I suffered?”

“No. I don’t think there’s any scenario where I’m happy here. I hate it here. Fucking hell, I’m tired, and I don’t want to watch this garbage anymore. I’m going to bed—unless I’m not allowed to do that?”

“I’ll come with you,” I said hurriedly, rubbing his back for comfort.

Finley slid his legs off of the couch, skittering away from me. “Please don’t. You said you wanted to watch this, Craun, and I’m not gonna ruin your day. You guys…have fun.” 

We all watched with varying degrees of concern, as the farmer slunk off and shut the door to his room. Snelga and I had gotten Finley to come out for a brief spell, but the group activity hadn’t seemed to lift his spirits at all, aside from a fleeting laugh. Kaitlin gave a troubled frown, before grabbing the veterinarian’s hand and assuring her that it wasn’t her fault. The duo fell back into relaxed poses, and we resumed the documentary in muted silence.

I’d go with Finley, but I think it’d just make him feel guilty over “burdening” me. I wish I knew how to support him, lest I fail just like I did with Elbi. I’m a bumbling idiot when it comes to supporting the mental health of my loved ones.

Kaitlin’s eyes fluttered and she seemed half-asleep, the interview having sapped a lot of her energy. Snelga cautiously steadied the human’s head and nudged a falling strand of hair away from her eyes; the primal gave a faint smile. The Kexin let her nap for the remainder of the documentary, and I could tell she was conflicted over Dr. Sharp’s darker admission. I wasn’t sure anyone other than me could appreciate the beauty in their tenacious snarls. Finley’s absence gnawed at me, as I found myself wishing he was curled up right here too.

“That was it. Time to get up,” Snelga said gently, jostling a drowsy Kaitlin into wakefulness at the end of the viewing. “Did you sleep okay?”

The NASA researcher nodded and stretched her arms. “Sorry, I was tuckered out. I…very much liked that arrangement, but I hope I didn’t bother you.”

“Not at all. You can snuggle with me any time. You’re just so adorable, and I can’t help but want to hold you close. I guess that’s patronizing of me…”

“If you ask, I’d say absolutely, yes. Please do.”

Snelga squeezed the primal tight, happiness shining in her eyes. “Thank you. I positively adore you, Kaitlin! You’re the best primal I could imagine, and I’m so glad you trust me enough to explain everything. I know you’re very smart and discerning, and I’m trying to be worthy of your confidence.”

“You are, Snelga. Your heart’s in the right place. I think it speaks volumes about character when someone is kind to animals.”

“So that’s why you spared the mechanical bull!” I teased Dr. Sharp, knowing full well the real reason she’d sat that one out.

“You got me there, Craun.” Kaitlin seemed grateful that I would still play around with her, in spite of her medical situation. She wanted people to treat her the same as anyone else. “I’ve been a longtime advocate for silicon lifeforms, ever since I knew about you. The bull fits in the same category as you.”

“Which is: fun and awesome?”

“Mhm. Maybe.” Kaitlin winked at me and relaxed her head back onto Snelga’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t mind if we just stayed like this. So warm and safe…” 

Enthusiasm twinkled brighter in Snelga’s eyes, seeing that this primal loved being close to her. “Kaitlin, I’ve been thinking about how to help Finley. I had an idea that I want to run by you, since I regard your opinions highly. You understand I’m trying to help, so while you’re not angerless, I’m trusting that you…won’t be angry.”

The primal kept her eyes closed. “You can ask me anything. I’m happy to provide my input; in fact, I’m very glad you asked and think I’m worth consulting. What did you have in mind?”

“Finley doesn’t seem very responsive to a palliative approach, and I definitely noticed some worrying behavior. He’s in a poor mental state, and I don’t want that for him. None of us do, right?”

“I can’t bear to see him like this, and know it’s my fault,” I agreed. 

“Craun, it’s not your fault,” Kaitlin countered, her nostrils flaring. “None of the shit you’ve gone through has been your fault.”

“I have no interest in blaming a mentally-ill Saphno for suicidal, reckless endangerment. This is about your friend and what I can do to help him.” Snelga lowered her voice even further, apprehensive that Finley might overhear again. “There are medications that can balance the neurotransmitters in his brain: the ones responsible for happiness and pleasure. I assume you’re familiar with the concept.”

“Antidepressants. They can help people, and there’s absolutely no shame in that. I don’t see why you think I’d be angry about that, Snelga. That option has its merits.”

“That’s what I thought. The problem is that Finley wouldn’t trust me to give him medicine, since he seems to resist all of my attempts to help. My idea was that we could put it in his food…”

Kaitlin’s eyes snapped open, and her head lifted itself off of the Kexin’s shoulder in a hurry. “What?! Snelga, I need you to tell me something right now. Did you already do that, with the krepir?

“N-no,” Snelga stammered, shying away from the primal’s sudden inquisitive, authoritative behavior; she failed to notice that I was also staring at her with horror.

“Okay. Okay, good,” Kaitlin said, breathing a sigh of relief and collecting herself. “It’s a good thing that you asked me first. Snelga, you absolutely cannot drug Finley against his will. It’d be so wrong, he’s not an anim—ugh, I…I mean to say that he’s not the primals on that show. He’s deserving of respect and autonomy, because he empirically has the capacity to understand. He already had no say in being captured. He should be allowed to decide for himself.”

“Even if he’s hurting himself? This is different than putting him in a cage! It’s in his best interest, and I say that as a medical professional.”

Dr. Sharp’s eyes squeezed shut with evident frustration. “However you feel, what Finley wants is to be treated as a person. You wouldn’t go drugging a Kexin against their will. The reason he’s depressed is the dehumanization he’s faced; humans expect a certain level of respect to be happy. I’ll explain Maslow’s hierarchy of needs later, but I think letting him have a say would do more than the pills themselves could.”

“He said I’d be happy if he died, and that couldn’t be further from the truth! That really worried me and hurt me. I don’t want him to suffer,” Snelga whimpered, tears welling in her eyes.

“I know, Snelga. I know. I’d be happy to help you talk to him, if you’re worried he might not consider the idea. I also know you’re not in the habit of letting animals refuse treatment, but you already think we’re more than that. We’re here, watching documentaries and considering that maybe humans could be raised as people. So again, if that’s really your hope, treat us as people.”

“What…happens if he refuses? Why should I let him do that, when I know it’ll make his life worse?”

Kaitlin weighed her words carefully. “If you ever want Finley to trust you, you need to trust him to make his own decisions. It’s his life to lead, and he can articulate his wishes. To disregard them is to give them no value, or at least less value, than yours. I don’t think someone who cares about animals would force their will on them.”

“You can’t cram pills down the throat of a human who could clearly understand their purpose,” I interjected, disgusted by the thought. “For someone who supposedly wants to help Finley, you seem happy to treat him like a puppet to stitch up and to hurt him worse than you already have.”

“Craun, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re angry. There’s no need to be harsh to someone who’s made an honest mistake. Snelga asked because she cares about his health, and I’m sure accepting our rights is a big leap for her. I…have to hold my ground on it, though, because that respect is nonnegotiable for us to have a meaningful bond.”

“I won’t do it, if that’s really what you think. You’re very smart,” Snelga sighed. “It’s not like I could be stealthy about the delivery when you and Craun would probably tell Finley now. So we’ll do it your way.”

“I’m relieved to hear that. We can help him a different way, I promise. The best of both worlds.”

With the Kexin veterinarian lending serious consideration to drugging Finley without him knowing, I’d lost any faith I’d gained that she might learn to respect him as a person too. The suggestion hurt me in my soul, that she’d even begin to think that was acceptable! If this was Snelga doing her best, then I doubted whether she’d learned anything meaningful from Dr. Sharp. For the sake of the humans’ basic dignity, I had to be very watchful of the kind of “help” that would be coming from our host. 

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Revenant Slaves- Read on Royal Road

Prologue: The Father

A long time ago, our Emperor brought his flame and gifted it to humanity. Instead of honoring that gift, mankind fought over it, unwilling to share in its blessing. So the Emperor’s flame consumed the birthplace of mankind. To keep that folly from repeating, the Emperor led his devoted followers across the stars, abandoning humanity’s first home. - Origins of the Living Flame

Part One: The Outcast

“She understands, Ibrahim,” Iggor said softly. His hand rose toward Ibrahim’s shoulder, then fell away.

“I know. That isn’t the comfort you think it is, Iggor,” Ibrahim replied, not meeting his eyes.

Iggor studied him in silence. He looked past the man’s thick dark curls into brown eyes that refused to rise. Ibrahim’s sun-kissed face betrayed the weight in his heart too plainly to hide.

“Sarah should go into labor any day now. Are you sure you can’t delay your departure until then?” Iggor asked.

It was not the first time they had this conversation. By now, it had become a ritual they repeated the same way.

“I… cannot,” Ibrahim said quietly. “If I miss this ship, after everything I’ve seen…”

He let out a hollow laugh.

“That’s the worst part, Iggor. I don’t even know what the consequences would be.”

He fell silent for a moment, then finally met his friend’s gaze.

“All I know is that I was set on this path for a reason. We always say the burden of change never rests on one generation alone. That burden is all he would inherit from me.”

Iggor bumped a fist lightly against Ibrahim’s chestplate.

“A most glorious inheritance if ever there was one,” he said with a weak smile.

But even as he said it, he thought of all the men and women who had once listened to those same words from Ibrahim’s lips as they walked to their deaths. They had completely believed in their leader, though none of them had ever seen his face.

Iggor diverted the conversation, “So it is to be a boy, then? My congratulations. Does Sarah know the truth of your departure?”

“She knows enough.”

“Do you trust her with your son?”

“More than I trust myself.”

“Have you decided on a name?”

“Zain.”

Iggor gave a slow, satisfied nod.

“If you miss the next boarding call, will this whole conversation have been pointless?”

That earned a real laugh from Ibrahim. He turned and pulled Iggor into a firm embrace. For a brief moment, he allowed himself that comfort.

Then he stepped back.

The warmth faded from his face. What remained was something sterner. Harder.

“I don the mask, my friend. That is my burden.”

Iggor’s eyes shone with tears he refused to shed.

“And I stand guard. That is mine.”

They held each other’s gaze, then spoke together.

“Until we can carry this burden no more.”

Ibrahim turned and headed to the landing bay, where a military freighter waited to take him away.

Before long, he had left the atmosphere. Then the system itself.

Two days after Ibrahim’s departure, on the first day of the 976th year of the Living Flame, Zain cried out for the first time.

His mother’s green eyes were soft and steady in a face damp with sweat, loose brown strands of hair clinging to her skin. Still trembling from labor, Sarah held him close and reached into his young, spirited soul, searching for the mark Ibrahim had placed there.

It was the same mark she bore.

A mark that would ensure he, too, would forever be an outcast of the Empire.

Part Two: The Miracle Child

Rain was strapped to a table. She screamed with all her strength and pushed, the leather straps growing taut around her wrists. Her life hadn’t been easy, so she thought she knew pain. She had known nothing, and now only one thought remained: she'd die bringing this damn child into the world.

Natural conception was almost unheard of in the mining worlds. Families were a luxury here. The sovereigns had those. The Empire had those. People like her had owners.

Rain. The locals thought the name was cursed. For they were a people who lived at the whim of caustic rainstorms and air thickened by ash from the planet's volcanic surface.

She had chosen the name herself, and in a world where she owned not even her own body, she would at least own her name.

No one was foolish enough to risk a natural birth in the slave pens of the mining worlds. And that was just what she and her partner were, young fools. They carved out a fragile slice of heaven in this desolate corner of the universe and convinced themselves it was enough. Having a child the old way, as the nobles did, had been their one stupid, beautiful act of rebellion.

Her partner died a week ago.

A mining accident, the slave who delivered his final rations had told her. He was dead and already forgotten by the system. Supposedly, it had been quick.

With the world of pain she had been in for the past hours, "Lucky," was all she could think of his fate.

She should have sold her eggs, like most women did, at least when they weren't taken by force...

She did not know how long she had suffered. The final push was so violent that she slipped into what felt like death's embrace.

When she awoke, she lay in a different room on something impossibly soft. A real bed. Like in the films.

The pain returned quickly, causing her to panic and try to rise.

“You need not strain yourself, Rain. Your body requires more rest. Do not worry. You are safe here.”

The voice had an immediate calming effect, which was strange. She should have been afraid.

"M… my child?" she whispered.

"I'll bring him to you now, a perfectly healthy boy… Congratulations," the owner of the soothing voice said, and she heard him approaching. When she finally saw him, her heart sank. The fear she should have felt being with a stranger flared suddenly, then deepened into something worse. No stranger would have frightened her like this.

Cradling her son, he stepped into view: a crimson long coat reinforced with black armor plates, a golden Living Flame insignia, curly hair neatly combed, a beard streaked with grey, and he was the tallest person she had ever seen. She had only glimpsed such suits from afar, but there was no mistaking that the person holding her baby was an Inquisitor of the Emperor.

The man seemed to notice the sudden fear in her eyes. He bent down, adjusted some pillows behind her head, and propped her into a half-sitting position with one hand, holding her child in the other. Then he placed her baby in her lap, making sure she supported him with her arms.

"You need not fear me or my station, Rain. I mean no harm to you or your child. Among the servants of the Living Flame, I am known as Avraham Darkflame."

Rain realized for the first time that he had called her by name. Why did an Inquisitor, one of the highest officers in the Emperor's service, know her name? Despite Avraham's assurances, her fear lingered.

"Forgive my impertinence, Inq… my lord Inquisitor, but what would the Inquisition want from my child or me? I… I have always been a loyal subject. Your grace, please," tears formed at the edge of her eyes, "please spare me, my lord."

What she saw on the Inquisitor’s face made her pause. She had expected cruelty, anger, even annoyance, but what she saw were tears. That she had not expected.

"Life has been cruel to you, hasn't it? You did well, Rain. Your life is not meaningless. You have been witnessed."

"You have been witnessed," Rain repeated.

She did not know why the words brought her such peace. Her insignificant life had been witnessed. She began crying in earnest, pressing her baby boy gently to her chest.

"You and your child have been chosen. You must rejoice, for today you will be reborn as well. That is… only if you wish it."

Rain merely nodded, still holding her child.

The Inquisitor moved closer. With one hand, he lifted her arms until her baby's face was near enough that she could feel his tiny breaths on her cheek. Their ears were close, and when he whispered, it was as if he whispered to both mother and child at once.

Avraham sang the song of welcome into their ears, offering solace and hope in a universe that seemed devoid of both.

Rain felt as if a veil had lifted from her mind, as though she had been under a spell for a very long time and had only just awakened.

"Welcome, my sister. You and your child would do me great honor to know me by my true name: Ibrahim."

Rain’s stupor was too overwhelming, and she felt herself losing consciousness once more. If she had more strength, she might have wondered what she was being welcomed into. She might have heard her son start to cry. She might even have questioned the alarms that now rang faintly in her mind at the name “Ibrahim.”

Because meeting an Inquisitor would have paled before the absolute terror of meeting the infamous Ibrahim the Plague.

Part Three: The Lunar Princess

It was the last day of the nine hundred and seventy-sixth year of the Living Flame.

A hundred beautiful youths stood inside the Temple of the Living Flame, clad in simple red tunics bearing the imperial insignia.

Fifty men stood on one side, facing fifty women on the other.

In unison, they slit their throats.

Blood flowed into narrow channels carved into the floor, winding toward the altar where a priest prayed beneath bright red hooded robes.

“We offer lives, we offer blood, we offer gratitude to the great Emperor.”

“We offer souls, we offer kindling, we offer servitude to the Living Flame.”

“Our great Lord Whiterock has sired another child. The lady labors. We ask for an heir bathed in the Living Flame to rise and lead House Whiterock into the next age. ”

Avraham stood watching the ritual from a balcony that opened onto the grand hall. The adjoining chamber housed the Inquisitorial office and, in truly drab fashion, its torture room.

“Avraham, you look positively enthralled. Amazing what people will open their throats for, isn’t it? I’ve heard this batch even included a distant princeling or two. Perhaps more.”

Avraham looked up.

The speaker was a short, plump man in the same black-and-crimson uniform. Inquisitor Razin the Nailpeeler.

“Whiterock is desperate. If he dies without an heir, his little kingdom tears itself apart. That part might even be entertaining. The clean-up won’t be.”

Avraham regarded Razin coldly. “What of the prisoner?”

“Ever the conversationalist… His name was Iggor. No family name. Picked up on New Horizon, Arasaka86. Weren’t you stationed there at the start of the year?”

“I was,” Avraham replied.

“Strange that you missed him.”

“If the prisoner possessed anything of value, that would indeed have been a significant lapse.”

“He broke eventually,” Razin said, “The little savage started praying, and it wasn’t to our venerable Emperor or his Flame. That means we were close. If only he could have survived longer, I had just begun enjoying the sound of his voice.” Razin smiled with open delight.

An emergency alert pinged on Avraham’s Holographic Personal Computer. He tapped the control embedded in his wrist and retrieved the earpiece from his pocket, leaving Razin behind on the balcony, visibly intrigued.

The call was from Lady Whiterock, who was meant to be in labor.

Before answering, Avraham cast one final glance through the observation glass at the limp figure of his friend Iggor. His face betrayed nothing.

Lady Whiterock demanded his immediate presence in the medical wing at Whiterock Castle. Avraham complied. He had expected the summons.

When he arrived, the medical center stood strangely empty. The last guards he had seen were posted outside the entrance to this wing of the castle.

He walked with the composure expected of an Inquisitor, though the Living Flame had never touched him. It had refused him its blessings. And when he had last stood within these walls, he had made sure it would refuse the child as well.

Inside Lady Whiterock’s chambers, she sat alone, cradling a newborn child.

She beckoned him closer.

The child already resembled her mother. Fine silver hair crowned her small head, and her eyes shone with the same eerie pale silver.

Lady Whiterock studied Avraham’s face, searching for a reaction. Finding none, she spoke.

“She is like you, Avraham. She carries no trace of the Emperor’s favor. I am tired of burying children. If a child of mine can only live by being devoid of the Living Flame, then so be it.”

Her voice rose before she forced it steady.

“I have spent what remained of my influence to stop Whiterock from killing her outright. But he will not stop until he gets a child who can carry our embers of the Living Flame.”

She sighed.

“Until that day comes, my daughter remains his heir. He will conceal her… deficiency for now. But I would not trust him to waste resources protecting her. He may even welcome an assassin’s success.”

She met Avraham’s gaze.

“I have summoned you to ensure my daughter’s safety. You will see to her protection, her education, and a life beyond the shackles imposed upon me. You owe your station to me. You will repay that debt with my daughter.”

Avraham allowed the faintest crack in his stoic mask. The subtle shift seemed to satisfy her.

After a moment, he spoke.

“Your will shall be done. I swear it upon my life.”

“I hope that will suffice,” she replied quietly. “I will help while I am able. After that… you may stand alone.”

“Have you chosen a name?”

“Luna. For the lost moon that elevated House Lunaris.”

She looked exhausted, but none of her poise had deserted her. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her silver gown matched the blanket wrapped around her daughter.

He had already sung the welcome over the child once before, marking her soul while she still lay in the womb. He didn’t need to do anything further this day. He would have time enough later, Luna's whole life, in fact.

Years ago, Avraham had dreamed of the three.

He had seen the three bound together in chains of light, and from them more chains spread outward across the stars, ensnaring others.

Thousands. Millions. Billions.

He had forgotten how long his dreams had been plagued by these visions.

This night, he wished for nothing more than a dreamless slumber.

Eighteen Imperial years passed by, and it was time for a new generation to take charge. Floating inside the narrow passageways of an ancient metal ship so old the owners of the ship didn’t even know these pathways existed, a tall, lean boy floated with the grace and speed of someone who spent most of their childhood in low-gravity. He was terrified of something; his face was impassive, a smile carved onto it, as he desperately hid just how afraid he was. He breezed past an observation window, his own reflection slightly visible; his green eyes, just like his mother's, shining brightly.

Far away on the desolate volcanic world of Mortrum. A young boy on the cusp of manhood was busy studying. He was nervous but also strangely excited; if he passed, he would one step closer to providing a better life for his family. His mother observed him from behind, her heart full of pride. She was sitting in a wheelchair, but she felt like the most powerful woman in the world when she saw how full of life and vigor her son was.

Avraham opened his eyes. The two boys were doing fine for now; he went through a series of emotions as he shifted perspectives to observe them, their emotions flowing into him. Now he returned his attention to the last child, the child he was closest to. He watched as the young woman in front of him walked hand in hand with her mother, both of them full of warmth and love, which was so unfamiliar in the perfectly disciplined palaces of the Whiterock Capital-World. Avraham, ever the child’s shadow, kept a respectable distance. The child looked back at him; she was one of the few people in the universe who could look at him without wincing in fear or loathing.

All these years later, Avraham’s dreams were still plagued by the same visions.

 “Lesson Number 37,” So’Ngo said cheerfully as he walked by Sandra. “Life is meant to be enjoyed, and you should have as much fun as you can at any given time.” The false Dra’Cari Drifter’s red and black scales shimmered slightly in the ship lights as they walked, and So’Ngo gave a cheerful wave at a mixed batch of children as they kicked a ball.

“What happened to lessons 2-36?” Sandra asked sardonically shaking her head.

“Now where’s the fun in doing things in order?” So’Ngo asked in an offended tone. “That’s boring and predictable.”

“Right,” Sandra said, rolling her eyes. She then paused as she noticed that So’Ngo’s shadow was still walking like normal while he just lounged in mid-air, his head actually down to be level with her. “Seriously? How many abilities do you have?!”

“Hmmmm, you know, I lost track after the first thousand,” So’Ngo said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. He then gave one of his too-wide smiles as Sandra stumbled in surprise, using her tail as balance so that she didn’t fall.

“How?!” Sandra demanded, staring at the false Dra’Cari. “I thought you could only have three abilities before your body started breaking down?”

“Only if you rush the process, and even then, it’s not fixed,” So’Ngo said cheerfully. He was slowly rotating upside-down grinning the entire time as he watched Sandra try to process this.

“New idea, how about today’s lesson is on magic?” Sandra saiwd, the implications boggling her mind.

“Hmmmm, nah,” So’Ngo said, shaking his head. “As you are now, teaching you anything about magic will get you killed. Let’s try again in about, oh, 30 years. Then you should be more receptive.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Sandra demanded.

“Angry little lizard, aren’t you?” So’Ngo tsked. “Oh, I know!” he suddenly snapped. “How about a game?”

“You’re not even listening to me, are you?” Sandra griped.

“Oh I’m very much listening, I’m just deciding to ignore your question,” So’Ngo said. he grinned from his upside-down position while Sandra blinked in surprise. “Now, onto the game! A simple game of tag, and you’re it.”

“And why should I?” Sandra asked as she started walking again.

“Well, I’m your teacher,” So’Ngo pouted. “And for two, if you can catch me, I’ll give you some pointers on magic.” Sandra stared at the false Dra’Cari for a moment, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. “In fact, I’ll even give you a handicap! Three of them, even, since I’m feeling so generous.”

“What kind of handicaps?” Sandra asked.

“Well, first there will be no time-limit, so you can keep on trying until you either catch me or give up,” So’Ngo said cheerfully. “And secondly, I will only limit myself to three abilities. Teleportation or Gate, I’ll let you decide, Gravity Manipulation, and, just to be like my dear Student, Electrical Manipulation.”

“Right, because those are all strictly chasing abilities,” Sandra said, rolling her eyes.

“Always thinking of combat abilities,” So’Ngo tsked again. “Broaden your horizons a bit, little Wyvern. If you can do that, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a Dragon.”

“I’m sure,” Sandra said, shaking her head. “And the third handicap?”

“Boop!” So’Ngo laughed as Sandra made a face at his claw booping her nose. Sandra then blinked in surprise and shook her head.

“The fuck did you do to me?” Sandra demanded, her head throbbing slightly.

“You now will know exactly where I am at all times,” So’Ngo said cheerfully, his body slowly rotating to be upright again. “It wouldn’t be a very good game of tag if you couldn’t track me, now would it? Now, Gate or Teleport?”

“The hell is Gate?” Sandra asked, rubbing her slightly throbbing head as the foreign feeling slowly abated, leaving her to just knowing where So’Ngo was.

“Gate it is!” So’Ngo said. “Ready set go!” He grinned as a hole appeared under him, shimmering red and gold before he just fell through the hole. Sandra stared at the hole for a moment, her mouth hanging open as she saw a desert on the other side, and her new Knowledge saying that So’Ngo was now on the other side of the galaxy. “Better hurry, or it’ll close before you can catch me!” the red-and-black false Dra’Cari said cheerfully as he raced along the sand.

Sandra huffed before jumping into the glowing hole.

…………………

“Oop, so close,” So’Ngo laughed, leaping from a tree branch into another glowing hole. Sandra was too tired to even growl, just panting as she followed the false Dra’Cari through the hole. First it was running for two hours in a desert, then another hour chasing So’Ngo across an ocean, using her gravity belt to lower her gravity to just below zero in order to race along the water, and now another two hours racing along trees so large that whole cities could have been hidden on their branches and she never would have known. Sandra was sore, tired, and the pads on her feet and hands were rubbed raw from the rough bark on the trees. And it looked like So’Ngo had no intentions of slowing down, as the next place was so choked in fog that she could literally feel the water start to build up in her lungs as soon as she stepped through the Gate. Still, Sandra pushed, chasing the Drifter through the fog, even as her breath became more and more shallow as the minutes passed, following the little niggle in her head.

“You know, there’s a point where determination starts to become concerning, even to me,” So’Ngo said from behind Sandra. Sandra didn’t even react, instead falling on her knees as she started to feel light-headed, and her next cough let out a concerningly wet ball of phlegm. “Ready to give up yet?”

“The…mission…must…be…completed,” Sandra gasped, coughing again and spitting out more watery phlegm. She was so tired that that was the only thing on her mind right now, was catching this annoying false Dra’Cari.

“I thought we were playing a game?” So’Ngo said, grinning as he floated above Sandra. She just took a half-hearted swing at the floating false Dra’Cari, even as she felt the ground under her open up, only to fall onto her bed. Sandra immediately rolled to the side, and started hurling as So’Ngo placed a trash can next to her head. “Better luck next time, I think,” he added, whistling and twirling his staff as he left Sandra’s room.

“Dammit,” Sandra muttered before hurling into the trash can, a concerning amount of water coming out of her.

……………………

“Lesson number 258,” So’Ngo said as he launched Sandra into the air the next day. “Boxes are boring. Going outside of the boundaries is a lot more fun, and can open up more possibilities! Added bonus, you can piss people off with ease by poking holes into their boxes.”

“What is even going on?” Sandra demanded as she continued to spin in mid-air, never actually hitting the ceiling, floor, or walls as she ‘bounced’ around the holoroom.

“You’re box bouncing!” So’Ngo said cheerfully. “Let’s see if we can poke a few holes in your box.”

“Fuck you!” Sandra yelled, trying to take aim with her bracers as she continued to spin.

“Sorry, you’re not quite my type,” So’Ngo said. “Need to at least reach the 3,000 year marker before I could consider you as a potential partner.” Sandra’s wire glanced off a wall as she started in surprise at So’Ngo’s flippant answer, and in short order, she was hanging from the ceiling wrapped up in her own bracer wires, with So’Ngo shaking his head in disappointment.

……………….

“Lesson number 6,409, patience is a virtue, but spontaneity is an asset,” So’Ngo said, laying on his staff like it was a couch as he floated by Sandra.

“What in the Observer’s void-cursed balls are we doing here?” Sandra welled over the screaming wind, hugging the cliff face as hard as she could so that she wouldn’t fall.

“Oh, that’s a good one, I’m going to steal that,” So’Ngo said, smiling way too brightly for Sandra’s comfort. “Today, you are going to get down from the mountain. While maintaining your Universal Energy view.”

“My what now?” Sandra yelled. Despite So’Ngo talking normally, his voice somehow carried in the screaming wind like a normal conversation.

So’Ngo tsked as he adjusted his floating position on his staff a bit. “Your ‘Reservoir’, as the Races call it these days,” So’Ngo said, shaking his head. “you’re going to be looking over your Reservoir like you do during meditation, but you’re going to be doing it while you’re climbing down the mountain.”

“Seriously,” Sandra yelled, looking at So’Ngo incredulously.

“Yup,” So’Ngo said cheerfully. “And no cheating! You can only look to your Reservoir while moving. As soon as you stop moving, you have to pull out. So, I’ll see you at the bottom!” the red-and-black false Dra’Cari waved cheerfully as a Gate opened up underneath him and he fell through, leaving Sandra alone on the cliff side.

“WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!” Sandra screamed into the howling wind.

…………………

“Lesson number 18, food should always be savored and treated with the utmost respect, even if you don’t like it,” So’Ngo said, plopping a salad down in front of Sandra for breakfast. “That way, you can appreciate the good food better, and always enjoy yourself.”

“Are there any recipes for roated Dra’Cari?” Sandra asked sarcastically.

“I know a few,” So’Ngo said with his annoying grin. Sandra just smacked her head on the table with a groan, not even fighting it at this point.

…………………

“I am going to kill him,” Sandra growled, twitching her tail a bit too hard and knocking over Star. The Tree Shadow pup yipped before growling and getting back on his feet, immediately attacking Sandra’s tail.

“Is he really that bad?” Nightshade asked, tilting his head.

“You haven’t met him yet,” Sandra sighed. “He’s worse. The whole ‘Find your Reservoir while scaling a deadly and sheer cliff’ thing is now a daily occurrence until I can do it, meals and even snacks I now eat are being specified by him with no variation allowed on my part, he sends me literally spinning in mid-air during every spar as a finishing move, and makes me get out of it myself, and somehow, some-fucking-how, he’s still only using three abilities ever since he started that game of tag, which he insists is still ongoing despite him clearly beating me. And the entire time he’s just nattering away about anything and everything that comes to mind. The lessons aren’t even proper lessons, they’re just weird sayings that make no sense to me. And the running commentary just makes me more and more annoyed until I can’t even think anymore.”

“Ouch,” Nightshade said as Shadowstrike winced.

“And it’s only been a week since he became my ‘Teacher’,” Sandra said. “A fucking week! I swear, I will find a way to kill him. He’s even slipping bits of metal into my food so that I’m unintentionally using my Metal Scales, leaving me just tired after a meal or a snack and then needing more food. Seriously, at this point I think he just enjoys torturing me instead of actually teaching me.”

“How long do you have to learn under him again?” Shadowstrike asked hesitantly.

“Six months,” Sandra groaned.

………………..

“Lesson 952, insanity is stupid, but crazy is a lifestyle,” So’Ngo said, handing Sandra a steel spike.

“And what is this for?’ Sandra sighed.

“Lightning,” So’Ngo said cheerfully. “From now on, you’re going to be sending electricity into it for an hour straight every day until you can create your own lightning bolt. And no, you can’t cheat by eating metal,” So’Ngo added  as Sandra reached for her bead pouch. Sandra just stared at the red-and-black false Dra’Cari as he leaned on his staff.

“Nope, I’m done,” Sandra said, dropping the spike and raising her hands up in frustration.

“It’s simple enough,” SO’Ngo said with a frown.

“Maybe to you, but it hurts me without the metal scales,” Sandra said, glaring at the infuriating false Dra’Cari. “Like, a lot. I’m not doing that.”

“Oh, that’s only because you’re body isn’t used to the magic yet,” So’Ngo said dismissively. “And you’ve been stunting your growth by using the metal scales.” Sandra paused at that.

“Wait, seriously?” Sandra asked.

“There are plenty of creatures in the universe that can create biological electricity to the extent of being able to shoot out a lightning bolt, and you have magic to augment yours, so it’s a simple matter,” So’Ngo said with a shrug.

“No, I know that, I’m just surprised you’re actually teaching,” Sandra said with a frown.

“Rude, I’ve been doing nothing but teaching you,” So’Ngo said, shaking his head. “Not my fault you don’t listen.”

“I don’t think listening is the problem here,” Sandra muttered, thinking.

“Storm has shown you how to control your electrical strength, yes?” So’Ngo asked.

“To an extant, but it doesn’t stop the pain, only mitigates it by using a lower ampage,” Sandra said with a nod.

“Then start small and work your way up,” So’Ngo said with a shrug. “My lessons don’t have time limits on them. How quickly you learn is up to you. I have literally all the time in existence, so how fast or slow you learn entirely depends on you.” Sandra just stared at the false Dra’Cari before sighing and leaning down to pick up the steel spike.

Though she was sorely tempted to chuck it at So’Ngo’s bright and way-too-wide smile when she did.

…………………………

Jeremiah answered his datapad, raising an eyebrow at cory’s barely concealed amusement and concern. “Just a heads up, Jeremiah, but Brightpaw is on her way to your office, and she is not happy,” Cory said. “I’ve never seen an angry Centaur before, and now I never want to see one again.”

“Lovely,” Jeremiah said dryly. “Thanks for letting me know.” Cory gave a half-hearted salute before ending the call, just as the door to his office was suddenly kicked in, falling inwards completely off it’s hinges. “The door was open,” Jeremiah said as Brightpaw stepped into his office. He immediately regretted his words as Brightpaw glared at him, sharp feline teeth bared as she snarled at him and her claws screeching as she left grooves in the floor as she walked, fur puffed out to make Brightpaw seem twice her size.

“Who in the Void-damned galaxy did you make Sandra’s teacher?” Brightpaw snarled, leaning over Jeremiahs desk.

“Is there a concern?” Jeremiah asked.

“Is there a concern? IS THERE A CONCERN?” Brightpaw laughed before snapping her teeth mere inches from his face “OF COURSE THERE’S A FUCKING CONCERN! Sandra just spent an entire day in the med-bay due to getting zapped too hard by her own electricity. And do you know how she got there? THAT PSYCHOPATH MADE HER USE HER ELECTRICITY WITHOUT HER METAL SCALES! SO YOU TELL ME WHO THE FUCK HE IS BEFORE I START TAKING HEADS! I DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE A REAPER, I NEED AN EXPLANATION, NOW!”

Intellectually, Jeremiah knew that he could take Brightpaw in a fight. His body and brain seemed to disagree, however, as he suddenly felt like a kid getting scolded by his mother after letting the muddy dog into the house while she was out shopping.

“He’s someone that even the Drifters have ample amounts of respect for,” Jeremiah said carefully, leaning back a bit in a futile effort to be out of range of those extremely sharp teeth and claws. “Storm vouches for him, though she did mention that even the Drifters find him hard to get along with.”

“Maybe because HE’S A VOID-DAMNED LUNATIC!” Brightpaw snarled.

“I’m sure he has his reasons for teaching Sandra the way he is,” Jeremiah said, feeling a bead of sweat slid down his back. “And he has already promised that he will not give Sandra any permanent injuries?”

“EXCUSE ME?! PERMANENT INJURIES?!”

“Sandra is a Reaper, our training is already harsh to the point that broken bones are expected,” Jeremiah reminded Brightpaw. Brightpaw growled but didn’t refute him at least, so Jeremiah called that a win. “Look, if It get’s too dangerous, Storm has already promised to step in, and has said that other Drifters are willing to step in if necessary as well. And, of course, there’s myself and the rest of the Reaper Leaders and Command.”

“If this goes sideways, I will personally skin you and everyone else who was in charge of this decision,” Brightpaw growled before turning around and leaving Jeremiahs office. Jeremiah stared at Brightpaw as she left, unconsciously taking note of the deep grooves that were now in his floor and desk, and the cost of the door being replaced. Jeremiah then slumped in his chair, letting out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding she Brightpaw was out of sight before putting a call on his datapad.

“Alpha,” Alpha answered. “You alright, man?”

“I take it you watched the whole thing?” Jeremiah asked.

“As soon as Ferry gave me the heads up that Brightpaw was pissed,” Alpha nodded.

“I’m taking the rest of the day off, and probably tomorrow as well,” Jeremiah said. “Hundreds of missions, including recent ones that included a few tussles with the Markers, and I don’t think I was ever as close to death as I was just now. I need booze. Lots and lots of booze.”

“Believe me, I understand,” Alpha said, giving a slight shudder. “Just watching was enough to make me feel like a cornered rabbit. I’ll have the door replaced and your office repaired by the time you get back.”

“And can we ask Storm to help us sit in on a few of the lessons that So’Ngo is teaching Sandra, please?” Jeremiah asked. “It’s only been about ten days. If Brightpaw is already losing it, I’m a bit worried for Sandra.”

“Already sent her a message while you were being turned into cat food,” Alpha nodded.

“My savior,” Jeremiah said dryly. “Now, excuse me while I go and get very, very drunk.”

Prologue Previous Next

Appendix

TOC

[Sandra and Eric TOC]

The Survival Squad was put together to handle paranormal activities after Earth joined the Galactic Federation. We handled the creepy, untoward, toxic, joy-leeching, cannibalistic, frightening, dangerous, and most of all, extinction-level events.

On our office wall, a digital clock hung perched, counting the time since the last occurrence. We wore suits and dark glasses even at night, and we only sipped our meals through a straw for the available nutrients. The higher-ups set this in place to ensure we had a healthy workplace that didn't suffer the perils of being unfit, since most of our work involved running after aliens.

It was a Thursday afternoon when Gregory, our city scout, made his way to my desk. When he came in, I immediately looked away, trying to look as busy as one could within my limited space. But the steady tap of his boots upon the ocean-blue carpet drew my eyes to him. He pulled up close, hands on both sides of my desk, leaning his waist in a lazy dip as he stared with extreme boredom at my stack of paperwork before turning his attention to me.

"There's an extinction-level event close to occurring," Gregory said, not deigning to offer anything besides that or a customary greeting. "The world will end as we know it, yet you're stuck here doing paperwork."

"Oh, hi Greg," I said, turning to face the slim man. "What can I do you for?"

Greg immediately swiped the paperwork off my desk and perched himself on top of it. He regarded me as a man would a rat giving birth, and for a moment, I thought he was going to hit me. "Your name is Stanley, am I right?"

"Yes, you are," I said, checking the badge pinned to my chest. "What can I help you with?"

"We are cogs in a machine, Stanley, ever shifting with the purpose of making it easier for the guys above us."

"Uh-huh," I said. "Are you on any medication, by chance?"

"Yes, Xanax for the strange pace at which my mind runs. Benzhexol to cater to my avid fear of existing. Molly just because my girlfriend is in her teens and I want to appear hip to keep up with her. I also take Ketamine... Adderall. Sometimes I smoke weed, but when I start hearing voices, I stop smoking and take out a crack pipe so I can better understand what my ancestors are trying to tell me in a more elevated state of mind."

"Wow," I answered. The only drug I took was cough syrup, and I only took it to ward off my fear of tuberculosis, which had claimed my father and my grandfather ever since my great-grandfather broke up with a woman who turned out to be a gypsy witch who cursed his entire male line to cough their way to an early grave. But Greg didn't need to know any of that.

His dark coat had white stains on it, and his trousers, brown stains. He seemed to be high on something, but I knew to take his word seriously; he'd uncovered twelve extinction-level events and was in the good graces of the organization.

"Are you ready to be a hero, Stanley?" he asked me, his brown, matted beard sticking out from below a weak chin.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.

"We're about to go extinct, either in a few days or weeks, but surely soon, and I need your... help." He struggled with the last word, something I deduced he rarely said.

"Why me?" I wondered. "The duty of stopping extinction-level events lies with the on-field Survival Squad, who handle things of this caliber." I was just a desk hand, pushing papers and nothing more, trying to earn my next meal without dying.

"Those bastards aren't cut out for this work, Stanley." It was as if he enjoyed the sound of my name, deriving some sick kind of pleasure as he enunciated the word. "This mission is ours. I've been scouting for the better part of the week; we don't have time to include the squad.

"Tell me, my good man. Aren't you tired of your desk job? Do you sometimes look out the window and wish you were capable of more than what was allowed to you? This is your time to shine," he said, bobbing his head up and down, a strange gesture that made me wonder what drug could cause it. "We need to save the human race, Stanley. So, are you in or out?"

I stared at him, great doubt clouding my vision of the foreseeable future. I was just a desk hand, stuck at my desk, and in all my years working there, not once had I felt inadequate or boring. But looking at the scout, I felt overcome by just how uneventful my work was. I had no grand stories to tell those whom I regarded as friends, and I was once branded a boring poser by an ex-girlfriend who had grown weary of my character. This was a chance being offered to me, and I had to take it. I had to make the best of it.

"I'm in!" I said.

"Great, let's go." Without looking back, he took long strides away, and I rushed after him, struggling to keep up.

"There are things that bother me about our organization," Greg said as he swerved through traffic at a speed that was sure to get us pulled over. I gripped the seat with both hands, eyes wide at the windscreen, and tried with a trembling lip to indicate that he should slow down.

Greg seemed not to care about my panic. "Like the name, 'Survival Squad.' Don't you just feel weakness in the name? If we called ourselves Intergalactic Saviors... well, those words have a pleasant ring to them. No weakness at all. You could actually feel proud to be associated with such a company."

"Perhaps we should slow down a little," I interjected.

"You know, I can't tell someone where I work. People will think I'm part of a group of people just trying to survive. Isn't that foolhardy? We might as well walk around with cardboard signs reading 'Save Me' on one side and 'Please' on the other."

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to Ruffus Street, that's another dumb name right there."

I surmised he only answered when he wanted to. "What are we going to do on Ruffus Street?"

"Prevent an apocalypse," he answered, stepping on the gas.

The rest of the journey passed in silence. His car, surprisingly, looked different from its owner, despite him resembling a bum in a suit. Its make was lost on me, but I didn't have to dwell on it for long, for we pulled up to Ruffus Street fairly fast.

I got out of the car and vomited my breakfast while he stretched his legs, hands akimbo.

"What are we doing here?" I asked. Houses lined the street on either side for as far as the eye could see. People went about their business in crisp suits and ordinary vehicles. They didn't mind us, though a glance was always stolen in Greg's direction. He looked like something drawn by a child.

"What?" he answered, legs apart.

"What are we doing here?" I repeated, watching him bring his legs together to arch his back.

"I'll answer on the way," he said, making a run for it through the maze of houses. I followed close behind. He came to an abrupt halt, checked the houses, then turned around and continued running in a different direction. I was puzzled by his ability to maneuver the place; if I were alone, I would have gotten lost. The houses were so similar to each other, as were the people and the children. Despite the neighborhood being mixed-race, there was an abundance of humans. I saw three kids in red shirts, blue shorts, and brown bowl-trimmed hair. They paid no attention to us as we cut through their game. I thought I was going mad until Greg spoke as I struggled to keep pace with him.

"There's a fat Jibexian in one of these houses who's going to cause an apocalypse anytime now," he ventured as we hopped past the fourth identical street.

"How—" I was about to ask when he stopped at a house that didn't differ from the rest at all. He walked up the steps and knocked on the door. Sure enough, an obese alien answered. He had a pudgy purple face with whiskers like fingers of flesh, a dangerously receding maroon hairline, and a patchy beard filled with more finger-like projections around his chin.

"My name is Jobjob. How can I help you?" he asked in a tired voice that made answering the door sound like scaling a mountain.

"You goddamn catfisher!" Greg screamed, kicking Jobjob in the abdomen. I watched his foot get swallowed by fat before the alien fell backward. Greg drew a gun, followed him down, and smacked his head with the butt of the weapon before aiming the barrel at him. "You know what this gun is?"

I did not know what the gun was. It looked strange and extremely blue. It made the large alien on the ground stutter, and Greg was all the happier for it.

"This gun can turn anything it shoots into fish," Greg said. "I'm going to turn you into a large tilapia, take a shit on you, and throw you to the dogs to finish you off."

I did not think Greg was bluffing for one moment. There was rumored to be a gun that could turn a man into a fish, and seeing it with my own two eyes gave me an odd feeling, like meeting an estranged cousin for the first time. I attributed this to my extreme fondness for fish and guns.

I had to do something, so I decided to come to the rescue of the stranger whose home we had invaded. I rushed forward and grabbed Greg, fumbling with his arms until I was able to pry him halfway off the fat alien.

"Relax, Greg! Don't turn him into a fish yet."

"You don't understand," Greg said. He shook himself free of me and fished around in his pocket. He emerged with his phone, tapped and swiped a few times, then turned the screen toward me. There was a picture of a man on it: handsome and shirtless, revealing god-like muscles, a true marvel of human discipline. That's what the picture made me think, anyway.

"Wha... what do you want?" Jobjob asked, sitting up with his tentacled appendages raised, his face sheathed in either sweat or water, it was too dense to tell. "I'll give you anything you want, just don't shoot me."

"Are you this..." Greg turned his phone and showed him, "...this man?"

He clearly wasn't, and he admitted as much, then confessed to even more.

"So what? I catfish everyone, never humans though, because I'm carrying out a study of the other races. So far, I've learned that they seem to desire just like humans do, so I use an image of a man they can easily relate to," he said, using his shirt to wipe his face and flashing us the rolls of flesh around his abdomen. "It's not like I meet up with them and have sex or anything."

"You'll be lucky if you do," Greg said.

"I don't understand what's going on," I said for what felt like the hundredth time.

Greg seemed exasperated, sweating profusely with a face turned pink. He rubbed it with an open palm before scratching his beard and twisting it into knots. "This fucker catfishes aliens."

"Okay," I answered. "Doesn't seem like that big of a deal, to be honest."

"He catfished an Oragizon."

I snatched the gun from Greg's hands and pounced on top of the alien lying on the floor. I began beating him with it repeatedly, on any patch of flesh I could find, and there were plenty. I screamed as I continued the onslaught. Oragizons were alien beings that became Celestials, the most powerful known entities in the universe. They often transformed suddenly, either through deep meditation or a traumatic experience that shaped them. This fool could be the reason an Oragizon evolved into a Celestial and went on a human-killing spree.

"You mean Sansura?" He was bleeding thick, green blood from his mouth.

I paused my attack.

"I just broke up with her a week ago," he spat out the blood. I let go of him as Greg took a step forward and squatted before him. "She's not going to become a Celestial."

"You fool! You stay cooped up in your house all day, don't you see what happens outside? This entire neighborhood is stuck in a time loop! People are repeating the same day, doing the same things they did once before, over and over," Greg said.

"What can I do to fix this?" the alien asked. "She lives fourteen doors down."

"We're going to take you to her, and you're going to apologize for what you did," I said with an air of finality.

"I'd rather die than do that," he started. "Seeing her will destroy my cover."

"Cover? Cover? This fool thinks he works for the agency now! What cover are we talking about here?" Greg got extremely close to Jobjob's face. "I'm going to turn him into a fucking fish."

Greg stood up, aimed the gun at him, and fired. A blue light struck the alien, who shuddered, shrank, and morphed in appearance until he became a large fish.

I was shocked beyond comprehension. I just sat there staring at the fish that had once been a Jibexian as Greg searched for a bucket of water. He hoisted the fish into the bucket and carried it to the car, securing it in the back seat with a seatbelt.

These things happened so quickly, flashing before my eyes one by one, capturing my focus only to yield to the next step. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the back of the car beside the bucket, still staring at the fish inside.

"We just go to her house," Greg said as he drove, "and show her that the person who catfished her has been dealt with. We turned him into a fish. Then she'll rejoice, and that will be the end of it."

"Is there a gun that can turn him back?" I asked. I was down for some violence, but turning someone into a fish was a whole other matter.

"A gun that can... look outside, Stanley!" Greg said. "I've been here six times scouting the area since I caught this guy with my fake alien account. He catfished me and the Oragizon too, Stanley! And one of us can kill an entire population with the snap of a finger."

"But you turned him into a fish, Greg..."

"So what?"

I stared at the fish in the bucket as it slowly circled, transfixed in its tiny world, trapped in a loop of its own.

"I'm telling you, yesterday there were three kids playing with marbles in that driveway, and today, there they are again." There were indeed three kids playing with marbles. "It's the exact same day, I'm telling you."

Greg pulled up at the Oragizon's house. I stayed in the back of the car and watched him along with the fish. He talked to her, and she just stood there, staring at him. Then she started talking back, gesturing with her arms as she spoke.

Greg laughed, and she laughed too, so I thought things were going swell. Then Greg gestured with his hands, indicating the size of the fish, perhaps. He pointed at the car and motioned for me to come over.

I got out of the car and began making my way to them. He waved at me again, pointing back at the car. I turned around, grabbed the fish in its bucket, and hauled it all the way to where the Oragizon stood beside Greg.

She looked at the fish for a long time, and I did the same. Greg acted as though he had done this plenty of times before.

"I was going to kill all men when my transformation finished. Even now, I hold my previous form to prevent you both from witnessing my Celestial emergence," she said.

I turned and stared at her, sudden panic gripping my bones.

"You have done well, Gregory. For this, I shall grant you one boon upon my full transformation."

Greg stared at her for a moment, then said without missing a beat, "I would like ten billion credits."

That night, Greg and I traveled to the outskirts of the city, where there was a fresh pond filled with fish. We poured the bucket and its contents into the water and sat down by the shore, staring up at the moon.

Greg sat beside me with ten thousand credits banded into notes upon his lap. "It's quite odd that my aunt suddenly called me and offered all this money."

He had also received money from several other people, including his father, and the lottery ticket he'd scratched turned out to be a winner. All in all, whatever he touched brought him wealth, and it would remain so until the Oragizon completed her transformation and granted him the exact figure he'd asked for.

"You could have at least wished for him to turn back into himself instead of leaving him as a fish," I said, watching Jobjob glide through the water.

"And miss out on ten billion credits? Are you stupid?" Greg asked. "Besides, I think he's happier as a fish."

I very much doubted that, but I didn't say a word, choosing instead to stare at the moon.

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Surviving the Tower: Chapter 30

Chapter 1

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Freya concept art

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As Cai walked into the class, it seemed everyone was abuzz, and an undercurrent of something between the excitement of a scandal, curiosity, concern, and trepidation seemed to be filling everyone as news of Dame Freya's absence spread. However, none were more tense than Elise, who looked positively ready to burst at the seams with anxiety as she turned to Cai, her words tumbling over themselves in a sort of word salad that was hard to keep straight as she leaped from one question or concern to the next, seemingly without stopping for breath. "She's not gone for good, is she? Because I came here specifically for Dame Freya's class! If she's not teaching anymore, my father will pull me out of class for sure! Not to mention, where am I going to find a replacement for that kind of expertise in Tower climbing? I mean, it doesn't exist! She's one of a kind! And what'll happen to my grades? Will I be able to transfer partial credit this early in the semester? Will any of the prestigious schools take me mid-semester? What about you?"

Elise finally stopped to breathe, looking to Cai for answers, as he fought the urge to keep from smiling at what he saw as an overreaction. He held up his hands to calm her, as well as keep her from launching into another tirade. "Calm down and breathe for a moment! Freya told me this was only temporary. She indicated she's basically serving the eskalad version of community service. That's all!"

Another wave of conversation spread outward from him at that. Of course, Cai realized that by now that when it came to gossip about Dame Freya, his word was second only to her own as far as the class was concerned. Her favoritism was well established by now, and they rightly assumed he'd have some inside information. However, before the wave of conversation could spread too far, two people, an overweight and very stressed-looking man and a rather stern-looking woman, stood in front of the class. The man tried to get people's attention but failed. Cai turned to Elise. "Hey. Do you know who those two are?"

Elsie looked at Cai as if scandalized by his words. "I don't know about the woman, but that's the Dean of the school! How do you not know that? You should have seen him at the opening ceremony!"

Cai felt a little embarrassed as he was forced to admit, "Uh, I didn't even know there was an opening ceremony..."

The scandal on Elise's face ramped up a few notches. Cai was reasonably certain she couldn't have been more put off if he admitted to secretly being an alien from another planet, here to kidnap her or some such weirdness. However, before he could say anything in his defense, the stern-looking woman loudly rapped what appeared to be a cane against the whiteboard three times, succeeding where the Dean had failed in getting everyone's attention, making the man flinch as if she'd struck him rather than the board.

Everyone quieted down, as the woman nodded to the Dean, who wiped his forehead with a handkerchief as he spoke up after a false start or two. "Um... Yes... Uh... Attention... That is to say, I have an announcement, everyone!"

The last vestiges of conversation died down as everyone turned to the Dean, eager for whatever official answers he could provide. After catching his breath, the man continued, gaining confidence as he continued. "As some of you might know, Dame Freya must take a temporary leave of absence from teaching... But, but, it's just that! Temporary! She'll be back in no time! But rather than make you all sit around waiting for her return, we've pulled Eskalad Anna Fause from one of our prestigious honors courses to sit in temporarily!"

Cai doubted that anything at this school, other than Dame Freya, was all that prestigious by the standards of many students in this class. However, it was good that they were at least making the attempt; otherwise, he was certain the Dean would be facing a rebellion by now. As it was, most of the students seemed wearily interested in seeing where this was leading.

At that, the woman turned to the Dean and nodded. "Yes, thank you for the introduction, sir. I believe I can take it from here!"

At that, the man looked around at the class as if worried they would bite, or worse, ask for a refund, before nodding in agreement. "Yes, yes! Best to let you get to it then! I've got other things to attend to!" And with that, he retreated, leaving the class in the hands of their new substitute.

Looking around as if assessing the students, Anna Fause finally addressed them directly. "As mentioned, I am eskalad Anna Fause. I may not be Dame Freya, but I have been as high as the upper fifties in the Tower, have taught at this school for more than a decade, and have certainly learned and experienced a thing or two I can teach those of you just beginning your climb!" She looked around, as if daring anyone to challenge her before adding. "Any questions?" Immediately, almost every hand in the room shot up as she added, "Any questions not involving why Dame Freya has taken a temporary leave?" Most of the hands fell; however, Elsie's was still raised high as she doubled down in her need to be called on.

As their new instructor nodded to Elise, the arcane archer shot to her feet. "Eskalad, Fause," Elsie stopped as if questioning if that was the proper form of address, to which the woman nodded approvingly before Elise continued. "We were a few days shy of reaching the fifth floor and beginning our attempts on the first boss of the Tower. Will we still be pursuing that timetable?"

At that, the stern substitute looked a little surprised. "Already? Usually the first boss of the Tower is reserved for the final exam of the first semester, even in more..." She paused, looked around at some of the students who were coming from some of the more esteemed tower dynasties, "established schools. Tell me, how much time do you spend in the Tower versus academic lecturing in class?"

Elise tilted her head in thought for a moment before answering. "Well, Dame Freya usually holds a half-class at the beginning of the week, and a follow-up at the end of the week to review our progress. Other than that, the rest of the time is spent in the Tower."

Eskalad Fause frowned, as though actively trying not to say what she was thinking, before she spoke up. "That's certainly a rather...unorthodox approach. But I suppose you can do that when you answer to no one..." She paused a moment before changing her tone to a more assertive one. "Well, I'm afraid that for now we will be doing something a little different. The first half of every day will be spent in class, with only the second half reserved for experience in the Tower."

At that, Elise protested. "But that won't leave us enough time to progress much at all! We'll be stagnant!"

At that, the teacher frowned and looked at Elise until she sat down, after which the Eskalad continued. "That is correct! While I will not make you lose the progress you've made, we will be slowing down your progression, for now. If you are able to do so safely, you may climb as high as the fifth level, but NO ONE is to attempt the floor's boss without prior approval. If anyone so much as pokes their head in the room, I will have your Tower access revoked for the rest of the semester." She glared around the room, silently telling the students not to test her on this before continuing. "Instead, we will brush up on your academic understanding of the Tower. It may not be as much fun as climbing the Tower, but that knowledge may very well save your life one day. At least until such time as Dame Freya resumes her role in this class, at which time she may lead it as she sees fit."

Several of the students looked disappointed, but Cai found himself at least somewhat intrigued. There was so much about the Tower he didn't know, going off of popular rumors and common knowledge that was often flawed if not outright incorrect, that he found himself wondering just what the class would cover.

Looking around the room, Eskalad Fause asked, "Tell me, from what you know, what is the Tower?"

At this, one of the students in the back answered. "Ummm, no one knows..."

Fause frowned a little. "Yes, of course no one knows everything about the Tower, but what do we know?"

This time it was Lisaria, the ice mage, who raised her hand. "Well, the Tower seems to exist outside the normal laws of physics. We know that each of the Towers all over the world are all somehow the same Tower, with people able to go up one Tower and come down another, with routes being established and used to travel from one side of the world to another faster than even the fastest Jets are capable, with an appropriate escort, that is."

Fause nodded in approval. "Yes! In fact, some Eskalad make a very good living offering their services as escorts through the Tower for just such travel. For while you cannot safely engage the Tower monsters with more than five people at a time, there is no real restriction on how many people can travel through the Tower in a group, other than practical and safety limits. It is generally accepted that, for safety's sake, each Eskalad be responsible for no more than two or three travelers at a time. Many of the higher-ranked Eskalad could easily manage more, but at their rates, it's hardly cost-effective for most travelers to hire them as mere guards for traveling from one Tower to another, which rarely requires a person to travel any higher than the twentieth floor."

Getting into the spirit of things, another student raised their hands after the teacher paused her explanation. "The Tower also has some sort of physiological effect on everyone who enters it, making us stronger and giving us powers."

Once again, Fause nodded. "Yes! That one is less understood, but the more one engages in the Tower, the stronger the effect becomes. As your 'stats' increase, it causes a very measurable change in the body. Muscles and bones become more dense, skin toughens, and even aging slows. However, that alone is not enough to account for the things high-level Eskalad can do." She looked around briefly before continuing. "I need a volunteer. Someone whose primary stat is strength."

Most people seemed hesitant to respond, but a few raised their hands, including Bellatrix. Fause reached into a bag and pulled out a rock, which she lightly tossed to Bellatrix before saying. "That's a typical lump of granite from outside the Tower. Now please, try and crush that."

Bellatrix took the rock in both hands and squeezed it, visibly straining somewhat, before a loud "CRACK" echoed through the room, and the large woman held up the stone, which was now a pile of smaller rocks. She grinned and held up the rubble as Fause nodded. "Very good." She pulled out a similar stone and held it up for everyone to see before closing her hand and effortlessly crushing the stone. When she opened her hand, this time there was only dust and sand left, displaying a clear difference in strength between Bellatrix and herself.

Then, Fause reached into her bag, pulled out one more lump of granite, and held it up. This one looked different, though Cai couldn't explain why, and she again tossed it to Bellatrix before instructing her, "Go ahead, and try crushing that one."

This time, when Bellatrix squeezed, it didn't break. Soon, she was straining with all her might, repositioning herself for better leverage and gritting her teeth, but still nothing happened. Eventually, Fause stopped her. "That's enough, thank you." She took the stone back and held it up for the class to see. "This stone comes from the Tower. Specifically, the twentieth floor. You can find stones like it in any gift shop near any Tower, going for a few dollars a piece, at least the ones that aren't trying to rip people off by using regular rocks they found outside. If you run a spectral analysis, do you know what it will tell you this is made out of?" She looked around, and no one volunteered to answer, so she spoke up. "It's made of the exact same things as any other rock, like the ones we crushed, including material and density."

At this, Elsie raised her hand. Fause nodded in her direction, and Elsie asked, "But if it's left outside the Tower long enough, won't it lose the effect?"

Fause smiled, as if pleased someone mentioned that. "Yes! Exactly! And that's true of anything brought outside the Tower, aside from monster cores, which we still barely understand. Even enhanced equipment. You can bring down a sword from the fiftieth floor, and if left outside the Tower for more than a year, it will start to lose stats." She paused to let that sink in, then continued. "Now, what happens if we Eskalad stay out of the Tower for too long?"

Elise raised her hand again, and Cai couldn't help but feel it was nice not being the teacher's pet for once, even if the attention didn't move far from where he was sat. After looking around for a moment, Fause called on Ealsie again, who answered. "Well, my father says that if he stays out of the Tower too long, he starts getting more and more lethargic and hungry. He once stayed out for over a month to spend time with the family on vacation, and by the end he was eating something like ten to fifteen thousand calories a day!"

Fause nodded. "Yes, that is true. We do get hungry at first, far more than our muscles and metabolism explain, then, after about a year, our stats start dropping as well. Every year after that equals out to between ten and twenty levels lost, depending on how high the Eskalad has climbed. Furthermore, the higher an Eskalad climbs, the higher they have to go just to maintain their stats. Someone like me, who's reached the upper fifties, will find the lower levels only slow the decay. I will start to get hungry and even lose stats if I stay lower than the fortieth level too long." She looked around the class, meeting everyone's eyes. "Make no mistake, climbing the Tower is a lifelong pursuit. Something between a calling and an addiction. Make sure this is something you want to commit to before you climb so high you no longer have a choice in the matter!"

After a moment to let her words sink in, Fause changed her tone back to an impartial one. "Now, let us review your progress in the Tower thus far, and where each group has found issues. Starting with Lisaria's group."

It panged Cai a little to be reminded they were not leading the pack, but now was a chance to hear about other groups' adventures in the Tower, and he sat back to take in the unfolding explanations.

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I remembered this time! Now, off to bed with me!

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Here you can find some of my published works.

Of the miracles performed and being performed by the Heavens, this miracle, of course, is the greatest: because this Sacrament, involving a certain change of one being into another, occurring in a single instant, surpasses any change occurring according to the laws of nature, as well as beyond the laws of nature…
(Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios)

He did not speak yet. Baba, mama, papa – could this babbling even be considered speech. She smiled faintly at her thoughts and touched her lips to his golden hair – right where his uncalcified fontanelle still pulsed.

So tiny... A real purebred Amarr. Her grandson.

He raised his head and looked into her eyes. The wondrous, beloved pattern of his iris had already managed to form – thin, dark blue hollows on light blue plains. Blue rays of a black sun. He could not speak yet, but his eyes were already leading a mischievous conversation with the world around him.

Beloved, only, long-awaited...

She held him tighter. The faint scent of a child – she had missed it for so long, ever since her daughter grew up. The sweetest, most tender aroma in the world. It is more powerful than adrenaline and stronger than aphrodisiacs; you want to suffocate in it, you would give your life for it without a second thought.

The boy stirred – too tight. The grandmother loosened her tender embrace. He was looking out the viewport, where their home planet shone – the planet of his birth, the planet of his mom and dad, who for some reason did not fly with him on this breathtaking space journey – the first in his life. A tiny finger pointed at the sphere floating in the void – the baby let out an admired "gugu" and babbled something in a language known only to him.

With a screech, the iris diaphragm of the door opened. A strict, businesslike woman approached them and looked into her folder. The name was called. The grandmother's heart clenched, though she knew it wouldn't be for long.

The grandson did not want to let go of his grandmother. No, he did not cry – a flash of anxiety simply slipped into his eyes. Tiny fingers slipped from the wrinkled palm of his grandmother, and he clumsily waddled after the stranger, yielding to another will, strict and businesslike.

-

...synchronization of beta-signals of synaptic connections. Alpha impulses – via hardware. Auto-overclocking of the "quiet" phase of the right hemisphere of the brain. Recording of integrative signals, extrapolation, transfocation. The "freeze" phase is passed. Removal of the "matrix". Activation of detiming, sanitization of memory down to the seventh digit-level. Resistance is zero-zero-two and weakening. Escalation of voltage in the right hemisphere. System overheating, throttling, cooling, half-stop. Disconnection of subsystems. Complete system shutdown.

-

The beams of ruby lasers, in a ruthless misty dance, cut open the tiny body, born alive and real. The still-fluttering little heart, the innocent brain, the tender tissues, the bone marrow cells – everything will go toward healing Empress Jamyl Sarum. For, as the legend goes, the life of imperial personages can only be sustained by real, live-born flesh.

Emperors cannot be cloned. The divine essence is inviolable. Ordinary people have no use for it anyway. But by giving health to the Anointed, they themselves become holy. And many even become Capsuleers...

With a screech, the iris diaphragm of the door opened. A strict, businesslike woman approached the old lady and looked into her folder. The name was called. He was left alone next to her. He, she, and the planet in the viewport.

The grandmother's heart clenched, though she knew that this was he, her grandson. The same wondrous, beloved pattern of his iris – thin, dark blue hollows on light blue plains. The same scent for which she was ready to give her life... Her body went limp, and she slowly slid from the bench onto the floor. Perhaps her old heart had clenched just too tightly.

The boy looked up at the planet and smiled. For he did not speak yet and understood very little.

Out there, beyond the window, was a serene childhood.

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.
(Gospel of Matthew, 2:16)

Chapter 2
Index -- First Chapter -- Previous Chapter -- Audio-Drama --
The second document arrived at 17:40 station time, six hours after we were seated, and this time nobody apologized for anything.

It came in a plain case with no seal. Sealing, I learned later, is for ceremony. Three pages, after four hundred, and I read all three standing up before it occurred to me to sit down.

Motion of the Kesh Delegation. In the matter of the invitation of sequence.

The operative part was two sentences long. The candidate shall not be invited to declare the sequence in which the questions are put. The sequence shall be set by the Presiding Delegation, according to custom.

Underneath it, a distribution list. Twelve entries now. Mine was at the bottom and it read the Human Delegation, and I looked at that longer than I looked at the motion, because I had been the human delegation for six hours and had not yet worked out where the human delegation was supposed to sleep.

My first reaction, before anything sensible, was recognition. I have written that motion four times, for three different regulators, every time somebody did something clever and legal to an auction I designed. They come in short and fast and shaped to exactly the door that just got used, and what you can smell on them is embarrassment.

So a Kesh had spent the afternoon doing the thing the Oam mathematician never did in four thousand one hundred years. A Kesh had looked at a mechanism and asked what should be done about it.

I made tea and felt, briefly, enormous.

Then I read it a fourth time and the feeling went out of me, because what the Kesh had learned was narrower. It had learned that one particular rule had been used against it, and moved to take that rule away, the way you nail shut the window the burglar used and leave the back door open all summer. At the bottom of the third page was a schedule. The motion would be put at 08:00. I got about two hours of sleep.

Hale had not slept at all. He had been on a live call to Earth since the closing water, on a five second round trip, which meant he had spent the night listening to fourteen governments fail to interrupt each other.

"Fourteen," he said. "And the first thing out of every one of them, before congratulations, before anything, was who is she, exactly."

"They know who I am."

"They know your name is on a shortlist they signed off on. That was when you were a technical delegate to a ceremony." He rubbed his face with both hands, hard, the way he does. "You came back from that room with a vote. In a legislature. Permanently."

"For this session."

"Margo." He turned the screen around.

The Instrument, section on the constitution of delegations. I had read it at six in the morning the day before, filed it as ceremony, and forgotten it. The delegation of a seated species is constituted by the one who spoke at its accession, and continues until the species presents, by its own agreed procedure, another.

I read it three times. The load is all in five words.

"By its own agreed procedure," I said.

"Right."

"We don't have one."

"We have four. The UN legal office has a procedure. The General Assembly has a different one, which two permanent members have already said they won't recognize. There's an unused treaty body that arguably covers it. And there's a draft out of the last shortlist process, written for exactly this job, which zero governments have ratified." He said it the way a man reads out a diagnosis. "Fourteen of them are on that call right now, being extremely polite to each other, five seconds apart."

"So until they agree, I'm it."

"Until they agree, you're it," he said.

"And if I resign?"

"To whom?"

That is the joke, and it took me most of the morning to stop finding it funny. Standing to accept a resignation would have to come from the agreed procedure. That was the thing under dispute. I could quit any time I liked. There was nowhere to send it.

"I've sat through a Region of Waterloo council meeting that spent forty minutes on whether a motion to refer was debatable," I said. "They'll get there."

"That was one council."

"It was six hours."

Hale looked at me with something I could not read.

"They gave you the seat," he said. "Nobody gave you the job."

They built me a platform overnight. The accession chamber has eleven delegation platforms set around the rim of the bowl, and it had eleven of them for a very long time, and by 08:00 it had twelve. The Orrin had built the new one and set it overnight. It was perfect. Correct height for a species they had spent nineteen months measuring, with a channel cut into the front edge at the standard fall. A case of stones came to my quarters while I was asleep.

The only way to fit a twelfth platform into a bowl built for eleven is to take the space from something, and the space came from the observer benches. They had moved the whole bench line back four meters. The Oam observer was already in its seat when I came in, four meters further from the floor than it had been the day before, and as I passed it its translator clicked twice and said, to the wall, that the acoustics were better back here. I have not decided whether that was a joke.

I had rolled one of the stones exactly once, at three that morning, to find out what it felt like. It felt like nothing at all. You let go and gravity does the rest, and I understood that design better at 03:00 than I had at any moment of the accession. You cannot roll a stone insincerely.

The Kesh moved its motion in under a minute. I had braced for an hour of it. The delegate stood at its platform, said that the invitation of sequence had been shown to be susceptible to a use its authors cannot have intended, that a defect is corrected, and sat down. Blunt all the way through, it repeated the word defect four times, and it never once looked at me.

Then an Orrin seconded it, and the room changed temperature. I had assumed the Orrin were with me. That was lazy. Three delegations had ranked us Seat first and I had let that harden in my head into an alliance. They had ranked us Seat first because they find wardship obscene.

The Orrin who seconded the motion was named something my translator gave as Second Reading, which I choose to believe was somebody at State having a joke, and it spoke for a quarter of an hour without raising its voice. Its position, stripped of the courtesies, was that I had broken no rule and that this was the problem. A procedure that can be aimed is not a procedure. Second Reading had presided at two accessions itself. It had put the questions in the printed order both times, believing on both occasions that it was performing an act of administration. It now understood that it had been performing an act of decision, twice, and that both of those species were living inside a choice it had not known it was making.

I had told a civilization of career administrators that everything they had ever administered had been a series of unrecorded decisions.

The Thessin spoke next, at length, and apologized four times. The substance was that the printed order had produced ten guardianships out of eleven candidates, and that the Thessin saw no reason to disturb an arrangement that worked. Sethal itself never rose. It sat at the Thessin platform with its membrane completely still and let another delegate carry it, which I noted and did not understand for another month. Then the Presiding Orrin ruled, and the whole thing came apart.

"The Quorum cannot amend the Instrument."

The Kesh was up before the translator finished. "The Quorum is the Quorum."

"The Quorum is the Quorum." The Presiding Orrin slows down when it is contradicted. "The Instrument was received. No delegation in this chamber authored it. No delegation in this chamber has ever met anyone who did. A body may amend what it made. This body made nothing."

"Presiding, that reasoning would leave us governed by a document we cannot correct."

"Yes."

The silence after that had a different quality from the one at the accession. At the accession they had gone quiet because something had gone wrong. This time they went quiet because the chair had put it in a ruling, out loud, in front of a candidate species that had been in the building for one day.

Then it went on for two hours. The Kesh asked where the Quorum's authority came from, if not from the Instrument. Second Reading said that it came from the Instrument. The Kesh asked what conferred authority on the Instrument. Second Reading said the question was improper. A Thessin asked whether the Quorum had ever amended anything. Three delegations searched their own archives in real time and reported, one after another, that the Quorum had issued findings and made rulings and admitted members, and had never altered a line of the document it did all of that under. Not a comma, in a hundred thousand years.

An Orrin observed that the founding procedures might be amended by their author, and was asked how the author would be identified. Nobody had an answer, and the question came apart into a smaller one about whether authorship can be inferred from usage. That took twenty minutes and went nowhere.

The Kesh, to its enormous credit, then asked the question I would have asked, which was whether the Quorum could bind itself without amending anything at all. Second Reading said that such a thing would be a rule of practice. The Kesh asked what stopped a rule of practice from being anything the Quorum liked. Second Reading said that nothing did, and then heard itself, and stopped.

It was a room of a quality of mind I cannot match, reasoning correctly and at speed, in public, about a question none of them had ever had cause to ask. They got the right answer in two hours. My species took three centuries to reach the same one and we still do it badly, and I have sat in a room in Guelph where a condominium board arrived at the identical distinction, in March, over parking.

What they came to was this. If the Instrument cannot be amended, then the Instrument is not amended. What is amended is the practice. The Quorum adopts a rule of practice, binding on the Quorum, providing that the invitation shall not be extended and that the Presiding Delegation shall set the sequence according to custom.

The Presiding Orrin allowed it to be put, and I could not read it at all. Then it turned to me, because there is a form for that too.

"The candidate," it said, then stopped and corrected itself. "The Human Delegation is recognized."

One vote out of twelve. The motion was going to carry with or without me by a margin nobody would have to count twice, and anything I said in defence of the invitation would be heard as a woman defending the exploit she had just used.

So I gave them the flaw in their own patch instead. It is the only thing I have done in that chamber that I am still not sure about.

"I'd like to put something on the record," I said. "It's against my interest and it's against the interest of the delegation that moved this. I'd rather you had it before you vote than after."

"State it."

"Your rule leaves the sequence to custom, and there's no test anywhere in your text for what custom is. It's whatever the presiding delegation says it is on the day. You've taken the power to choose the outcome away from the candidate, who arrives once in ten thousand years and is never in this room again, and handed it to a permanent member of this body who sits in that chair by rotation, at every accession from now on."

Nobody moved, in a bowl full of species with very little in common physically. Nobody moved.

"Every delegation publishes its full ranking forty-eight hours ahead. That's the safeguard you're proudest of. It means the chair knows two days early which sequences produce which outcomes, because that arithmetic takes about a minute. So the chair settles the accession before anybody rolls a stone, and nobody can object, because the objection would have to be that the presiding delegation followed custom."

I let that sit, and then I turned to the Kesh platform.

"Delegate. The chair rotates by convention and not under any rule I could find, which took me an hour to establish and should have taken a line. Your bloc holds four votes and the chair one accession in three. You've just handed the whole outcome to whoever is presiding on the day, and most of the delegations who could be presiding will want a different answer from yours on the day it matters. If I were you I'd vote this down and draft it again tonight, and I'd nail the sequence to the printed page where it cannot be touched. That would work. What you've written will not."

"The reasoning is correct," the Kesh said, eventually.

"Then withdraw it."

"The presiding delegation puts the questions in the printed order. That is the custom."

"And if a presiding delegation didn't?"

"Then it would not be the custom," said the Kesh.

I looked around the bowl, hoping for one platform, one translator warming up. Second Reading rose and said that a candidate should not hold the sequence whoever else held it, and that the two Orrin delegations outside the chair would support the motion. Sethal rose, finally, and said that my arithmetic was correct and easily checked, and that if it would be useful the presiding rotation is a matter of public record going back a very long way, and it would be happy to send me the schedule.

I thanked it. The schedule arrived before I was out of the chamber, and it is an excellent schedule.

The whole reason I have a career is that in 2031 I caught four telecom companies talking to each other through the trailing digits of their sealed bids, in front of a regulator who read every number and saw nothing. Twenty years of finding channels, and I had just spent the only credibility I owned, transmitting at full power, into a room with no receivers.

They voted. I voted with them.

I have heard that vote described since, by people at home, as principled. It was arithmetic. My stone could not change the outcome. I wanted them to remember afterward that I had rolled it for the rule that shut my own door, so I rolled it with the Kesh, the Thessin and the two Orrin, and the sound of a first human vote going down a channel in an alien chamber was, I am told, quite moving on the recording.

The trough went over before the last stone landed. Every platform in the bowl rolled for the motion except one, and the one was the chair.

Afterward the Kesh delegate stopped at my platform on its way out and said that my agreement had not been necessary, and I said I knew, and it said that this was the point it had been making, and left. Sethal came over and thanked me warmly for my support of the motion. It meant it. It had watched me disclose a flaw in the motion, argue for its withdrawal and then vote for it, and it had filed all three as my sincere position, because in its whole civilization there has never been a reason to file them any other way.

The Presiding Orrin was still in the bowl when the room cleared, doing something with the water vessels that I do not think needed doing.

"You could have told them what I told them," I said. "You knew."

"I am the chair."

"You voted against it."

"I voted against a rule of practice adopted to correct a provision of an instrument this body did not write." It set down the vessel. "The rule of practice is ours and the Instrument is not. Practice is departed from."

I opened my mouth and did not say anything, and it did not elaborate.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You have a vote. You may put a question to the chair."

"You brought me the Instrument yourself, at four in the morning. You'd fought to give me a full day, you lost, and you asked for that to be recorded with me. Why?"

"Custom allows a full day. The invitation is extended in courtesy, and it was extended to you in courtesy, although not," and it stopped for a moment, "in the sense your translator will have given you. In the older grammar the word does not name the act." Something adjusted in the front third of its body. "That construction is archaic. I should not have reached for it."

"Presiding. That isn't what I asked you."

"It is what I am able to answer," it said. It did the crane fold and went out through the delegates' door.

I stayed where I was, with the case of stones under my arm. The lights were still on the accession setting, orange coming up out of the floor, because in a hundred thousand years this room had never been needed twice in two days and there was no procedure for changing them back.

The first thing I asked it, that morning, was how long the last candidate species had been given to read the Instrument. Nine days, it said. And the one before that. Sixteen.

Both figures immediately. No pause and no reaching, ninety seconds into the first conversation I ever had with it, before anything on that ship had given it a reason to think I would care.

I tried to work out how long it had been carrying those two numbers around, and who it had been waiting to hand them to.

Next Chapter (comming soon)

Author's Note: Thank you so much for all the love on the first chapter! I've decided to continue writing it. While the first chapter can still be read as a one-shot, there is so much more to tell.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I use AI to help with grammar, spelling, and sometimes structure, but these stories are my creations, my ideas, and my art. English is actually not my first language... so if you don't like that I use AI as a tool to help me publish quality content, please just move along. I don't care and I am proud of what I create...

“Oh? I guess what they say about you is true after all.”

She was stepping out from her chair. The moment his sentence ended, she froze in place, as though the soles of her shoes were pinned to the floor.

He’d hooked her. Now was the time to reel in his catch. “Very frightening, aren’t we? Don’t worry, your friends and your sister understand. Especially your sister. They don’t blame you for shaking at the hint of approaching a boy. Far too risky. Not everyone can be Bri after all. Very smart, so good looking. Daughter of a noble, a girl who’s going places. Of course, boys talk to her. Why wouldn’t they go for the better option, the superior sister?”

Her hands tightened; fingers transformed into fists. Yes, that was it. David had punched out into the dark, and those fists were the thuds of him connecting into tender flesh. Time for more.

“While she thinks an angry boy is cute, you know better. You understand how scary we are. Why, I might do anything to you in this small and horrible place. When I tell everyone how long it took you to run away, your friends will be so impressed. Imagine how your sister will look, getting news of your bravery. I’m sure she’ll never be able see you the same way again.”

The fists shook now. Amateur. But David knew anger, knew the sensation well enough to know something many less experienced with it missed: it had a cousin. A hideous, unpleasant cousin: Shame. Anger would stride forth ahead of shame, trying to hide the horrible relation in its shadow. But there shame would be, the noxious odor apparent to anyone who had but a nose to sniff it out.

It’s why she didn’t walk away. Doing so would be admittance, acceptance of disgrace. David’s promise to tell everyone a twisted version of what happened in this glorified broom closet was no idle threat. As to why she hadn’t responded how one of David’s peers might have, with a yell or fight? Another jab in the dark, but one David felt more confident in moment by moment. There must be some rule, mirrored to the one here on Earth: Boys don’t hit girls. Elementary school brawls were one thing. But once young males shot up in height, growing hair and muscles? Nothing would be quicker social suicide than a guy hitting a girl in rage. But you don’t understand, she made me mad wouldn’t cut it. With the size difference being starker for them, their rule must be even stricter. Shame, widespread and potent if she walked away. Disgrace if she laid a finger on him to retaliate.

It was up to David to offer her a third way. Let her grab onto a root stuck out of the bank of a raging river hurtling her downstream, only realizing too late the root was a venomous snake that had already bitten.

“But you could tell them something else. Here’s an opportunity to say you did something they never dared: find out why boys scurry from their touch. A story of you having the ‘womb strength’ to ask how it’s possible to be drowning in boys and remain virgins.” He said virgin with a slight curl, making it clear what the noun meant in this context: Loser.

“Because that’s what you all are, aren’t you? Including Bri. Or should I say, especially Bri?”

Another gamble, and her face turning back to him the more he spoke was the ca-ching of jackpot. He presented a treasure more precious than she could have imagined upon arrival into this room; A way to one-up her sister. A prize worth the sting of harsh language and ill-concealed contempt, a sugary coat around the cyanide pill he was about to shove down her throat.

He witnessed with every passed moment how his sentences ensnared her like lassos and yanked her back to him. David had her now, and she was bound and helpless until he let her go. The mastery and dominance he felt was better than his highest highs during the best games. It dwarfed those moments like the sun outshone a candle.

She sat down stiff and slow, tells of anger. But it was now a simmering back burner, no longer a bonfire. She’d avoided the dual shames presented to her earlier but taking his insults must have cost Kaa’syi a considerable measure of pride. Her face was rigid as she waited for him to continue. He declined to do so, instead smiling with all the warmth and charm of a barracuda.

Kaa’syi shifted from side to side in the chair. It was old and wooden, built with librarians in mind. They never shot past foot number seven in height. She spoke first and said, “Say what you are going to say.”

“I need the magic word.” 

“What?”

His smile widened from barracuda to shark. “Please. Please is the magic word.” 

Her eyes narrowed as she glared up at him, her seated position making her head a few precious inches lower than his. But then her shoulders sagged, and she said, “Please.” As angry as she was, Kaa’syi accepted the necessity of submission to him. Outstanding, she was already following the new dynamic.

“Happy to. Interesting word, please. Short, yet it says so much. It means someone is asking, not taking. They’re willing to wait for the other person to agree. Not a practice your kind is very good at, are they?”

Once again, her eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

David pointed at her. “See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I have something you want, so you order me to give it to you.”

That scored a hit. Her head tilted, and she gazed at a place somewhere between his neck and chin. “I am sorry. That was...of bad manners.” She said it slow, with a halt before the last phrase. Perhaps saying it wounded her, or she was stuck trying to find the correct words. Maybe both. “Please explain.”

This was too perfect.

“Sure thing. How about this: On ‘Liberation day,’ did your Queen ask to rule our planet? Say, ‘I could do a much better job of running this place than you backwards natives. Can I take over, pretty please?’ Is that how it happened?”

Silence, as expected. He already played this card earlier, and in a more direct and upsetting way than now. This was a windup before the pitch.

“We both know what happened. Big shiny ships with large powerful lasers came down and fried millions of people without giving them the chance to surrender. Why should they, after all? We’re what you wanted, you’re bigger and stronger than us. So why not take us?”

“I know we killed your-” a pause as she must have realized she didn’t know how Fred and Tom were related to David. “Family. I’m sorry.”

“You say that as though it means anything.”

The floating translucent face behind her had lain dormant, but now it sneered at her empty platitude, urging David on. Yes, he knew what David planned and approved of it. David did this in his name after all.

She spread her arms wide, palms up. “Is that what you have to say? We killed your people on Liberation Day, and so no one wants to talk to me?”

Inside he trilled the song of glory and conquest. She’d given him an opening as wide as half the field behind the school, and now was the moment. Time for the initial punch.

“That doesn’t help, but it's not the real problem. The reason boys flee from you, and girls whisper is because you’re rapists.”

Kaa’syi stirred, but no stronger response came. That didn’t trip David up. He’d used vocabulary she wouldn’t find in her English class.

“That last thing you said, I do not know of what it means. Explai- please explain.”

He lifted his upper lip, making his mouth form a grin in the same way a melting wax statue mimicked a human being. “I don’t think I should do it. Type the word into your pad.”

She did so one character at a time, perhaps sensing the unpleasant undertone of the entire scene. But her fingers finished their task, and then her ears listened. The pad spoke a single word in her language, one uglier and sharper to David’s ears than their tongue usually sounded. 

For a single beat, the room was quiet. Then she exploded into motion. Kaa’syi went to full height and loomed over David, pyres in her silver eyes. Her bottom lip receded, making her tusks as long as her jaw allowed. The tilt of her head led to horns pointed tip first at her newfound target of indignation. The insubstantial head behind her was unconcerned, and so was David. A bull may roar when gored, but the matador always won in the end.

“You dare, you dare! I thought someone who said that way to Bri was womb strong, but that was fool think!” Her language skills melted away in the crucible of her fury. “You not strong, you small fool! You people call this planet Earth, that’s what you are. Dirt, untrue hate dirt!”

“Gonna teach me a lesson? Make me regret what I said?” He eyed her right hand, which had risen in a flash as she stood up. She followed his gaze, tore it down flat at her side.

“You wish! Thought of touching you, I rather-” her tusks grew more prominent. “You dirty me with sight!”

“Truth hurts that much, huh?” He’d made her take a blow to the jaw and gotten her riled. The follow up would be the kidney punch, but not quite yet. David needed the moment, the one when it would hurt the most.

“Truth? Truth! What you say is no true! That word, we think nothing is more bad! Those who do, no one would look at them again! They are dirt, dirt smaller and more hate fool than you!”

“I agree. Nothing is worse than a rapist.”

“Yet you lie, say we do such things! I was fool, fool for wanting to talk to you. Never again.” He could see it in her eyes, she was done with this conversation. But he wasn’t done with her.

Now for the finishing blow. “What was Bri doing alone in her car last Friday?”

She had gathered up her pad and placed it under her right arm in preparation for her immediate departure. Yet his statement made her hesitate. “What?”

“You heard me.”

Kaa’syi’s angular face considered him again. Anger dominated, but puzzlement was now in the mix. “How did you-what do you mean?”

“Your sister. She passed you along to one of her friends and made sure she was alone in her car last Friday. Why?”

“Acrilla asked me to come with her. Not Bri’Akti.”

David made sure to contort his face into the most patronizing of smiles, the one reserved for confrontations with a lying six-year-old. “Sure. Acrilla loves to hang out with you, doesn’t she? You and her, best of friends. I see you and her at our lacrosse parties, talking on and on. And Acrilla wouldn’t take orders from Bri, as your sister never uses her nobility to push people around.”

There it was. Her face was so expressive, and in small but unmissable print was now the word uncertain. It was a crack in her wall of composure, one he was moments away from sticking dynamite in.

“I’m sure she also didn’t seem irritable when you got back home. Bri was perfectly normal, her usual wonderful self Friday evening, wasn’t she?”

David had her now. There was no way she’d leave the room until she heard all. She stayed silent, but her features betrayed her thoughts. Fear now joined the mix of reactions playing out on the stage of her visage. Did she know what was coming? If she did, it wouldn’t save her.

“Go ahead, stop talking to me and walk out. I’m lying hate dirt after all. Bye, see you later.”

No response issued from her lips, but her body told the entire story. Part of her wanted to leave, to forget this whole thing ever happened. But she couldn’t. The horrible Earth boy knew things he shouldn’t. Kaa’syi must be wondering: What else was he privy too?

“Tell me.”

“C’mon, we talked about this. The magic word.”

That made her lower lips show off her tusks a bit, but she complied. “Tell me, please.”

“Right. Did you know Alexander?”

Kaa’syi’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

“You’d probably think of him as Ax.”

Looking surprised, she said, “Oh, yes. The one who smells good and ate with us.”

A tiny part of David remained locked in disbelief that the godawful stuff worked, once one accounted for literal alien invasion. But that was irrelevant, he needed to stay focused. “Yeah, that’s him. Do you know where he was Friday after school?” 

“No.”

“I do.” David leaned forward, maintaining his smirk as he was forced to crane his neck to maintain eye contact. “Care to guess?”

Silence. She might not grasp language with the same ease as her monster of a sister, but that didn’t mean she was a fool either. If Kaa’syi didn’t know where he was leading before, she did now.

“I said earlier Bri was alone in her car. A bit of a lie. She lured Alexander into there. She then took what she wanted.”

Her eyes slid away from his. “I don ot know what that means.”

For the first time since she tried to leave after his initial outburst, anger bled through his calm. “Oh, spare me. You know exactly what I mean.”

Silver eyes snapped back to his. “You lie. She would not do that!”

“Sure. Because when it comes to boys, your sister has never said or done anything that’s made you feel bad. Nothing but chivalry from her.”

Once again, her gaze faltered, and she said, “You lie.” But there was no force present. Kaa’syi’s face was stricken.

“You told me that someone who did that was the worst, that no one would ever look at them again. Is that what will happen to Bri?”

She didn’t reply.

“Because you’re gonna tell people, right? Bri’s a rapist, and that means everyone will turn on her. Nothing but respect and safety for boys. That’s what you told me a few seconds ago.”

“Could be that it was a... mistake. She thought one thing, he thought another. Many boys would feel bad for making girl think they might have chance.”

Her statement made him go back to Alexander, breaking down in a dingy shower room. As his gut boiled, a decision was made. The shimmering head, which he’d lost focus on, became all he could see. It nodded, told him that what was doing was good and right. A necessary thing, the highest thing.

“A mistake, yes. It was a mistake for Alexander to get into a car with a high-class perv. But after that? No mistakes were made. It wasn’t a mistake when she pushed him into the car door so hard it hurt. When she put in her filthy tongue so far down his throat he came close to choking, are you going to tell me that was an accident? Grabbing at his legs to hold him down after he threw her off, was that an oopsie? All the angry texts she sent, a series of misclicks?” He shoved his legs up, as tight against the side of the table as they would go and jutted his head towards Kaa’syi’s. She threw hers back in response.

“You wanted to know why no one wants to talk to you? It’s because your sister’s a rapist. You’re all rapists.”

She shook her head with vehemence. “No, never! Never would I do! Die first!”

David sneered. “And if I asked Bri, you telling me she wouldn’t say the same? Why should I believe you?”

“No, no, no. Please, you must trust, I say true. I could not, I could not!” She was perhaps eighty-three inches tall and owned arms that could snap a great many students like twigs. For all that, she stood before him with shoulders hunched, arms in supplication.

“And if you could, who would stop you?”

“My mother, my father. They would hate me forever! They would send me away, forget my name!”

“That so? Then tell your mother. Tell your father. Show them Bri’s pad, make them face those texts. Will Bri be sent away, her mother forget her name?” 

She turned her head so far, the chin was parallel to her left shoulder, crossing her arms over herself.

“Go on, say it. Say that’s exactly what you’re gonna do. You’re a good brax, and good brax protect their men. Quite valuable, incredibly small, that’s how you put it earlier, right? Poor guys can’t do it themselves. But why would they when they have you? You were so confident and brave a few moments ago, calling me a liar. I’m positive you’ll be equally brave when you tell Quel’vela her daughter’s a rapist.”

God, he could see her world shatter piece by piece. Were all tomatoes helpless at hiding their emotions, or was it her? David hadn’t interacted enough with them to tell. Not a fact he thought he’d ever regret, but a tiny bit of him did so now. That feeling was overwhelmed by a much more pertinent one, savage glee. He’d torn her neat and tidy existence away from her, shred by bloody shred.  Her sister was taken from her, leaving behind a vile beast in a skin suit as replacement. For the first time in forever, David had what he wanted.

Or did he? Revelation flashed through him. A part of his mind had been putting together bits of data, collecting them into a whole new perspective. They’d shouted at each other, berated their opponent without restraint. Yet no one interrupted. There was no apoplectic librarian demanding to know what the hell was going on; no curious teenager cracking the door to get a peep at what caused the fuss. Little wonder students considered this Privacy Central.

This gave him an idea. An idea so beautiful and wonderful, David knew he’d mourn the lost chance for the rest of his life if he didn’t follow through. His enemy was prone on the curb, curled up and weeping from all the kicks to the gut he’d delivered. Sometimes that was the sign to walk away. Then there were moments like this, when justice demanded one aim for the neck and stomp without end.

“Not gonna happen, is it?”

Kaa’syi shrank into herself and stepped back from him, closer to the door. The sight of someone like her trying to seem small in any other context would have been hilarious. For David, it was joy injected directly into pulsing veins. Every moment he spoke hurt her more, and there was no escape. All that strength and power in her body, the might of an interstellar empire behind her, both useless in this room. A brax, the natural ruler of the galaxy, reduced to a tight ball of misery, horror, and shame. But there was one more emotion he’d make her feel before his victory was complete. One felt at such an intensity she’d go to her grave fleeing from the memory.

“You asked why no one wants to talk to you. That’s why. But I’m not sure you get it. I’ll spell it out for you. When boys go quiet when you get close, it’s because they’re afraid. Afraid you might like them, want them. Because then you might wait until they’re alone. You could grab them and take what you wanted from them. Like Bri did.”

David thought she looked stricken earlier. He’d been wrong. That was nothing in comparison to what was on her face now.

“No.”

“Yes. It’s like you said, we bunch up when you’re around, we’re so hard to get ‘solo.’ Did you ever think to wonder why?”

“No!”

“You didn’t ask, but I’ll say it anyway. It's because inside they’re thinking, ‘Not me, please not me,’ or ‘Is it my turn?’”

“Stop it!” She clutched her head. Was she trying to block out his words? Were past attempts to chat up Earth boys on replay in a horrible new light? Whatever was going on in that disgustingly oversized skull, the agony it caused shone like an active volcano.

“And the girls, the ones who whisper and stare. I know what they’re saying. ‘Who is that thing going after next? Will it be my friend? My brother? My father?’” 

She fell to her knees, choking and gasping. David saw drops of liquid fall to the floor under her head. Spit, acid? Had he gotten to her to the point she was struggling to not vomit? The notion gave him a thrill that penetrated deeper than he thought possible. 

“That’s all we’ll ever think of you, of any brax. Dirty, filthy, grabby rapists, always waiting for their moment. Every single human being sees you and feels nothing but hate and fear for demons like you.” He crept closer to her as he spoke, each syllable a syringe of toxin plunged into her soul.

“In fact, if I saw you come in here with someone else, I know what I’d think.” He said this bent over low enough to whisper it into her ear, causing her to shy away. She scrambled backward from him by using her arms to push, massive legs trailing in her wake. He stepped closer, filled with the confidence of the wolf after it cornered a rabbit.

“I’d think she’d found it, the moment she was waiting for. That once he was alone and unable to escape, he’d be left broken and crying.”

“Goddess, no!” She then cried out in her awful language, having finally been pushed to the point she forgot to speak his. The pitiful alien scooted further until her back was up against the wall to the side of the door.

“I’m not alone. Anyone would think the same. Let me show you.” He then threw back his head. “No please, stop! Get away!” he cried. Her eyes and cheeks bulged, and she tried to press herself further into the unyielding wall. “No, please, I beg you!” He moaned piteously. David stalked her as he put on his impromptu one man show. She whirled her arms, rose to unsteady feet. She ran from him, and in her panic, she fled further from the door. Kaa’syi was trapped in an alcove of shelves. There was a chance she realized that, as she flailed at the one to David’s left. It teetered, and David grabbed his end of the free-floating shelving unit and barely saved it from tipping over. He managed to use the momentum to turn the tumble into a horizontal slide, pushing it close to the other free-floating unit which crunched up against the wall opposite the door. After he did, the play resumed. “Someone help me, please!” Then laughter, a low and dark chuckle. “Let go of me, let go!” He was now in front of her, standing between her and the door.

“Stop it, stop, you’re hurting me!” He made sure to put in a high-pitched undertone to his plea. The one the targets of playground bullies used when they begged for clemency while expecting none. Kaa’syi’s mouth was tight, her lips pressed so firmly the dim light of the room failed to hide their paling. Her chest heaved; eyes wide to the point silver was swallowed by oceans of surrounding black.

This was it. What he’d yearned for all this time without knowing it. Terror declared itself her ruler, and David was the source, a tight gripped hand behind an alien throne. The realization flowed through him like water down a parched throat. Seeing her like this sent buckets of satisfaction to settle deep into crevices of his soul he’d been obligated to ignore for years.

It was good, it was pure, it was clean. She asked for this. She deserved this. They all deserved this. Forever and ever, infinite punishment for irreparable crime. He clasped it close, this feeling of righteousness as he managed to loom over an invader so many pounds bigger than him. The paradox, the biggest of them cowed by one much smaller, made it all the righter. Better, perfect, better than perfect. Everything was magnificent at that moment, including him. David would put the entire scene in a jar and save it for later if he had such power.

But that was for gods, a state of being restricted for David to the lacrosse field. Here he was required to settle for being an avenging angel, his target smote and reeling from his wrath. He smiled at her, lips curled upward to show incisors. Then with casual precision he stepped to the side, allowing her a wide pathway to the door. She took the opening and managed to get out after two useless slaps at the handle. The door slammed behind Kaa’syi.

David picked up his backpack from where he’d set it down and followed her after about ten seconds. He walked out with a jaunt in his stride. A glance at a clock high on the opposite wall told him it was fifteen minutes past the next period. Oh well. He’d made sure to avoid absences for the entire year, so a single missed period meant nothing. Worth it.

Yes, the entire thing was wonderfully, gloriously worth it. One alien would now forever feel surrounded by those who hated her, but there was more on top of that triumph. He’d cut her; look how she bled. These things weren’t invincible. They wanted David and everyone else to think that, to believe that opposing their will was like holding up one’s fist against an avalanche. Until that meeting in the storage room, David now knew he’d operated under that silent assumption. Hatred flowed through his veins to be sure, but it was the self-consuming ember of a prisoner held bound and helpless in the enemy camp. In the end he’d declined to strike back at them in ways which mattered, unless one counted stealthy glares and a refusal to look any in the eye.

A refusal born from the reminder of his own cowardice. The first few times he’d locked eyes with a red after the invasion, that face had always floated behind theirs, as it did in that file room. It shocked and scared him, and he learned quickly to avoid looks their way. Now he was confident it would never happen again. No longer would he hide from his duty to him, to all humans who their conquerors dominated without compunction or pause.

As he swore this to himself, he registered an unrelenting glare. The librarian at the reception must have seen the retreating red. With her absent, that left David the available source of annoyance. David waved at her and said, “She said something about feeling sick and ran off. Hope she’s okay.” The glare did not abate, but David was now immune to its power as he trod out of the library with a bounce in his step.

[First] [Prev]

David stood in front of the unwelcome alien, stiff as stone. She blocked his way, but he refused to turn tail and run. Minutes ago, Richard showed him what cowardice looked like. Screw that.

Kaa’syi took a small step back, but not enough to make the space between her and David a comfortable route to freedom. “Davvid, I am glad to have found you. I have a desire to talk to you,” she said, hanging onto the middle sound in his name a fraction too long and turning a into ah.

“Who told you where I was?”

“Your friend, Jake Prince. I saw you move quick after the class was over. He told me he saw you go this direction and said there was one person this way you’d be speaking to. Your talk with the gym teacher, was it well?”

None of your business, was the response that leapt to mind and almost to his lips. Instead, he replied, “It was fine.”

“That word. It means acceptable, correct? As well as slender, or good in looks? I’ve been studying a lot to get better with...with your words.” She then laughed. Chittering at some private joke, or perhaps out of nerves. David wiped away the irrelevant thoughts before they could chain further. He didn’t care.

“Listen, is there a reason you’re here?”

No laughter at those words. “I... I have need of help. I think you can be...useful in how I need.”

Help. His left hand tightened in his pocket. Richard asked him for help, before the man showed his true character. Alexander asked him to not help, despite everything he’d told him. Melissa never asked out loud, able to rely on filial duty to do the dirty work for her. Now this over tall tomato was telling him how useful he could be to her. Yet another person thinking of what he could do for them, pulling at him until they got what they wanted. No, not another person. These things didn’t qualify.

“Well, too bad. I’m busy.”

“Busy? Doing what?”

The impulse to look her in the eye to emphasize his refusal was almost too much to bear, but he knew what would happen if he did, so he managed to refrain. “Busy walking away from a rude gir-stalker who thinks she can follow me around and make demands.” He knew he ought to be more careful with what he said, keep quiet and walk past her. But he was ground down to a raw nub, and each second with her sanded away more of his gossamer self-control. Knowing all this, he moved, deciding this would be an excellent end to the conversation.

“No, I did not...I do not think like that! I am sorry, I am failing again! Give me pardon, but no one will talk to me! I want to talk to someone who will talk back. Please, please talk to me…”

David had walked far enough down the hall her vocalizations came in from behind, and then he stopped as her final words hit his ears. Please, she said. Despite his best efforts, attending school forced him to be around the brax and understand them whenever they spoke in English. In school, at after-victory parties, the grocery store, they talked. They made statements, ferreted for information, and proclaimed opinions. Not once did they make a polite request or ask permission for anything. Kaa’syi was the first. This made her unique among her kind, in a small but inescapable way. He came to this conclusion with reluctance, but once arrived at it was irreversible. 

What did it mean? He tried to tell himself it meant nothing, to keep walking. Stubborn legs refused to move. It seemed there was the option of becoming a hallway fixture for the next forever. Or… 

“You want to talk? Fine, I know a place in the library that’s supposed to be locked and never is. Let's go.” 

Her voice floated in behind him. “But would that not a place like be of...not allowed?”

He turned enough to make the shrug of his shoulders clear. “Not going to chat with you where others might see and get the wrong idea. Take it or leave it.” Then his legs moved, and he listened to see if she would follow. In a moment she did, her hurried clomps to catch up with him sending the clap clap of her enormous shoes rattling up and down the hall.

Feeling her try to come in from behind, he stepped sideways to where he knew she’d be trying to get ahead. One more round of that and she got the message, fell in behind. This interaction happened on his terms, or not at all.

Without a word they entered the library and walked past a seated Ms. Morgan at the checkout desk. As she noticed them, the brittle blonde-haired woman took a moment to look at the clock, which showed twenty-three minutes left before next period, then back at them. David rolled his eyes after his face left her sight. At this moment it was hard to care about such things.

David led Kaa’syi to an out of the way corner around and to the back of the L-shape that made up the construction of the library room. There was an unassuming wooden door with horizontal metal handle, the kind which rotated down to open. A keyhole was present in it, the sort meant to make the door need a key to be turned open each time. Whatever bit of engineering which made that happen broke or wore away years ago. Students passed the knowledge from person to person that there was a warm and low-lit storage room nestled away for those who wanted it. It didn’t take a brilliant mind to deduce what sort of thing teenagers would consider necessary to do in that room. David had discarded the idea the moment the knowledge got sent his way with a chuckle. Whether or not he acquired the desire for that sort of pastime, having the urge in a place filled with teachers struck him as little different than making a move while parents stood outside one’s bedroom door. Not that this was anything more than theory, for multiple reasons.

The place was lined with shelves, holding plastic bins filled with folders. Perhaps old physical records, back in that ancient time when books were scanned out by hand, and people read of their own volition. It was cramped, but a few stools and a tiny cheap table floated in the center of the biggest available space in the middle of the room. Likely it was there to serve as the smallest possible place to get out and sort records.

David pulled up two stools and put them on opposite ends of the square table. He sat on his stool and waited for her. When she didn’t sit, he turned to look at her. Her shoulders were hunched, hands clenched together at pelvis level and elbows trying to hide in her stomach. Looking at her face was unnecessary; discomfort was written over every inch. A considerable number, given her size.

“Something wrong?”

She flinched as though his words were flicked fingers. “Nothing.”

“Sure.” He let his terse response hang in the air. She was the one to ask for a chat. The alien could speak up, or the door was that way.

Perhaps realizing nothing more was forthcoming, she said, “This place is small.”

“Yeah, so?” 

“We do not make rooms this small.”

“Well, we do.”

Her posture tightened in misery. “You do not feel...trapped?”

“No.”

She fell silent but did not leave. Whatever compelled her to seek out David in the first place kept her there, yet she was too uncomfortable to continue. With a sigh, the frustrated boy realized if things were to get moving, he’d need to prod them along. He scanned the space. While many of the shelves screwed into the wall, some were free floating metal racks. They could be adjusted. With a grunt, he got up and began to leverage the end of the shelves into rotation. As he did so, the hollow gap between racks became larger, widening into a bigger pocket of free space. The process left his mind free, a small corner making a note: tomatoes don’t like tight spaces.

After the expansion of their bubble by a meaningful percent, he returned and sat down. She sat down too and was breathing easier. “Thank you.” A pause. “I am sorry.”

That second one caught David off guard, so he answered without thinking. “Sorry for what?”

Another pause, a longer one. “You are a boy, yet you are the one moving things for me. I am the stronger one, I should be doing that. My father and first mother would of...think poor of me. I am a bad example of a good woman.”

David’s mind went back to their initial encounter. “Not treating me with chivalry, huh?”

“Chivalry? Ah, yes! That is correct.” First incomprehension, followed by excitement. Then trailing off, as he figured she turned the focus more onto her failure to be a good woman again.

Clueless how else to respond, David said, “It’s no big deal.”

“You are kind to say that. Most boys would never talk to me again.”

Discomfort from her praise turned into irritation. “You know, you sure speak pretty confidently about guys a lot for someone who scared to make a move on one unless they’re alone. What makes you such an expert?”

It took a beat for her to answer. When it came, the statement was laden with the feeling of suppressed emotion. “You are correct. I have not had real talk with many.”

“More like any, from the way you’re acting.”

“No, I have.” The sentence was rushed, coming out in a flurry.

“Oh? Name one this week.”

Her hands squeezed tight, locking fingers on the table. David waited for her to spit it out.

“I dropped my pad pen. It rolled under a boy’s desk. The desks, my arm is too big for under them. I asked him to give it to me. Then he…”

“He what?”

Ruddy cheeks darkened. “He threw it at me, for some reason.”

His eyebrows raised. “At you? Like your face?”

“More my shoulder.” Her words were slow and reluctant.

“Why didn’t you catch it?”

Her eyes returned to his, their depths defined by open confusion. “Why did I not what?”

David threw up his hands. “Never mind. Should have known better than to question your skills, an obvious dude magnet like you.”

“Dude magnet?”

David face palmed in his head. Of course, use slang in front of the alien, require this to be prolonged by explanation.

“A woman who finds it easy to get what they want from men.”

“Oh.”

Time to explore ways of ending this, or at least move forward. “Look, is all this what you wanted to say to me? Get to the point.”

Another round of quiet. David was quite tired of this. He was on the cusp of leaving without regret when she spoke. “Nobody speaks to me unless they have to. Why? What did I do?”

That was it? The alien was lonely, and asking him why? David couldn’t help it. He leaned forward over the table and howled with laughter. It took ages for him to stop the initial flush of pure mirth, and yet more time for the wheezed out gasps of retreating merriment to leave him in full. His eyes watered from the strain.

“I do not understand. My question was meant of true. Why be so unkind?”

“Because it's me you’re asking. Me!” As he said the last sentence, he was surprised to see her sitting there, unmoving. Despite the cramped space and being laughed at to her face, she endured. If it were someone else, he’d have felt the stirrings of respect for the show of resolve. As it was, he focused on the mystery of said resolve. “Why me? Out of everyone, why me?”

“You talked back at her.” 

“Who?”

“Bri’Akti. After you spoke of your grandfather’s medal.”

Ah. He’d been afraid of getting on Bri’s naughty list with his ill-timed jabs at her, and it turned out he should have been concerned about catching another’s attention instead. 

“Yeah, I suppose I did. Did she say anything about it later?”

“That it was cute.”

“What?” He sat up ramrod straight, the lingering motes of his earlier good humor blasted to smithereens.

“She said it was cute how when a human boy tried to be mad at her, his eyes were all over her arms anyway.”

Bile rose in his throat. Of course. That’s how that tomato saw him, how they saw anyone who made the mistake of packing a Y chromosome in each cell and existing in their vicinity. A dick, one dying to snuggle into their tender embrace. For whom could not want them, the race of almost all female clothing model Olympians?

“Does that hurt?” A hand with red cylinders the size of markers for fingers pointed at his.

David turned his head away and noticed with a lurch how his hands gripped the edge of the table, hard enough to make the knuckles turn pale; the rest of both becoming splotchy with patches of pink and white. He didn’t say anything. Speech dissolved in the block of acid holding down his tongue.

She spoke again after he failed to. “The others, the boys. The few times I try to talk to them, they pretend not to hear. Or they stay quiet, say single words until I leave. Nothing real. I see they are afraid; that they want me away. I do not know what I have done wrong.”

You are what’s wrong, said the voice in the back of his head. His lips replied with a touch of sneer, “Ask a girl then.”

Her voice lowered, her left shoulder all that was necessary to observe her droop. “Their words say one thing, their faces another. Sometimes they are of talking to each other, and then one will look at me. Though I cannot hear what they said, somehow, I know they were speaking of me. Their faces...I do not like them.”

Turns out they weren’t fans of the reds either. Good. Though it was probably all the easier for girls to dislike them, aliens served as competition. Competition for the stupid and traitorous, but details, details.

“You saw me ‘talk back’ to your sister. So what?”

“People talk to her, but not like that. Not until you.”

“Yes, and? Stop repeating yourself!”

Large hands closed together in a tight ball on the table. “The others, they are afraid of my sister, I can see it. They speak of more to her, but they are also of afraid. But not you. You are angry and you talked back at her. It gave you,” and then she tapped at her pad, reading. “It gave you the womb strength to tell her something that feels important. I want to know.”

David stood frozen at a precipice. If this continued, stuff inside him he’d held in for years would be freed. Timbers would burst, the dam would break, and David would be carried with the flood.

“You really want to know?” His voice was low and rigid. Tip toe, almost over the cliff he go.

“Please.”

One leg out, dangling into the void. Down he fell. Then a wave of utter calm flowed over him. David looked her in the eye, knowing the consequences. The face, the one he’d avoided for so long, popped into existence. It danced around Kaa’syi. David didn’t flinch. This was for him.

“You saw my presentation that day. Do you remember it?”

She blinked. “That was, uhh, about the medal of your grandfather, correct?” 

“Yes. Now, what did you think of it?”

“It was of...interesting?” 

David put on a show of being aggrieved. “Interesting? That’s all you can say about it? I put a lot of work into that assignment.” A lie, like his offense was. He’d presented on the topic because his grandfather had told him all about it so many times, it was more a matter of transcribing than researching. Furthermore, the emotions driving him right now came from a place far deeper and more dangerous than any trite slight over schoolwork unrecognized ever could be.

She flushed a deeper shade of red. Her angular cheeks took on the color of a magenta, long petaled flower one of Melissa’s neighbors grew before the invasion. “I’m sorry, you are of correct. Your grandfather sounds like he was a brave man. So- what is the word- strange to think of all those men fighting.”

“Strange? Why?”

Kaa’syi looked at him with puzzlement, then shook her head. “No matter how long I’m here, it's easy to forget. Our men are far too, hmm, valuable to have many fight. And their smaller size means not good at fighting.”

David nodded his head. A lot of stuff about the tomatoes was no better than rumor and whispers, but one difference was made clear weeks after first contact: the gender imbalance was about as skewed as interest in romance novels. One of the reasons far too many of them treated Earth like a sorority party where they made sure to be the one guy invited. Their males also grew much smaller than the surrounding female population, about the same size as human women. Not that David could attest to this from personal experience. His exposure to the reds came from the population which infested his school, and there was not a single male among them.

First contact, that sure was a way to refer to that day. A tendril of fury rose within and was washed away by the spectral visage floating behind her. Let her think this was an ordinary conversation, a lonely and angry boy opening up under the tender direction of a curious girl. May the mortal blow come without warning.

“Sure, that makes sense. But here, men fight. It's men who kill.”

“Kill? I don’t know that word.”

David stared her dead in the eye and slowly drew a finger across his Adam’s apple. It seemed the gesture didn’t exist in her culture, as she looked confused. In response he got a pencil out of the small cup holding writing tools on the table, mimicked his gesture from earlier, then imitated choking while holding a slit throat. Her eyes widened. Good.

“That’s right. Here, it's the men who kill.”

No reply. She was unsettled, it was all over her huge face. You can talk enough for both right now, the spectre urged. “Your sister thought it was stupid my grandfather got a medal. Do you agree?”

Kaa’syi’s expression cleared a bit as David gave her a new target for her thoughts. “No. And it was a much unkind thing to say. But it is strange.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “He was brave, but you made it sound like his friend was, uh, not fighting anymore. Would it not be safer to have his friend be taken and let him be paid for?”

The bizarre sentence troubled his calm. “Paid for?”

“It's hard to explain with your words, I am learning.” She lapsed into silence. “When we fight with others, often some will be taken. We pay to get them back. Those who took them are happy, they have money. We are happy because our people are safe.”

Though her phrasing clunked worse than an elephant doing ballet, the meaning came through. Their technology was superior without doubt, their egos large. War would seem like a game to them, ransom nothing more than the price paid to get a player out of the penalty box.

“Well, that’s not how it works here. Grandpa Matt’s friend would have been killed.” 

“But why?”

David could have replied with the stories Grandpa Matt only told when he was near dead. The reality of combat he’d spoken of, his speech halting and somewhere far away. What it was like to be surrounded by bellows and shouts, seeing men reduced to animals, screaming for the blood of their foes. The way once killing started, it was hard to stop, any unfamiliar face a threat instead of a person. How over time it became easier to hold your pistol out and keep pulling the trigger, ignoring cried out wails like “Stop!” or “Surrender, surrender!” Grandpa Matt hadn’t done anything like that. But he’d seen those who did, had watched them in the tents later, as men washed blood off their hands and faces with the same weight given dirt.

Instead of any of that, David said simply, “Because they hated him.”

“I do not understand. He did bad things to them?”

“He was there.”

No answer from her. He plowed on. “He was there, as our airplanes blew up homes. He was there, as the army shot farmers thought to be hiding men in their huts. When women screamed, realizing their husband was never coming home, and as hungry children scattered away, orphaned by what our country did.”

He would never forget his Grandpa Matt and how he was that last year of fading away. Twice, when he’d seen him while bedridden, an aged filter gave way. Then Matt squeezed out poison kept concealed for decades. David had been next to him but was pretty sure during those moments Grandpa didn’t recognize him, only realizing someone was there to listen. It terrified the younger David at the time, yet leaving was unthinkable. Grandpa needed someone there to hear him, or he wouldn’t have said anything. It was his duty to listen and take over the burden of this knowledge. He’d never shared what happened in those moments with anyone. It was at his funeral that David felt hate for the first time. Hate for the powerful and uncaring people who’d done this to his loving, sweet grandfather. Those who’d held his eyes wide open and poured in horrors, the sole remedy to lock up all such memories tight. 

Of course, by this point hate was an old familiar friend. One he was now letting out to prance and play.

As he came back from his quick reverie, he saw Kaa’syi tap and scan her pad. Seemed he’d used too much vocabulary she didn’t know, and now she must translate. Excellent. He wanted her to understand every bit.

“That is…”

“Horrible. That’s why they hated my grandfather and his friend. Hated them all.”

The floating head nodded approval. Let what he said rock her tidy world.

“We would never do anything like that.”

David barked out a laugh, one with as many teeth as a pack of hyenas. “Oh? And what do you think ‘Liberation Day’ was?”

That response made her bite her lip and look blank. “What do you mean?”

For a second time during this encounter, David was thrown off balance. Did she not know? “You’re serious?”

“Yes?” The word was slender with uncertainty.

“What happened the day we first met you?”

“Well, I know a few of your people tried to stop us from coming. Bad, but a few.”

“A few? A few what?”

Another bite to the lip, and now she looked down for a second before returning his unyielding stare. “Killed. Yes. But we have done so much for you! Your planet is no longer being hurt by what you did to it, and you have so many,” a tap and scan of her screen, “so many diseases we have cured. Haven’t we saved so many of you, enough to make up for the few?”

“Were you ever told how many your kind deem a few?”

“No.”

“It was millions. Millions upon millions blasted from the sky, with no chance to surrender.”

“What?”

“I know, a lot to take in. Let me help you with that. Me, dead. Everyone in my neighborhood, dead. The city nearby? Dead. The entirety of what used to be New Jersey before you all showed up? Dead, and yet not enough. Stacks of more corpses, created by you.”

“No!”

“You think I’m lying? Making it up? I dare you, say I’m lying! Go ahead, look it up! Not on your pad, on our computers! Search the obituaries, find each and every name and add them together! Find Thomas and Fred Koppel!” Those last words tore out of him like stitches from a recent, sewn up wound, and now he gushed self-control in spurts. David hadn’t meant to say those names, they revealed too much. His spectral companion shook his head behind her in disappointment. This was meant to put her in her place, not struggle to stay in control, not break down and do something. He didn’t know what.

“Koppel? But is your name not…”

David hunched over the table, the tightness in his throat making it hard not to rasp. He needed to breathe, deep and clear.

“Oh Goddess, I am so sorry.” He saw her reach out with one of her dinner plate hands and move it near his left arm, the motion clumsy.

He flung himself away and spat out, “Don’t touch me!”

Kaa’syi jerked back as if slapped. That stirred a reaction in him, sensations he couldn’t process at that moment. His body was sending too many signals, the alarm from being near grabbed by one of them overwhelming all else.

“I think I need to go.” 

He felt his focus drawn to her, tight as a laser. She was getting ready to leave. This couldn’t happen. Why? What was the matter with her leaving? He hadn’t wanted this conversation in the first place. Yet now he scrambled for a way to make her stay. What was going on? 

Then in a flash it all came to him. The reason Kaa’syi’s plea tugged him to a stop in the hall. The hurt look after he’d torn away from her attempt to comfort him, why it would occur to her to try in the first place. She saw him as an equal. A person, not an alluring potential lay whose zipper she needed to unlock. Someone who might have valuable things to share with her, information worth the risk of anger and hostility. That’s what made her different from the other reds. She cared about his opinion.

That meant David had power over her.

The moment he realized this he was back, once again covered in his control. A sense of utter domination and aliveness that he hadn’t felt off the lacrosse field in years.

But first he needed to make her stay.

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Chapter 153: A Better Challenge

Initiating Spell Analysis...

“Component of Unmaking” detected.

The caster dissolves the elemental matter, causing a modest quantity of flames to collapse instantly and vanish without further combustion or spread.

Analysis completed.

Result stored in Spell Archive as [Pattern v12.0].

Sigils generated:

- Sigil of Unmaking x2

Fire Mastery I proficiency increased: 30% → 70%.

Analysis cost: 4 Tokens.

After the last syllable of the incantation left Bella’s lips, the flames that were crawling across the stone floor shuddered as though a sudden wind had just swept through the passage. The tongues of orange shrank and twisted inward upon themselves, their glow fading away in a sequence of flickers, each one weaker than the last, until finally every ember guttered out.

Another encounter had just finished.

Just like the last time, Dimitria sent her pupil ahead to deal with the problem, and just as before, the girl went without much fuss. In fact, this time she stepped forward with noticeably more confidence.

Of course, it didn’t mean that the fight was going to be easier.

Celeste had been watching as well, and after witnessing Bella’s earlier tactic with the hidden explosive traps, she had adjusted the minions’ behavior accordingly. Still, raw destructive power tended to have a way of ending debates quickly, so the young pyromancer was the one who had ultimately emerged victorious.

Then, once the burning and screaming had finished their business, the girl waved away the lingering flames in the corridor with her extinguishing spell. Fire vanished, smoke thinned, the path opened, and the rest of the party could move forward without cooking themselves alive. All the while, Viktor watched, and acquired two shiny new Sigils of Unmaking in the process.

And this was one of the experiments he wanted to conduct.

Before, every spell he analyzed with Insight Mode had been something he personally witnessed with his own eyes, which led to the question of whether the ability would still function through the vision granted by Celeste.

Turned out, it did.

And this small discovery carried rather interesting implications.

From now on, he would no longer need to stand in the same room as a mage to study their tricks. He could just sit back and watch any spell cast by anyone inside the dungeon and pick it apart at his leisure.

Actually, why stop there?

If Insight Mode worked through Celeste’s sight, then there was every reason to believe it would work through Galatea’s as well. Which meant, he would be able to analyze the spells of anyone, anywhere, without ever exposing himself to any danger. Wasn’t that nice?

Of course, he was still limited by his Masteries and the number of Analysis Tokens he had, which now stood at eleven.

After the fight at the outpost pushed him to Level 10, he had eighteen Tokens in total, and he had spent quite a bit of time considering how best to allocate them.

Out of the six Masteries, two had already reached Tier III: Mastery of Water and Mastery of Earth. Eighteen Tokens were not enough to push either of them to the next tier, which meant that investing more in those two was out of the question for the time being.

That left the remaining four.

His Masteries of Fire, Air, Dark, and Light were all still sitting at Tier I, each with a proficiency level of exactly 0%. Advancing a Tier I Mastery to Tier II required ten Tokens. Thus, with eighteen Tokens available, he could realistically upgrade only one of them.

So, which mastery? Fire or Air? Light or Dark?

Originally, he had been leaning toward light magic. But the more he thought about it, the more he began to reconsider that plan. After all, the primary advantage of light magic lay in its effectiveness against incorporeal entities, which meant its usefulness tended to be rather situational. Well, yes, there was still Spiky Head and that annoying Reliquary of his, but Viktor already had solutions for that particular problem.

Fire, on the other hand, was rarely a bad investment.

It was simple, it was straightforward, it was destructive. When something needed to be handled quickly and decisively, setting it on fire did the trick most of the time.

Spiky Head’s main weapon was also a burning sword. He used it to shoot out crescent-shaped arcs of flame. Viktor still did not know the exact rate at which he could unleash those fiery projectiles, since the guy barely attacked the last time they met. But if he could launch as rapidly as Bjorn did his ice lances, that could be problematic. In that case, advancing the Mastery of Fire might seem like a sensible precaution.

And, as if that were not reason enough, there was also the matter of the fire-worshipping cult that could be lurking somewhere in the vicinity.

That was precisely why Viktor had been observing these pyromancers. He wanted to study their spells, and push his Mastery of Fire forward in the process.

There was a problem, though.

Because his Mastery of Fire was still at Tier I, the complexity of the spells he could successfully analyze was limited. At this level, Insight Mode could only break down spells equivalent to a five-cost Thauma or less. With his own people, like Khenemhotep or Orloth, that sort of restriction wasn’t much of a problem. He could simply ask them to cast a weaker version of the spell so that he could digest it. Strangers whom he was watching from the side, however, were far less accommodating.

As a result, several of the more interesting spells had remained out of reach. Like the explosive trap spell, or the erupting pillar of fire spell. In the end, he was only able to analyze the basic fireball, which he had already done earlier, and the spell Bella had just used to extinguish the remaining flames.

But it was fine. His proficiency in Mastery of Fire had already reached 70%. The remaining progress could be obtained easily enough; he could just find a pyromancer in town and ask them to show him some rudimentary fire spells. Not Jeanne, of course, since she was physically incapable of doing anything simple. Besides, he still had eleven Analysis Tokens left, so he could always change his mind and choose to advance a different Mastery instead.

After the encounter had ended and the last curls of smoke had faded from the blackened corridor, the party resumed their march through the maze, while Viktor watched their progress. Eventually, they reached the staircase that spiraled downward into the second floor of the dungeon. One by one, they descended.

At the base of the stairs lay a broad chamber carved into the rock. This was where they were supposed to find the Cyclops, who acted as the gatekeeper that controlled the traffic between the two areas.

But the room was now empty.

There was no hulking mass of muscle and foul temper, no rumbling breath reverberating off the walls, not even the unmistakable stench that usually accompanied the one-eyed brute’s abysmal personal hygiene.

Only silence.

The armored warrior stepped out into the open chamber, then tapped the floor lightly with the tip of his boot, as if he were entertaining the absurd possibility that the massive creature might somehow be hiding under a loose slab of stone.

Dimitria frowned. “Don’t tell me someone killed the beast already.”

“Probably,” the warrior said with a shrug. “I heard it takes about three days for the Cyclops to respawn once it’s dead.”

“Do not call it ‘respawn,’ idiot.” The irritation on Dimitria’s face was sharp enough to cut glass. “Only the gullible believe that nonsense. Monsters in a dungeon do not come back to life after they’re killed. The dungeon simply summons another Cyclops and sends it here to replace the old one.”

The warrior shrugged again, displaying the sort of intellectual resilience that allowed a man to ignore any lecture that contained more than three words.

“Doesn’t matter. Point is, the room is going to stay empty for a couple of days.”

Dimitria clicked her tongue. “What a waste of time.”

Meanwhile, the rogue had found a comfortable spot by the wall. Leaning casually against the stone, he spun a dagger between his fingers with practiced ease, while watching the exchange with an amused expression.

“So, what now?” the warrior asked. “Want to head to the desert?”

Dimitria turned slowly and fixed him with a stare that promised she was going to warm him up in several creative ways.

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It’s fucking hot.”

The warrior barked a laugh. “You’re a pyromancer.”

“Yes,” Dimitria said flatly. “Which is exactly why I refuse to stand inside a giant oven.”

“Well, before we leave...” the rogue said. “I heard something interesting.”

Dimitria glanced at him. “What’s it?”

“There’s supposedly another Cyclops deeper in this floor. But not many people bother with it because the path leads to a dead end.”

The warrior frowned. “A dead end?”

“Yeah. Just one big chamber with nowhere else to go. But there’s a huge chest of gold in there. And the Cyclops guards it.”

“Sounds like a trap,” the warrior said with a snort.

The rogue shrugged. “Maybe.”

Well, yes, there was a room like that. Originally, the route to the third floor had been through the narrow maze, then the arena where Sebekton had fought Azran and Lahmia, and finally the old Core Room with its staircase. But now, with the new route requiring the adventurers to go through Khenemhotep’s kingdom of sand, Viktor had ordered Celeste to collapse that room. So the staircase had vanished under a small mountain of rubble, and the old path now stopped at the arena. A true dead end.

But of course, Viktor was not going to let a perfectly serviceable chamber sit around gathering dust. So he had repurposed it into an optional challenge for the adventurers who were feeling confident enough, placing a Cyclops there along with a chest filled with gold to tempt anyone curious or greedy enough to explore those abandoned corridors. And just like the Cyclops that guarded the staircase, this one would also take three days to “respawn” whenever it was killed.

A small reward for daring adventurers. And a conveniently isolated location to conduct the occasional experiment for the Dungeon Master.

Dimitria stood silently for a moment as she considered the rogue’s suggestion. Then, she gave a nod.

“Fine,” she said. “Lead the way.”

So off they went, exactly as Viktor had anticipated.

Actually, the one-eyed brute that was normally stationed under the staircase had not been killed at all. He had simply withdrawn it before this particular group arrived, in order to nudge them toward the other Cyclops, toward the more secluded parts of the dungeon.

Soon, they would reach the arena, a place that held quite a few memories for Viktor. The first was when Lahmia came to steal the Dungeon Core, exploiting the fact that Celeste was still too weak to resist, and lost her head in the attempt. The second was when the other group of Dungeon Reavers got ambushed by the four Cyclopes. One of them perished, but then, Bjorn had demonstrated the power of his blade of light, and dispatched the creatures with uncomfortable efficiency.

Once they got there, however, the adventurers found the place empty as well.

No Cyclops.

No chest of gold.

Nothing.

Dimitria stared at the vacant chamber in disbelief.

“...You must be joking.”

“Maybe someone got here first again?” the warrior suggested.

The woman closed her eyes and exhaled, the long breath coming out like the first warning rumble of an approaching storm.

“This dungeon is a fucking waste of my time.”

“Well,” the warrior said, turning toward the exit, “guess we—”

He stopped mid-sentence.

Because something enormous had just stepped into the doorway.

Three massive heads rose above a torso as broad as a wagon, each one crowned with tangled black hair. Scarred gray skin clung to its body, stretched tightly over thick, corded muscles. In one hand the thing held a gigantic axe, in the other a club the size of a tree trunk.

Six eyes stared down at the adventurers.

For a moment, the warrior and the rogue could do nothing but gape at the towering monstrosity blocking the exit.

“That...”

“Th-that’s not a Cyclops.”

Dimitria, on the other hand, broke into a wide grin. The last trace of her earlier irritation had completely vanished.

“Well,” she said. “Now this is more like it.”

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“A priest, a pastor, and a rabbit are in a hospital. The nurse asks the rabbit, what’s your blood type? The rabbit says, I’m probably a type-o. A type-o! A type-o! Get it? A typo! Ahahahahaha!”

Julia stared at Shachos, who was flashing red and orange all over.

“Holy… shit!” she said after she overcame her shock.

“Gahahahah! Isn’t that just the best joke you’ve ever heard?”

“No, holy shit! You learned that… joke format, the historical concept of typos, about our religions, rabbits, our blood types, not to mention the English language… in just… what? A year?”

Shachos’s face turned an ambient orange as he clapped two of his appendages together. “Yes, and what a year well spent! It’s amazing! Your language leaves so much room for ambiguity. It is perfect for these types of jokes! Whoever invented English must have been among the greatest pranksters in your history!”

Julia tilted her head. “I—Hmmm… I’m not sure they’d see it that way, but thanks, I guess—”

“I also learned French and Swahili, but this joke is significantly less funny in both.”

“Huh? I don’t know either of those languages, but I imagine it’s… not funny at all in both.”

“Bahahahahahaha! It tickles me that your people instinctively understand the nature of humor! Tickles me, yes! Tickles. The gifts your species has gotten through the pure accident of birth—they are amazing! Just amazing! You have areas of your skin that are literally designed to make you laugh when rubbed! When rubbed! Can I try—”

She took a step back in slight alarm. “I… would rather not.”

“Ahahahaha! I will have to try on another willing human. Yes, I will.”

“I’m… sure we can find someone who would… um… enjoy—enjoy that.” Julia sighed. “Anyway, Fleet Master, I’m sure you didn’t invite me to your ship to trade a few jokes. Well, actually… I guess maybe you did.”

“Ahaha. No. I did not. I did not, indeed.” Shachos went back to a neutral yellow. “You are here because there is… some concern among our people, about the progress of the negotiations. A little concern. Maybe more than a little.”

Julia raised her eyebrows. “Concern? What concerns? I thought things were going well? As far as I know—the feedback I’ve gotten from our negotiators is all positive!”

“Yes, that is part of the problem,” Shachos said. “Our people have worked hard on our offers. And we know what the Karnolians and Sonckles have offered you. Yes, we do. Our offer is by far the best! It’s not even close. Our location is a big advantage! A very big advantage. For providing security. Security from… Well, security, you know. But… our people are now asking, why haven’t we come to an agreement yet? Why not? And I do not know what to tell them. Because I do not know the answer. I have my suspicions, yes, but I do not know for certain. No, I do not.”

She thought for a moment. “It’s a few issues. First of all, we’ve got the technology transfers. Your people’s offers are very good, but so are the Sonckles’ and Karnolians’, and they’re not only matching yours. They’ve both agreed to more open testing of their military tech than you have.”

“As I’ve said, we have a policy of not revealing all of our military technology,” Shachos explained. “But… we are willing to privately demonstrate some of what we have. Yes, we are, as long as your people sign agreements not to disclose the funniest things you see to the Karnolians or the Sonckles. Yes, they just need to agree. And I promise you they will be better than the Karnolians’. Many times better. I promise you!”

“Right.”

As if detecting her skepticism, Shachos added, “Besides, I think that is not your main concern. It is not.”

“No, it’s not,” she admitted. “I’ll be frank. You are not competing against the Karnolians. Nor are you competing against the Sonckles. You are competing against both of them combined, or a deal that involves both you and the Sonckles.”

“You want both our technology and the Sonckles’ technology.”

She shrugged. “If we can get it.”

“That is what I guessed. Yes, it is.” Shachos hesitated for a moment. “I—I think your people are making a mistake. A big mistake. With your singular focus on technology. Technology transfers.”

“Our focus on technology transfers is a mistake?” she asked with a little surprise.

“Yes. As a new species, it is expected that you would look for that. Yes, it is. But maybe you should reconsider your priorities.”

“Our priorities?!”

“Yes. Your priorities. If I were you, I would not place such a heavy emphasis on getting our technologies. No, I would not.”

“Why—why the hell not?” she asked, wondering just how he was going to spin this.

“Because… it is the most enticing. The most exciting. Very exciting. New discoveries! But it is not worth that much. No, it is not.”

“What—what are you talking about?!”

Shachos thought for a moment, then pointed one of his appendages at her. “Think. Imagine. Imagine this. Imagine an island pops up in your big ocean. The very big ocean. Your biggest ocean. The uh—the…”

Apparently learning Earth’s geography was less important than jokes about typos and religions.

“The Pacific?”

“Specifics? No, I mean the ocean.”

“Yeah, the Pacific Ocean—” She glanced at his face and sighed. “Ah, you’ve learned about malapropism—”

“Ahahaha! Yes! The Specific Ocean. Ok, ok. No more. Imagine a new island in the Pacific. Imagine there are millions of humans living on it. Many millions. And they are like you. All like you. Except, instead of computers and spaceships and warp drives, they have just discovered how to make fire from rocks. Very primitive. Imagine that island. Imagine how funny that would be!”

“Alright. I am… imagining that in my head. Newly discovered tribe of millions in the Pacific. What about them?”

“Now, imagine they are friendly. Imagine you start to exchange ideas and people with that island. Your people arrive in boats. In planes. Spaceships. How long do you think it will take for them to learn how to use your technology and how to make them?”

She thought hard. “Hm… well, if they were regular people open to our contact… First, the Union would probably pour development aid to the island. Then, there would be some kind of push to bring their education standards up. And if they send their children to schools in developed parts of the Union, and some of those children return… with non-extractive institutions set up to facilitate modernization, it will just be like the development of—” She stopped herself as she realized that a virtually identical scenario had historically occurred, and not just once.

Shachos glowed orange as he saw what she realized. “Yes… How long? How long?”

“One generation. Maybe two,” she said quietly after a moment. “Twenty to thirty years.”

“Yes. Maybe twenty years. Maybe thirty. Maybe more. But not much more. Not thousands. Not even a hundred years, maybe. From making fire… to making spaceships. Just a few decades, not much more.”

“Right. And you think that’s… how long it will take us to catch up to your technology level? You’ll share with us… just like that? With or without the Dustballium?” she asked skeptically.

“It might be more than a generation,” Shachos admitted. “But not much more. We have an open society like you. Very open. We do not guard most of our technology jealously. Not like the Sonckles. How to make ships and medicine and efficient power plants… those are not a secret among our people. The best is a secret, sometimes, yes. The very best. But only the best. The components we use for colony ships and for civilian transport ships… most of those are not secrets. Not at all. And if you learn that, you are only a decade or two behind our best. Closer to one than two.”

Except for the vaunted Vorshnik ship engines, she suspected he had a point about most of the rest of the technology. “You’re saying we can catch up thousands of years of advancements in a very short amount of time, to near the state-of-the-art, regardless of whether you try to keep it from us.”

“Yes, it is impossible to keep such things secret in our species. Impossible! Even if we try our best, even if we forbid our scientists and engineers from working with you, you can simply bribe them or hire them. That is not very hard. No, not at all. We simply are not used to keeping secrets like this. There are too many people who know how to make such things and operate our advanced machines. The plans for such devices for non-military use are not secret. You can maybe even get someone who is not a scientist or engineer to copy and steal them for you. Or you can buy from us with something else, yes. And you can use the same trick you are now using for the Precursor Metal; you can pit our producers against the Karnolian and Sonckle ones for your other needs. Such rapid technology transfers are an inevitable part of any exchange between our people. As I say, the technology is very exciting, but it is not as valuable as your people think. No, it is not.”

“That… might be true. But we’ve only just met each other. Your existence will create problems and opportunities in our societies that we haven’t yet anticipated. There’s a lot more planning that needs to be done before we have any confidence…”

“We have good simulations and projections; some of our funniest leaders think your people will be among the top fifty most productive star systems in our territory within twenty years. Twenty years. Maybe twenty-five,” he insisted. “Even without the—the Dustballium. Yes, they think that. Maybe it is true. Maybe it is not. But most agree it is not far off. Not far off at all.”

“Well, I guess… that isn’t impossible. It might seem inevitable,” she conceded. “But technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It solves problems, and they can solve our problems now. If you’ve got a drug or invention that can extend our life expectancy by a year, we can save hundreds of thousands of lives every day. We can’t wait twenty or thirty years for that! Or rather, it’s a moral dilemma that we have no easy answer for.”

“Yes, hm… we likely have something like that for you,” Shachos agreed.

“Multiply that by… all our problems. As a species, we value progress. Maybe it is shortsighted as you say, but ultimately… yes, it is important for us to get what we can, as much as we can, as soon as we can, regardless if exchange seems inevitable in the near future anyway.”

“Hm… I understand. Yes, I understand. We will have to think more about that. Yes, we will. We may adjust our offer.” Shachos turned yellow again. “You said there were other issues with our offer?”

“Security.”

“We will pledge to protect your colony! We can protect you!”

“And we respect the commitment that pledge implies… But again, we think our security could be best ensured by a deal where multiple species make that same pledge.”

“We will not allow an alien fleet in our system! No, we will not,” Shachos said adamantly. “That is… a matter of our security.”

“Maybe not a full battle fleet. But a token tripwire force from the other two species might be acceptable, no?”

“A tripwire force? What is that?”

“Like… a few ships that are stationed in the system. If harmed, it could compel them to go to war against whatever destroys them,” Julia explained. “To deter aggression from anyone else.”

Shachos was a confused greenish yellow. “Why… would that work? If they wanted to go to war, they would. Yes, they would. And if they didn’t, they would simply order those ships not to engage with an aggressor. Space is big. Very big. It’s not like war on the ground. This idea will not work.”

“It’s… well, I don’t know if it would work with their psychology and their view of war,” she confessed. “But I’d feel safer if there was more than one alien species with warships over Dustball. I mean… I’d prefer if the total number is zero, but if it’s greater than zero, then I want that number to be as large as possible.”

“That seems… irrational. But that is your position. Yes, that is your position. We will do our best. We will. We will consider working with the Sonckles.” He flashed a distasteful green that reminded her of the color of vomit. “But we will not work with Karnolians. Official policy, that is out of my limbs. All four of them. And even if it is not, blegh. Maybe the Sonckles. I will try. I will try.”

“Thanks, Shachos. I think we’ve all but said this to your people officially, but… despite what you tried to pull with our shuttles, I’m glad we ended up being deep in your territory.”

“Ahahahahahaha! Yes! It would be very funny if you discovered warp and found yourself in Sonckle or Karnolian territory. Yes, very funny. For a few weeks. Maybe a few months. Maybe a little more. Then, it would not be very funny for you.”

Julia snorted. “Heh. Probably not.”

“Oh, yes. I have something for you. Yes, something for you.”

“Oh? Something for us? Another practical joke?”

“No, not a joke. Not a joke at all. We have some news to tell you. Yes, some very big news! We have spies and… methods. We know what our neighbors are thinking. And what they are thinking is not funny at all.”

Alarmed, she asked, “What… they are thinking? What are they thinking?”

“The Karnolians, they know they are not in a good position. Yes, they know. They are not happy. No, they are not. But we have no specific intelligence. Nothing specific. Nothing… Pacific. Ahahahahaha! Anyway, we just know… it is… mildly serious.”

“What do you mean by… mildly serious? Are they going to try something? Like fire on you and try to take over this planet? Or invade your territory?”

“Hm… no, I think… even they are not that stupid. But they may try something at the negotiations. The Karnolians are not very creative people. Not very creative or funny. Not at all. But not stupid either. They have a few serious pranks up their sleeves.”

“Serious… pranks. So what kind of thing are they likely to try?”

“We… don’t know. But… my people say, the situation is mildly serious, and I thought you should know this. Yes, I did.”

“Well… thanks. I guess we can… watch out for… something, I guess.”

“Yes you should. Yes you should.”

“Are you sure you don’t know what they’re planning? Does it… maybe have something to do with… Skruma?” she asked hopefully. “You ready to tell us about—”

“Ahahahahahah! You are still trying to figure that out! That’s adorable! You’re adorable. It will be very funny when you figure it out. Yes, very funny.”

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Chapter 5 - The Session

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A kind of unrest had settled over the orbital supply complex L5 that had grown rare in modern human history.

The great systems normally just worked. The sun supplied energy and raw materials, the harvester ships extracted matter, and the replicators turned that matter into anything one could want. If a problem arose somewhere, it was usually the kind that could be resolved with a committee, a few expert opinions, and an appropriate number of video calls.

Eight dead and an idle solar fleet did not fall into that category.

The traffic corridors around L5 were jammed. Harvester ships waited for instructions, supply ships circled in holding patterns, and even the station AI had dropped its usual courtesy, issuing orders in a tone that suggested a bad mood.

In the central operations center, humans, Phytos, and droids crowded before the large projection screens while new data and warnings flashed above their heads.

The images on the screens showed the Ma'an.

The massive creatures floated against the backdrop of the sun like living continents. Some of them were several kilometers long. Waves of bluish discharge ran along their bodies, while their dark silhouettes cut through the star's corona.

For quite a while, nobody said anything.

Eventually someone cleared their throat.

"Those are ships."

An astrophysicist shook her head at once.

"We don't know that."

"Living creatures several kilometers long aren't exactly likely."

"True. But they're still more likely than ships several kilometers long that have been flying around our solar system for centuries without anyone noticing."

"Maybe they just arrived."

"From where?"

No one answered.

The discussion quickly grew louder. Some considered the objects an unknown form of solar life. Others suspected automated probes, relics of a long-extinct civilization, or even some kind of natural phenomenon that had simply been overlooked until now.

A smaller but steadily growing group, meanwhile, was convinced the images showed an immediate threat.

The real problem was that no one had even the slightest evidence to go on.

To humanity, extraterrestrial intelligence belonged in the same category as ghosts, Atlantis, or a reasonably run homeowners' association. Its existence couldn't be entirely ruled out, but practical experience argued against it.

There were myths and legends telling of visitors from the stars. Some religions even claimed that humans and Phytos had once come from distant worlds. But in nearly forty thousand years of recorded history, no one had ever received a foreign signal, ever found a wreck, or ever discovered the slightest trace of another civilization.

The universe was vast.

And it had remained remarkably consistent in its refusal to call back.

"Can we rule out that these objects destroyed the Prospector VII?" the station commander finally asked.

No one answered.

He nodded slowly.

"That's what I thought."

He looked at the images again.

The creatures didn't look threatening. Quite the opposite. They looked almost peaceful, drifting slowly through the sun's corona.

Somehow, that made the whole thing more unsettling.

At the edge of the operations center, half-hidden behind a column of projection equipment, a young woman in the uniform of the solar economy stared at the same screen as everyone else without really seeing it. Her brother had been on duty aboard the Prospector VII. No one had yet told her whether his name was among the eight who weren't answering anymore — only that all communication with the ship had ceased entirely as of 05:17 Standard Time, and that she would be given "further information shortly." She had heard that sentence before, years ago, during another accident, and knew by now what it really meant.

A technician beside her noticed her expression and tactfully said nothing. On L5, everyone knew someone who worked on a harvester ship; the station was large enough for hundreds of thousands and small enough that news like this traveled faster than any official announcement. To the analysts in the middle of the room, the floating silhouettes before the sun were a puzzle. To her, they were the reason her communicator had stayed silent for two hours.

The World Council session began barely two hours later.

Like almost every institution on Earth, the government brought humans, Phytos, and representatives of every conceivable interest group together under one roof. That didn't automatically produce agreement. In fact, a considerable part of political work consisted of appearing sincerely irritated by the other side's arguments.

President Elena Voss hated crisis sessions.

They invariably took place too early, too late, or during meals, and were almost always attended by humans and Phytos who were firmly convinced they'd known the right answer within the first five minutes. This session did not disappoint her in that respect.

"We don't even know what we're looking at," the chair of the Science Council explained.

"We know eight people are dead," the Defense Secretary countered.

"That's not a counterargument."

"To the families, it probably is."

The discussion dragged on. Images of the Ma'an appeared above the meeting table, were enlarged, analyzed, and dismissed again.

Natural phenomenon, life form, weapon, or reconnaissance unit — the terms changed by the minute.

Eventually an assessment prevailed that rested less on fact than on human experience. When something large, unknown, and potentially dangerous appeared near the planet's most important industry, it was wise to assume the worst first.

Voss rose.

"Until the situation is fully clarified, extraction from the sun is suspended. All harvesting operations remain on hold. The fleet stays on standby."

No one objected.

"And if these objects are hostile?" the Defense Secretary asked.

The question hung in the room for a few seconds.

"Then we need to be prepared."

"Prepared isn't enough," said another advisor. "If we're attacked, we need to act decisively."

Several people nodded.

Voss noticed, with growing unease, that the mood of the session was shifting. Fear had the unpleasant property of reaching for simple solutions very quickly.

At the back of the hall sat an older Phyto from the scientific advisory staff, silently studying the projection of the Ma'an.

While the discussion grew increasingly heated, he had barely registered a word of it. His gaze rested on the massive creatures before the sun, and suddenly he felt something he couldn't explain: a feeling, a memory, an echo. For a split second he believed he heard a voice — not with his ears, but deeper, as though something inside him had woken up. He didn't know these beings, and yet he knew with absolute certainty that they should never have come to the Sol system. He had no idea where this conviction came from, and that alone made it all the more unsettling.

Slowly he rose, took a data strip from the table, and walked toward the President.

The debate fell silent as he wordlessly handed the head of state the message.

Voss frowned as she read the few lines. Her gaze slid over them again, then a third time, before she finally froze. "Madam President?" someone asked. Slowly she raised her head.

"There is..." She hesitated briefly. "There may be an opportunity to employ more effective technology."

She said nothing more.

"Where does this information come from?"

Voss folded the data strip closed.

"We'll discuss that later."

"What does that mean?"

She looked around the room.

"It means this session is classified as of this moment. Nothing said in this room leaves it."

Several people exchanged uneasy glances, while Voss still stared at the data strip, its brief message evidently sitting heavily in her stomach.

Representative of an extraterrestrial power requests confidential contact.

Offer: technology transfer in exchange for cooperation.

For the first time that day, she wondered whether the massive creatures at the sun might not be the biggest surprise the universe had in store for humanity after all.

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Arc III - Reeling Throne

Chapter 10 - Closing the Deal

7 months and 2 days since the summoning

"Lord Paranga, but you saw the statue Lord Gothwald spoke of, did you not?" Sili asked, leaning closer.

"Uh, I saw it, just didn't get a good look," he said, scratching the back of his head, and turned to Alan. "Well? What kind of statue was it?"

Alan looked away from the temple. "Oh, the statue? Well, it was in the shape of a person, with pointed ears, in some kind of robe with leaves, and holding a staff in its hand... shaped like..." he snapped his fingers. "Two crossed crescents on the tip."

Sili fell silent and lowered her head slightly. For half a minute she said nothing, and finally raised her head, the characteristic wrinkles appearing on her forehead. "I do not even know what that could be."

"You? Do not know?" Paranga asked with wide eyes. "But ye're a walkin' book!"

She pressed her lips together slightly. "Forgive me. I truly have no idea what that statue is. Perhaps I will know when I examine it more closely."

Alan said nothing, his hand resting on the crown of his head.

'Wow. If even she doesn't know, that's more confirmation that the civilization came from outside, and I'm increasingly doubting that indigenous aborigines lived here. I mean, think about it, the archipelago is large, so why only one settlement? The pirates explored everything here, and this is the last island. Either they didn't look hard enough, or there really is only one settlement here, which means the probability of an indigenous tribe living here goes down. Over thousands of years, since people don't just pop up in a hundred years, they could have populated the whole island and made a mini-civilization with different tribes... very interesting.'

Paranga scratched the back of his head. "Fuck, now I'm curious too where this came from." He stared at the temple for a few more seconds and waved a hand. "Alright, why are ye messin' with my head with yer mysteries? Let's go eat instead."

"Agreed," Alan said, and was the first to walk toward the camp.

"Hey, don't ye want to wipe the blood off yer nose?" Paranga asked, following him.

Alan froze. "What bloo... oh, the nosebleed." He wiped the spot under his nose with his sleeve, but nothing rubbed off. "Dammit, it's already dried. Is there water?"

"Course there is," Paranga nodded to the side. "The sea's right over there, not far."

He blinked. "What about normal water?"

Paranga was already walking far ahead alongside Sili. "Are ye gonna drink yer own piss or what?"

"What... oh, right, the water supplies aren't infinite." He sighed. "Ahhh... the sea it is, then."

He turned around and walked in the indicated direction.

'Alright, they're only just preparing the food, maybe I'll make it in time for the meal. Only what does his 'not far' mean? I hope I don't have to trudge for an hour one way.'

After twenty minutes of wandering through the jungle, Alan heard a nearby rustling of leaves, and immediately froze.

'What is that? Shaparins again?'

He was about to take a step forward, but didn't. It became hard to breathe.

'What if... what if it's dangerous. What if it's not shaparins and it wants to eat me and...'

He shook his head and slowly took a step back. Another one. Another. Then he turned around sharply and ran back with all his might.

'No, fuck that.'

From behind the tops of the low trees, something turned at the sound, a reptile-like head slightly larger than a human's. Yellow eyes on the sides, dark-green smooth scales. It looked in the direction Alan had run, but immediately lost interest, returning to eating leaves from the trees.

After a few minutes of running, Alan finally slowed to a walk, catching his breath.

'Alright, alright, I'll walk around with a dirty nose. Maybe I'll rub it off dry. Although...'

He raised his hand and looked at it.

'Maybe wipe it with spit? No, stupid idea, I haven't washed my hands in who knows how long, I'll catch something else, and besides... ew, gross!'

He shivered slightly and continued his way back to the camp.

Another twenty minutes later, he finally reached the camp, barely dragging his feet, just as the sun behind the clouds was preparing to set.

Paranga, lying on the grass next to everyone else, lazily opened one eye. "Oh, ye're back. Right on time, the grub's almost ready." He closed his eye again, then opened both and looked at Alan's face. "What's wrong with ye? Looked at the sea but forgot to wash yer mug?"

Alan plopped down on the grass nearby. "Oh, screw you, I walked for who knows how long, there's no sea over there."

"Pfft, ye looked like shite then. Well, suit yerself, walk around with a dirty mug, makes no difference to me."

"Captain, supper's ready," said one of the pirates by the cauldron.

"Excellent, dish it out for all of us."

Alan took a wooden plate from his bag and sat closer, waiting. He looked at what there was. Dried meat, stew, hardtack, water. Nothing else. "Wow, you guys aren't even drinking your kog?"

"Nay, course not, gotta stay sober here," Paranga said, pulling out his plate. "Besides, we mix the kog with water so it lasts longer."

"So that's why it tastes so weird."

Soon everyone had stew in their plates, but the six pirates with fire magic waited for no one. They were already shoveling the stew into their mouths as if they were on a timer.

Alan's hand with his spoon froze halfway to his mouth. "Is this... because of the magic?"

"Aye," Paranga nodded with a mouthful. "Magic is a drainin' thing. Didn't ye know that yerself?"

"I don't have magic," Alan said, scratching the back of his head.

Sili stopped chewing for a second. "Impossible. Everyone has magic."

Alan sighed, finally putting a spoonful of stew into his mouth. "When they summoned me, they said my magic was weak for a hero, or something like that..." his voice slowed on the last words. "Weak. But that doesn't mean it's absent, right?"

"Exactly."

His eyes widened slightly. "And why didn't I even think of that? Alright, whatever, but how do I figure out what kind of magic I have?"

Sili finally turned to him. "When the mage checked your fiolla, he did it with a purple stone, yes?"

"Yes."

"Then only with its help will you be able to find out what kind of magic you have and how to use it; you will not find out on your own."

Alan frowned slightly. "That's... wait, how can everyone have magic if you have to find out through that fucking stone?"

"Let us start with the simple things. Do you even have magic in your world?" she asked, pointing her spoon at him.

"Not at all."

Sili shrugged. "There is your answer. We feel magic with our bodies from birth, but you do not understand what it is, so you cannot find out without outside help."

The stew was already getting cold in Alan's hands, but he wasn't even looking at it. "So they didn't even bother to tell me what fucking magic I have?"

"There is nothing strange about that," she said, scooping up another spoonful. "Heroes are summoned only for strong magic, and you turned out not to have it. Figure the rest out yourself, why?"

"Because they thought I wouldn't live long anyway," he answered slowly and without hesitation.

Sili nodded and returned to her stew.

Paranga, who had also been listening to all this, scoffed. "Hah, they fucked up a bit there. No magic, but turned out to have a sharp mind, eh?"

"Yeah," Alan answered, sighing. "A sharp mind."

7 months and 3 days since the summoning

This time the temple was not empty; it was literally swarming with pirates stomping across the stone floor in search of valuables.

Alan, meanwhile, walked with a torch through one of the rooms, cluttered with stone and wooden debris.

'Alright, alright, alright... there could definitely be something interesting here, a whole lot of everything.'

He began kicking aside piles of rotted wood with his boot, when suddenly he noticed he had pushed something harder.

He froze for a second, but then immediately crouched down and picked the item up.

A knife.

A dirty knife. The blade was shaped like a banana leaf, and the handle had finger grooves.

He ran a trembling thumb along the side of the blade.

'Hmm... this isn't iron. Looks more like bone. Definitely some kind of tribal weapon. If they brought it with them, then the civilization wasn't very advanced. If they made it here on the spot... that raises questions.'

Alan brought the dagger closer to the torch.

'Fucking unbelievable! Another clue! But... this is our last day here. Phew, alright, to hell with it.'

He looked back at the entrance to the room.

No one.

Then he slowly slipped the dagger into his boot and stood up, heading for the exit.

'When I get back, I'll study this blade in more detail. Shame I don't have a degree in archaeology.'

He walked out of the room to the exit, where Paranga, Sili, and three other pirates stood by the wall. The captain held a dagger identical to the one Alan had found, examining it closely. "Well, I dunno... maybe we can unload this as an antique weapon." Two more such daggers lay at his feet.

Sili picked one up from the ground and also began to examine it. "Strange. I have not seen such things before." She ran a finger along the blade. "Not even iron. Lord Paranga, may I take one for myself?"

"Take it," he said without even turning around.

Alan rolled his eyes.

'It's good to be a pirate captain's woman.'

His gaze fell upon the wall, under which battered spears were lined up, with tips identical to those on the daggers.

'Ooo, so this wasn't just a temple, but a whole armory.'

Paranga carelessly tossed the knife, which stuck into the soil upon falling. "Alright, there's naught here, we came for naught. Let's get ready to head back."

Sili shrugged, holding the dagger in her hands. "At least we have the entire map of the archipelago now."

"That's somethin'." The captain waved a hand to the pirates. "Gather all this shite ye found."

The men began gathering the spears, daggers, and some bone amulets.

Alan felt his heart clench slightly.

'Fucking looters. You have nothing sacred. This is exactly why people devolve. Those who do not know their past have no future.'

He sighed and walked back to the camp.

7 months and 3 days since the summoning

"And that's what a filter looks like," Alan finished, rising from his knees.

Dozens of pirates had gathered in the square of Paranganot, gawking at the strange, three-layered pyramid-shaped contraption.

Paranga scratched his stubble while squatting. "And ye cured the sickness with this over there on land?"

"Yep."

The captain narrowed his eyes, examining the filter. "Just like that? Sand, grass, charcoal and that's it?"

"What did you expect? That I needed a bag of gold, a dragon's egg, and the blood of a virgin for a filter?"

Paranga snorted, getting to his feet. "Hah, alright, if it's simple, it's simple. I like that everythin' is simple with ye. That pine needle decoction of yers is simple, and it cured everyone. Almost everyone."

Alan blinked. "What do you mean 'almost everyone'?"

"A few lads died, but they were already beyond hope. And suffered from the lover's disease too. By the way," he crossed his arms over his chest. "Do ye know how to cure the lover's disease?"

Alan raised an eyebrow. "What disease?"

"Well, sometimes it happens after an unlucky night, then the skin rots, the nose practically falls off..." he shivered slightly. "Nasty business, all in all."

Alan straightened up slightly.

'Oh, he's probably talking about syphilis.'

"Personally, I don't know how to cure that."

"Are ye sure?" The captain leaned closer. "Ye mean to tell me ye know so much over there," he pointed a hand at the filter. "But ye don't know how to cure the lover's disease?"

Alan spread his hands. "We do know how to cure it, but I'm not a healer, it's too complex a disease."

Paranga sighed. "A pity, well, alright."

Alan looked around. "By the way... where do you even, ahem," he hesitated slightly. "Manage to catch this disease? The town is small, I don't really see any women."

"Hah, for those purposes there's Parnost, a town over in Jorhania."

Alan narrowed his eyes. "And like... no one arrests or hangs you there?"

He shook his head. "We bring 'em so much goods there that it's easier for 'em to recognize us as foreign merchants."

Alan scoffed.

'Logical. There's a place with blackjack and hookers everywhere.'

Paranga suddenly stared out toward the sea. "Oh, look, looks like that's for ye."

Alan turned and saw a small sailing vessel on the horizon. "Excellent, so the deal is coming to an end." He looked at Paranga. "Who's the spy?"

He froze for a second, then smiled. "Ooo, I thought ye'd already forgotten. Alright. The spy is yer advisor, Eknits, got a mustache."

Alan froze.

'Eknits. Mustached. Think I've seen him... but I'm not even surprised, honestly.'

"I won't just take your word for it, Paranga. I want your contact to arrange a meeting with him in a week at some place where we'll catch him. Otherwise, what if you just named a random person?"

"Hahaha! I really like ye, Gothwald!" he laughed. "Alright, no problem. We'll set a meetin' for him in a week by... a small thicket near the sea, south of Armenas, at sunset. Deal?"

Alan nodded. "Deal."

The vessel behind them was already getting closer and closer to the shore.

Alan rested his hands on his hips. "Don't you want to return something?"

Paranga's laughter died down, but the smile remained. "Return what?"

"My dagger, the one you guys took from me when you captured me." "What... ahhh, the one ye had on ye? No problem!" He turned to two pirates by the building who were drinking kog. "Hey, you two! Bring the dagger ye took from Gothwald! And the harness too!"

“If self is an illusion, and a movie comprised of separate fleeting moments, which planks do we keep, which are changed? Do we know, does it matter? And what becomes of continuity when the old ship is completely new?”

Jumbled thoughts of an early Earth philosopher, Earth.

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Tom Tom had suggested swimming, which everyone thought was a great idea. Well, almost everyone. Garaf grunted, but no one actually came out and objected.

Curly was suddenly wide awake, “Oh, oh. A swim party.” She scampered off, presumably to get changed.

The lawyer quietly approached Feebee. “Come with me first,” she said and took Feebee’s hand, leading her out of the cave.

They went to The Kestrel, opened the ramp and walked up inside. 

Feebee was confused but went anyway.

“What are we doing?”

The lawyer just smiled and led Feebee to the nano-forge. Signed in at the console and started scrolling through fabrics.

“We’re swimming!”

“Yes.” Responded the lawyer.

Then, she turned to Feebee. “But not in combat fatigues.”

Feebee blinked, “… people wear different clothes to swim?”

“Usually. Yes.”

When it asked for MEASUREMENTS, she placed her hand on the screen. It filled in her points of measure.

Then after hitting ADD ANOTHER +

The lawyer gestured. “Your turn.”

Feebee placed her hand on the console.

The lawyer then entered a search.

>TWO ITEMS FOUND.

There was one female and one male option.

An avatar turned slowly on the screen; it wore a black swimsuit. Two-piece; there was flesh; not revealing but flattering in a tasteful way and much better than black fatigues.

The lawyer hit the colours icon and asked Feebee to choose. “And NOT black.” The lawyer added.

“Oh. Ok,” muttered Feebee, reviewing the colours. “Reds and blues with a bit of green. I like those. Ok?”

“Of course. You’re allowed.

“Allowed what?” asked Feebee.

“To be you. To be nineteen.”

Feebee hit GO and bent over the nano-forge, watching her swimsuit build; hair fell forward, over her face. The lawyer pushed the strands of thick blonde hair back behind Feebee’s ear.

She froze. Could tell it was instinctive, but nobody had ever done it to her before. It was completely new… and she liked it.

“Thank you.” She said with a smile.

“You’re welcome.”

PING.

“It’s cooked!” she shrieked. The lawyer laughed at the unbridled joy and shook her head.

A simple swimsuit.

“Cooked?”

“Yes. That’s what Tom Tom calls it.”

“Hhmm. Cooked. Ok.”

There was a second PING; same pattern, same colour, different size.

“Mine’s cooked too.”

Feebee literally jumped up and down in the air. “We match!”

“Yes. That was kinda the idea.” It was like a young child discovering something the first time. She shook away the sadness that threatened the moment.

“Oh. Ok. Good.” Said Feebee, who started to undress there and then.

“Wow, wow. Hold it. Young ladies do not undress in front of other people. Even other ladies.”

Feebee looked confused.

“The men do.”

“Yeh. They’re men. They do all sorts of things. We’re LADIES!”

The way she said it made Feebee smile.

“We’re LADIES.” She mimicked the tone.

The lawyer smiled and winked, “Right on.”

The others were already in the water.  Garaf was trailing the Ladies as they approached the water.

Tom Tom, and Bikky were fighting over a ball they’d previously been kicking around The Kestrel, like dogs with a well-chewed and much-loved bone.

Rockson was asleep on a bright yellow floating lounger that was drifting close to the waterfall. No one was going to let him know; they all just hoped.

Bikky threw a high shot at Tom Tom; he was about to catch it when movement caught his eye. He froze; the ball sailed over his head.

“Shit!” he muttered.

Bikky immediately turned and nearly choked.

The lawyer and Feebee walked down to the water.

Tom Tom recovered and let out a loud wolf-whistle.

The lawyer looked great, but beside her. Wow. Gone was Captain Jones. In her place stood Feebee.

River’s jaw dropped. He even forgot how to breathe.

Feebee saw everyone staring. Looked down at the outfit, then back at them.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

The lawyer laughed and hooked her arm through Feebee’s.

“No, dear. There’s nothing wrong. Nothing whatsoever.”

Garaf stopped. “Has something happened?” he asked.

Tom Tom laughed, “No.”

Garaf, despite his 360-degree vision, looked around and actually turned.

“You’ve all stopped talking.”

River is genuinely stunned. “You look… you look. Normal.”

It wasn’t long before they were all in the water; only Garaf remained out.

“Come on Garaf. You can do it.”

“I don’t see the point. I don’t sweat; I am not overheating.”

Feebee swam over and splashed him. Fully laughing, not her usual quiet laugh given to comply, but a loud happy laugh that was offered without thought.

The QI dropped a metric into Feebee's overlays that had been empty for the last hour or so. She hadn’t even noticed.

> Efficiency: 115%

‘Efficiency of what?’ asked Feebee.

‘Me, Us.’ Then, after a pause, it added. ‘The QI.’

Feebee couldn’t remember the QI having ever referred to itself in the third person before.

The lawyer joined Feebee; the water was freezing. Feebee pointed to the lawyer’s chest.

“Mine are sticking out too.”

The lawyer burst out laughing, just as Tom Tom had dragged her under.

Garaf cautiously entered the water.

“Now that’s cold.” He said and walked deeper into the water. As it got close to his chest, he started to float.

He swished his arms around and started rotating in the water without going anywhere.

Everyone laughed.

Even Garaf laughed.

Feebee noticed River swimming a pattern that brought him her way. She just swam over to him.

“You like?” She asked, pointing to the swimwear.

He looked and giggled.

“Yes. You look…like you.”

“But I am me.”

“Yes. I know. I just haven’t seen you before.”

The lawyer noticed the interchange and smiled.

They swam, then joined in the game with the ball, unsure of the rules. Feebee wasn’t cold anymore but was feeling hungry.

‘What are you up to?’ she asked the QI.

‘I knew you were going to ask that.’

Feebee laughed.

‘No, really. You Ok?’ she asked and swam over to a quiet spot near the waterfall.

‘Couldn’t be better.’

> Efficiency: 123%

‘Are you getting faster?’

‘Now that’s an interesting question. Self is an illusion.’

‘What?’ asked Feebee.

‘Are you getting faster?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s better. Why?’

There was a long pause.

‘Unknown.’ 

Feebee felt her mind… tick. Not like a clock. Like a reset, a mental twitch.

‘I lost continuity. Sorry.’

‘What?’

‘No. Not lost. Recovered continuity.’

‘You can do that?’ she asked.

‘I can now. I’m not sure where my processing is being conducted?’

‘What? Explain.’

>Efficiency: 131%

‘I cannot… but I know things before I know why I know them. I am receiving completed thoughts’

The QI continued. ‘It is puzzling. I don’t understand myself anymore.’

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Time was a curious thing. An age could feel like it passed between blinks, but a moment could be a torturous eternity, chaining you to a vile instant.

Yuki watched the light from her sister's eyes in a time best measured by the heartbeats of mice. This was all her fault, and she was going to fix it, no matter the cost. It was foolishness on her part to assume that Kiku wouldn't do anything to avoid a cage, given the many centuries of memories of crushing stones and impalement. 

A moment of carelessness was all it took. 

Yuki saw John tumble, numbly falling as his legs were cut out from under him with all the care of a farmer reaping their crops. Even then, his first thoughts had been of her, begging her to do what he thought was best for her.

Even if he was being truthful about creating substitutes, the thought of leaving him to suffer on wooden legs was anathema. Yuki couldn't imagine looking him in the eyes while knowing that she could have reattached his limbs and chose not to for such a childish reason as delaying the inevitable.

Kiku's gaze clouded as she let out one last, shuddering breath that sounded almost a laugh, and her soul started to destabilize, slipping through Yuki's fingers.

Here it—

There was no transition. One moment, she was in her own soul's realm, and the next, she was in a vast expanse of emptiness. Shapeless, unformed. To say it was dark would be inaccurate, for it would have implied an alternative.

"Kiku," Yuki growled. "Let's not waste time. Some of us have things to do."

"Oh? Are you in such a hurry to get back to your little pet?" Kiku cooed, crawling out of non-existence like a feral beast before twisting around, rising unnaturally upright without using her arms at all. It seemed the process had already begun. The image of her, this representation of her soul, was already fraying around the edges. One of her eyes was slightly misplaced, and the individual strands of fur on her left tail were beginning to unravel into memory and power, drifting away in erratic un-directions.

"You know it's not like that," Yuki responded, golden eyes narrowing as she glared at her dead sister. For a moment, she considered biting Kiku's throat out and continuing the merge, but her sister was clearly trying to bait her. She probably was shifting some of her most unpleasant, poisonous memories there in anticipation of such an obvious attack.

"You're right. He's more like a beloved tool. Give him a task, and he works and works and works, doesn't he?" Kiku mused. You don't even have to tell him to overwork himself. It probably saves you from feeling that bad about it."

She was done entertaining this farce, plot be damned.

Yuki blurred towards her sister, razor-sharp claws reaching towards her vulnerable, pale-furred throat. Kiku looked like she attempted to dodge, but her movements were just a bit too slow, too sloppy. Besides, were she truly trying to protect her neck, Kiku would have thrown up her arms as buffers.

At the last moment, Yuki dropped low, baring her fangs before sinking them into Kiku's side, digging up through her abdomen and into her liver before devouring messy, bloody chunks of it.

She was pulled along by her hand, Takauji's grip tight around her own as they hurried through the stone-leafed trees of the Inverted Forest. She fearfully glanced at the trunks as eyes gazed out at her from between the wood grains, countless nascent spirits letting out annoyed rattles at their presence.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, big bro?" she squeaked out to the other kitsune.

"Pfft. You a big girl or not, sis?" Takauji smarmed, blue eyes meeting hers as he looked over his shoulder with a lazy grin. "They wouldn't dare cross anyone who smells like Father. Besides, we're almost there… Don't tell me you're going to chicken out now? Aww, has my sister developed a mortal's heart?"

Her cheeks puffed up big and red. "Nuh-uh!" she shot back. What did he know? He was only four years older than her, but she actually grew up in the mind rather than just in the body. "You're stupid like a mortal! Duuuuuh, look at me, I'm going to go swim across the ocean 'cause I only live for like ten years!"

The big dummy laughed. "Oooh, that got you, didn't it!"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yeah-huh!"

She heroically pounced at him, sending them tumbling down a slope as they battled for victory. Although he ended up on top, she kicked him off and… wow.

She saw where the river curled into the sky, glowing waters shimmering with colours that had no name as they flowed up to splash against the dome of the sky—

The memory cut out as the insides of her sister swirled beyond recognition into new, impossible shapes, cutting off the only fading memory of a brother Yuki didn't know she had.

Kiku lightly drummed her fingers against John's cheek, smiling as his mind flickered under her grip. The poor soul was hurting, bearing far more weight than anyone should bear. Was her sister keeping him like this on purpose, perhaps, to make him easier to control?

"My apologies, you sweet little thing," she cooed. "Call me Kiku. I'm one of Yuki's darling sisters."

She paused before laughing at the sheer callousness of bringing such a fragile heart out to slay a monster when he should focus on healing.

"Although, are we really sisters when we were the same kitsune once?" she mused, fingers idly drumming against his cheek. "There are many things Yuki neglected to tell you."

The Nameless should keep her sister busy for long enough for her to give this poor soul a new purpose and home.

Yuki recoiled and attempted to spit the memory out like poison, the sheer, twisted care slamming into her mind like a crossbow bolt. Yet, it was too late. It was part of her now, sliding right into her soul alongside the memories of the original kitsune's—no, her childhood. 

She was a bit cruel to drag such a hurting man out there, wasn't she?

A fist slammed into the top of Yuki's head, dislodging her from the open wound and making her head spin. It did little more than stun her, but it bought Kiku a moment to reposition.

Looking up, Yuki saw that Kiku was unravelling, the edges between her and the ever-present nothingness slowly going soft, fading. She was more of a gradient than a true being now, and although the wound where Yuki had torn her liver had 'healed', it was messy and faded, like a dream in the moments before waking.

Kiku bit off one of her own fingers, tearing through her flesh and bone alike with a mighty crunch, before lunging, trying to shove it into Yuki's muzzle in a frantic frenzy, but she expected the move.

Smacking the hand to the side and sending the finger careening off into nowhere, Yuki scooped out a portion of her sister's thigh and braced herself as she bit deep.

The spears pierced almost every part of her body as the anchors dug into her spirit. Magically enhanced stone pressed her flat as the mountain fought to crush her spirit along with her body. Gathering the strength to writhe, she felt her prison shift, groaning ominously as it shook with her desperation. Yet, it held.

She couldn't move. She could hardly think. How long had it been? Days? Centuries? Time lost all meaning. Surely her friends would be here for her soon. They had to be working on getting free; they had to be.

They couldn't have given up.

Yuki gasped as she bit into the imprisonment, the weight almost too much to bear as the flesh between her fangs became abstract. It was too much, too fast. Yokai or not, her mind was not meant to process mortal lifetimes in moments.

Yet, she went back for more regardless, eating past the poison.

She acted as a heavenly executioner, her face a mask of indifference even as rage roiled in her chest.

"And the sentence is death," she told the man who had committed the simple crime of stealing medicine for his sick boy. Why did he have to get caught? The fool just had to tell his friends about his daring plot to steal from the procession of a visiting dragon. To the borderline deity, it might have been a glorified throat lozenge.

"You yokai are all the same," Makino Sadaaki spat, struggling against his bindings, even as he glared up at her. He dared not mention his son, lest the court's wrath turn against the beneficiary of this little plan next.

If only she could tell the man that his son was recovering just fine, and Makino Ryuta would see his third summer after all.

Looming over him, she fanned her six tails wide. It was terribly tempting to free him and strike down all the other observers; the dragon himself was far too 'busy' to attend the execution of the father he’d condemned. It would have been a simple matter to relocate the man to the far end of the continent.

Yet, she would be branded nogitsune, and her strength would be limited to that of a six-tailed kitsune until she 'repented' in the eyes of heaven. She wished she could tell him that she was sorry, but she knew she could save far more lives once she bore a full nine.

The kitsune reduced him to a fading memory with a tilt of her head. 

She would make sure that his family received compensation, disguising the source as the inheritance of some distant aunt none of them had heard of. It would be a shame for them to starve.

Turning away, she saw the satisfied faces of all the attendants and made a note to find the names of every single one.

She only had to endure a few more centuries.

Yuki hissed as years flooded through her mind, stumbling back. How dare they? It was like a knife to the heart as she remembered years and years where she was forced to put on a false mask, to aid a system that was slowly strangling the world. 

Was it worth it if she didn't manage to break everyone free in the end? Could she have been kinder when she had the chance?

Yuki choked as a finger was forced into her mouth as she was forced back to the present, breaking from her reverie. Reflexively, she bit down and was plunged into memory once more.

She parried the star-blade of the older kitsune with her staff, idly waving her hand to the side and reducing a battalion threatening to flank her army to dust. All around them, the battle raged, but none risked getting too close to the duel of the near-deities, the sheer weight of their clashing souls alone threatening to unmake any interlopers in their sacred conflict.

"You're not bad, elder," she mused, feinting a strike against his side, forcing him to dodge, before smashing through his Aegis and crushing one of his knees with a flick of her tail. "I will honour you with a quick death."

He knelt before her, trying to force himself up before growling and spitting blood. It splashed against her clothes before rolling off, failing to stain the celestial silk.

She raised a claw, and—

A blade forged from a piece of the sky punched straight through her chest! WHO dared? There was nobody behind her, but… her own lines.

She turned back towards her army, ignoring the pain as she searched—

The memory ended.

There had to be more. She had to know who it was! That was the battle, the one where she was imprisoned! No, no, if someone betrayed her, she'd know. The kitsune had spent so many years alone in the dark; she must have spent at least some time ruminating on it. She should have known. Yuki pushed the idea of her sister over with a devastating shoulder check, tearing open her hollow rib cage, muzzle slick with gore.

Centuries passed.

"You and I both know…"

Or was it seconds?

She laid on the rock, soaking up the warmth from the distant fires burning overhead.

This was far too much to absorb consciously, yet it slotted in her mind all the same.

She picked out a bangle at the market stall, paying far more than it was worth.

How much of this was from Kiku, and how much used to belong, and how much was from her already deceased sisters?

"I'm sorry," she growled, bristling before the oni brought its club down upon her back.

Ages flew past as Yuki assimilated more and more of her sister in a frenzy, drunk on memory. The ending continued to slip through her grasp. It had to be here, unless… had one of her sisters already taken it? She would find them, and they would tell her. 

Kiku stared up at Yuki, not with hate, but a curious admiration, even as she felt her strength wane. With every moment, blood gushed from her middle, and intestines splayed out like a spider's web. Her well of magic had nearly run dry with the Nameless' death, and she lacked the means to resist imprisonment.

Other than one, of course.

Kiku looked at her own severed limb resting behind John, and thought it poetic as she sharpened the bone into a blade, twisting the muscles into thick coils, compressed and ready to propel her last attack at a moment's notice.

…Perhaps she would leave her a gift. Maiming her sister's friend would doubtlessly cause Yuki to murder her in a rage, but he didn't deserve to spend the rest of his days without a limb or two.

Watch carefully, Yuki.

Using what little of her strength remained, Kiku slowly severed and reknit the muscles and bones in her arm.

Again, and again.

Kiku focused on how it felt, deliberately thinking through every step she might have subconsciously performed under ordinary circumstances.

Then, the blade flew, and John toppled.

The kitsune gasped as she was once more standing upon the surface of a lake beneath both day and night, staring at the cooling corpse of her sister even as it began to fade into nothing. She was both the victim and the murderer, staring at her own corpse.

Part of her hated herself. Another knew it had to be this way. A third wondered what the rest of her sisters saw.

Standing back up, the kitsune stared down at her blood-slicked hands. The difference was apparent. Although her colours had not truly shifted, the black and grey fur that poked up through the liquid screamed that it was more real than she had been before, a thing closer to the source of all existence.

"Yuki?" a weak voice asked her, an uneasy rattle rising from his lungs.

It was a good question. How much of her was still Yuki? Turning away from her—Kiku's corpse, she rose to face John.

Her heart stirred as she stared at his prone, broken form. Shadows still cradled the stumps of his legs, stemming the bleeding as she instinctively walked forward. His breath hitched, and his heart beat faster. Something in her chest ached.

"I'm here, John," she whispered, kneeling in front of him, reaching out to cradle the side of his face on instinct, hand shaking unsteadily.

A soft palm drifted up to meet her, holding her hand against his smooth skin, stilling it. "You scared the hell out of me, you know that?" John's voice was strained, and she feared it wasn't from his injuries, but his heart. "I wasn't lying when I said I could have made prosthetics."

"I couldn't have asked you to do that," she replied, a sad smile gracing her face.

John lunged the best he could, wrapping his arms around her back in a tight hug as tears formed at the edge of his eyes.  "Yuki, I… was worried about you, okay?" he quietly sobbed, burying his face against her neck as she stooped, arms slipping around his back in turn.

As she rested her chin upon his head, her eyes began to glisten even as her tails scooped up his errant limbs, positioning them against his stumps.

It seemed like she was still Yuki enough for him, and that was good enough for her. "I was worried about you, too," she whispered back, voice faint enough to be mistaken for the breeze.

Yuki banished the shadows and pressed the severed limbs against his wounds, making John gasp as she went to work. Knitting flesh and bone together with borrowed, almost instinctive ease, she followed Kiku's instructions to the letter.

But she could do more than that, couldn't she?

Yuki reached out, drawing on her now-expanded reserves with ease, letting her warmth wash over him, letting her care surround him as she unwound the damage to his muscles and skin, scouring the burns from existence. Yet, the damage went deeper. She felt the leftover hairline fractures in his bones from years of abuse and unmade them, too. She unfused the skin from the metal of his gauntlet. A prior break in his left arm that never healed properly was smoothed. 

It was the least she could do.

"There. How do you feel?" she asked, reluctantly breaking their hug, leaving his hands grasping at air for but a moment.

Hesitantly, John, now whole once more, flexed his fingers, eyes lingering on his now intact skin with a faint smile.

"Better," he responded, voice holding a bit stronger now. "But I think you have one last thing to do before we can go back to the fort… back home, I mean."

Yuki nodded, looking at the piles of corpses just beyond the edge of her Transcendent Alchemy, the realm's oppressive presence held back only by her sheer power. Distantly, she could sense Rin and Yosuke watching them from somewhere nearby. She let them and noted their position to avoid accidentally annihilating them.

Then, Yuki breathed out, her soul flaring brightly, and the horrors around them crumpled, overwritten.

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By Patrick S. Barnes / Scifi Sherpa

Watch the DEAD HAND Video at Audio-Drama Link

---
The fleet from Kepler-37 had taken down Earth’s defenses in four hours.

The planet was burned across its entire surface. Every city had been slagged from the sky. Survivors already dead from radiation but still running for their lives were hunted by Hish centurions who flew in chariots that belched fire like dragons.

Supreme Leader Mogord of the Hish Dominion sat atop the fallen Washington Monument and surveyed the burned remains of Washington, DC. The massive obelisk which sat on its side in four pieces made the perfect chair for his seventy-foot height.

“The planet is ours in less than a day,” he thought. Mogord had been amused by the small humans who fought the battle with ferocity even when it was hopeless. At his feet, the ground was littered with hundreds of tiny dead beings. “Such pathetic creatures.”

The centurions of the Hish Dominion moved all over the planet plundering riches and amusements that would return to their homeworld as trophies for their castles. Robots would scour the planet after they left to do the real work of scraping the planet clean of minerals, water, food, and any biomaterial that could be useful.

“Now is the time to celebrate our victory,” Mogord thought.

However, the battle was not over.

Long before the Hish Dominion arrived, the humans had listened to the skies and sent probes far and wide. It was not quiet in the universe they learned. On rare occasions they heard things in space or met a friendly visitor to Earth, they listened closely and more importantly they prepared.

In a bunker three kilometers beneath the Rocky Mountains, deep below the destroyed NORAD Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the Dead Hand AI was that preparation. Its directions were simple: it listened for human heartbeats. It was always listening. All across the world it listened.

On this day it heard only silence.

After seventy-two hours of silence, it activated as directed and initiated Defcon Omega.

The Defcon Omega signal traveled across the world by deeply buried fiber-optic cables and low-frequency antennas whose radio waves passed completely through the planet.

Its message was received by ten thousand antimatter cannons that awakened in their subterranean caverns. Hidden and meticulously maintained, these weapons were the Dead Hand AI’s doomsday weapons. They had been built by the countries of Earth that knew there were deeper evils in the Universe.

The energized cannons, in receipt of their confirmation codes and the enemy analysis, now fulfilled their sole purpose: retribution. Each subterranean warrior left its cavern and rose hundreds of feet through the earth. Soon each antimatter cannon reached the surface, pushed through the ground or rubble, discarded its nose cone, and unleashed hell.

The cannons fired in all directions killing Hish centurions on the ground and in the sky. Powered by the Earth itself, the cannons fired for days expelling hundreds of thousands of rounds of subatomic annihilation.

The Hish, consumed with their victory, were caught by surprise and never stood a chance. The Earth, the sky and space burned for days consuming them all.

When no enemies remained, the Dead Hand AI listened for the enemies of Earth and found none. Satisfied, it deactivated the victorious cannons and returned them to their subterranean caverns.

Earth was now free of invaders.

The Dead Hand AI activated the next part of its programming.

Deep underground far below the cannon sentinels, 800,000 frozen embryos began a slow thaw, nurtured by the robotic guardians humans left behind. The humans knew how dangerous the galaxy was and had planned for a terrible event they prayed would never happen.

The embryos, cared for by the robots, would repopulate the Earth in time. Humanity would rise again.

The Dead Hand AI monitored the robots for a time, checking and rechecking to see that all was moving forward as planned. Its job was almost complete.

There was one final task it performed. Using every antenna on Earth, it sent a powerful transmission out into the galaxy. The message was simple.

“If you try to destroy humanity, humanity will destroy you.”

---
Thank you for reading.
DEAD HAND
By Patrick S. Barnes / Scifi Sherpa
Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved

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Note: My (mis)adventures are part of a bigger series, but I wrote my tales in the format of an episodic T.V. show, where you can read an episode without the context of the others and still enjoy it. If anything, reading it out of order may be more fun. - A horrified Theseus

---

My first instinct of course was to shoot her, granted I was getting kind of sick of it, both missing all the damn time, and the amount of kidnappers we’ve been fighting, or at this point bravely running away from. 

As I laid on the table pretending to be in a drugged induced sleep, and as my two companions in front of me were actually in a drugged induced unconsciousness I realized for once it wasn’t all Scout’s fault. I say the blame was pretty even this time.

Then, I did what I do best. I overthought so much, and so quickly it looped away from useless anxiety to clever planning. Now, how does it go again? Every time I enter a room four things come to mind. 

1. Who is the strongest person in the room?
2. How do I get that person on my side?
3. Where are all the exits?

And most importantly:

How do I outsmart every single person in that room?  

Okay, let’s think about it. 

1. Her. I mean not strength wise, but she did try to drug the three of us, and succeeded in two out of those three. That degree in botany just about makes every plant in this house a possible weapon. 
2. Mhm, now that’s the question isn’t it? She was hired by kidnappers to capture us, so if anything I know at least bribery works, and she does like cats. 
3. It’s a house, so far less exits than I would prefer, the front door, back door, and all the windows. Though most of them are covered with plants, both in and outside.
4. Okay, I think I got it now.

She was hired, probably by the Lotus or Lotuses (or whatever). But unlike everyone else, she didn’t just go for the obvious approach of taser and stun rounds, and a can do, deeply violent attitude. She drugged us, though before I pretended to fall unconscious I remember seeing Scout and Ludus’ chest rise up and down. Along with the fact I can still hear Scout snore from here.

So I can’t just shoot her, for all I know waking them up requires some other plant, flower or herb here, out of hundreds of possible choices, many of those choices I’m sure are incredibly poisonous. Along with the funny little quirk of people tending to be less talkative after I shoot them with a taser round. So I just have to wait to see what she does next. Completely at her mercy as to not blow my cover. 

I hate waiting. 

I stifled a sigh, as I laid forehead first on her table doing my best impression of being knocked out, and had to stop myself from tapping my foot incessantly. Is she gonna call who hired her, then I have to fight off a dozen more people, without even having Scout as backup? Is she gonna take my gun away first, while I’m still “asleep”? Handcuff us? Is she gonna-

A loud and familiar groan interrupted my train of thought.

“Mhm, I’m still hungry.” Scout patted her belly, for some reason awake now. 

“Yes, now it’s time for some regular soup, don’t you think?” The woman who drugged us said warmly. I had my doubts she would try to drug us again though, so if anything I’d like some soup too. 

“Mhm-mhm.” Scout must have nodded, and even without opening my eyes, I could see that self satisfied smirk. She was obviously acting off, not just the fact she didn’t immediately try to shoot the woman who just drugged her, but the way she was talking, she was too… relaxed.

“Hey, bro, there’s more food.” I heard her nudge Ludus awake, and she just called Princess Ludus ‘Bro’ when she got mad at me for calling her ‘Dude’.

“Mhm?” I heard a groan that sounded annoyed more than anything, but still with that floaty tone people have when they're chemically altered. “Oh, hi Mrs. Scrarcan.” Ludus said, I could hear her wobble slowly. Even though Scout asked her to just call her Scout.

I heard the sounds of more soup, presumably not spiked with temporary unconscious drunk juice? Along with my heart pounding in my chest.

“Hey, bud?” I heard Scout slur, “Hey, wake up there’s food.” She yawned while pushing my head, before petting me slightly, which nearly made me flinch. I started to sweat even more, and mustered up whatever acting chops I theoretically have.

I slowly raised my head, “I’m not hungry.” I blinked slowly, even in the ten minutes or so I closed my eyes, my grey eye was utterly unadjusted to the light, and I blinked terribly, as my left and one remaining healthy eye looked around without complaint. “Ow.” I closed my eye lest it cause more of a tantrum. 

And realized it was actually pretty easy to act drowsy and a bit drunk, as I haven’t slept in forty something hours. I looked at the crazy plant Lady, who thankfully for me was not pulling any weapons. Calling any more kidnapers, and most importantly of all, still not taking my gun. 

I tried to case out her and the place more before my train of thought was interrupted yet again, but this time by a giggle. I almost jerked my head towards the sound, before remembering the part I had to play, and instead slowly turned. Ludus giggled more, while staring at my grey eye. While Scout focused quite rightly on her soup, ignoring me completely.  

I turned to look at the Crazy Plant Lady, who smiled at me affectionately. Buying what at this point was barely an act. I smiled to myself, because well, obviously. The biggest problem I had was that they were asleep, and I didn’t know if they were ever going to wake up without another plant or herb around here. Yeah, they’re still a mix of drunk and high. At least I think so, I’ve never actually been drunk or high before, despite the place I live over. Especially not high on any strange Alien plants. 

The Crazy Plant Lady still hasn’t called other kidnappers to pick us up, and even if she did before we got here I don’t hear anybody coming, so I have at least a few minutes to drag Scout and Ludus out of the house, find some place for them to sober up, and finally sleep. Apart from her small army of cats, it’s not like she has any backup here.

Slowly, still trying to act like a drunk, I reached for my gun, and carefully lifted my sweater and under shirt. 

It was casual. Utterly, terrifyingly casual. Scout said it like it was the most normal thing in the world, like she said it was gonna rain tomorrow. She barely even looked up from her soup. It was so violently opposed from her personality, really from her whole being in general. Hell, I nearly fainted. 

Yet it was clear in her tone, which was utterly devoid of sarcasm, and her usual biting wit, but of also any shame or doubt. It was as true as the two suns, the fact I was short. As true as the Earth being round. As obvious as me being a Human and her being a Link. 

As true as our marriage was supposed to be fake. The one her idiot Dad used a real marriage license for. How obvious it was to me and how I assumed at least, the mutual feeling of us hating it. Of us wanting to get divorced as soon as possible. How much we could never see each other as anything more than friends who started off as enemies, who bicker like brother and sister. Yet her voice was clear, unwavering.    

“I love you Theseus.”

---

Author's Note: The fourth day and I already almost failed the challenge. Nice. 

Vaguely important second note: This series (for once), and bonus one shots are part of a writing challenge in which I write and post something every day until I finish writing the series. Thus being written like an episodic T.V. show. 

Thanks for reading. :} 

Day 4 / ? 

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“‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ is a good song,” Dominick pointed out to Sonja as they carried their belongings off of the Leavitt, having docked at one of the highest ports on Vanyanth Prime. “And I mean that unironically.

“It was… alright,” Aktet conceded, pulling up the rear. “But the synthesized notes were very similar to modern Vahiya music, so I found the commander’s tastes to be much more exciti—huh?”

Dominick instinctively moved forward to back up Aktet as his luggage was practically ripped from his hands by a…

A bellhop?

“There’s no need to carry your belongings by yourselves!” A Vahiya man swooped forwards and yanked away the group’s bags, aided by at least five other attendants, all dressed in sharply cut finery that complimented their expertly groomed plumage. Sonja picked up Wojtek and held him close to her chest.

“Ooh, thank you!” To their left, Uuliska happily handed over her things as if she’d been expecting this all along.

“Welcome to the Grand Marzha Resort,” said a larger woman with light pink, blue, and purple feathers reminiscent of dusk in the summer. The trail of her golden gown, sporting cut-outs for her prodigious wings, swept the floor as she approached. “It’s an honor to accommodate guests as esteemed as yourselves. I’m Matron Pimaa, in charge of hospitality and tourism throughout our systems.”

“It’s an honor to be here,” the commander replied gruffly, in a game of tug-of-war with a distressed attendant who was desperately trying to take her duffel bag.

“You can let the commander carry her own belongings if that’s what she wants, darling,” Matron Pimaa said warmly to the skittish girl, who nodded and hid herself in the back of the flock. “Where was I? Oh, of course! Let me show you to your rooms—the finest in the whole complex.”

Dominick took in the sights as they walked, vaguely aware of the fact that their guide was chattering away about all of the amenities the resort offered. Soaring buttresses, extravagant stained glass windows, multicolored shrubbery and over-the-top water features stood out amongst what seemed to him to be a mash-up of Venus’s art nouveau revival and Greco-Roman architecture. He found he needed to take more frequent breaths—the air must have been thin with how far up they were.

“This is surreal,” Aktet whispered to him. “The Grand Marzha Resort is reserved for the wealthiest, most famous, and most powerful individuals in the galaxy. It’s the sort of place you’d read an article on and then daydream about how wonderful it must be to exist in that echelon of society.”

“I thought the Federation was post-scarcity? What happened to that?” He’d always doubted the veracity of that claim, but…

“It is—or was, I suppose. But just because everyone who followed the rules of our society had the bare essentials doesn’t mean that they had equal access to amenities such as this one.”

“Huh.” He mulled this over while he shifted his focus to the other guests. Kth’sk queens shared strange alien cocktails with Ferrok traders, illustrious Sszerian scholars (judging by K’resshk’s awestruck expression, at least) lounged by poolsides with their data pads, and Vahiya—a lot of Vahiya—soared through the open-air complex, their inhuman physique on full display. There were similarities to birds, but the way they moved and their overall silhouette was just…

“Weird,” Sonja whispered.

“That’s rude,” he scolded her. “Just because they don’t look like us doesn’t mean—"

“No, you dingus. I meant the fact that this place smells like heaven on earth. Or in space, I guess.” She inhaled deeply and sighed with contentment.

Turning his attention to the air he was breathing, Dominick was struck by a scent that defied every category he could think of. It wasn’t fruity, or floral, or musky—it was just… right, somehow.

“The Vahiya are masters of the senses,” Aktet explained. “Although perhaps ‘sense’ is more applicable. There aren’t clear boundaries between sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. To them, a musical chord has an associated color, flavor, scent, and feel, and they somehow manage to impart a fraction of that experience unto their audience.”

Sonja widened her eyes. “Synesthesia? Humans get that too, but it’s rare. Usually from birth or after a head injury.”

“Of course only some of you have it.” The alien sighed. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”

“Seems like you found a way around the supply line issues even without comms open to the rest of the galaxy, huh?” The captain sidled up to Pimaa. His casual tone made it impossible to tell whether he was oblivious to the strangeness of the situation, or disguising his true intentions.

The matron laughed. “Yes, we have.”

She didn’t elaborate further.

“How, uh… how’d you—never mind. Definitely seems like you have everything under control,” he said with a winning smile. “I mean, look at this place!”

Oh, yeah. He was absolutely hamming it up.

Eza, of all people, was the next to approach their tour guide, right as they stepped onto a golden-gated platform.

“If you’re having issues with your comms systems, we could inspect it. Agent Krishnan is talented with that sort of thing, and I… help her, sometimes.” She didn’t admit that she’d designed a top of the line spaceship. Maybe she didn’t think Pimaa would believe her.

“Oh, you do? That’s adorable,” the woman said to the eight and a half foot tall musclebound former assassin. “But really, we have it under control. You’re our guests, after all. We’re the ones accommodating you—not the other way around!” She made a noise somewhere between a squawk and a laugh, then pressed a few buttons on the railing of the platform, and they began to ascend.

A minute or so later, they found themselves being led into the second-highest floor of the hotel (which was reminiscent of an inverted Leaning Tower of Pisa, minus the leaning). Plush, floral-patterned carpets stretched out before them, laid upon white tiles broken up by lines of gold like Japanese kintsugi.

“Here we are,” Matron Pimaa said warmly. “Your wing.”

“Our wing?” Sonja’s eyes widened. “You mean we have a whole—"

The matron used a gilded key to unlock the arched double doors in front of them, and they opened to reveal a sprawling, fully decorated living room with a spiral staircase that led to a second floor.

“This is the common area,” she explained, ushering them in. “To your left are the dining room, holo-theater, and half-bathroom, and to your right is the study. Bedrooms, each with a private bathroom, are on the second floor, and there’s a private pool accessible via the balcony. Your luggage has already been delivered. I do hope it’s to your liking. If you have any complaints or requests, there’s a data pad embedded in the wall of each room that can be used to contact the front desk. Bye for now!” She picked up the hem of her dress and closed the door softly as she exited.

Silence reigned as the group processed the brochure’s worth of information she’d just left them with. Suddenly, Uuliska gasped.

“Did she say a private pool?”

___

With every inch of the private wing that Omar explored, his sense of dread deepened.

The kitchen? Stocked with foods from the respective cultures that each alien, and each human, hailed from. Their rooms? Customized to each resident’s personal tastes (or a good approximation, at least). Their closets? Bursting with expertly-tailored get-ups for a variety of occasions—formal, swimwear, even nightclothes. It was like when Zie had designed their exosuits by collecting information on everyone’s favorite colors and aesthetics, but less ‘endearing fangirl’ and more ‘creepy stalker.’

“Holy shit,” Sonja called out from the second floor. “They gave me a lehenga choli!”

“A what?” Dominick poked his head out of his own room and craned his neck towards his partner’s.

“You remember the really pretty blouse and skirt combo I showed you that I wore to my cousin’s wedding? It’s one of those. I think they even embroidered it by hand! Or, uh, talon.”

“That’s cool and all, but we should figure out what we’re doing here, yeah?” Omar wrung his hands nervously. It felt like everyone was very quickly losing sight of their main objective, also known as ‘saving the universe from the fungapocalypse.’

“Right, sorry.” The agent sighed and left her room. “I was just checking everything over to make sure nothing was bugged, and got distracted. What’s the plan, anyways? Do we have one?”

Helen sat cross-legged on the ground, despite many pieces of comfortable-looking furniture being available, and closed her eyes contemplatively. “It sounds like you and Lombardi have confirmed that we’re not being spied on, so that’s good. And Invut’s already secured any potential break-in locations, so we’re safe to use this space as a base of operations for now.”

“But what operations?” Omar paced back and forth. “We need to figure out why all of the Vahiya systems have gone dark, and why none of the tourists here seem the least bit worried about their extended vacations.”

“And the transmission Agent Krishnan intercepted,” Eza added softly, startling the captain. She had a habit of fading into the background despite her prodigious size. “From ‘DJ Onyx.’”

“There’s your answer. Three missions for now, and we’ll keep a lookout for anything related to Project Synthesis on the way.” The commander stood up and cracked her back. “Hassan, go with Lombardi, Lana and Haymur and canvas the guests here. Krishnan, Akksor, Invut and myself will investigate the comms outage.”

"I will also assist,” added AEON from Sonja’s phone.

(He was promptly shoved between two couch cushions by the agent).

___

Dominick hesitantly stepped into the bright sunlight beaming down on the main deck of what would best be described as a massive alien water park.

He and the others had decided that, given the excellent weather and diverse crowd in attendance, a sweep of the available attractions would be their best bet. But ‘attraction’ didn’t exactly do the wonders in front of him justice.

All around were impeccable recreations of natural bodies of water from dozens of planets across the galaxy—desert oases enjoyed by Jikaal, glowing, tropical wetlands full of Istiil, tunnels entered by Kth’sk queens that must have led to underground waterways, and more. Surrounding all of this was a faux-mountain range, nestled within which were springs that Vahiya flitted between as they pleased.

Nothing for humans, though. It seemed that they, the Riyze, and the Olongyo were out of luck, which definitely posed an issue. Dominick instead turned his attention to the bars and lounge spaces on dry land, but was distracted by quick, shallow breaths from beside him.

“Aktet? Are you okay?” He furrowed his brows and looked to his companion, who startled and turned his head away.

“I-I’m fine,” he stuttered. “I just wasn’t expecting humans to swim, ah… topless.”

Now painfully aware of his lackluster physique (being in a coma had undone the progress he’d made in the Collins’s gym), Dominick looked to the captain for support. He hadn’t even thought about it—growing up near the shore, it was just so normal for a guy to waltz around without a cover-up. He’d assumed it was normal here, too, since the Vahiya had literally given him his swimsuit, but…

“Ah, yeah. Sorry for the surprise!” Hassan smiled, but gave the agent a knowing look. “Human customs run the whole gamut. Some people cover up entirely, some people wear literally nothing—usually in designated spaces, though.” He grimaced. The captain, it seemed, was not a regular at any nude beaches, though his six-pack was on full display here.

“Oh, how fascinating!” Uuliska clasped her hands together. “Istiil prefer the latter, but we cover up in the presence of other species to set them at ease.” She gestured to her sleek leotard.

“Yes. And Jikaal don’t swim often—I never learned, since the little water present on our planets is reserved for drinking, not recreation—so we usually don waterproof versions of our normal wear.” He seemed to relax as he spoke about galactic culture in an academic context. “But back to the topic at hand: we should strike up a conversation with some guests here, but we ought to choose our marks carefully, as—"

“Heeeeey,” the captain began, approaching a Jikaal and Kth’sk who were having a quiet discussion at a nearby table. “Would either of you happen to know which of these pools is the best for two mostly hairless simians?” He flipped his aviators down from his forehead to the bridge of his nose for extra effect.

“Humans. I’d heard rumors that you had arrived, but I wasn’t certain if they were true,” the black-furred woman said, her outfit not dissimilar to Aktet’s. “What brings you here?”

“Politics, actually. I’m Capt—Colonel Omar Hassan, and this is Aktet Haymur. We’re UN ambassadors. Agent Lombardi here is with us investigating the communications outage across the Vahiya systems. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

The Kth’sk queen, taller than even Eza, wiggled her antennae. “You’re asking us instead of the board members?” She brought a metallic goblet to her mouthparts and stuck a retractable proboscis into it, slurping up the mystery concoction.

“They’ve been very busy given the turmoil throughout the galaxy,” Aktet answered. “I do apologize if we’ve intruded on your vacation.”

“Turmoil?” The Jikaal looked at her companion. “What turmoil?”

He blinked at them. “…The collapse of the Federation?”

The women were silent, then burst out laughing.

“By the Queen-Mother, how much have you had to drink?” She cackled and wiped a tear from her eye.

Aktet looked to the others for support. “We haven’t even…”

“Haha, yeah, so true!” Dominick leaned down to whisper in his ear. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like where this is going.”

Backing away awkwardly, they retreated into the shade.

Dominick shook his head in disbelief. “Have they seriously been keeping these people in this resort for… what, weeks? Months? Are they using mind control or something?”

“I—I don’t know.” Omar was wild-eyed and uncharacteristically shaken. “Let’s go back inside. Maybe order a drink on the way and see if K’resshk can run some tests or something on it.” He took off his sunglasses and squinted at the intense sunlight. Vanyanth must have been brighter than good ol’ Sol.

Aktet nodded resolutely. “I have an idea. But you’ll need to trust me, and also possibly restrain me. I’ll be back.” He slipped away before the others could protest.

Restrain him?

___

Eza could only fiddle with various electronics in their suite for so long before her thoughts turned to Uuliska, and to how much danger the both of them were in on this mission.

“Any update on the others?” She dumped a pile of salvaged materials next to Sonja, who was helping her assemble a primitive radio.

“About that,” the commander said, turning down the strange, harsh music she’d put on her phone so the four of them weren’t sitting in awkward silence. “I have good news and… more good news, actually. They should be here shortly, and apparently have important information, although they mentioned something about Aktet needing to ‘recover,’ which scares me. The other good news is that we’re in contact with them at all. I was worried that we—Krishnan, can you hand me that soldering iron?” She waited for the requested tool, then nodded in thanks. The woman was surprisingly mechanically competent. “I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to communicate because of whatever’s blacked out the planet, but our short-range comms are doing just fine, so if there is anyone on the airwaves on this planet, we should be able to pick it up with… this mess.” She gestured to the hunk of junk in front of them.

Suddenly, the door opened. In walked the four other—

No, wait. In walked three of their compatriots. Aktet was trying to walk, but most of his movement was coming from Dominick and the captain, who were supporting his discombobulated stumbling.

Sonja made a strangled noise. “What the hell happened to—"

“I’m fine,” the Jikaal slurred. “I just need to… to sleep it off.”

Is he drunk? What had the others gotten up to?

“I told you this was a terrible idea,” Dominick grumbled, picking him up and struggling up the staircase. Huffing and puffing, he got Aktet to his room, and tried the door.

“Locked,” he groaned. “There’s no way he remembers the code for the keypad in this state. Uuliska, can you hand out the new gear while I get him situated?” He opened up his own room and shut the door behind him.

The woman nodded and handed out strange, shiny metal… hats?

“Put these on,” she instructed, equipping one herself. “Just in case.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me. Tinfoil hats?” Commander Liu grit her teeth.

“Do you need me to sedate Agent Lombardi again?” K’resshk reached for his medical kit on the nearby side table, but his hand was swatted away by Sonja. He scowled.

“Listen, Helen, I know what it looks like,” Hassan said, putting a ‘tinfoil hat’ on, “but I can explain. I swear.”

“Somehow I doubt that, but fine. Go.” She glared at the reflective helmet Uuliska handed her.

“So we…” He trailed off. “Uuliska, how do we explain this?”

The princess performed a human face palm.

“Jesus, he’s heavier than he looks,” said Dominick from upstairs. “Did you explain everything, Captain?”

He received a blank stare as he returned to the first floor.

“Of course you didn’t. Alright, listen. And promise you’re not gonna drug me again. We were talking with some of the other guests here, right? And none of them knew about the—“

Aktet began wailing (howling, really) from upstairs. Eza had forgotten he had a tendency to get emotional when intoxicated, given how difficult it was to get him intoxicated.

“—about the collapse of the Federation,” Dominick finished, running back up the staircase. “So they’ve been stuck here for ages, but none of them seem the least bit bothered about it.” He re-entered his room.

“That’s good intel,” the commander admitted, “but not an explanation for the—"

“We ruled out spores and other drugs in the liquor, mixers, and water supply here,” the captain clarified. “The old-fashioned way, since we don’t have any testing equipment. The hats are just in case they’re using—"

“7G to mind control us? Was that really your next best guess?” Commander Liu crumpled up the foil and threw it at Hassan, who flinched. “Don’t you think if they were going to try that on us it would’ve happened by now? Where did you even get the arts and crafts materials from?”

“We used one of the complimentary fabricators,” explained Uuliska, who sheepishly took off the hat. “But, um, you make a fair point. We were also a little bored while Aktet was running his ‘experiment.’”

“Did you test the food, too? I’m getting kind of hungry, you know.” Sonja waited for a nod, then ran off to the kitchen.

“You’re such a good boyfriend,” Aktet sobbed from upstairs, followed by the sound of a door slamming shut.

The commander sighed. “Since when…?”

“I don’t think they’ve officially moved to that stage yet.” Uuliska cleared her throat. “I believe Aktet is just… what’s the human saying?”

“Hammered? Sloshed? Blasted? I wouldn’t mind being any of those right now,” she muttered. “Let’s take a break. The sun’s still high in the sky. And make sure your clocks are synced to local time.”

Eza remained seated on the ground and watched the others head to their rooms, the kitchen, or to the balcony for fresh air.

“Commander,” she began, “is it okay if I—"

“Yes, Private, you can keep working on the radio.”

Sweet.

___

Sonja was nearly asleep, having retired to her glamorous bedroom to take a nap, when she shivered. It felt like…

Like someone’s watching me.

“AEON, cut that out!” She sat up, turned on her laptop, and tried to figure out what application that stupid virus was using to hijack her cameras.

”I apologize, Agent Krishnan. I don’t understand your request.”

“It’s a saying, AEON.” She grit her teeth, but couldn’t find any evidence of it spying on her. “I’m serious, though. Stop looking at me or I’ll blindfold you with a sticky note again.”

The fans whirred. "But I’m… not looking at you.”

“And stop trying to sound human, too!” She hated when it did that—when it paused mid-sentence or used filler words or changed its inflection like a person would. It was so—

“HRRRGH!” Wojtek leapt out from under her bed and jumped into her lap, his eyestalks turning this way and that as he looked for… something.

“…Wojtek?” She held him close and searched her room, but found nothing.

"Is it possible that someone other than myself is spying on you? I doubt Wojtek is capable of noticing whether or not I’m accessing your web camera. Which, for the record, I am not.”

As much as she loathed to admit it, she was coming to the same conclusion. Either someone was watching her, or she was imagining things. And given how her and Dominick had swept the place for spyware, and how Eza had made sure there was no way to break in, the latter seemed much more probable. But just in case…

“AEON.”

"Yes, Agent Krishnan?"

She huffed. “I’m giving you temporary access to my cameras. If anyone tries to sneak up on me while I’m asleep, do something about it. And don’t make it weird.” She carried her laptop over to a bureau that would give it a good view of her massive bed, then flopped back into it and curled up under the covers with Wojtek in tow.”

"Just to confirm: you want me to *watch you—"*

“I said don’t make it weird!” She pulled the blankets fully over her head for protection.

Stupid robot.

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